d auditory impressions excites painful feelings. The infant
knows no more about the relation existing between a ferocious expression
of face, and the evils which may follow perception of it, than the young
bird just out of its nest knows of the possible pain and death which may
be inflicted by a man coming towards it; and as certainly in the one
case as in the other, the alarm felt is due to a partially-established
nervous structure. Why does this partially-established nervous structure
betray its presence thus early in the human being? Simply because, in
the past experiences of the human race, smiles and gentle tones in those
around have been the habitual accompaniments of pleasurable feelings;
while pains of many kinds, immediate and more or less remote, have been
continually associated with the impressions received from knit brows,
and set teeth, and grating voice. Much deeper down than the history of
the human race must we go to find the beginnings of these connexions.
The appearances and sounds which excite in the infant a vague dread,
indicate danger; and do so because they are the physiological
accompaniments of destructive action--some of them common to man and
inferior mammals, and consequently understood by inferior mammals, as
every puppy shows us. What we call the natural language of anger, is due
to a partial contraction of those muscles which actual combat would call
into play; and all marks of irritation, down to that passing shade over
the brow which accompanies slight annoyance, are incipient stages of
these same contractions. Conversely with the natural language of
pleasure, and of that state of mind which we call amicable feeling:
this, too, has a physiological interpretation.[35]

Let us pass now from the infant in arms to the children in the nursery.
What have the experiences of each been doing in aid of the emotional
development we are considering? While its limbs have been growing more
agile by exercise, its manipulative skill increasing by practice, its
perceptions of objects growing by use quicker, more accurate, more
comprehensive; the associations between these two sets of impressions
received from those around, and the pleasures and pains received along
with them, or after them, have been by frequent repetition made
stronger, and their adjustments better. The dim sense of pain and the
vague glow of delight which the infant felt, have, in the urchin,
severally taken shapes that are more definit