STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD.

I.

INTRODUCTORY.

Man has always had the child with him, and one might be sure that since

he became gentle and alive to the beauty of things he must have come

under the spell of the baby. We have evidence beyond the oft-quoted

departure of Hector and other pictures of childish grace in early

literature that baby-worship and baby-subjection are not wholly things

of modern times. There is a pretty story taken down by Mr. Leland from

the lips of an old Indian woman, which relates how Glooskap the

hero-god, after conquering all his enemies, rashly tried his hand at

managing a certain mighty baby, Wasis by name, and how he got punished

for his rashness.[1]

-----

Footnote 1:

Quoted by Miss Shinn. _Overland Monthly._ January, 1894.

-----

Yet there is good reason to suppose that it is only within comparatively

recent times that the more subtle charm and the deeper significance of

infancy have been discerned. We have come to appreciate babyhood as we

have come to appreciate the finer lineaments of nature as a whole. This

applies, of course, more especially to the ruder sex. The man has in him

much of the boy’s contempt for small things, and he needed ages of

education at the hands of the better-informed woman before he could

perceive the charm of infantile ways.

One of the first males to do justice to this attractive subject was

Rousseau. He made short work with the theological dogma that the child

is born morally depraved, and can only be made good by miraculous

appliances. His watchword, return to nature, included a reversion to the

infant as coming virginal and unspoilt by man’s tinkering from the hands

of its Maker. To gain a glimpse of this primordial beauty before it was

marred by man’s awkward touch was something, and so Rousseau set men in

the way of sitting reverently at the feet of infancy, watching and

learning.

For us of to-day, who have learned to go to the pure springs of nature

for much of our spiritual refreshment, the child has acquired a high

place among the things of beauty. Indeed, the grace of childhood may

almost be said to have been discovered by the modern poet. Wordsworth

has stooped over his cradle intent on catching, ere they passed, the

‘visionary gleams’ of ‘the glories he hath known’. Blake, R. L.

Stevenson, and others, have tried to put into language his

day-dreamings, his quaint fancyings. Dickens and Victor Hugo have shown

us something of his delicate quivering heart-strings; Swinburne has

summed up the divine charm of “children’s ways and wiles”. The page of

modern literature is, indeed, a monument of our child-love and our

child-admiration.

Nor is it merely as to a pure untarnished nature that we go back

admiringly to childhood. The æsthetic charm of the infant which draws us

so potently to its side and compels us to watch its words and actions

is, like everything else which moves the modern mind, highly complex.

Among other sources of this charm we may discern the perfect serenity,

the happy ‘insouciance’ of the childish mind. The note of

world-complaint in modern life has penetrated into most domains, yet it

has not, one would hope, penetrated into the charmed circle of childish

experience. Childhood has, no doubt, its sad aspect:—

Poor stumbler on the rocky coast of woe,

Tutored by pain each source of pain to know:

neglect and cruelty may bring much misery into the first bright years.

Yet the very instinct of childhood to be glad in its self-created world,

an instinct which with consummate art Victor Hugo keeps warm and quick

in the breast of the half-starved ill-used child Cosette, secures for it

a peculiar blessedness. The true nature-child, who has not become

_blasé_, is happy, untroubled with the future, knowing nothing of the

misery of disillusion. As, with hearts chastened by many experiences, we

take a peep over the wall of his fancy-built pleasance, we seem to be

taken back to a real golden age. With Amiel, we say: “Le peu de paradis

que nous aperçevons encore sur la terre est du à sa présence”. Yet the

thought, which the same moment brings, of the flitting of the nursery

visions, of the coming storm and stress, adds a pathos to the spectacle,

and we feel as Heine felt when he wrote:—

Ich schau’ dich an, und Wehmuth

Schleicht mir ins Herz hinein.

Other and strangely unlike feelings mingle with this caressing,

half-pitiful admiration. We moderns are given to relieving the strained

attitude of reverence and pity by momentary outbursts of humorous

merriment. The child, while appealing to our admiration and our pity,

makes a large and many-voiced appeal also to our sense of the laughter

in things. It is indeed hard to say whether he is most amusing when

setting at naught in his quiet, lordly way, our most extolled views, our

ideas of what is true and false, of the proper uses of things, and so

forth, or when labouring in his perfectly self-conceived fashion to

overtake us and be as experienced and as conventional as ourselves. This

ever new play of droll feature in childish thought and action forms one

of the deepest sources of delight for the modern lover of childhood.

With the growth of a poetic or sentimental interest in childhood there

has come a new and different kind of interest. Ours is a scientific age,

and science has cast its inquisitive eye on the infant. We want to know

what happens in these first all-decisive two or three years of human

life, by what steps exactly the wee amorphous thing takes shape and

bulk, both physically and mentally. And we can now speak of the

beginning of a careful and methodical investigation of child-nature, by

men trained in scientific observation. This line of inquiry, started by

physicians, as the German Sigismund, in connection with their special

professional aims, has been carried on by a number of fathers and others

having access to the infant, among whom it may be enough to name Darwin

and Preyer. A fuller list of writings on the subject will be given at

the end of the volume.

This eagerness to know what the child is like, an eagerness illustrated

further by the number of reminiscences of early years recently

published, is the outcome of a many-sided interest which it may be worth

while to analyse.

The most obvious source of interest in the doings of infancy lies in its

primitiveness. At the cradle we are watching the beginnings of things,

the first tentative thrustings forward into life. Our modern science is

before all things historical and genetic, going back to beginnings so as

to understand the later and more complex phases of things as the outcome

of these beginnings. The same kind of curiosity which prompts the

geologist to get back to the first stages in the building up of the

planet, or the biologist to search out the pristine forms of life, is

beginning to urge the student of man to discover by a careful study of

infancy the way in which human life begins to take its characteristic

forms.

The appearance of Darwin’s name among those who have deemed the child

worthy of study suggests that the subject is closely connected with

natural history. However man in his proud maturity may be related to

Nature, it is certain that in his humble inception he is immersed in

Nature and saturated with her. As we all know, the lowest races of

mankind stand in close proximity to the animal world. The same is true

of the infants of civilised races. Their life is outward and visible,

forming a part of nature’s spectacle; reason and will, the noble

prerogatives of humanity, are scarce discernible; sense, appetite,

instinct, these animal functions seem to sum up the first year of human

life.

To the evolutionist, moreover, the infant exhibits a still closer

kinship to the natural world. In the successive stages of fœtal

development he sees the gradual unfolding of human lineaments out of a

widely typical animal form. And even after birth he can discern new

evidences of this genealogical relation of the “lord” of creation to his

inferiors. How significant, for example, is the fact recently

established by a medical man, Dr. Louis Robinson, that the new-born

infant is able just like the ape to suspend his whole weight by grasping

a small horizontal rod.[2]

-----

Footnote 2:

The _Nineteenth Century_ (1891). _Cf._ the somewhat fantastic and not

too serious paper by S. S. Buckman on “Babies and Monkeys” in the same

journal (1894).

-----

Yet even as nature-object for the biologist the child presents

distinctive attributes. Though sharing in animal instinct, he shares in

it only to a very small extent. The most striking characteristic of the

new-born offspring of man is its unpreparedness for life. Compare with

the young of other animals the infant so feeble and incapable. He can

neither use his limbs nor see the distance of objects as a new-born

chick or calf is able to do. His brain-centres are, we are told, in a

pitiable state of undevelopment—and are not even securely encased within

their bony covering. Indeed, he resembles for all the world a public

building which has to be opened by a given date, and is found when the

day arrives to be in a humiliating state of incompleteness.

This fact of the special helplessness of the human offspring at birth,

of its long period of dependence on parental or other aids—a period

which, probably, tends to grow longer as civilisation advances—is rich

in biological and sociological significance. For one thing, it

presupposes a specially high development of the protective and fostering

instincts in the human parents, and particularly the mother—for if the

helpless wee thing were not met by these instincts, what would become of

our race? It is probable, too, as Mr. Spencer and others have argued,

that the institution by nature of this condition of infantile weakness

has reacted on the social affections of the race, helping to develop our

pitifulness for all frail and helpless things.

