be referred to this fact; on the other hand, the play
of hide-and-seek (especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth months),
and, nearly allied to this, the hunting after scraps of paper, bits of
biscuit, buttons, and other favorite objects (in the fifteenth month),
constitute an intellectual advance.

By practice in this kind of seeking for well-known, purposely concealed
objects, the intelligence of little children can easily be increased to
an astonishing degree, so that toward the end of the second year they
already understand some simple tricks of the juggler; for example,
making a card disappear. But after I had discontinued such exercises for
months, the ordinary capacity for being duped was again present.

This ease with which children can be deceived is to be attributed to
lack of experience far more than to lack of intelligence. When the child
of a year and a half offers leaves to a sheep or a stag, observes the
strange animal with somewhat timid astonishment, and a few days after
holds out some hastily plucked grass-blades to a chaffinch he sees
hopping across the road, supposing that the bird will likewise take them
from his hand and eat them--an observation that I made on my child
exactly as Sigismund did on his--it is not right to call such an act
"stupid"; the act shows ignorance--i. e., inexperience--but it is not
illogical. The child would be properly called stupid only in case he did
not _learn_ the difference between the animals fed. When, on the other
hand, the child of two and a half years, entirely of his own accord,
holds a watch first to his left ear, then to his right, listens both
times, and then says, "The watch goes, goes too!" then, pointing with
his finger to a clock, cries with delight, "The clock goes too," we
rightly find in such independent induction a proof of intellect. For the
swinging of the pendulum and the ticking had indeed often been
perceived, but to connect the notion of a "going clock" with the visible
but noiseless swinging, just as with the audible but invisible ticking
of the watch, requires a pretty well advanced power of abstraction.

That the ability to _abstract_ may show itself, though imperfectly, even
in the first year, is, according to my observations, certain. Infants
are struck by a quality of an object--e. g., the white appearance of
milk. The "taking away" or "abstracting" then consists in the isolating
of this quality out of innumerable other sight-impressi