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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12359 ***
+
+Riverside Educational Monographs
+
+EDITED BY HENRY SUZZALLO
+
+PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
+SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
+
+
+
+THE MEANING OF INFANCY
+
+BY
+
+JOHN FISKE
+
+
+
+
+1883
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+I. THE MEANING OF INFANCY
+     From "Excursions of an Evolutionist"
+
+II. THE PART PLAYED BY INFANCY IN THE EVOLUTION OF MAN
+     From "A Century of Science"
+
+OUTLINE
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+The new significance of education
+
+The last century has witnessed an unprecedented development in the
+significance of education.  One direct consequence has been an
+increased reverence for childhood.  In this movement which has
+increased the dignity of children and schools, two large forces
+have been at work,--one social and the other scientific.  The
+growth of the democratic spirit among men and institutions has made
+the education of children a public necessity, and lifted the school
+to a position of high social importance.  The application of the
+theory of evolution to man and his life has revealed human infancy
+as one of the largest factors making for the superiority of man in
+the struggle for existence, and given to childhood a vast
+biological importance.  The necessities of democracy and the truths
+of science, acting more or less independently of each other, have
+given to education a breadth of meaning which it did not possess
+before.  They have shown that infancy is the largest opportunity
+and education the most powerful instrument for the conscious
+adjustment of man to the physical and social world in which he
+lives.
+
+
+
+_Democracy changes the function of schools_
+
+It was the attempt of democracy to educate all of its children
+which was the initial and important event that provoked large
+changes in our notions of the social function of education.  As
+long as the school was for the few, and such it was in the less
+liberal periods of history, the school tended to be an
+authoritative institution with more or less rigid methods of
+procedure.  With fixed ideas of truth and the means of acquiring
+truth, it was to a considerable degree unbending in its attitude
+toward youth.  Even if freedom from economic toil and social
+regulation permitted, only the type of mind that could fit the
+school's established institutional ways could endure its discipline
+and achieve its rewards.  Other types of mentality it would not
+receive or retain as students.  Under such an organization the
+school was selective of a special kind of talent.  It was not an
+instrument, so adjustable in its methods of appeal and instruction,
+that every manner of child could gain considerable of the wisdom of
+the world.  But when a more democratic order was established, the
+function of the school underwent a considerable change.  Democracy
+granted to all men freedom in manhood; to safeguard its privileges,
+it had to educate all men in childhood.  The school for selected
+scholars had to be transformed into a school for every variety of
+citizen.  With every child sent to school by order of the state,
+the teacher had to forego his traditional aloofness, and to adjust
+his methods of teaching so that every member of the enlarged school
+community could come into a knowledge of the civilization in which
+he lived.  With the inclusion of the blind, the deaf, the slow of
+mind, and the restless of spirit,--individuals left out of the old
+scheme of education and now reverently educated by the new
+democratic order in spite of all their defects,--the school becomes
+more flexible and variable in its methods of transmitting truth.
+More of the knowledge of human life is brought within the
+comprehension of children; more men are brought into a large and
+sympathetic participation in the activities of our civilization.
+In the truest sense the school becomes an instrument of adjustment
+between childhood and society.
+
+
+
+_Evolutionary thought interprets childhood_
+
+If the democratic movement emphasized the factor of social
+adjustment in the school's function, it was the scientific movement
+of the last half-century which drew attention to infancy as a
+superior opportunity for biological adjustment Among all the
+contributions of modern evolutionary science to educational
+thought, none is, more striking or more far-reaching in its
+implications than that special group of generalizations which
+states the biological function of a prolonged infancy in man.
+Interpreting this period, of helplessness and dependence as one of
+plasticity and opportunity, it has shown that the greater power of
+man in adjusting himself to the complex conditions of life is due
+to his educability, which in turn is the outcome of his lengthened
+childhood.  This "doctrine of the meaning of infancy," for such it
+has been called, is perhaps best known to the teaching profession
+through those enlargements and applications of the doctrine which
+have been made by Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler in his exposition of
+"the meaning of education."  As a belief, it is at least as old as
+the period of the ancient Greek philosopher, Anaximander.  As a
+doctrine in our modern thought, it owes its influential
+reappearance to certain evolutionary hypotheses of Mr. Alfred
+Russel Wallace, which in turn stimulated Mr. John Fiske to that
+further inquiry which resulted in those first cogent and extended
+statements of the doctrine which have been the basis of so many
+subsequent educational applications.