Nor is this all. The existence of the infant, with its large and

imperative claims, has been a fact of capital importance in the

development of social customs. Ethnological researches show that

communities have been much exercised with the problem of infancy, have

paid it the homage due to its supreme sacredness, girding it about with

a whole group of protective and beneficent customs.[3]

-----

Footnote 3:

See, for example, the works of H. Ploss, _Das Kind in Brauch und

Sitte_, and _Das kleine Kind_.

-----

Enough has been said, perhaps, to show the far-reaching significance of

babyhood to the modern savant. It is hardly too much to say that it has

become one of the most eloquent of nature’s phenomena, telling us at

once of our affinity to the animal world, and of the forces by which our

race has, little by little, lifted itself to so exalted a position above

this world; and so it has happened that not merely to the perennial

baby-worshipper, the mother, and not merely to the poet touched with the

mystery of far-off things, but to the grave man of science the infant

has become a centre of lively interest.

Nevertheless, it is not to the mere naturalist that the babe reveals all

its significance. Physical organism as it seems to be more than anything

else, hardly more than a vegetative thing indeed, it carries with it the

germ of a human consciousness, and this consciousness begins to expand

and to form itself into a truly human shape from the very beginning. And

here a new source of interest presents itself. It is the human

psychologist, the student of those impalpable, unseizable, evanescent

phenomena which we call “state of consciousness,” who has a supreme

interest, and a scientific property in these first years of a human

existence. What is of most account in these crude tentatives at living

after the human fashion is the play of mind, the first spontaneous

manifestations of recognition, of reasoning expectation, of feelings of

sympathy and antipathy, of definite persistent purpose.

Rude, inchoate, vague enough, no doubt, are these first groping

movements of a human mind: yet of supreme value to the psychologist just

because they are the first. If, reflects the psychologist, he can only

get at this baby’s consciousness so as to understand what is passing

there, he will be in an infinitely better position to find his way

through the intricacies of the adult consciousness. It may be, as we

shall see by-and-by, that the baby’s mind is not so perfectly simple, so

absolutely primitive as it at first looks. Yet it is the simplest type

of human consciousness to which we can have access. The investigator of

this consciousness can never take any known sample of the animal mind as

his starting point if for no other reason for this, that while

possessing many of the elements of the human mind, it presents these in

so unlike, so peculiar a pattern.

In this genetic tracing back of the complexities of man’s mental life to

their primitive elements in the child’s consciousness, questions of

peculiar interest will arise. A problem which though having a venerable

antiquity is still full of meaning concerns the precise relation of the

higher forms of intelligence and of sentiment to the elementary facts of

the individual’s life-experience. Are we to regard all our ideas, even

those of God, as woven by the mind out of its experiences, as Locke

thought, or have we certain ‘innate ideas’ from the first? Locke thought

he could settle this point by observing children. To-day, when the

philosophic emphasis is laid not on the date of appearance of the

‘innate’ intuition, but on its originality and spontaneity, this method

of interrogating the child’s mind may seem less promising. Yet if of

less philosophical importance than was once supposed, it is of great

psychological importance. There are certain questions, such as that of

how we come to see things at a distance from us, which can be approached

most advantageously by a study of infant movements. In like manner I

believe the growth of a moral sentiment, of that feeling of reverence

for duty to which Kant gave so eloquent an expression, can only be

understood by the most painstaking observation of the mental activities

of the first years.

There is, however, another, and in a sense a larger, source of

psychological interest in studying the processes and development of the

infant mind. It was pointed out above that to the evolutional biologist

the child exhibits man in his kinship to the lower sentient world. This

same evolutional point of view enables the psychologist to connect the

unfolding of an infant’s mind with something which has gone before, with

the mental history of the race. According to this way of looking at

infancy the successive phases of its mental life are a brief _resumé_ of

the more important features in the slow upward progress of the species.

The periods dominated successively by sense and appetite, by blind

wondering and superstitious fancy, and by a calmer observation and a

juster reasoning about things, these steps mark the pathway both of the

child-mind and of the race-mind.

This being so, the first years of a child, with their imperfect verbal

expression, their crude fanciful ideas, their seizures by rage and

terror, their absorption in the present moment, acquire a new and

antiquarian interest. They mirror for us, in a diminished distorted

reflection no doubt, the probable condition of primitive man. As Sir

John Lubbock and other anthropologists have told us, the intellectual

and moral resemblances between the lowest existing races of mankind and

children are numerous and close. They will be illustrated again and

again in the following studies.

Yet this way of viewing childhood is not merely of antiquarian interest.

While a monument of his race, and in a manner a key to its history, the

child is also its product. In spite of the fashionable Weismannism of

the hour, there are evolutionists who hold that in the early manifested

tendencies of the child, we can discern signs of a hereditary

transmission of the effects of ancestral experiences and activities. His

first manifestations of rage, for example, are a survival of actions of

remote ancestors in their life and death struggles. The impulse of

obedience, which is as much a characteristic of the child as that of

disobedience, may in like manner be regarded as a transmitted rudiment

of a long practised action of socialised ancestors. This idea of an

increment of intelligence and moral disposition, earned for the

individual not by himself but by his ancestors, has its peculiar

interest. It gives a new meaning to human progress to suppose that the

dawn of infant intelligence, instead of being a return to a primitive

darkness, contains from the first a faint light reflected on it from the

lamp of racial intelligence which has preceded that instead of a return

to the race’s starting point, the lowest form of the school of

experience, it is a start in a higher form, the promotion being a reward

conferred on the child for the exertions of his ancestors. Psychological

observation will be well employed in scanning the features of the

infant’s mind in order to see whether they yield evidence of such

ancestral dowering.

So much with respect to the rich and varied scientific interest

attaching to the movements of the child’s mind. It only remains to touch

on a third main interest in childhood, the practical or educational

interest. The modern world, while erecting the child into an object of

æsthetic contemplation, while bringing to bear on him the bull’s eye

lamp of scientific observation, has become sorely troubled by the

momentous problem of rearing him. What was once a matter of instinct and

unthinking rule-of-thumb has become the subject of profound and

perplexing discussion. Mothers—the right sort of mothers that is—feel

that they must know _au fond_ this wee speechless creature which they

are called upon to direct into the safe road to manhood. And

professional teachers, more particularly the beginners in the work of

training, whose work is in some respects the most difficult and the most

honourable, have come to see that a clear insight into child-nature and

its spontaneous movements, must precede any intelligent attempt to work

beneficially upon this nature. In this way the teacher has lent his

support to the savant and the psychologist in their investigation of

infancy. More particularly he has betaken him to the psychologist in

order to discover more of the native tendencies and the governing laws

of that unformed child-mind which it is his in a special manner to form.

In addition to this, the growing educational interest in the spontaneous

behaviour of the child’s mind may be expected to issue in a demand for a

_statistic_ of childhood, that is to say, carefully arranged collections

of observations bearing on such points as children’s questions, their

first thoughts about nature, their manifestations of sensibility and

insensibility.

The awakening in the modern mind of this keen and varied interest in

childhood has led, and is destined to lead still more, to the

observation of infantile ways. This observation will, of course, be of

very different value according as it subserves the contemplation of the

humorous or other æsthetically valuable aspect of child-nature, or as it

is directed towards a scientific understanding of this. Pretty anecdotes

of children which tickle the emotions may or may not add to our insight

into the peculiar mechanism of children’s minds. There is no necessary

connection between smiling at infantile drolleries and understanding the

laws of infantile intelligence. Indeed, the mood of merriment, if too

exuberant, will pretty certainly swamp for the moment any desire to

understand.

The observation which is to further understanding, which is to be

acceptable to science, must itself be scientific. That is to say, it

must be at once guided by foreknowledge, specially directed to what is

essential in a phenomenon and its surroundings or conditions, and

perfectly exact. If anybody supposes this to be easy, he should first

try his hand at the work, and then compare what he has seen with what

Darwin or Preyer has been able to discover.

