It is however extremely difficult to prove that our children
instinctively recognize any expression. I attended to this point in my
first-born infant, who could not have learnt anything by associating
with other children, and I was convinced that he understood a smile and
received pleasure from seeing one, answering it by another, at much too
early an age to have learnt anything by experience. When this child was
about four months old, I made in his presence many odd noises and
strange grimaces, and tried to look savage; but the noises, if not too
loud, as well as the grimaces, were all taken as good jokes; and I
attributed this at the time to their being preceded or accompanied by
smiles. When five months old, he seemed to understand a compassionate,
expression and tone of voice. When a few days over six months old, his
nurse pretended to cry, and I saw that his face instantly assumed a
melancholy expression, with the corners of the mouth strongly
depressed; now this child could rarely have seen any other child
crying, and never a grown-up person crying, and I should doubt whether
at so early an age he could have reasoned on the subject. Therefore it
seems to me that an innate feeling must have told him that the
pretended crying of his nurse expressed grief; and this through the
instinct of sympathy excited grief in him.
M. Lemoine argues that, if man possessed an innate knowledge of
expression, authors and artists would not have found it so difficult,
as is notoriously the case, to describe and depict the characteristic
signs of each particular state of mind. But this does not seem to me a
valid argument. We may actually behold the expression changing in an
unmistakable manner in a man or animal, and yet be quite unable, as I
know from experience, to analyse the nature of the change. In the two
photographs given by Duchenne of the same old man (Plate III. figs. 5
and 6), almost every one recognized that the one represented a true,
and the other a false smile; but I have found it very difficult to
decide in what the whole amount of difference consists. It has often
struck me as a curious fact that so many shades of expression are
instantly recognized without any conscious process of analysis on our
part. No one, I believe, can clearly describe a sullen or sly
expression; yet many observers are unanimous that these expressions can
be recognized in the various races of man. Almost everyone to whom I
showed Duchenne s photograph of the young man with oblique eyebrows
(Plate II. fig. 2) at once declared that it expressed grief or some
such feeling; yet probably not one of these persons, or one out of a
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