+
+
+
+_Mr. Fiske's presentation of the meaning of infancy_
+
+Because of the fundamental importance of Mr. Fiske's presentation
+of "the doctrine of the meaning of infancy," his views are here
+reprinted in detail.  The material consists of an essay and an
+address.  The first of these, "The Meaning of Infancy," is a brief
+and simplified restatement of those theories of man's origin and
+destiny as first suggested in his lectures at Harvard University in
+1871, and later developed more fully in the "Outlines of Cosmic
+Philosophy," part II, chapters xvi, xxi, and xxii.  The second of
+these, "The Part played by Infancy in the Evolution of Man," is an
+address delivered by Mr. Fiske as the guest of honor at a dinner at
+the Aldine Club, New York, May 13, 1895.  Together these two papers
+constitute the most detailed and valuable elucidation of the
+doctrine that we possess.  In offering them to the teaching
+profession and the reading public in this form, it is with the
+sincere hope that this biological interpretation of childhood and
+education will lend a new spiritual dignity to the whole
+institution of education.  It must certainly be gratifying to those
+who are profound believers in the efficacy of education, to note
+that its significance is wider than its service to particular
+persons and states; that education is, in truth, the conscious and
+latest mode of that wider world-evolution which has been in
+progress since the beginning of time.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE MEANING OF INFANCY
+
+What is the Meaning of Infancy?  What is the meaning of the fact
+that man is born into the world more helpless than any other
+creature, and needs for a much longer season than any other living
+thing the tender care and wise counsel of his elders?  It is one of
+the most familiar of facts that man alone among animals, exhibits a
+capacity for progress.  That man is widely different from other
+animals in the length of his adolescence and the utter helplessness
+of his babyhood, is an equally familiar fact.  Now between these
+two commonplace facts is there any connection?  Is it a mere
+accident that the creature which is distinguished as progressive
+should also be distinguished as coming slowly to maturity, or is
+there a reason lying deep down in the nature of things why this
+should be so?  I think it can be shown, with very few words, that
+between these two facts there is a connection that is deeply
+in-wrought with the processes by which life has been evolved upon
+the earth.  It can be shown that man's progressiveness and the
+length of his infancy are but two sides of one and the same fact;
+and in showing this, still more will appear.  It will appear that
+it was the lengthening of infancy which ages ago gradually
+converted our forefathers from brute creatures into human
+creatures.  It is babyhood that has made man what he is.  The
+simple unaided operation of natural selection could never have
+resulted in the origination of the human race.  Natural selection
+might have gone on forever improving the breed of the highest
+animal in many ways, but it could never _unaided_ have started the
+process of civilization or have given to man those peculiar
+attributes in virtue of which it has been well said that the
+difference between him and the highest of apes immeasurably
+transcends in value the difference between an ape and a blade of
+grass.  In order to bring about that wonderful event, the Creation
+of Man, natural selection had to call in the aid of other agencies,
+and the chief of these agencies was the gradual lengthening of
+babyhood.
+
+Such is the point which I wish to illustrate in few words, and to
+indicate some of its bearings on the history of human progress.
+Let us first observe what it was then lengthened the infancy of the
+highest animal, for then we shall be the better able to understand
+the character of the prodigious effects which this infancy has
+wrought.  A few familiar facts concerning the method in which men
+learn how to do things will help us here.
+
+When we begin to learn to play the piano, we have to devote much
+time and thought to the adjustment and movement of our fingers and
+to the interpretation of the vast and complicated multitude of
+symbols which make up the printed page of music that stands before
+us.  For a long time, therefore, our attempts are feeble and
+stammering and they require the full concentrated power of the
+mind.  Yet a trained pianist will play a new piece of music at
+sight, and perhaps have so much attention to spare that he can talk
+with you at the same time.  What an enormous number of mental
+acquisitions have in this case become almost instinctive or
+automatic!  It is just so in learning a foreign language, and it
+was just the same when in childhood we learned to walk, to talk,
+and to write.  It is just the same, too, in learning to think about
+abstruse subjects.  What at first strains the attention to the
+utmost, and often wearies us, comes at last to be done without
+effort and almost unconsciously.  Great minds thus travel over vast
+fields of thought with an ease of which they are themselves
+unaware.  Dr. Nathaniel Bowditch once said that in translating the
+"Mecanique Celeste," he had come upon formulas which Laplace
+introduced with the word "obviously," where it took nevertheless
+many days of hard study to supply the intermediate steps through
+which that transcendent mind had passed with one huge leap of
+inference.  At some time in his youth no doubt Laplace had to think
+of these things, just as Rubinstein had once to think how his
+fingers should be placed on the keys of the piano; but what was
+once the object of conscious attention comes at last to be
+well-nigh automatic, while the night of the conscious mind goes on
+ever to higher and vaster themes.
+
+Let us now take a long leap from the highest level of human
+intelligence to the mental life of a turtle or a codfish.  In what
+does the mental life of such creatures consist?  It consists of a
+few simple acts mostly concerned with the securing of food and the
+avoiding of danger, and these few simple acts are repeated with
+unvarying monotony during the whole lifetime of these creatures.
+Consequently these acts are performed with great ease and are
+attended with very little consciousness, and moreover the capacity
+to perform them is transmitted from parent to offspring as
+completely as the capacity of the stomach to digest food is
+transmitted.  In all animals the new-born stomach needs but the
+contact with food in order to begin digesting, and the new-born
+lungs need but the contact with air in order to begin to breathe.
+The capacity for performing these perpetually repeated visceral
+actions is transmitted in perfection.  All the requisite nervous
+connections are fully established during the brief embryonic
+existence of each creature.  In the case of lower animals it is
+almost as much so with the few simple actions which make up the
+creature's mental life.  The bird known as the fly-catcher no
+sooner breaks the egg than it will snap at and catch a fly.  This
+action is not so very simple, but because it is something the bird
+is always doing, being indeed one out of the very few things that
+this bird ever does, the nervous connections needful for doing it
+are all established before birth, and nothing but the presence of
+the fly is required to set the operation going.
+
+With such creatures as the codfish, the turtle, or the fly-catcher,
+there is accordingly nothing that can properly be called infancy.