How difficult this is may be seen even with reference to the outward

physical part of the phenomena to be observed. Ask any mother untrained

in observation to note the first appearance of that complex facial

movement which we call a smile, and you know what kind of result you are

likely to get. The phenomena of a child’s mental life, even on its

physical and visible side, are of so subtle and fugitive a character

that only a fine and quick observation is able to cope with them. But

observation of children is never merely seeing. Even the smile has to be

interpreted as a smile by a process of imaginative inference. Many

careless onlookers would say that a baby smiles in the first days from

very happiness, when another and simpler explanation of the movement is

forthcoming. Similarly, it wants much fine judgment to say whether an

infant is merely stumbling accidentally on an articulate sound, or is

imitating your sound. A glance at some of the best memoirs will show how

enormously difficult it is to be sure of a right interpretation of these

early and comparatively simple manifestations of mind.[4]

-----

Footnote 4:

These difficulties seem to me to be curiously overlooked in Prof. Mark

Baldwin’s recent utterance on child psychology. (_Mental Development

in the Child and the Race_, chap. ii.) In this optimistic presentment

of the subject there is not the slightest reference to the difficult

work of interpretation. Child-study is talked of as a perfectly simple

mode of observation, requiring at most to be supplemented by a little

experiment, and, it may be added, backed by a firm theory.

-----

Things grow a great deal worse when we try to throw our scientific

lassoo about the elusive spirit of a child of four or six, and to catch

the exact meaning of its swiftly changing movements. Children are, no

doubt, at this age frank before the eye of love, and their minds are

vastly more accessible than that of the dumb dog that can only look his

ardent thoughts. Yet they are by no means so open to view as is often

supposed. All kinds of shy reticences hamper them: they feel unskilled

in using our cumbrous language; they soon find out that their thoughts

are not as ours, but often make us laugh. And how carefully are they

wont to hide from our sight their nameless terrors, physical and moral.

Much of the deeper childish experience can only reach us, if at all,

years after it is over, through the faulty medium of adult memory—faulty

even when it is the memory of a Goethe, a George Sand, a Robert Louis

Stevenson.[5]

-----

Footnote 5:

In these days of published reminiscences of childhood it is quite

refreshing to meet with a book like Mr. James Payn’s _Gleams of

Memory_, which honestly confesses that its early recollections are

almost _nil_.

-----

Even when there is perfect candour, and the little one does his best to

instruct us as to what is passing in his mind by his ‘whys’ and his ‘I

’sposes,’ accompanied by the most eloquent of looks, we find ourselves

ever and again unequal to comprehending. Child-thought follows its own

paths—roads, as Mr. Rudyard Kipling has well said, “unknown to those who

have left childhood behind”. The dark sayings of childhood, as when a

child asks, ‘Why am I not somebody else?’ will be fully illustrated

below.

This being so, it might well seem arrogant to speak of any ‘scientific’

investigation of the child’s mind; and, to be candid, I may as well

confess that, in spite of some recently published highly hopeful

forecasts of what child-psychology is going to do for us, I think we are

a long way off from a perfectly scientific account of it. Our so-called

theories of children’s mental activity has so often been hasty

generalisations from imperfect observation. Children are probably much

more diverse in their ways of thinking and feeling than our theories

suppose. But of this more presently. Even where we meet with a common

and comparatively prominent trait, we are far as yet from having a

perfect comprehension of it. I at least believe that children’s play,

about which so much has confidently been written, is but imperfectly

understood. Is it serious business, half-conscious make-believe, more

than half-conscious acting, or, no one of these, or all of them by

turns? I think he would be a bold man who ventured to answer this

question straight away.

In this state of things it might seem well to wait. Possibly by-and-by

we shall light on new methods of tapping the childish consciousness.

Patients in a certain stage of the hypnotic trance have returned, it is

said, to their childish experience and feelings. Some people do this, or

appear to do this, in their dreams. I know a young man who revives vivid

recollections of the experiences of the third year of life when he is

sleepy, and more especially if he is suffering from a cold. These facts

suggest that if we only knew more about the mode of working of the brain

we might reinstate a special group of conditions which would secure a

re-emergence of childish ideas and sentiments.

Yet our case is not so hopeless that we need defer inquiry into the

child’s mind until human science has fathomed all the mysteries of the

brain. We can know many things of this mind, and these of great

importance, even now. The naturalist discusses the actions of the lower

animals, confidently attributing intelligent planning here, and a germ

of vanity or even of moral sense there; and it would be hard were we

forbidden to study the little people that are of our own race, and are a

thousand times more open to inspection. Really good work has already

been done here, and one should be grateful. At the same time, it seems

to me of the greatest importance to recognise that it is but a

beginning: that the child which the modern world has in the main

discovered is after all only half discovered: that if we are to get at

his inner life, his playful conceits, his solemn broodings over the

mysteries of things, his way of responding to the motley show of life,

we must carry this work of noting and interpreting to a much higher

point.

Now, if progress is to be made in this work, we must have specially

qualified workers. All who know anything of the gross misunderstandings

of children of which many so-called intelligent adults are capable, will

bear me out when I say that a certain gift of penetration is absolutely

indispensable here. If any one asks me what the qualifications of a good

child-observer amount to, I may perhaps answer, for the sake of brevity,

‘a divining faculty, the offspring of child-love, perfected by

scientific training’. Let us see what this includes.

That the observer of children must be a diviner, a sort of clairvoyant

reader of their secret thoughts, seems to me perfectly obvious. Watch

half a dozen men who find themselves unexpectedly ushered into a room

tenanted by a small child, and you will soon be able to distinguish the

diviners, who, just because they have in themselves something akin to

the child, seem able at once to get into touch with children. It is

probable that women’s acknowledged superiority in knowledge of

child-nature is owing to their higher gift of sympathetic insight. This

faculty, so far from being purely intellectual, is very largely the

outgrowth of a peculiar moral nature to which the life of all small

things, and of children more than all, is always sweet and congenial. It

is very much of a secondary, or acquired instinct; that is, an

unreflecting intuition which is the outgrowth of a large experience. For

the child-lover seeks the object of his love, and is never so happy as

when associating with children and sharing in their thoughts and their

pleasures. And it is through such habitual intercourse that there forms

itself the instinct or tact by which the significance of childish

manifestation is at once unerringly discerned.

There is in this tact or fineness of spiritual touch one constituent so

important as to deserve special mention. I mean a lively memory of one’s

own childhood. As I have observed above, I do not believe in an exact

and trustworthy reproduction in later life of particular incidents of

childhood. All recalling of past experiences illustrates the modifying

influence of the later self in its attempt to assimilate and understand

the past self; and this transforming effect is at its maximum when we

try to get back to childhood. But though our memory of childhood is not

in itself exact enough to furnish facts, it may be sufficiently strong

for the purposes of interpreting our observations of the children we see

about us. It is said, and said rightly, that in order to read a child’s

mind we need imagination, and since all imagination is merely

readjustment of individual experience, it follows that the skilled

decipherer of infantile characters needs before all things to be in

touch with his own early feelings and thoughts. And this is just what we

find. The vivacious, genial woman who is never so much at home as when

surrounded by a bevy of eager-minded children is a woman who remains

young in the important sense that she retains much of the freshness and

unconventionality of mind, much of the gaiety and expansiveness of early

life. Conversely one may feel pretty sure that a woman who retains a

vivid memory of her childish ideas and feelings will be drawn to the

companionship of children. After reading their autobiographies one

hardly needs to be told that Goethe carried into old age his quick

responsiveness to the gaiety of the young heart; and that George Sand

when grown old was never so happy as when gathering the youngsters about

her.[6]

-----

Footnote 6:

Since this was written the authoress of _Little Lord Fauntleroy_ has

shown us how clear and far-reaching a memory she has of her childish

experiences.

-----

Yet valuable as is this gift of sympathetic insight, it will not, of

course, conduce to that methodical, exact kind of observation which is

required by science. Hence the need of the second qualification:

psychological training. By this is meant that special knowledge which

comes from studying the principles of the science, its peculiar

problems, and the methods appropriate to these, together with the

special skill which is attained by a methodical, practical application

of this knowledge in the actual observation and interpretation of

manifestations of mind. Thus a woman who wishes to observe to good

effect the mind of a child of three must have a sufficient acquaintance

with the general course of the mental life to know what to expect, and

in what way the phenomena observed have to be interpreted. Really fine

and fruitful observation is the outcome of a large knowledge, and

anybody who is to carry out in a scientific fashion the observation of

the humblest phase of a child’s mental life must already know this life

as a whole, so far as psychology can as yet describe its

characteristics, and determine the conditions of its activity.

