important; things may be subordinated to regular
treatment or reaction. But persons become constantly more important,
as uncertain and dominating agents of pleasure and pain. The sight of
movement by persons, with its effects on the infant, seems to be the
most important factor in this peculiar influence; later the voice
comes to stand for a person's presence, and at last the face and its
expressions equal the person in all his attributes.

I think this distinction between persons and things, between agencies
and objects, is the child's very first step toward a sense of
personality. The sense of uncertainty or lack of confidence grows
stronger and stronger in his dealings with persons--an uncertainty
aroused by the moods, emotions, changes of expression, and shades of
treatment of the persons around it. A person stands for a group of
quite unstable experiences. This period we may, for brevity of
expression, assuming it to be first in order of development, call the
"projective" stage in the growth of the child's personal
consciousness.

It is from this beginning that the child goes on to become fully
conscious of what persons are. And when we observe his actions more
closely we find no less than four steps in his growth, which, on
account of the importance of the topic, may be stated in some little
detail.

1. The first thing of significance to him, as has been said, is
_movement_. The first attempts of the infant at anything like steady
attention are directed to moving things--a swaying curtain, a moving
light, a stroking touch, etc. And further than this, the moving things
soon become more than objects of curiosity; these things are just the
things that affect him with pleasure or pain. It is movement that
brings him his bottle, movement that regulates the stages of his bath,
movement that dresses him comfortably, movement that sings to him and
rocks him to sleep. In that complex of sensations, the nurse, the
feature of importance to him, of immediate satisfaction or redemption
from pain, is this--movements come to succour him. Change in his
bodily feeling is the vital requirement of his life, for by it the
rhythm of his vegetative existence is secured; and these things are
accompanied and secured always in the moving presence of the one he
sees and feels about him. This, I take it, is the earliest reflection
in his consciousness of the world of personalities about him. At this
stage his "personality suggestion" is