+With them the sphere of education is extremely limited.  They get
+their education before they are born.  In other words, heredity
+does everything for them, education nothing.  The career of the
+individual is predetermined by the careers of his ancestors, and he
+can do almost nothing to vary it.  The life of such creatures is
+conservatism cut and dried, and there is nothing progressive about
+them.
+
+In what I just said I left an "almost."  There is a great deal of
+saving virtue in that little adverb.  Doubtless even animals low in
+the scale possess some faint traces of educability; but they are so
+very slight that it takes geologic ages to produce an appreciable
+result.  In all the innumerable wanderings, fights, upturnings and
+cataclysms of the earth's stupendous career, each creature has been
+summoned under penalty of death to use what little wit he may have
+had, and the slightest trace of mental flexibility is of such
+priceless value in the struggle for existence that natural
+selection must always have seized upon it, and sedulously hoarded
+and transmitted it for coming generations to strengthen and
+increase.  With the lapse of geologic time the upper grades of
+animal intelligence have doubtless been raised higher and higher
+through natural selection.  The warm-blooded mammals and birds of
+to-day no doubt surpass the cold-blooded dinosaurs of the Jurassic
+age in mental qualities as they surpass them in physical structure.
+From the codfish and turtle of ancient family to the modern lion,
+dog, and monkey, it is a very long step upward.  The mental life of
+a warm-blooded animal is a very different affair from that of
+reptiles and fishes.  A squirrel or a bear does a good many things
+in the course of his life.  He meets various vicissitudes in
+various ways; he has adventures.  The actions he performs are so
+complex and so numerous that they are severally performed with less
+frequency than the few actions performed by the codfish.  The
+requisite nervous connections are accordingly not fully established
+before birth.  There is not time enough.  The nervous connections
+needed for the visceral movements and for the few simple
+instinctive actions get organized, and then the creature is born
+before he has learned how to do all the things his parents could
+do.  A good many of his nervous connections are not yet formed,
+they are only formable.  Accordingly he is not quite able to take
+care of himself; he must for a time be watched and nursed.  All
+mammals and most birds have thus a period of babyhood that is not
+very long, but is on the whole longest with the most intelligent
+creatures.  It is especially long with the higher monkeys, and
+among the man-like apes it becomes so long as to be strikingly
+suggestive.  An infant orang-outang, captured by Mr. Wallace, was
+still a helpless baby at the age of three months, unable to feed
+itself, to walk without aid, or to grasp objects with precision.
+
+But this period of helplessness has to be viewed under another
+aspect.  It is a period of plasticity.  The creature's career is no
+longer exclusively determined by heredity.  There is a period after
+birth when its character can be slightly modified by what happens
+to it after birth, that is, by its experience as an individual.  It
+becomes educable.  It is no longer necessary for each generation to
+be exactly like that which has preceded.  A door is opened through
+which the capacity for progress can enter.  Horses and dogs, bears
+and elephants, parrots and monkeys, are all teachable to some
+extent, and we have even heard of a learned pig.  Of learned asses
+there has been no lack in the world.
+
+But this educability of the higher mammals and birds is after all
+quite limited.  By the beginnings of infancy the door for
+progressiveness was set ajar, but it was not all at once thrown
+wide open.  Conservatism stilt continued in fashion.  One
+generation of cattle is much like another.  It would be easy for
+foxes to learn to climb frees, and many a fox might have saved his
+life by doing so; yet quickwitted as he is, this obvious device
+never seems to have occurred to Reynard.  Among slightly teachable
+mammals, however, there is one group more teachable than the rest.
+Monkeys, with their greater power of handling things, have also
+more inquisitiveness and more capacity for sustained attention than
+any other mammals; and the higher apes are fertile in varied
+resources.  The orang-outang and gorilla are for this reason
+dreaded by other animals, and roam the undisputed lords of their
+native forests.  They have probably approached the critical point
+where variations in intelligence, always important, have come to be
+supremely important, so as to be seized by natural selection in
+preference to variations in physical constitution.  At some remote
+epoch of the past--we cannot say just when or how--our half-human
+forefathers reached and passed this critical point, and forthwith
+their varied struggles began age after age to result in the
+preservation of bigger and better brains, while the rest of their
+bodies changed but little.  This particular work of natural
+selection must have gone on for an enormous length of time, and as
+its result we see that while man remains anatomically much like an
+ape, be has acquired a vastly greater brain with all that this
+implies.  Zoologically the distance is small between man and the
+chimpanzee; psychologically it has become so great as to be
+immeasurable.
+
+But this steady increase of intelligence, as our forefathers began
+to become human, carried with it a steady prolongation of infancy.
+As mental life became more complex and various, as the things to be
+learned kept ever multiplying, less and less could be done before
+birth, more and more must be left to be done in the earlier years
+of life.  So instead of being born with a few simple capacities
+thoroughly organized, man came at last to be born with the germs of
+many complex capacities which were reserved to be unfolded and
+enhanced or checked and stifled by the incidents of personal
+experience in each individual.  In this simple yet wonderful way
+there has been provided for man a long period during which his mind
+is plastic and malleable, and the length of this period has
+increased with civilization until it now covers nearly one third of
+our lives.  It is not that our inherited tendencies and aptitudes
+are not still the main thing.  It is only that we have at last
+acquired great power to modify them by training, so that progress
+may go on with ever-increasing sureness and rapidity.
