nt from
the active rejection of the lower center. It is passive, but cold and
negative. It is the great force of our day. From the ganglion of the
shoulders, also, the child breathes and his heart beats. From the same
center he learns the first use of his arms. In the gesture of
sympathy, from the upper plane, he embraces his mother with his arms.
In the motion of curiosity, or interest, which derives from the
thoracic ganglion, he spreads his fingers, touches, feels, explores.
In the motion of rejection he drops an undesired object deliberately
out of sight.

And then, when the four centers of what we call the first _field_ of
consciousness are fully active, then it is that the eyes begin to
gather their sight, the mouth to speak, the ears to awake to their
intelligent hearings; all as a result of the great fourfold activity
of the first dynamic field of consciousness. And then also, as a
result, the mind wakens to its impressions and to its incipient
control. For at first the control is non-mental, even non-cerebral.
The brain acts only as a sort of switchboard.

The business of the father, in all this incipient child-development,
is to stand outside as a final authority and make the necessary
adjustments. Where there is too much sympathy, then the great
voluntary centers of the spine are weak, the child tends to be
delicate. Then the father by instinct supplies the roughness, the
sternness which stiffens in the child the centers of resistance and
independence, right from the very earliest days. Often, for a mere
infant, it is the father's fierce or stern presence, the vibration of
his voice, which starts the frictional and independent activity of the
great voluntary ganglion and gives the first impulse to the
independence which later on is life itself.

But on the other hand, the father, from his distance, supports,
protects, nourishes his child, and it is ultimately on the remote but
powerful father-love that the infant rests, in a rest which is beyond
mother-love. For in the male the dominant centers are naturally the
volitional centers, centers of responsibility, authority, and care.

It is the father's business, again, to maintain some sort of
equilibrium between the two modes of love in his infant. A mother may
wish to bring up her child from the lovely upper centers only, from
the centers of the breast, in the mode of what we call pure or
spiritual love. Then the child will be all gentle, all tender and
t