This ease with which children can be deceived is to be attributed to lack of experience far more than to lack of intelligence. When the child of a year and a half offers leaves to a sheep or a stag, observes the strange animal with somewhat timid astonishment, and a few days after holds out some hastily plucked grass-blades to a chaffinch he sees hopping across the road, supposing that the bird will likewise take them from his hand and eat them--an observation that I made on my child exactly as Sigismund did on his--it is not right to call such an act "stupid"; the act shows ignorance--i. e., inexperience--but it is not illogical. The child would be properly called stupid only in case he did not _learn_ the difference between the animals fed. When, on the other hand, the child of two and a half years, entirely of his own accord, holds a watch first to his left ear, then to his right, listens both times, and then says, "The watch goes, goes too!" then, pointing with his finger to a clock, cries with delight, "The clock goes too," we rightly find in such independent induction a proof of intellect. For the swinging of the pendulum and the ticking had indeed often been perceived, but to connect the notion of a "going clock" with the visible but noiseless swinging, just as with the audible but invisible ticking of the watch, requires a pretty well advanced power of abstraction. That the ability to _abstract_ may show itself, though imperfectly, even in the first year, is, according to my observations, certain. Infants are struck by a quality of an object--e. g., the white appearance of milk. The "taking away" or "abstracting" then consists in the isolating of this quality out of innumerable other sight-impressions and the blending of the impressions into a concept. The _naming_ of this, which begins months later, by a rudimental word, like _mum_, is an outward sign of this abstraction, which did not at all lead to the formation of the concept, but followed it, as will be shown in detail further on (in the two following chapters). It would be interesting to collect observations concerning this reasoning power in the very earliest period, because at that time language does not interfere to help or to hinder. But it is just such observations that we especially lack. When a child in the twelfth month, on hearing a watch for the first time, cries out, "Tick-tick," looking meantime at the clock on the wall, he has not, in doing this, "formed," as G. Lindner supposes, "his first concept, although a vague and empty one as yet," but he had the concept before, and has now merely given a name to it for the first time.