+
+In thus pointing out the causes of infancy, we have at the same
+time witnessed some of its effects.  One effect, of stupendous
+importance, remains to be pointed out.  As helpless babyhood came
+more and more to depend on parental care, the correlated feelings
+were developed on the part of parents, and the fleeting sexual
+relations established among mammals in general were gradually
+exchanged for permanent relations.  A cow feels strong maternal
+affection for her nursing calf, but after the calf is fully grown,
+though doubtless she distinguishes it from other members of the
+herd, it is not clear that she entertains for it any parental
+feeling.  But with our half-human forefathers it is not difficult
+to see how infancy extending over several years must have tended
+gradually to strengthen the relations of the children to the
+mother, and eventually to both parents, and thus give rise to the
+permanent organization of the family.  When this step was
+accomplished we may say that the Creation of Man had been achieved.
+For through the organization of the family has arisen that of the
+clan or tribe, which has formed, as it were, the cellular tissue
+out of which the most complex human society has come to be
+constructed.  And out of that subordination of individual desires
+to the common interest, which first received a definite direction
+when the family was formed, there grew the rude beginnings of human
+morality.
+
+It was thus through the lengthening of his infancy that the highest
+of animals came to be Man,--a creature with definite social
+relationships and with an element of plasticity in his organization
+such as has come at last to make his difference from all other
+animals a difference in kind.  Here at last there had come upon the
+scene a creature endowed with the capacity for progress, and a new
+chapter was thus opened in the history of creation.  But it was not
+to be expected that man should all at once learn how to take
+advantage of this capacity.  Nature, which is said to make no
+jumps, surely did not jump here.  The whole history of
+civilization, indeed, is largely the history of man's awkward and
+stumbling efforts to avail himself of this flexibility of mental
+constitution with which God has endowed him.  For many a weary age
+the progress men achieved was feeble and halting.  Though it had
+ceased to be physically necessary for each generation to tread
+exactly in the steps of its predecessor, yet the circumstances of
+primitive society long made it very difficult for any deviation to
+be effected.  For the tribes of primitive men were perpetually at
+war with each other, and their methods of tribal discipline were
+military methods.  To allow much freedom of thought would be
+perilous, and the whole tribe was supposed to be responsible for
+the words and deeds of each of its members.  The tribes most
+rigorous in this stern discipline were those which killed out
+tribes more loosely organized, and thus survived to hand down to
+coming generations their ideas and their methods.  From this state
+of things an intense social conservatism was begotten,--a strong
+disposition on the part of society to destroy the flexible-minded
+individual who dares to think and behave differently from his
+fellows.  During the past three thousand years much has been done
+to weaken this conservatism by putting an end to the state of
+things which produced it.  As great and strong societies have
+arisen, as the sphere of warfare has diminished while the sphere of
+industry has enlarged, the need for absolute conformity has ceased
+to be felt, while the advantages of freedom and variety come to be
+ever more clearly apparent.  At a late stage of civilization, the
+flexible or plastic society acquires even a military advantage over
+the society that is more rigid, as in the struggle between French
+and English civilization for primacy in the world.  In our own
+country, the political birth of which dates from the triumph of
+England in that mighty struggle, the element of plasticity in man's
+nature is more thoroughly heeded, more fully taken account of, than
+in any other community known to history; and herein lies the chief
+potency of our promise for the future.  We have come to the point
+where we are beginning to see that we may safely depart from
+unreasoning routine, and, with perfect freedom of thinking in
+science and in religion, with new methods of education that shall
+train our children to think for themselves while they interrogate
+Nature with a courage and an insight that shall grow ever bolder
+and keener, we may ere long be able fully to avail ourselves of the
+fact that we come into the world as little children with
+undeveloped powers wherein lie latent all the boundless
+possibilities of a higher and grander Humanity than has yet been
+seen upon the earth.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE PART PLAYED BY INFANCY IN THE EVOLUTION OF MAN
+
+The remarks which my friend Mr. Clark has made with reference to
+the reconciling of science and religion seem to carry me back to
+the days when I first became acquainted with the fact that there
+were such things afloat in the world as speculations about the
+origin of man from lower forms of life; and I can recall step by
+step various stages in which that old question has come to have a
+different look from what it had thirty years ago.  One of the
+commonest objections we used to hear, from the mouths of persons
+who could not very well give voice to any other objection, was that
+anybody, whether he knows much or little about evolution, must have
+the feeling that there is something degrading about being allied
+with lower forms of life.  That was, I suppose, owing to the
+survival of the old feeling that a dignified product of creation
+ought to have been produced in some exceptional way.  That which
+was done in the ordinary way, that which was done through ordinary
+processes of causation, seemed to be cheapened and to lose its
+value.  It was a remnant of the old state of feeling which took
+pleasure in miracles, which seemed to think that the object of
+thought was more dignified if you could connect it with something
+supernatural; that state of culture in which there was an
+altogether inadequate appreciation of the amount of grandeur that
+there might be in the slow creative work that goes on noiselessly
+by little minute increments, even as the dropping of the water that
+wears away the stone.  The general progress of familiarity with the
+conception of evolution has done a great deal to change that state
+of mind.  Even persons who have not much acquaintance with science
+have at length caught something of its lesson,--that the infinitely
+cumulative action of small causes like those which we know is
+capable of producing results of the grandest and most thrilling
+importance, and that the disposition to recur to the cataclysmic
+and miraculous is only a tendency of the childish mind which we are
+outgrowing with wider experience.
