The second statement is undoubtedly far more rational and consistent with fact than the first; but I cannot think it is a just or adequate account of the growth of intelligence, either in the individual man, or in the human species.  Any one who will carefully watch the development of the intellect of a child will perceive that, from the first, its mind is mirroring nature in two different ways.  On the one hand, it is merely drinking in sensations and building up associations, while it forms conceptions of things and their relations which are more thoroughly “positive,” or devoid of entanglement with hypotheses of any kind, than they will ever be in after-life.  No child has recourse to imaginary personifications in order to account for the ordinary properties of objects which are not alive, or do not represent living things.  It does not imagine that the taste of sugar is brought about by a god of sweetness, or that a spirit of jumping causes a ball to bound.  Such phaenomena, which form the basis of a very large part of its ideas, are taken as matters of course—­as ultimate facts which suggest no difficulty and need no explanation.  So far as all these common, though important, phaenomena are concerned, the child’s mind is in what M. Comte would call the “positive” state.

But, side by side with this mental condition, there rises another.  The child becomes aware of itself as a source of action and a subject of passion and of thought.  The acts which follow upon its own desires are among the most interesting and prominent of surrounding occurrences; and these acts, again, plainly arise either out of affections caused by surrounding things, or of other changes in itself.  Among these surrounding things, the most interesting and important are mother and father, brethren and nurses.  The hypothesis that these wonderful creatures are of like nature to itself is speedily forced upon the child’s mind; and this primitive piece of anthropomorphism turns out to be a highly successful speculation, which finds its justification at every turn.  No wonder, then, that it is extended to other similarly interesting objects which are not too unlike these—­to the dog, the cat, and the canary, the doll, the toy, and the picture-book—­that these are endowed with wills and affections, and with capacities for being “good” and “naughty.”  But surely it would be a mere perversion of language to call this a “theological” state of mind, either in the proper sense of the word “theological,” or as contrasted with “scientific” or “positive.”  The child does not worship either father or mother, dog or doll.  On the contrary, nothing is more curious than the absolute irreverence, if I may so say, of a kindly-treated young child; its tendency to believe in itself as the centre of the universe, and its disposition to exercise despotic tyranny over those who could crush it with a finger.