And here the question naturally arises: “Who is to carry out this new

line of scientific observation?” To begin with the first stage of it,

who is to carry out the exact methodical record of the movements of the

infant? It is evident that qualification or capacity is not all that is

necessary here; capacity must be favoured with opportunity before the

work can be actually begun.

It has been pointed out that the pioneers who struck out this new line

of experimental research were medical men. The meaning of this fact is

pretty apparent. The doctor has not only a turn for scientific

observation: he is a privileged person in the nursery. The natural

guardians of infancy, the mother and the nurse, exempt him from their

general ban on the male. He excepted, no man, not even the child’s own

father, is allowed to meddle too much with that divine mystery, that

meeting point of all the graces and all the beatitudes, the infant.

Consider for a moment the natural prejudice which the inquirer into the

characteristics of the infant has to face. Such inquiry is not merely

passively watching what spontaneously presents itself; it is

emphatically experimenting, that is, the calling out of reactions by

applying appropriate stimuli. Even to try whether the new-born babe will

close its fingers on your finger when brought into contact with their

anterior surface may well seem impious to a properly constituted nurse.

To propose to test the wee creature’s sense of taste by applying drops

of various solutions, as acid, bitters, etc., to the tongue, or to

provoke ocular movements to the right or the left, would pretty

certainly seem a profanation of the temple of infancy, if not fraught

with danger to its tiny deity. And as to trying Dr. Robinson’s

experiment of getting the newly arrived visitor to suspend his whole

precious weight by clasping a bar, it is pretty certain that, women

being constituted as at present, only a medical man could have dreamt of

so daring a feat.

There is no doubt that baby-worship, the sentimental adoration of infant

ways, is highly inimical to the carrying out of a perfectly cool and

impartial process of scientific observation. Hence the average mother

can hardly be expected to do more than barely to tolerate this

encroaching of experiment into the hallowed retreat of the nursery. Even

in these days of rapid modification of what used to be thought

unalterable sexual characters, one may be bold enough to hazard the

prophecy that women who have had scientific training will, if they

happen to become mothers, hardly be disposed to give their minds at the

very outset to the rather complex and difficult work, say, of making an

accurate scientific inventory of the several modes of infantile

sensibility, visual, auditory, and so forth, and of the alterations in

these from day to day.

It is for the coarser fibred man, then, to undertake much of the earlier

experimental work in the investigation of child-nature. And if fathers

will duly qualify themselves they will probably find that permission

will little by little be given them to carry out investigations, short,

of course, of anything that looks distinctly dangerous to the little

being’s comfort.

At the same time it is evident that a complete series of observations of

the infant can hardly be carried out by a man alone. It is for the

mother, or some other woman with a pass-key to the nursery, with her

frequent and prolonged opportunities of observation to attempt a careful

and methodical register of mental progress. Hence the importance of

enlisting the mother or her female representative as collaborateur or at

least as assistant. Thus supposing the father is bent on ascertaining

the exact dates and the order of appearance of the different articulate

sounds, which is rather a subject of passive observation than of active

experiment; he will be almost compelled to call in the aid of one who

has the considerable advantage of passing a good part of each day near

the child.[7]

-----

Footnote 7:

The great advantage which the female observer of the infant’s mind has

over her male competitor is clearly illustrated in some recent studies

of childhood by American women. I would especially call attention to a

study by Miss M. W. Shinn of the University of California

(_Development of a child. Notes on the writer’s niece_), where the

minute and painstaking record (_e.g._, of the child’s colour

discrimination and visual space exploration) points to the ample

opportunity of observation which comes more readily to women.

-----

As the wee thing grows and its nervous system becomes more stable and

robust more in the way of research may of course be safely attempted. In

this higher stage the work of observation will be less simple and

involve more of special psychological knowledge. It is a comparatively

easy thing to say whether the sudden approach of an object to the eye of

a baby a week or so old calls forth the reflex known as blinking: it is

a much more difficult thing to say what are the preferences of a child

of twelve months in the matter of simple forms, or even colours.

The problem of the order of development of the colour-sense in children

looks at first easy enough. Any mother, it may be thought, can say which

colours the child first recognises by naming them when seen, or picking

them out when another names them. Yet simple as it looks, the problem is

in reality anything but simple. A German investigator, Professor Preyer

of Berlin, went to work methodically with his little boy of two years in

order to see in what order he would discriminate colours. Two colours,

red and green, were first shown, the name added to each, and the child

then asked: “Which is red?” “Which is green?” Then other colours were

added and the experiments repeated. According to these researches this

particular child first acquired a clear discriminative awareness of

yellow. Preyer’s results have not, however, been confirmed by other

investigators, as M. Binet of Paris, who followed a similar method of

inquiry. Thus according to Binet it is not yellow but blue which carries

the day in the competition for the child’s preferential recognition.

What, it may be asked, is the explanation of this? Is it that children

differ in the mode of development of their colour-sensibility to this

extent, or can it be that there is some fault in the method of

investigation? It has been recently suggested that the mode of testing

colour-discrimination by naming is open to the objection that a child

may get hold of one verbal sound as ‘red’ more easily than another as

‘green’ and that this would facilitate the recognition of the former. If

in this way the recognition of a colour is aided by the retention of its

name, we must get rid of this disturbing element of sound. Accordingly

new methods of experiment have been attempted in France and America.

Thus Professor Baldwin investigates the matter by placing two colours

opposite the child’s two arms and noting which is reached out to by

right or left arm, which is ignored. He has tabulated the results of a

short series of these simple experiments for testing childish

preference, and supports the conclusions of Binet, as against those of

Preyer, that blue comes in for the first place in the child’s

discriminative recognition.[8] It is however easy to see that this

method has its own characteristic defects. Thus, to begin with, it

evidently does not directly test colour discrimination at all, but the

liking for or interest in colours, which though it undoubtedly implies a

measure of discrimination must not be confused with this. And even as a

test of preference it is very likely to be misapplied. Thus supposing

that the two colours are not equally bright, then the child will grasp

at one rather than at the other, because it is a brighter object and not

because it is this particular colour. Again if one colour fall more into

the first and fresh period of the exercise when the child is fresh and

active, whereas another falls more into the second period when he is

tired and inactive, the results would, it is evident, give too much

value to the former. Similarly, if one colour were brought in after

longer intervals of time than another it would have more attractive

force through its greater novelty.

-----

Footnote 8:

_Mental Development in the Child and the Race_, chap. iii.

-----

Enough has been said to show how very delicate a problem we have here to

deal with. And if scientific men are still busy settling the point how

the problem can be best dealt with, it seems hopeless for the amateur to

dabble in the matter.

I have purposely chosen a problem of peculiar complexity and delicacy in

order to illustrate the importance of that training which makes the

mental eye of the observer quick to analyse the phenomenon to be dealt

with so as to take in all its conditions. Yet there are many parts of

this work of observing the child’s mind which do not make so heavy a

demand on technical ability, but can be done by any intelligent observer

prepared for the task by a reasonable amount of psychological study. I

refer more particularly to that rich and highly interesting field of

exploration which opens up when the child begins to talk. It is in the

spontaneous utterances of children, his first quaint uses of words, that

we can best watch the play of the instinctive tendencies of thought.

Children’s talk is always valuable to a psychologist; and for my part I

would be glad of as many anecdotal records of their sayings as I could

collect.

Here, then, there seems to be room for a relatively simple and unskilled

kind of observing work. Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that even

this branch of child-observation requires nothing but ordinary

intelligence. To begin with, we are all prone, till by special training

we have learned to check the inclination, to read far too much of our

older thought and sentiment into children. As M. Drox observes, _nous

sommes dupes de nous-mêmes lorsque nous observous ces chers bambins_.[9]

-----

Footnote 9:

_L’Enfant_, p. 142.

-----

Again, there is a subtle source of error connected with the very

attitude of undergoing examination which only a carefully trained

observer of childish ways will avoid. A child is very quick in spying

whether he is being observed, and as soon as he suspects that you are

specially interested in his talk he is apt to try to produce an effect.

This wish to say something startling, wonderful, or what not, will, it

is obvious, detract from the value of the utterance.