+
+The whole doctrine of evolution, and in fact the whole advance of
+modern science from the days of Copernicus down to the present day,
+have consisted in the substitution of processes which are familiar
+and the application of those processes, showing how they produce
+great results.
+
+When Darwin's "Origin of Species" was first published, when it gave
+us that wonderful explanation of the origin of forms of life from
+allied forms through the operation of natural selection, it must
+have been like a mental illumination to every person who
+comprehended it.  But after all it left a great many questions
+unexplained, as was natural.  It accounted for the phenomena of
+organic development in general with wonderful success, but it must
+have left a great many minds with the feeling: If man has been
+produced in this way, if the mere operation of natural selection
+has produced the human race, wherein is the human race anyway
+essentially different from lower races?  Is not man really
+dethroned, taken down from that exceptional position in which we
+have been accustomed to place him, and might it not be possible, in
+the course of the future, for other beings to come upon the earth
+as far superior to man as man is superior to the fossilized dragons
+of Jurassic antiquity?
+
+Such questions used to be asked, and when they were asked, although
+one might have a very strong feeling that it was not so, at the
+same time one could not exactly say why.  One could not then find
+any scientific argument for objections to that point of view.  But
+with the further development of the question the whole subject
+began gradually to wear a different appearance; and I am going to
+give you a little bit of autobiography, because I think it may be
+of some interest in this connection.  I am going to mention two or
+three of the successive stages which the whole question took in my
+own mind as one thing came up after another, and how from time to
+time it began to dawn upon me that I had up to that point been
+looking at the problem from not exactly the right point of view.
+
+When Darwin's "Descent of Man" was published in 1871, it was of
+course a book characterized by all his immense learning, his
+wonderful fairness of spirit and fertility of suggestion.  Still,
+one could not but feel that it did not solve the question of the
+origin of man.  There was one great contrast between that book and
+his "Origin of Species."  In the earlier treatise he undertook to
+point out a _vera causa_ of the origin of species, and he did it.
+In his "Descent of Man" he brought together a great many minor
+generalizations which facilitated the understanding of man's
+origin.  But he did not come at all near to solving the central
+problem, nor did he anywhere show clearly why natural selection
+might not have gone on forever producing one set of beings after
+another distinguishable chiefly by physical differences.  But
+Darwin's co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, at an early stage in
+his researches, struck out a most brilliant and pregnant
+suggestion.  In that one respect Wallace went further than ever
+Darwin did.  It was a point of which, indeed, Darwin admitted the
+importance.  It was a point of which nobody could fail to
+understand the importance, that in the course of the evolution of a
+very highly organized animal, if there came a point at which it was
+of more advantage to that animal to have variations in his
+intelligence seized upon and improved by natural selection than to
+have physical changes seized upon, then natural selection would
+begin working almost exclusively upon that creature's intelligence,
+and he would develop in intelligence to a great extent, while his
+physical organism would change but slightly.  Now, that of course
+applied to the case of man, who is changed physically but very
+slightly from the apes, while he has traversed intellectually such
+a stupendous chasm.
+
+As soon as this statement was made by Wallace, it seemed to me to
+open up an entirely new world of speculation.  There was this
+enormous antiquity of man, during the greater part of which he did
+not know enough to make history.  We see man existing here on the
+earth, no one can say how long, but surely many hundreds of
+thousands of years, yet only during just the last little fringe of
+four or five thousand years has he arrived at the point where he
+makes history.  Before that, something was going on, a great many
+things were going on, while his ancestors were slowly growing up to
+that point of intelligence where it began to make itself felt in
+the recording of events.  This agrees with Wallace's suggestion of
+a long period of psychical change, accompanied by slight physical
+change.
+
+Well, in the spring of 1871, when Darwin's "Descent of Man" came
+out, just about the same time I happened to be reading Wallace's
+account of his experiences in the Malay Archipelago, and how at one
+time he caught a female orang-outang with a new-born baby, and the
+mother died, and Wallace brought up the baby orang-outang by hand;
+and this baby orang-outang had a kind of infancy which was a great
+deal longer than that of a cow or a sheep, but it was nothing
+compared to human infancy in length.  This little orang-outang
+could not get up and march around, as mammals of less intelligence
+do, when he was first born, or within three or four days; but after
+three or four weeks or so he would get up, and begin taking hold of
+something and pushing it around, just as children push a chair; and
+he went through a period of staring at his hands, as human babies
+do, and altogether was a good deal slower in getting to the point
+where he could take care of himself.  And while I was reading of
+that I thought, Dear me! if there is any one thing in which the
+human race is signally distinguished from other mammals, it is in
+the enormous duration of their infancy; but it is a point that I do
+not recollect ever seeing any naturalist so much as allude to.
+
+It happened at just that time that I was making researches in
+psychology about the organization of experiences, the way in which
+conscious intelligent action can pass down into quasi-automatic
+action, the generation of instincts, and various allied questions;
+and I thought, Can it be that the increase of intelligence in an
+animal, if carried beyond a certain point, must necessarily result
+in prolongation of the period of infancy,--must necessarily result
+in the birth of the mammal at a less developed stage, leaving
+something to be done, leaving a good deal to be done, after birth?
