nstruction; lack of images, and especially fewness of possible
combinations of images. This last point is proven alike from the data of
animal psychology and of comparative anatomy. We know that the nervous
elements in the brain serving as connections between sensory
regions--whether one conceive of them as centers (Flechsig), or as
bundles of commisural fibers (Meynert, Wernicke)--are hardly outlined in
the lower mammalia and attain only a mediocre development in the higher
forms.

By way of corroboration of the foregoing, let us compare the higher
animals with young children: this comparison is not based on a few
far-fetched analogies, but in a thorough resemblance in nature. Man,
during the first years of his life, has a brain but slightly
differentiated, especially as regards connections, a very poor supply of
images, a very weak capacity for abstraction. His intellectual
development is much inferior to that of reflex, instinctive, impulsive,
and imitative movements. In consequence of this predominance of the
motor system, the simple and imperfect images, in children as in
animals, tend to be immediately changed into movements. Even most of
their inventions in play are greatly inferior to those enumerated above
under nine distinct heads.

A serious argument in favor of the prevalence of imagination of the
motor type in the child is furnished by the principal part taken by
movements in infantile insanity: a remark made by many alienists. The
first stage of this madness, they say, is found in the convulsions that
are not merely a physical ailment, but "a muscular delirium." The
disturbance of the automatic and instinctive functions of the child is
so often associated with muscular disturbances that at this age the
mental disorders correspond to the motor ganglionic centers situated
below those parts that later assume the labor of analysis and of
imagination. The disturbances are in the primary centers of organization
and according to the symptoms lack those analytic or constructive
qualities, those ideal forms, that we find in adult insanity. If we
descend to the lowest stage of human life--to the baby--we see that
insanity consists almost entirely of the activity of a muscular group
acting on external objects. The insane baby bites, kicks, and these
symptoms are the external measure of the degree of its madness.[39] Has
not chorea itself been called a muscular insanity?

Doubtless, there likewise exists in the chi