But once more the saying which it is so easy to report has had its

history, and the observer who knows something of psychology will look

out for facts, that is to say, experiences of the child, suggestions

made by others’ words which throw light on the saying. No fact is really

quite simple, and the reason why some facts look so simple is that the

observer does not include in his view all the connections of the

occurrence which he is inspecting. The unskilled observer of children is

apt to send scraps, fragments of facts, which have not their natural

setting. The value of psychological training is that it makes one as

jealously mindful of wholeness in facts as a housewife of wholeness in

her porcelain. It is, indeed, only when the whole fact is before us, in

well-defined contour, that we can begin to deal with its meaning. Thus

although those ignorant of psychology may assist us in this region of

fact-finding, they can never accomplish that completer and exacter kind

of observation which we dignify by the name of Science.[10]

-----

Footnote 10:

Since writing the above I have had my opinion strongly confirmed by

reading a record of sayings of children carried out by women students

in an American Normal College (_Thoughts and Reasonings of Children_,

classified by H. W. Brown, Teacher of Psychology in State Normal

School, Worcester, Mass., with introduction by E. H. Russell,

Principal: reprinted from the _Pedagogical Seminary_). Many of the

quaint sayings noted down lose much of their psychological point from

our complete ignorance of the child’s home-experience, companionships,

school and training.

-----

One may conclude then that women may be fitted to become valuable

labourers in this new field of investigation, if only they will acquire

a genuine scientific interest in babyhood, and a fair amount of

scientific training. That a large number of women will get so far is I

think doubtful: the sentimental or æsthetic attraction of the baby is

apt to be a serious obstacle to a cold matter-of-fact examination of it

as a scientific specimen. The natural delight of a mother in every new

exhibition of infantile wisdom or prowess is liable to blind her to the

exceedingly modest significance of the child’s performances as seen from

the scientific point of view. Yet as I have hinted, this very fondness

for infantile ways, may, if only the scientific caution is added, prove

a valuable excitant to study. In England, and in America, there is

already a considerable number of women who have undergone some serious

training in psychology, and it may not be too much to hope that before

long we shall have a band of mothers and aunts busily engaged in noting

and recording the movements of children’s minds.

I have assumed here that what is wanted is careful studies of individual

children as they may be approached in the nursery. And these records of

individual children, after the pattern of Preyer’s monograph, are I

think our greatest need. We are wont to talk rather too glibly about

that abstraction, ‘the child,’ as if all children rigorously

corresponded to one pattern, of which pattern we have a perfect

knowledge. Mothers at least know that this is not so. Children of the

same family will be found to differ very widely (within the

comparatively narrow field of childish traits), as, for example, in

respect of matter-of-factness, of fancifulness, of inquisitiveness.

Thus, while it is probably true that most children at a certain age are

greedy of the pleasures of the imagination, Nature in her well-known

dislike of monotony has taken care to make a few decidedly

unimaginative. We need to know much more about these variations: and

what will best help us here is a number of careful records of infant

progress, embracing examples not only of different sexes and

temperaments, but also of different social conditions and nationalities.

When we have such a collection of monographs we shall be in a much

better position to fill out the hazy outline of our abstract conception

of childhood with definite and characteristic lineaments.

At the same time I gladly allow that other modes of observation are

possible and in their way useful. This applies to older children who

pass into the collective existence of the school-class. Here something

like collective or statistical inquiry may be begun, as that into the

contents of children’s minds, their ignorances and misapprehensions

about common objects. Some part of this inquiry into the minds of

school-children may very well be undertaken by an intelligent teacher.

Thus it would be valuable to have careful records of children’s progress

carried out by pre-arranged tests, so as to get collections of examples

of mental activity at different ages. More special lines of inquiry

having a truly experimental character might be carried out by experts,

as those already begun with reference to children’s “span of

apprehension,” _i.e._, the number of digits or nonsense syllables that

can be reproduced after a single hearing, investigations into the

effects of fatigue on mental processes, into the effect of number of

repetitions on the certainty of reproduction, into musical sensitiveness

and so forth.

Valuable as such statistical investigation undoubtedly is, it is no

substitute for the careful methodical study of the individual child.

This seems to me the greatest desideratum just now. Since the teacher

needs for practical reasons to make a careful study of individuals he

might well assist here. In these days of literary collaboration it might

not be amiss for a kindergarten teacher to write an account of a child’s

mind in co-operation with the mother. Such a record if well done would

be of the greatest value. The co-operation of the mother seems to me

quite indispensable, since even where there is out-of-class intercourse

between teacher and pupil the knowledge acquired by the former never

equals that of the mother.

II.

THE AGE OF IMAGINATION.

_Why we call Children Imaginative._

One of the few things we seemed to be certain of with respect to

child-nature was that it is fancy-full. Childhood, we all know, is the

age for dreaming, for decking out the world as yet unknown with the gay

colours of imagination; for living a life of play or happy make-believe.

So that nothing seems more to characterise the ‘Childhood of the World’

than the myth-making impulse which by an overflow of fancy seeks to hide

the meagreness of knowledge.

Yet even here, perhaps, we have been content with loose generalisation

in place of careful observation and analysis of facts. For one thing,

the play of infantile imagination is probably much less uniform than is

often supposed. There seem to be matter-of-fact children who cannot rise

buoyantly to a bright fancy. Mr. Ruskin, of all men, has recently told

us that when a child he was incapable of acting a part or telling a

tale, that he never knew a child “whose thirst for visible fact was at

once so eager and so methodic”.[11] We may accept the report of Mr.

Ruskin’s memory as proving that he did not idle away his time in

day-dreams, but, by long and close observation of running water, and the

like, laid the foundations of that fine knowledge of the appearances of

nature which everywhere shines through his writings. Yet one may be

permitted to doubt whether a writer who shows not only so rich and

graceful a style but so truly poetic an invention could have been _in

every respect_ an unimaginative child.

-----

Footnote 11:

_Præterita_, p. 76.

-----

Perhaps the truth will turn out to be the paradox that most children are

at once matter-of-fact observers _and_ dreamers, passing from the one to

the other as the mood takes them, and with a facility which grown people

may well envy. My own observations go to show that the prodigal out-put

of fancy, the revelling in myth and story, is often characteristic of

one period of childhood only. We are apt to lump together such different

levels of experience and capacity under that abstraction ‘the child’.

The wee mite of three and a half, spending more than half his days in

trying to realise all manner of pretty, odd, startling fancies about

animals, fairies, and the rest, is something vastly unlike the boy of

six or seven, whose mind is now bent on understanding the make and go of

machines, and of that big machine, the world.

So far as I can gather from inquiries sent to parents and other

observers of children, a large majority of boys and girls alike are for

a time fancy-bound. A child that did not want to play and cared nothing

for the marvels of story-land would surely be regarded as queer and not

just what a child ought to be. Yet, supposing that this is the right

view, there still remains the question whether imagination always works

in the same way in the childish brain. Science is beginning to aid us in

understanding the differences of childish fancy. For one thing it is

leading us to see that a child’s whole imaginative life may be specially

coloured by the preponderant vividness of a certain order of images,

that one child may live imaginatively in a coloured world, another in a

world of sounds, another rather in a world of movements. It is easy to

note in the case of certain children of the more lively and active turn,

how the supreme interest of story as of play lies in the ample range of

movement and bodily activity. Robinson Crusoe is probably for the boyish

imagination, more than anything else, the goer and the doer.[12]

-----

Footnote 12:

The different tendencies of children towards visual, auditory, motor

images, etc., are dealt with by F. Queyrat, _L’Imagination et ses

variétés chez l’enfant_. _Cf._ an article by W. H. Burnham,

“Individual Differences in the Imagination of Children,” _Pedagogical

Seminary_, ii., 2.

-----

With this difference in the elementary constituents of imagination,

there are others which turn on temperament, tone of feeling, and

preponderant directions of emotion. Imagination is intimately bound up

with the life of feeling, and will assume as many directions as this

life assumes. Hence, the familiar fact that in some children imagination

broods by preference on gloomy and terrifying objects, religious and

other, whereas in others it selects what is bright and gladsome; that

while in some cases it has more of the poetic quality, in others it

leans rather to the scientific or to the practical type.

Enough has been said perhaps to show that the imaginativeness of

children is not a thing to be taken for granted as existing in all

children alike. It is eminently a variable faculty requiring a special

study in the case of each new child.