+And then the argument seemed to come along very naturally, that for
+every action of life, every adjustment which a creature makes in
+life, whether a muscular adjustment or an intelligent adjustment,
+there has got to be some registration effected in the nervous
+system, some line of transit worn for nervous force to follow;
+there has got to be a connection between certain nerve-centres
+before the thing can be done, whether it is the acts of the viscera
+or the acts of the limbs, or anything of that sort; and of course
+it is obvious that if the creature has not many things to register
+in his nervous system, if he has a life which is very simple,
+consisting of few actions that are performed with great frequency,
+that animal becomes almost automatic in his whole life; and all the
+nervous connections that need to be made to enable him to carry on
+life get made during the foetal period or during the egg period,
+and when he comes to be born, he comes all ready to go to work.  As
+one result of this, he does not learn from individual experience,
+but one generation is like the preceding generations, with here and
+there some slight modifications.  But when you get the creature
+that has arrived at the point where his experience has become
+varied, he has got to do a good many things, and there is more or
+less individuality about them; and many of them are not performed
+with the same minuteness and regularity, so that there does not
+begin to be that automatism within the period during which he is
+being developed and his form is taking on its outlines.  During
+prenatal life there is not time enough for all these nervous
+registrations, and so by degrees it comes about that he is born
+with his nervous system perfectly capable only of making him
+breathe and digest food,--of making him do the things absolutely
+requisite for supporting life; instead of being born with a certain
+number of definite developed capacities, he has a number of
+potentialities which have got to be roused according to his own
+individual experience.  Pursuing that line of thought, it began
+after a while to seem clear to me that the infancy of the animal in
+a very undeveloped condition, with the larger part of his faculties
+in potentiality rather than in actuality, was a direct result of
+the increase of intelligence, and I began to see that now we have
+two steps: first, natural selection goes on increasing the
+intelligence; and secondly, when the intelligence goes far enough,
+it makes a longer infancy, a creature is born less developed, and
+therefore there comes this plastic period during which he is more
+teachable.  The capacity for progress begins to come in, and you
+begin to get at one of the great points in which man is
+distinguished from the lower animals, for one of those points is
+undoubtedly his progressiveness; and I think that any one will say,
+with very little hesitation, that if it were not for our period of
+infancy we should not be progressive.  If we came into the world
+with our capacities all cut and dried, one generation would be very
+much like another.
+
+Then, looking round to see what are the other points which are most
+important in which man differs from the lower animals, there comes
+that matter of the family.  The family has adumbrations and
+foreshadowings among the lower animals, but in general it may be
+said that while mammals lower than man are gregarious, in man have
+become established those peculiar relationships which constitute
+what we know as the family; and it is easy to see how the existence
+of helpless infants would bring about just that state of things.
+The necessity of caring for the infants would prolong the period of
+maternal affection, and would tend to keep the father and mother
+and children together, but it would tend especially to keep the
+mother and children together.  This business of the marital
+relations was not really a thing that became adjusted in the
+primitive ages of man, but it has become adjusted in the course of
+civilization.  Real monogamy, real faithfulness of the male parent,
+belongs to a comparatively advanced stage; but in the early stages
+the knitting together of permanent relations between mother and
+infant, and the approximation toward steady relations on the part
+of the male parent, came to bring about the family, and gradually
+to knit those organizations which we know as clans.
+
+Here we come to another stage, another step forward.  The instant
+society becomes organized in clans, natural selection cannot let
+these clans be broken up and die out,--the clan becomes the chief
+object or care of natural selection, because if you destroy it you
+retrograde again, you lose all you have gained; consequently, those
+clans in which the primeval selfish instincts were so modified that
+the individual conduct would be subordinated to some extent to the
+needs of the clan,--those are the ones which would prevail in the
+struggle for life.  In this way you gradually get an external
+standard to which man has to conform his conduct, and you get the
+germs of altruism and morality; and in the prolonged affectionate
+relation between the mother and the infant you get the opportunity
+for that development of altruistic feeling which, once started in
+those relations, comes into play in the more general relations, and
+makes more feasible and more workable the bonds which keep society
+together, and enable it to unite on wider and wider terms.
+
+So it seems that from a very small beginning we are reaching a very
+considerable result.  I had got these facts pretty clearly worked
+out, and carried them around with me some years, before a, fresh
+conclusion came over me one day with a feeling of surprise.  In the
+old days before the Copernican astronomy was promulgated, man
+regarded himself as the centre of the universe.  He used to
+entertain theological systems which conformed to his limited
+knowledge of nature.  The universe seemed to be made for his uses,
+the earth seemed to have been fitted up for his dwelling place, he
+occupied the centre of creation, the sun was made to give him
+light, etc.  When Copernicus overthrew that view, the effect upon
+theology was certainly tremendous.  I do not believe that justice
+has ever been done to the shock that it gave to man when he was
+made to realize that he occupied a kind of miserable little clod of
+dirt in the universe, and that there were so many other worlds
+greater than this.  It was one of the first great shocks involved
+in the change from ancient to modern scientific views, and I do not
+doubt it was responsible for a great deal of the pessimistic
+philosophizing that came in the seventeenth and eighteenth
+centuries.
