The Biography of a Baby
Milicent Washburn Shinn
Paperback
(TheClassics.us, Sept. 12, 2013)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1900 edition. Excerpt: ... THE DAWN OP INTELLIGENCE The sixth month, though it lay between two great development periods, -- that of learning to use the senses, and that of learning to carry the body, -- was not in itself a period of suspended development. It is true that its progress, being more purely mental, could not be so continuously traced as that which came before and after, but rather cropped up to the surface every now andβ’ then in a more or less broken way; still, no doubt, it really went on in the same gradual method, one thread and another knitting together into the fabric of new powers. It was to this month, as I said in closing the last chapter, that the beginnings of adaptive intelligence belonged; and this alone marks it a great epoch. There is a great deal of discussion about the use of the words "intelligence," "reason," "instinct," "judgment," "inference," and the like: what these faculties and acts really are, how they come about, where the bine is to be drawn between their manifestations (in the minds of animals and of man, for instance), and many other problems. But I think that all agree upon recognizing two types of action that come under the discussion: one, that which shows merely the ability to adapt means to ends, to use one's own wit in novel circumstances; the other, that which rests on the higher, abstract reasoning power, such as is hardly possible without carrying on a train of thought in words. Whether these two types are to be called intelligence and reason, as Professor Lloyd Morgan calls them, or whether both come under the head of reason, lower and higher, we need not trouble to decide. If we call them adaptive intelligence and higher or ab stract reason, we are safe enough. Even if it be true that any glimmer of...