But even waiving this fact of variability it may, I think, be said that

we are far from understanding the precise workings of imagination in

children. We talk, for example, glibly about their play, their

make-believe, their illusions; but how much do we really know of their

state of mind when they act out a little scene of domestic life, or of

the battle-field? We have, I know, many fine observations on this head.

Careful observers of children and conservers of their own childish

experiences, such as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Jean Paul, Madame Necker,

George Sand, R. L. Stevenson, tell us much that is valuable: yet I

suspect that there must be a much wider and finer investigation of

children’s action and talk before we can feel quite sure that we have

got at their mental whereabouts, and know how they feel when they

pretend to enter the dark wood, the home of the wolf, or to talk with

their deities, the fairies.

Perhaps I have said enough to justify my plea for new observations and

for a reconsideration of hasty theories in the light of these. Nor need

we object to a fresh survey of what is perhaps the most delightful side

of child-life. I often wonder indeed when I come across some precious

bit of droll infantile acting, or of sweet child-soliloquy, how mothers

can bring themselves to lose one drop of the fresh exhilarating draught

which daily pours forth from the fount of a child’s phantasy.

Nor is it merely for the sake of its inherent charm that children’s

imagination deserves further study. In the early age of the individual

and of the race what we enlightened persons call fancy has a good deal

to do with the first crude attempts at understanding things.

Child-thought, like primitive folk-thought, is saturated with myth,

vigorous phantasy holding the hand of reason—as yet sadly rickety in his

legs—and showing him which way he should take. In the moral life again,

we shall see how easily the realising force of young imagination may

expose it to deception by others, and to self-deception too, with

results that closely simulate the guise of a knowing falsehood. On the

other hand a careful following out of the various lines of imaginative

activity may show how moral education, by vividly suggesting to the

child’s imagination a worthy part, a praiseworthy action, may work

powerfully on the unformed and flexible structure of his young will,

moving it dutywards.

_Imaginative Transformation of Objects._

The play of young imagination meets us in the domain of

sense-observation: a child is fancying when he looks at things and

touches them and moves among them. This may seem a paradox at first, but

in truth there is nothing paradoxical here. It is an exploded

psychological fallacy that sense and imagination are wholly apart. No

doubt, as the ancients told us, phantasy follows and is the offspring of

sense: we live over again in waking and sleeping imagination the sights

and sounds of the real world. Yet it is no less true that imagination in

an active constructive form takes part in the very making of what we

call sense-experience. We _read_ the visual symbol, say, a splash of

light or colour, now as a stone, now as a pool of water, just because

imagination drawing from past experience supplies the interpretation,

the group of qualities which composes a hard solid mass, or a soft

yielding liquid.

A child’s fanciful reading of things, as when he calls the twinkling

star a (blinking) eye, or the dew-drops on the grass tears, is but an

exaggeration of what we all do. His imagination carries him very much

farther. Thus he may attribute to the stone he sees a sort of

stone-soul, and speak of it as feeling tired of a place.

This lively way of envisaging objects is, as we know, similar to that of

primitive folk, and has something of crude nature-poetry in it. This

tendency is abundantly illustrated in the metaphors which play so large

a part in children’s talk. As all observers of them know they are wont

to describe what they see or hear by analogy to something they know

already. This is called by some, rather clumsily I think, apperceiving.

For example, a little boy of two years and five months, on looking at

the hammers of a piano which his mother was playing, called out: ‘There

is owlegie’ (diminutive of owl). His eye had instantly caught the

similarity between the round felt disc of the hammer divided by a piece

of wood, and the owl’s face divided by its beak. In like manner the boy

C. called a small oscillating compass-needle a ‘bird’ on the ground of

its slightly bird-like form, and of its fluttering movement.[13] Pretty

conceits are often resorted to in this assimilation of the new and

strange to the familiar, as when a child seeing dew on the grass said,

‘The grass is crying,’ or when stars were described as “cinders from

God’s star,” and butterflies as “pansies flying”.[14] Other examples of

this picturesque mode of childish apperception will meet us below.

-----

Footnote 13:

The references to the child C. are to the subject of the memoir given

below, chap. xi.

Footnote 14:

W. H. Burnham, _loc. cit._, p. 212 f.

-----

This play of imagination in connexion with apprehending objects of sense

has a strong vitalising or personifying element. That is to say, the

child sees what we regard as lifeless and soulless as alive and

conscious. Thus he gives not only body but soul to the wind when it

whistles or howls at night. The most unpromising things come in for this

warming vitalising touch of the child’s fancy. He will make something

like a personality out of a letter. Thus one little fellow aged one year

eight months conceived a special fondness for the letter W, addressing

it thus: ‘Dear old boy W’. Another little boy well on in his fourth

year, when tracing a letter L happened to slip so that the horizontal

limb formed an angle thus, [L-like character]. He instantly saw the

resemblance to the sedentary human form and said: “Oh, he’s sitting

down”. Similarly when he made an F turn the wrong way and then put the

correct form to the left thus, [F reversed F], he exclaimed: “They’re

talking together”.

Sometimes this endowment of things with feeling leads to a quaint

manifestation of sympathy. Miss Ingelow writes of herself: When a little

over two years old, and for about a year after “I had the habit of

attributing intelligence not only to all living creatures, the same

amount and kind of intelligence that I had myself, but even to stones

and manufactured articles. I used to feel how dull it must be for the

pebbles in the causeway to be obliged to lie still and only see what was

round about. When I walked out with a little basket for putting flowers

in I used sometimes to pick up a pebble or two and carry them on to have

a change: then at the farthest point of the walk turn them out, not

doubting that they would be pleased to have a new view.”[15]

-----

Footnote 15:

See her article, “The History of an Infancy,” _Longman’s Magazine_,

Feb., 1890.

-----

This is by no means a unique example of a quaint childish expression of

pity for what we think the insentient world. Plant-life seems often to

excite the feeling. Here is a quotation from a parent’s chronicle: “A

girl aged eight, brings a quantity of fallen autumn leaves in to her

mother, who says, ‘Oh! how pretty, F.!’ to which the girl answers: ‘Yes,

I knew you’d love the poor things, mother, I couldn’t bear to see them

dying on the ground’. A few days afterwards she was found standing at a

window overlooking the garden crying bitterly at the falling leaves as

they fell in considerable numbers.”

I need not linger on the products of this vitalising and personifying

instinct, as we shall deal with them again when inquiring into

children’s ideas about nature. Suffice it to say that it is wondrously

active and far-reaching, constituting one chief manifestation of

childish fancy.

Now it may be asked whether all this analogical extension of images to

what seem to us such incongruous objects involves a vivid and illusory

apprehension of these as transformed. Is the eyelid realised and even

_seen_ for the moment as a sort of curtain, the curtain-image blending

with and transforming what is present to the eye? Are the pebbles

actually viewed as living things condemned to lie stiffly in one place?

It is of course hard to say, yet I think a conjectural answer can be

given. In this imaginative contemplation of things the child but half

observes what is present to his eyes, one or two points only of supreme

interest in the visible thing, whether those of form, as in assimilating

the piano-hammer to the owl, or of action, as the _falling_ of the leaf,

being selectively alluded to: while assimilative imagination overlaying

the visual impression with the image of a similar object does the rest.

In this way the actual field of objects is apt to get veiled,

transformed by the wizard touch of a lively fancy.

No doubt there are various degrees of illusion here. In his

matter-of-fact and really scrutinising mood a child will not confound

what is seen with what is imagined: in this case the analogy recalled is

distinguished and used as an explanation of what is seen—as when C.

observed of the panting dog: ‘Dat bow-wow like puff-puff’. On the other

hand when another little boy aged three years and nine months seeing the

leaves falling exclaimed, “See, mamma, the leaves is flying like

dickey-birds and little butterflies,” it is hard not to think that the

child’s fancy for the moment transformed what he saw into these pretty

semblances. And one may risk the opinion that, with the little thinking

power and controlling force of will which a child possesses, such

assimilative activity of imagination always tends to develop a degree of

momentary illusion. There is, too, as we shall see later on, abundant

evidence to show that children at first quite seriously believe that

most things, at least, are alive and have their feelings.

There is another way in which imagination may combine with and transform

sensible objects, _viz._, by what is commonly called association. Mr.