+
+Now, it flashed upon me a dozen years or so ago--after thinking
+about this manner in which man originated--that man occupies
+certainly just as exceptional a position as before, if he is the
+terminal in a long series of evolutionary events.  If at the end of
+the long history of evolution comes man, if this whole secular
+process has been going on to produce this supreme object, it does
+not much matter what kind of a cosmical body he lives on.  He is
+put back into the old position of theological importance, and in a
+much more intelligent way than in the old days when he was supposed
+to occupy the centre of the universe.  We are enabled to say that
+while there is no doubt of the evolutionary process going on
+throughout countless ages which we know nothing about, yet in the
+one case where it is brought home to us we spell out an
+intelligible story, and we do find things working along up to man
+as a terminal fact in the whole process.  This is indeed a
+consistent conclusion from Wallace's suggestion that natural
+selection, in working toward the genesis of man, began to follow a
+new path and make psychical changes instead of physical changes.
+Obviously, here you are started upon a new chapter in the history
+of the universe.  It is no longer going to be necessary to shape
+new limbs, and to thicken the skin and make new growths of hair,
+when man has learned how to build a fire, when he can take some
+other animal's hide and make it into clothes.  You have got to a
+new state of things.
+
+After I had put together all these additional circumstances with
+regard to the origination of human society and the development of
+altruism, I began to see a little further into the matter.  It then
+began to appear that not only is man the terminal factor in a long
+process of evolution, but in the origination of man there began the
+development of the higher psychical attributes, and those
+attributes are coming to play a greater and greater part in the
+development of the human race.  Just take this mere matter of
+"altruism," as we call it.  It is not a pretty word, but must serve
+for want of a better.  In the development of altruism from the low
+point, where there was scarcely enough to hold the clan together,
+up to the point reached at the present day, there has been a
+notable progress, but there is still room for an enormous amount of
+improvement.  The progress has been all in the direction of
+bringing out what we call the higher spiritual attributes.  The
+feeling was now more strongly impressed upon me than ever, that all
+these things tended to set the whole doctrine of evolution into
+harmony with religion; that if the past through which man had
+originated was such as has been described, then religion was a fit
+and worthy occupation for man, and some of the assumptions which
+underlie every system of religion must be true.  For example, with
+regard to the assumption that what we see of the present life is
+not the whole thing; that there is a spiritual side of the question
+beside the material side; that, in short, there is for man a life
+eternal.  When I wrote the "Destiny of Man," all that I ventured to
+say was, that it did not seem quite compatible with ordinary common
+sense to suppose that so much pains would have been taken to
+produce a merely ephemeral result.  But since then another argument
+has occurred to me: that just at the time when the human race was
+beginning to come upon the scene, when the germs of morality were
+coming in with the family, when society was taking its first start,
+there came into the human mind--how one can hardly say, but there
+did come--the beginnings of a groping after something that lies
+outside and beyond the world of sense.  That groping after a
+spiritual world has been going on here for much more than a hundred
+thousand years, and it has played an enormous part in the history
+of mankind, in the whole development of human society.  Nobody can
+imagine what mankind would have been without it up to the present
+time.  Either all religion has been a reaching out for a phantom
+that does not exist, or a reaching out after something that does
+exist, but of which man, with his limited intelligence, has only
+been able to gain a crude idea.  And the latter seems a far more
+probable conclusion, because, if it is not so, it constitutes a
+unique exception to all the operations of evolution we know about.
+As a general thing in the whole history of evolution, when you see
+any internal adjustment reaching out toward something, it is in
+order to adapt itself to something that really exists; and if the
+religious cravings of man constitute an exception, they are the one
+thing in the whole process of evolution that is exceptional and
+different from all the rest.  And this is surely an argument of
+stupendous and resistless weight.
+
+I take this autobiographical way of referring to these things, in
+the order in which they came before my mind, for the sake of
+illustration.  The net result of the whole is to put evolution in
+harmony with religious thought,--not necessarily in harmony with
+particular religious dogmas or theories, but in harmony with the
+great religious drift, so that the antagonism which used to appear
+to exist between religion and science is likely to disappear.  So I
+think it will before a great while.  If you take the case of some
+evolutionist like Professor Haeckel, who is perfectly sure that
+materialism accounts for everything (he has got it all cut and
+dried and settled; he knows all about it, so that there is really
+no need of discussing the subject!); if you ask the question
+whether it was his scientific study of evolution that really led
+him to such a dogmatic conclusion, or whether it was that he
+started from some purely arbitrary assumption, like the French
+materialists of the eighteenth century, I have no doubt the latter
+would be the true explanation.  There are a good many people who
+start on their theories of evolution with these ultimate questions
+all settled to begin with.  It was the most natural thing in the
+world that after the first assaults of science upon old beliefs,
+after a certain number of Bible stories and a certain number of
+church doctrines had been discredited, there should be a school of
+men who in sheer weariness should settle down to scientific
+researches, and say, "We content ourselves with what we can prove
+by the methods of physical science, and we will throw everything
+else overboard."  That was very much the state of mind of the
+famous French atheists of the last century.  But only think how
+chaotic nature was to their minds compared to what she is to our
+minds to-day.  Just think how we have in the present century
+arrived where we can see the bearings of one set of facts in nature
+as collated with another set of facts, and contrast it with the
+view which even the greatest of those scientific French
+materialists could take.  Consider how fragmentary and how lacking
+in arrangement was the universe they saw compared with the universe
+we can see to-day, and it is not strange that to them it could be
+an atheistic world.  That hostility between science and religion
+continued as long as religion was linked hand in hand with the
+ancient doctrine of special creation.  But now that the religious
+world has unmoored itself, now that it is beginning to see the
+truth and beauty of natural science and to look with friendship
+upon conceptions of evolution, I suspect that this temporary
+antagonism, which we have fallen into a careless way of regarding
+as an everlasting antagonism, will come to an end perhaps quicker
+than we realize.
