Association

Before the days of the scientific study of human nature, romancers often imagined what a man would be like who had grown up without human association. In every case they portrayed a being with our faculties and reactions, although quite without culture. We know now that a child with only animals for nurses and companions would never develop the distinctively human traits. Its mentality would be arrested on a plane but little above that of an imbecile. The observations upon human beings of "wild" upbringing who at various times have been brought among civilized people show them to be characterized by a vegetative type of existence, automatic reactions, unconsciousness of self, inability to learn the use of language, absence of social emotions, and indifference tohuman companionship. Self-consciousness, the rise of personality, and the ordinary capacity for thought and emotion are impossible without the give and take of life in society. About a century ago, from observing the mutual contamination of prison inmates, some were led to advocate the solitary confinement of prisoners, at least for the first part of their term of incarceration. It was argued that in the silence of his cell the offender would come to see his misconduct in a new light and would resolve to change his ways. But the results of the policy showed how little the penologists understood the social side of human nature. In I82I, by act of the legislature of New York, eighty convicts in the Auburn prison were put into solitary cells without labor. At the end of a year five were dead, one had killed himself, another was mad, and the rest were melancholy. The next year the experiment was abandoned. In I842, in England, Pentonville prison began to confine the prisoner in solitude for the first eighteen months of his