movement in a child's learning to walk to the most complicated
action of our daily lives, the nerve centres exercise a mistaken
selection of muscles,--not only selecting more muscles than are
needed for perfect co-ordination of movement, but throwing more
force than necessary into the muscles selected. To a gradually
increasing extent, the contracting force, instead of being withdrawn
when the muscle is inactive, remains; and, as we have already seen,
an arm or leg that should be passive is lifted, and the muscles are
found to be contracted as if for severe action. To the surprise of
the owner the contraction cannot be at once removed. Help for this
habitual contraction is given in the preceding chapter. Further on
Dr. Lagrange tells us that "Besides the apprenticeship of movements
which are unknown, there is the improvement of already known
movements." When the work of mistaken selection of muscles has gone
on for years, the "improvement of already known movements," from the
simplest domestic action to the accomplishment of very great
purposes, is a study in itself. One must learn first to be a grown
baby, and, as we have already seen, gain the exquisite passiveness
of a baby; then one must learn to walk and to move by a natural
process of selection, which, thanks to the contractions of his
various ancestors, was not the process used for his original
movements. This learning to live all over again is neither so
frightful nor so difficult as it sounds. Having gained the passive
state described in the last chapter, one is vastly more sensitive to
unnecessary tension; and it seems often as though the child in us
asserted itself, rising with alacrity to claim its right of natural
movement, and with a new sense of freedom in the power gained to
shun inherited and personal contractions. Certainly it is a fact
that freedom of movement is gained through shunning the
contractions. And this should always be kept in mind to avoid the