Ruskin tells us that when young he associated the name ‘crocodile’ with

the creature so closely that the long series of letters took on

something of the look of its lanky body. The same writer speaks of a Dr.

Grant, into whose therapeutic hands he fell when a child. "The name (he

adds) is always associated in my mind with a brown powder—rhubarb or the

like—of a gritty or acrid nature.... The name always sounded to me

gr-r-ish and granular."

We can most of us perhaps, recall similar experiences, where colours and

sounds, in themselves indifferent, took on either through analogy or

association a decidedly repulsive character. How far, one wonders, does

this process of transformation of things go in the case of imaginative

children? There is some reason to say that it may go very far, and that,

too, when there is no strong feeling at work cementing the combined

elements. A child’s feeling for likeness is commonly keen and subtle,

and knowledge of the real relations of things has not yet come to check

the impulse to this free far-ranging kind of assimilation. Before the

qualities and the connexions of objects are sufficiently known for them

to be interesting in themselves, they can only acquire interest through

the combining art of childish fancy. And the same is true of associated

qualities. A child’s ear may not dislike a grating sound, a harsh noise,

as our ear dislikes it, merely because of its effect on the sensitive

organ. _En revanche_ it will like and dislike sounds for a hundred

reasons unknown to us, just because the quick strong fancy adding its

life to that of the senses gives to their impressions much of their

significance and much of their effect.

There is one new field of investigation which is illustrating in a

curious way the wizard influence wielded by childish imagination over

the things of sense. It is well known that a certain number of people

habitually ‘colour’ the sounds they hear, imagining, for example, the

sound of a vowel, or of a musical tone, to have its characteristic tint

which they are able to describe accurately. This ‘coloured hearing,’ as

it is called, is always traced back to the dimly recalled age of

childhood. Children are now beginning to be tested and it is found that

a good proportion possess the faculty. Thus, in some researches on the

minds of Boston school-children, it was found that twenty-one out of

fifty-three, or nearly 40 per cent., described the tones of certain

instruments as coloured.[16] The particular colour ascribed to an

instrument, as also the degree of its brightness, though remaining

constant in the case of the same child, varied greatly among different

children, so that, for example, one child ‘visualised’ the tone of a

fife as pale or bright, while another imaged it as dark.[17] It is

highly probable that both analogy and association play a part here.[18]

As was recently suggested to me by a correspondent the instance given by

Locke of the analogy between scarlet and the note of a trumpet may

easily be due in part at least to association of the tone with the

scarlet uniform.

-----

Footnote 16:

See the article by G. Stanley Hall, “The Contents of Children’s

Minds,” _Princeton Review_. New Series, 1883. _Cf._ the same writer’s

volume, _The Contents of Children’s Minds on entering School_, 1894.

-----

Footnote 17:

_Ibid._, p. 265.

Footnote 18:

This has been well brought out by Professor Flournoy of Geneva in his

volume _Des Phénomènes de Synopsie_ (audition colorée), chap. ii.

-----

I may add that I once happened to overhear a little girl of six talking

to herself about numbers in this wise: “Two is a dark number,” “forty is

a white number”. I questioned her and found that the digits had each its

distinctive colour; thus one was white; two, dark; three, white; four,

dark; five, pink; and so on. Nine was pointed and dark, eleven dark

green, showing that some of the digits were much more distinctly

visualised than others. Just three years later I tested her again and

found she still visualised the digits, but not quite in the same way.

Thus although one and two were white and black and five pink as before,

three was now grey, four was red, nine had lost its colour, and eleven

oddly enough had turned from dark green to bright yellow. This case

suggests that in early life new experiences and associations may modify

the tint and shade of sounds. However this be, children’s coloured

hearing is worth noting as the most striking example of the general

tendency to overlay impressions of the senses with vivid images. It

seems reasonable to suppose that coloured hearing and other allied

phenomena, as the picturing of numbers, days of the week, etc., in a

certain scheme or diagrammatic arrangement, when they show themselves

after childhood are to be viewed as survivals of early fanciful

brain-work. This fact taken along with the known vividness of the images

in coloured hearing, which in certain cases approximate to

sense-perceptions, seems to me to confirm the view here put forth that

children’s imagination may alter the world of sense in ways which it is

hard for our older and stiff-jointed minds to follow.

I have confined myself here to what I have called the _play_ of

imagination, the magic transmuting of things through the sheer

liveliness and wanton activity of childish fancy. How strong, how vivid,

how dominating such imaginative transformation may become will of course

be seen in cases where violent feeling, especially fear, gives

preternatural intensity to the mind’s realising power. But this will be

better considered later on.

This transformation of the actual surroundings is of course restrained

in serious moments, and in intercourse with older and graver folk. There

is, however, a region of child-life where it knows no check, where the

impulse to deck out the shabby reality with what is bright and gay has

all its own way. This region is Play.

_Imagination and Play._

The interest of child’s play in the present connexion lies in the fact

that it is the working out into visible shape of an inner fancy. The

actual presentation may be the starting-point of this process of

imaginative projection: the child, for example, sees the sand, the

shingle and shells, and says, ‘Let us play keeping a shop’. Yet this is

accidental. The source of play is the impulse to realise a bright idea:

whence, as we shall see by-and-by, its close kinship to art as a whole.

This image is the dominating force, it is for the time a veritable _idée

fixe_, and everything has to accommodate itself to this. Since the image

has to be acted out, it comes into collision with the actual

surroundings. Here is the child’s opportunity. The floor is instantly

mapped out into two hostile territories, the sofa-end becomes a horse, a

coach, a ship, or what not, to suit the exigencies of the play.

This stronger movement and wider range of imagination in children’s

pastime is explained by the characteristic and fundamental impulse of

play, the desire to be something, to act a part. The child-adventurer as

he personates Robinson Crusoe or other hero steps out of his every-day

self and so out of his every-day world. In realising his part he

virtually transforms his surroundings, since they take on the look and

meaning which the part assigns to them. This is prettily illustrated in

one of Mr. Stevenson’s child-songs, “The Land of Counterpane,” in which

a sick child describes the various transformations of the bed-scene:—

And sometimes for an hour or so I watched my leaden soldiers go, With

different uniforms and drills, Among the bed-clothes through the

hills;

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets, All up and down among the

sheets; Or brought my trees and houses out, And planted cities all

about.

Who can say to how many and to what strange play-purposes that stolid

unyielding-looking object a sofa-head has been turned by the ingenuity

of the childish brain?

The impulse to act a part meets us very early and grows out of the

assimilative instinct. The very infant will, if there is a cup to hand,

pretend to drink out of it.[19] Similarly a boy of two will put the stem

of his father’s pipe into, or, if cautious, near his mouth, and make

believe that he is smoking. A little boy not yet two years old would

spend a whole wet afternoon “painting” the furniture with the dry end of

a bit of rope. In such cases, it is evident, the playing may start from

a suggestion supplied by the sight of an object. There is no need to

suppose that in this simple kind of imitative play children knowingly

act a part. It is surely to misunderstand the essence of play to speak

of it as a fully conscious process of imitative acting.[20] A child is

one creature when he is truly at play, another when he is bent on

astonishing or amusing you. It seems sufficient to say that when at play

he is possessed by an idea, and is working this out into visible action.

Your notice, your laughter, may bring in a new element of enjoyment; for

as we all know, children are apt to be little actors in the full sense,

and to aim at producing an impression. Yet the child as little _needs_

your flattering observation as the cat needs it, when he plays in the

full sense imaginatively, and in make-believe, with his captured mouse,

placing it, for example, deliberately under a copper in the scullery,

and amusing himself by the half-illusion of losing it. Indeed your

intrusion will be just as likely to destroy or at least to diminish the

charm of a child’s play, if only through your inability to seize his

idea, and, what is equally important, to rise to his own point of

enthusiasm and illusive realisation. Perhaps, indeed, one may say that

the play-instinct is most vigorous and dominant when a child is alone,

or at least self-absorbed; for even social play, delightful as it is

when all the players are attuned, is subject to disturbance through a

want of mutual comprehension and a need of half-disillusive

explanations.[21]

-----

Footnote 19:

Of course, as Preyer suggests, this drinking from an empty cup may at

first be due to a want of discriminative perception.

