These aimless movements are called “impulsive” by Preyer. I have followed Bain and Mrs. Moore in calling them “spontaneous.” There were no movements beyond these three types, and therefore none that showed the least volition. Mothers often think the crying shows wish, will, or understanding of some sort. But Preyer tells us that babies born without a brain cry in just the same manner. Mothers do not like to think that the baby is at first an automaton; and they would be quite right in objecting if that meant that he was a mere machine. He is an automaton in the sense that he has practically neither thought, wish, nor will; but he is a living, conscious automaton, and that makes all the difference in the world. And it would be a bold psychologist who should try to say what _germ_ of thought and will lies enfolded in his helplessness. Certainly, the capacity of developing will is there, and an automaton with such a capacity is a more wonderful creature than the wise, thinking, willing baby of nursery tradition would be. If mothers would only reflect how little developed a baby’s mind is at a year old, after all the progress of twelve months, they would see that they rate the mental starting point altogether too high. And they miss thus the whole drama of the swift and lovely unfolding of the soul from its invisible germ--a drama that sometimes fairly catches one’s breath in the throat with excitement and wonder. III THE NEW-BORN BABY: SENSATIONS AND CONSCIOUSNESS. I have said that the baby began the world as an automaton, but a conscious, feeling automaton. And what, then, were these feelings and this consciousness? What was the outfit for beginning the world that the little mind brought with it? When I asked such questions I was skirting the edge of one of the great battle-grounds of philosophy. Whether all human ideas are made up solely from one’s own experience of the outer world as given him by his senses, or whether there are, on the contrary, inborn ideas, implanted directly by nature or God,--this is a question on which volumes have been written. Did the baby start out ready equipped with ideas of space, personal identity, time, causation, such as we find so ineradicable in our own minds? That is, did she see objects about her, located in space, nearer and farther, right and left, and all outside and separate from herself, as we do? hear sounds coming from without, as we do? Did she feel herself a separate thing from the outer world? Did she perceive events as happening in time succession, one after another? And did she think of one thing as happening because of another, so that, for instance, she was capable of crying in order to cause her dinner to be brought?