+
+There is one point that is of great interest in this connection,
+although I can only hint at it.  Among the things that happened in
+that dim past when man was coming into existence was the increase
+of his powers of manipulation; and that was a factor of immense
+importance.  Anaxagoras, it is said, wrote a treatise in which he
+maintained that the human race would never have become human if it
+had not been for the hand.  I do not know that there was so very
+much exaggeration about that.  It was certainly of great
+significance that the particular race of mammals whose intelligence
+increased far enough to make it worth while for natural selection
+to work upon intelligence alone was the race which had developed
+hands and could manipulate things.  It was a wonderful era in the
+history of creation when that creature could take a club and use it
+for a hammer, or could pry up a stone with a stake, thus adding one
+more lever to the levers that made up his arm.  From that day to
+this, the career of man has been that of a person who has operated
+upon his environment in a different way from any animal before him.
+An era of similar importance came probably somewhat later, when man
+learned how to build a fire and cook his food; thus initiating that
+course of culinary development of which we have seen the climax in
+our dainty dinner this evening.  Here was another means of acting
+upon the environment.  Here was the beginning of the working of
+endless physical and chemical changes through the application of
+heat, just as the first use of the club or the crowbar was the
+beginning of an enormous development in the mechanical arts.
+
+Now, at the same time, to go back once more into that dim past,
+when ethics and religion, manual art and scientific thought, found
+expression in the crudest form of myths, the aesthetic sense was
+germinating likewise.  Away back in the glacial period you find
+pictures drawn and scratched upon the reindeer's antler,
+portraitures of mammoths and primitive pictures of the chase; you
+see the trinkets, the personal decorations, proving beyond question
+that the aesthetic sense was there.  There has been an immense
+aesthetic development since then.  And I believe that in the future
+it is going to mean far more to us than we have yet begun to
+realize.  I refer to the kind of training that comes to mankind
+through direct operation upon his environment, the incarnation of
+his thought, the putting of his ideas into new material relations.
+This is going to exert powerful effects of a civilizing kind.
+There is something strongly educational and disciplinary in the
+mere dealing with matter, whether it be in the manual training
+school, whether it be in carpentry, in overcoming the inherent and
+total depravity of inanimate things, shaping them to your will, and
+also in learning to subject yourself to their will (for sometimes
+you must do that in order to achieve your conquests; in other
+words, you must humour their habits and proclivities).  In all this
+there is a priceless discipline, moral as well as mental, let alone
+the fact that, in whatever kind of artistic work a man does, he is
+doing that which in the very working has in it an element of
+something outside of egoism; even if he is doing it for motives not
+very altruistic, he is working toward a result the end of which is
+the gratification or the benefit of other persons than himself; he
+is working toward some result which in a measure depends upon their
+approval, and to that extent tends to bring him into closer
+relations to his fellow man.
+
+In the future, to an even greater extent than in the recent past,
+crude labour will be replaced by mechanical contrivances.  The kind
+of labour which can command its price is the kind which has trained
+intelligence behind it.  One of the great needs of our time is the
+multiplication of skilled and special labour.  The demand for the
+products of intelligence is far greater than that for mere crude
+products of labour, and it will be more and more so.  For there
+comes a time when the latter products have satisfied the limit to
+which a man can consume food and drink and shelter,--those things
+which merely keep the animal alive.  But to those things which
+minister to the requirements of the spiritual side of a man, there
+is almost no limit.  The demand one can conceive is well-nigh
+infinite.  One of the philosophical things that have been said, in
+discriminating man from the lower animals, is that he is the one
+creature who is never satisfied.  It is well for him that he is so,
+that there is always something more for which he craves.  To my
+mind, this fact most strongly hints that man is infinitely more
+than a mere animate machine.
+
+
+
+
+ OUTLINE
+
+ I. THE MEANING OF INFANCY
+
+  1. The relation between progress and infancy
+  2. Man's method of learning
+  3. The mental inheritance of animals
+  4. Infancy and educability of animals
+  5. Infancy is a period of plasticity
+  6. Educability varies widely in different creatures
+  7. Increased intelligence means prolonged infancy
+  8. The socializing effects of infancy
+  9. The use of this capacity for progress in the past
+
+
+ II. THE PART PLAYED BY INFANCY IN THE EVOLUTION OF MAN
+
+  1. The grandeur of natural causation
+  2. The problem of man's ascendancy
+  3. Natural selection seizes on intelligence
+  4. A long infancy characteristic of man
+  5. A complex life requires a longer infancy
+  6. Infancy fosters sociability and the family
+  7. Group life increases the social and moral bonds
+  8. Spiritual man is evolution's terminal factor
+  9. Man marks a development along new lines
+ 10. Hand-work in the evolution of intelligence
+ 11. The educational value of aesthetic effort
+ 12. Man's spirituality is prophetic of his destiny
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Meaning of Infancy, by John Fiske
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12359 ***