e and predilection--answering to
situations which revive feelings of pain on the one hand, and feelings
of pleasure on the other. And such is the working of suggestion that,
not alone an object or situation may produce a given state of feeling,
but a voice, an odor, a color, or any characteristic sign of an object
may produce the same effect as the object itself. The sight or smell
of blood is an excitant to a bull, because it revives a conflict state
of feeling, and even the color of a red rag produces a similar effect.

When we come to examine in detail the process by which an
associational and sympathetic relation is set up between the
individual and certain parts of the outside world to the exclusion
of others, we find this at first, on a purely instinctive and reflex
basis, originating in connection with food-getting and reproduction,
and growing more conscious in the higher forms of life. One of the
most important origins of association and prepossession is seen in
the relation of parents, particularly of mothers, to children. This
begins, of course, among the lower animals. The mammalian class, in
particular, is distinguished by the strength and persistence of the
devotion of parents to offspring. The advantage secured by the form
of reproduction characteristic of man and the other mammals is that
a closer connection is secured between the child and the mother. By
the intra-uterine form of reproduction the association of mother and
offspring is set up in an organic way before the birth of the latter,
and is continued and put on a social basis during the period of
lactation and the early helpless years of the child. By continuing the
helpless period of the young for a period of years, nature has made
provision on the time side for a complex physical and mental type,
impossible in types thrown at birth on their own resources. Along
with the structural modification of the female on account of the
intra-uterine form of reproduction and the effort of nature to secure
a more complex type and a better chance of survival, there is a
corresponding development of the sentiments, and maternal feeling,
in particular, is developed as the subjective condition necessary
to carrying out the plan of giving the infant a prolonged period of
helplessness and play through which its faculties are developed.[161]
The scheme would not work if the mother were not more interested
in the child than in anything else in the world. In the cou