and accessible objects. Their notions of what is distant and
inaccessible are, as remarked, wont to be formed on the model of the
first. Here, however, their knowledge of things will be largely
dependent on others’ information, so that the naïve impulse of childish
intelligence has, as best it may, to work under the limitations of an
imperfectly understood language.
It is perhaps hardly necessary to remind the reader that children’s
ideas of distance before they begin to travel far are necessarily very
inadequate. They are disposed to localise the distant objects they see,
as the sun, moon and stars, and the places they hear about on the
earth’s surface as near as possible. The tendency to approximate things
as seen in the infant’s stretching out of the hand to touch the moon
lives on in the later impulse to localise the sky and heavenly bodies
just beyond the farthest terrestrial object seen, as when a child
thought they were just above the church spire, another that they could
be reached by tying a number of ladders together, another that the
setting sun went close behind the ridge of hills, and so forth. The
stars, being so much smaller looking, seem to be located farther off
than the sun and moon. Similarly when they hear of a distant place, as
India, they tend to project it just beyond the farthest point known to
them, say Hampstead, to which they were once taken on a long, long
journey from their East End home. A child’s standard of size and
distance is, as all know who have revisited the home of their childhood
after many years, very different from the adult’s. To the little legs
unused as yet to more than short spells of locomotion a mile seems
stupendous: and then the half-formed brain cannot yet pile up the units
of measurement well enough to conceive of hundreds and thousands of
miles.
The child appears to think of the world as a circular plain, and of the
sky as a sort of inverted bowl upon it. C.’s sister used on looking at
the sky to fancy she was inside a blue balloon. That is to say he takes
them to be what they look. In a similar manner C. took the sun to be a
great disc which could be put on the round globe to make a ‘see-saw’.
When this ‘natural realism’ gets corrected, children go to work to
convert what is told them into an intelligible form. Thus they begin to
speculate about the other side of the globe, and, as Mr. Barrie reminds
us, are apt to fancy they can know about it by peeping down a well. When
religious instruction introduces the new region of heaven they are apt
to localise it just above the sky, which to their thought forms its
floor. Some genuine thought-work is seen in the effort to harmonise the
various things they learn by observation and instruction about the
celestial region into a connected whole. Thus the sky is apt to be
thought of as _thin_, this idea being probably formed for the purpose of
explaining the shining through of moon and stars. Stars are, as we know,
commonly thought of by the child as holes in the sky letting through the
light beyond. One Boston child ingeniously applied the idea of the
thinness of the sky to explain the appearance of the moon when one half
is bright and the other faintly illumined, supposing it to be half-way
through the partially diaphanous floor. Others again prettily accounted
for the waning of the moon to a crescent by saying it was half stuck or
half buttoned into the sky.
The movements of the sun and other heavenly bodies are similarly
apperceived by help of ideas of movements of familiar terrestrial
objects. Thus the sun was thought by the Boston children
half-mythologically, half-mechanically, to roll, to fly, to be blown
(like a soap bubble or balloon?) and so forth. The anthropocentric form
of teleological explanation is apt to creep in, as when a Boston child
said charmingly that the moon comes round when people forget to light
some lamps. Theological ideas, too, are pressed into this sphere of
explanation, as in the attribution of the disappearance of the sun to
God’s pulling it up higher out of sight, to his taking it into heaven
and putting it to bed, and so forth. These ideas are pretty obviously
not those of a country child with a horizon. There is rather more of
nature-observation in the idea of another child that the sun after
setting lies under the trees where angels mind it.
The impressive phenomena of thunder and lightning give rise in the case
of the child as in that of the Nature-man to some fine myth-making. The
American children, as already observed, have different mechanical
illustrations for setting forth the _modus_ of the supernatural
operation here, thunder being thought of now as God groaning, now as his
walking heavily on the floor of heaven (_cf._ the old Norse idea that
thunder is caused by the rolling of Thor’s chariot), now as his
hammering, now as his having coals run in—ideas which show how naïvely
the child-mind humanises the Deity, making him a respectable citizen
with a house and a coal-cellar. In like manner the lightning is
attributed to God’s burning the gas quick, striking many matches at
once, or other familiar human device for getting a brilliant light
suddenly. So God turns on rain by a tap, or lets it down from a cistern
by a hose, or, better, passes it through a sieve or a dipper with
holes.[47] In like manner a high wind was explained by a girl of five
and a half by saying that it was God’s birthday, and he had received a
trumpet as a present.
-----
Footnote 47:
See the article on “The Contents of Children’s Minds” already referred
to.
-----
Throughout the whole region of these mysterious phenomena we have
illustrations of the anthropocentric tendency to regard what takes place
as designed for us poor mortals. The little girl of whom Mr. Canton
writes thought “the wind, and the rain and the moon ‘walking’ came out
to see _her_, and the flowers woke up with the same laudable
object”.[48] When frightened by the crash of the thunder a child
instinctively thinks that it is all done to vex his little soul. One of
the funniest examples of the application of this idea I have met with is
in the Worcester Collection. Two children, D. and K., aged ten and five
respectively, live in a small American town. D., who is reading about an
earthquake, addresses his mother thus: “Oh, isn’t it dreadful, mamma? Do
you suppose we will ever have one here?” K., intervening with the
characteristic impulse of the young child to correct his elders: “Why,
no, D., they don’t have earthquakes in little towns like this”. There is
much to unravel in this delightful childish observation. It looks to my
mind as if the earthquake were envisaged by the little five-year-old as
a show, God being presumably the travelling showman, who takes care to
display his fearful wonders only where there is an adequate body of
spectators.
-----
Footnote 48:
_The Invisible Playmate_, pp. 27, 28.
