lapped hands when the
fingers reaching out to the flame had not yet quite touched. These
punishment experiences are only effective in many children after more or
less repetition has set up an automatic prohibition from brain to motor
nerves; but right here intellect begins to assert itself in the form of
sense memory. The baby does not reason about the matter. His nerve-cells
simply remember pain, and that particular brightness and glow, and
finger touch--or that reaching out to the glow--and slapped hands, as
occurring together. In the same way he early connects pleasure with the
taste of certain forbidden things. He does not know they are sweet. He
only knows "I want." Even here his desire to taste may be checked in
action by a vivid memory of what happened when he tasted that other
time, and was spanked or put in his little room all alone with only milk
and bread to eat for a long time.

Later on the child may think, from cause to effect, thus: "Sweet, good,
want, taste, spank, hurt (or no dinner, all by self, lonely), spank hurt
more than sweets good. Not taste." But long before he can work this out,
consciously, two distinct memories, one of pleasure and one of pain, are
aroused by the sight of the sweet. And what he will do with it depends
upon which memory is stronger. In other words, his action is governed
altogether by his feeling, though memory, which is an intellectual
factor, supplies the material for feeling.

DEVELOPMENT OF REASON AND WILL

Later still, when the child is older, we may have somewhat the following
mechanism: "Sweets, good, want, taste; spank, hurt; don't care, spank
not hurt much, maybe never found put, sweets very good."

Now the child is reasoning and choosing between two courses of action,
_don't_ and _do_. His decision will depend upon whether immediate
satisfaction of desire is stronger than the deferred satisfaction of
being good, and the fear of punishment. He probably prefers to take a
chance, and even if the worst comes, weighs it with the other worst, not
having the sweet--and takes the "bird in the hand." He has reasoned, and
has chosen between two emotions the one which his judgment says is the
more desirable; and his will carries out the decision of his reasoning.
His chief end in life is still to get the most immediate pleasure. Still
later in child-life, much later, perhaps, his decision about the jam is
based on neither love of it nor fear of punishment, but--despite his