lie, and look at her with the strange, odd,
curious look of knowledge, like a little imp who is spying her out.
This is the curious look that many mothers cannot bear. Involuntarily
it arouses a sort of hate in them--the look of scrutinizing curiosity,
apart, and as it were studying, balancing them up. Yet it is a look
which comes into every child's eyes. It is the reaction of the great
voluntary plexus between the shoulders. The mother is suddenly set
apart, as an object of curiosity, coldly, sometimes dreamily,
sometimes puzzled, sometimes mockingly observed.

Again, if a mother neglect her child, it cries, it weeps for her love
and attention. Its pitiful lament is one of the forms of compulsion
from the upper center. This insistence on pity, on love, is quite
different from the rageous weeping, which is compulsion from the lower
center, below the diaphragm. Again, some children just drop everything
they can lay hands on over the edge of their crib, or their table.
They drop everything out of sight. And then they look up with a
curious look of negative triumph. This is again a form of recoil from
the upper center, the obliteration of the thing which is outside. And
here a child is acting quite differently from the child who joyously
_smashes_. The desire to smash comes from the lower centers.

We can quite well recognize the will exerted from the lower center. We
call it headstrong temper and masterfulness. But the peculiar will of
the upper center--the sort of nervous, critical objectivity, the
deliberate forcing of sympathy, the play upon pity and tenderness, the
plaintive bullying of love, or the benevolent bullying of love--these
we don't care to recognize. They are the extravagance of spiritual
_will_. But in its true harmony the thoracic ganglion is a center of
happier activity: of real, eager curiosity, of the delightful desire
to pick things to pieces, and the desire to put them together again,
the desire to "find out," and the desire to invent: all this arises on
the upper plane, at the volitional center of the thoracic ganglion.

CHAPTER IV

TREES AND BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS

Oh, damn the miserable baby with its complicated ping-pong table of an
unconscious. I'm sure, dear reader, you'd rather have to listen to the
brat howling in its crib than to me expounding its plexuses. As for
"mixing those babies up," I'd mix him up like a shot if I'd anything
to mix him with. Unfortunately he's my own