en two mothers could be found
who would agree in such an interpretation of their children's looks. Add
to this that this whole scale has very little to do with what, in the
strict sense of the word, we call mind. From fear up to shame and
penitence are all manifestations simply of the feelings, and not of the
mind. We know that what we call fear is often a reflex action, as when a
child closes its eyelids before a blow. What has been named jealousy in a
child, is often nothing but hunger, while shame is instilled into one
child, and in others is by no means of spontaneous growth.

The worst feature of such observations is that they are very quickly
regarded as safe ground, and are reared higher and higher until in the end
the entire scaffold collapses. In order to establish the truth of this
psychologic scale in children still more firmly, and at the same time to
make good its universal necessity, an effort has been made to prove that a
similar scale is to be found in the animal kingdom, and of course what was
sought has been found. Romanes asserts that the lowest order of animals,
the annelids, only show traces of fear; a little higher in the scale, in
insects, are found social instincts such as industry, combativeness, and
curiosity; another step higher, fishes exhibit jealousy, and birds,
sympathy; then in carnivorous animals follow cruelty, hate, and grief; and
lastly, in the anthropoid apes, remorse, shame, and a sense of the
ridiculous, as well as deceit. It needs but one step more to make this
scale, which belongs much more to the sphere of feeling than the realm of
thought, universally applicable to all psychology. How should we otherwise
explain the parallelism between the mental development of infants and that
of undeveloped animals? One need but take a firm hold of such
observations, and they are transformed into airy visions. Who, for
instance, would dare to distinguish the traces of fear in annelids from
those of surprise in higher animals? Nevertheless fear occupies the first
place, surprise the third. And what mark distinguished combativeness in
insects from jealousy in fishes? In the same way I doubt if any two nurses
would agree in the chronology of the phenomena of the infant disposition,
and have therefore long since given up all hope of obtaining any hints
either in embryological or physiological development, about the real
historical unfolding of the human consciousness, either out of a nursery
or ou