Footnote 20:

M. Compayré seems to go too far in this direction when he talks of the

child’s play with its doll as a charming comedy of maternity

(_L’Evolution intell. et morale de l’Enfant_, p. 274).

Footnote 21:

For a good illustration of the disillusive effect of want of

enthusiasm in one’s playmates, see Tolstoi, _Childhood, Boyhood,

Youth_, part i., chap. viii.

-----

The essence of children’s play is the acting of a part and the realising

of a new situation. It is thus, as we shall see more fully by-and-by,

akin to dramatic action, only that the child’s ‘acting’ is like M.

Jourdain’s prose, an unconscious art. The impulse to be something, a

sailor, a soldier, a path-finder, or what not, absorbs the child and

makes him forget his real surroundings and his actual self. His

day-dreams, his solitary and apparently listless wanderings while he

mutters mystic words to himself, all illustrate this desire to realise a

part. In this playful self-projection a child will become even something

non-human, as when he nips the ‘bread-and-cheese’ shoots off the bushes

and fancies himself a horse.[22] It is to be noted that such passing out

of one’s ordinary self and assuming a foreign existence is confined to

the child-player; the cat or the dog, though able, as Mr. Darwin and

others have shown, to go through a kind of make-believe game, remaining

always within the limits of his ordinary self.

-----

Footnote 22:

_Uninitiated_, p. 10.

-----

Such play-like transmutation of the self extends beyond what we are

accustomed to call play. One little boy of three and a half years who

was fond of playing at the useful business of coal-heaving would carry

his coal-heaver’s dream through the whole day, and on the particular day

devoted to this calling would not only refuse to be addressed by any

less worthy name, but ask in his prayer to be made a good coal-heaver

(instead of the usual ‘good boy’). On other days this child lived the

life of a robin redbreast, a soldier, and so forth, and bitterly

resented his mother’s occasional confusion of his personalities. A

little girl aged only one year and ten months insisted upon being

addressed by a fancy name, Isabel, when she was put to bed, but would

not be called by this name at any other time. She probably passed into

what seemed to her another person when she went to bed and gave herself

up to sweet ‘hypnagogic’ reverie.

In the working out of this impulse to realise a part the actual external

surroundings may take a surprisingly small part. Sometimes there is

scarcely any adjustment of scene: the child plays out his action with

purely imaginary surroundings. Such simple play-actions as going to

market to buy imaginary apples occur very early, one mother assuring me

that all her children carried them out in the second year before they

could talk. Another mother writes of her boy, aged two and a half years:

“He amuses himself by pretending things. He will fetch an imaginary cake

from a corner, rake together imaginary grass, or fight a battle with

imaginary soldiers.” This reminds one of Mr. Stevenson’s lines:—

It is he, when you play with your soldiers of tin, Who sides with the

French and who never can win.

This impulse to invent imaginary surroundings, and more especially to

create mythical companions, is very common among lonely and imaginative

children. A lady friend, a German, tells me that when she was a little

girl, a lonely one of course, she invented a kind of _alter ego_,

another girl rather older than herself, whom she named ‘Krofa’—why she

has forgotten. She made a constant playmate of her, and got all her new

ideas from her. Mr. Canton’s little heroine took to nursing an invisible

‘iccle gaal’ (little girl), the image of which she seemed able to

project into space.[23] The invention of fictitious persons fills a

large space in child-life. Perhaps if only the young imagination is

strong enough there is, as already hinted, more of sweet illusion, of a

warm grasp of living reality in this solitary play, where fictitious

companions perfectly obedient to the little player’s will take the place

of less controllable tangible ones. But such purely imaginative

make-believe, which derives no help from actual things, is perhaps

hardly ‘play’ in the full sense, but rather an active form of

day-dreaming or romancing.[24]

-----

Footnote 23:

_The Invisible Playmate_, p. 33 ff.

Footnote 24:

I fail to understand what Professor Mark Baldwin means by saying that

an only child is wanting in imagination (_op. cit._, p. 358). In his

emphasising of the influence of imitation and external suggestion the

writer seems to have overlooked the rather obvious fact that childish

imagination in its intenser and more energetic forms means a

detachment from the sensible world, and that lonely children are, as

more than one autobiography, as well as mother’s record, show,

particularly imaginative just because of the absence of engaging

activities in the real world.

-----

In much of this playful performance all the interference with actual

surroundings that the child requires is change of place or scene. Here

is a pretty example of this simple type of imaginative play. A child of

twenty months, who is accustomed to meet a _bonne_ and child in the

Jardin du Luxembourg, suddenly leaves the family living-room,

pronouncing indifferently well the names Luxembourg, nurse, and child.

He goes into the next room, pretends to say “good-day” to his two

out-door acquaintances, and then returns and simply narrates what he has

been doing.[25] Here the simple act of passing into an adjoining room

was enough to secure the needed realisation of the encounter in the

garden. The movement into the next room is suggestive. Primarily it

meant no doubt the child’s manner of realising the out-of-door walk; yet

I suspect there was another motive at work. Children love to enact their

little play-scenes in some remote spot, withdrawn from notice, where

imagination suffers no let from the interference of mother, nurse, or

other member of the real environment. How many a thrilling exciting play

has been carried out in a corner, especially if it be dark, or better

still, screened off. The fascination of curtained spaces, as those

behind the window curtains, or under the table with the table-cloth

hanging low, will be fresh in the memory of all who can recall their

childhood.

-----

Footnote 25:

Egger quoted by Compayré, _op. cit._, pp. 149, 150.

-----

A step towards a more realistic kind of play-action, in which, as in the

modern theatre, imagination is propped up by strong stage effects, is

taken when a scene is constructed, the chairs and sofa turned into

ships, carriages, a railway train, and so forth.

Yet, after all, the scene is but a very subordinate part of the play.

Next to himself in his new part, proudly enjoying the consciousness of

being a general, or a school-mistress, a child who is not content with

the pure creations of his phantasy requires the semblance of living

companions. In all play he desires somebody, if only as listener to his

talk in his new character; and when he does not rise to an invisible

auditor, he will talk to such unpromising things as a sponge in the

bath, a fire-shovel, a clothes’ prop in the garden, and so forth. In

more active play, where something has to be done, he generally desires a

full companion and assistant, human or animal. And here we meet with

what is perhaps the most interesting feature of childish play, the

transmutation of the most meagre and least promising of things into

complete living forms. I have already alluded to the sofa-head. How many

forms of animal life, vigorous and untiring, from the patient donkey up

to the untamed horse of the prairies, has this most inert-looking ridge

served to image forth to quick boyish perception.

The introduction of these living things seems to illustrate the large

compass of the child’s realising power. Mr. Ruskin speaks somewhere of

“the perfection of child-like imagination, the power of making

everything out of nothing”. “The child,” he adds, "does not make a pet

of a mechanical mouse that runs about the floor.... The child falls in

love with a quiet thing—with an ugly one—nay, it may be with one to us

totally devoid of meaning. The _besoin de croire_ precedes the _besoin

d’aimer_."

The quotation brings us to the focus where the rays of childish

imagination seem to converge, the transformation of toys.

The fact that children make living things out of their toy horses, dogs

and the rest, is known to every observer of their ways. To the natural

unsceptical eye the boy on his rudely carved “gee-gee” slashing the dull

flank with all a boy’s glee, looks as if he were realising the joy of

actual riding, as if he were possessed with the fancy that the stiff

least organic-looking of structures which he strides is a very horse.

The liveliness of this realising imagination is seen in the

extraordinary poverty and meagreness of the toys which to their happy

possessors are wholly satisfying. Here is a pretty picture of child’s

play from a German writer:—

There sits a little charming master of three years before his small

table busied for a whole hour in a fanciful game with shells. He has

three so-called snake-heads in his domain; a large one and two smaller

ones: this means two calves and a cow. In a tiny tin dish the little

farmer has put all kinds of petals, that is the fodder for his

numerous and fine cattle.... When the play has lasted a time the

fodder-dish transforms itself into a heavy waggon with hay: the little

shells now become little horses, and are put to the shafts to pull the

terrible load.

The doll takes a supreme place in this fancy realm of play. It is human

and satisfies higher instincts and emotions. As the French poet says,

the little girl—