Yet this dim dream was flecked all through with the beginnings of later comparison and choice. The light was varied with dark; the feelings of passive motion, of muscular action, of touch, of sound, were all unlike each other; the discomforts of hunger, of pain, of fatigue, were different discomforts. The baby began from the first moment to accumulate varied experience, which before long would waken attention, interest, discrimination, and vivid life. IV THE EARLIEST DEVELOPMENTS Out of the new-born baby’s dim life of passivity the first path was that of vision. I noticed about the end of the second week that her eyes no longer wandered altogether helplessly, but rested with a long and contented gaze on bright surfaces they chanced to encounter, such as the shining of the lamp on the white ceiling, or our faces turned toward the light as she lay on our knees. It was not active looking, with any power to direct the eyes, but mere staring; when the gaze fell by chance on the pleasant light, it clung there. But something must have come to pass, that it _could_ stop and cling to what gave it pleasure. I think no one has yet analyzed this earliest stage in progress toward real seeing, though Professor Sully touches on an explanation when he says that the eyes “maintain their attitude under stimulus of the pleasure.” We know that muscular action is normally caused by stimulus received from the nerve centres, and that in the earliest days there seems to be a good deal of random discharge of stimulus, developed by the growth of the centres, and causing aimless movements. Now there are two fundamental and profoundly important things about this nervous discharge. One is that pleasure, attention, or intensity of sensation seems to have the power of increasing it, and thus influencing the action of the muscles. The other is that the discharge always tends to seek the same paths it has used before, and more and more easily each time; so that physiologists speak of it as a current deepening its channels. It is really nothing like a flowing liquid, nor the nerve threads along which it passes like channeled watercourses. Still, just as a current of water will deepen a gully till it drains into itself all the water that had spread about in shallower ditches, so the wave of molecular change running along a nerve somehow so prepares that nerve that by and by, instead of spreading about through any fibres that come handy, the whole energy will drain into the accustomed ones. Then, of course, the muscles to which these run will perform more and more easily the accustomed acts. Some of these channels--even whole connected systems of them--are already well prepared by inheritance, and hence come instinctive and reflex actions; many are still to be deepened by the baby’s own experience.