-----
Finally, the same impulse to understand the new and strange by
assimilating it to the familiar is, so far as I can gather, seen in
children’s first ideas about those puzzling semblances of visible
objects which are due to subjective sensations. As we shall see in C.’s
case the bright spectra or after-images caused by looking at the sun are
instinctively objectived by the child, that is regarded as things
external to his body. Here is a pretty full account of a child’s thought
about these subjective optical phenomena. A little boy of five, our
little zoologist, in poor health at the time, “constantly imagined he
saw angels, and said they were not white, that was a mistake, they were
little coloured things, light and beautiful, and they went into the
toy-basket and played with his toys”. Here we have not only objectifying
but myth-building. A year later he returned to the subject. “He stood at
the window at B. looking out at a sea-mist thoughtfully and said
suddenly, ‘Mamma, do you remember I told you that I had seen angels?
Well, I want now to say they were not angels, though I thought they
were. I have seen it often lately, I see it now: it is bright stars,
small bright stars moving by. I see it in the mist before that tree. I
see it oftenest in the misty days.... Perhaps by-and-by I shall think it
is something in my own eyes.’” Here we see a long and painstaking
attempt of a child’s brain to read a meaning into the ‘flying spots,’
which many of us know though we hardly give them a moment’s attention.
What are children’s first thoughts about their dreams like? I have not
been able to collect much evidence on this head. What seems certain is
that to the simple intelligence of the child these counterfeits of
ordinary sense-presentations are real external things. The crudest
manifestation of this thought-tendency is seen in taking the
dream-apparition to be actually present in the bedroom. A boy in an
elementary school in London, aged five years, said one day: “Teacher, I
saw an old woman one night against my bed”. Another child, a little
girl, in the same school told her mother that she had seen a funeral
last night, and on being asked, “Where?” answered quaintly, “I saw it in
my pillow”. A little boy whom I know once asked his mother not to put
him to bed in a certain room, “because there were so many dreams in the
room”. In thus materialising the dream and localising it in the actual
surroundings, the child but reflects the early thought of the race which
starts from the supposition that the man or animal which appears in a
dream is a material reality which actually approaches the sleeper.
The Nature-man, as we know from Professor Tylor’s researches, goes on to
explain dreams by his theory of souls or ‘doubles’ (animism). Children
do not often find their way to so subtle a line of thought. Much more
commonly they pass from the first stage of acceptance of objects present
to their senses to the identification of dreamland with the other and
invisible world of fairyland. There is little doubt that the imaginative
child firmly believes in the existence of this invisible world, keeps it
apart from the visible one, even though at times he may give it a
definite locality in this (_e.g._, in C.’s case, the wall of the
bedroom). He gets access to it by shutting out the real world, as when
he closes his eyes tightly and ‘thinks’. With such a child, dreams get
taken up into the invisible world. Going to sleep is now recognised as
the surest way of passing into this region. The varying colour of his
dreams, now bright and dazzling in their beauty, now black and
terrifying, may be explained by a reference to the division of that
fairy world into princes, good fairies, on the one hand, and cruel
giants, witches, and the like, on the other.
We may now pass to some of children’s characteristic ideas about living
things, more particularly human beings, and the familiar domestic
animals. The most interesting of these I think are those respecting
growth and birth.
As already mentioned, growth is one of the most stimulating of childish
puzzles. A child, led no doubt by what others tell him, finds that
things are in general made bigger by additions from without, and his
earliest conception of growth is, I think, that of such addition. Thus,
plants are made to grow, that is, swell out, by the rain. The idea that
the growth or expansion of animals comes from eating is easily reached
by the childish intelligence, and, as we know, nurses and parents have a
way of recommending the less attractive sorts of diet by telling
children that they will make them grow. The idea that the sun makes us
grow, often suggested by parents (who may be ignorant of the fact that
growth is more rapid in the summer than in the winter), is probably
interpreted by the analogy of an infusion of something into the body.
In carrying out my inquiries into this region of childish ideas, I
lighted quite unexpectedly on the queer notion that towards the end of
life there is a reverse process of shrinkage. Old people are supposed to
become little again. The first instance of this was supplied me by the
Worcester Collection of Thoughts. A little girl of three once said to
her mother: “When I am a big girl and you are a little girl I shall whip
you just as you whipped me now”. At first one is almost disposed to
think that this child must have heard of Mr. Anstey’s amusing story
_Vice Versâ_. Yet this idea seems too improbable: and I have since found
that she is not by any means the only one who has entertained this idea.
A little boy that I know, when about three and a half years old, used
often to say to his mother with perfect seriousness of manner: “When I
am big then you will be little, then I will carry you about and dress
you and put you to sleep”.
I happened to mention this fact at a meeting of mothers and teachers,
when I received further evidence of this tendency of child-thought. One
lady whom I know could recollect quite clearly that when a little girl
she was promised by her aunt some treasures, trinkets I fancy, when she
grew up; and that she at once turned to her aunt and promised her that
she would then give her in exchange all her dolls, as by that time she
(the aunt) would be a little girl. Another case narrated was that of a
little girl of three and a half years, who when her elder brother and
sister spoke to her about her getting big rejoined: “What will you do
when you are little?” A third case mentioned was that of a child asking
about some old person of her acquaintance: “When will she begin to get
small?” I have since obtained corroboratory instances from parents and
teachers of infant classes. Thus a lady writes that a little girl, a
cousin of hers aged four, to whom she was reading something about an old
woman, asked: “Do people turn back into babies when they get quite old?”
What, it may be asked, does this queer idea of shrinkage in old age
mean? By what quaint zig-zag movement of childish thought was the notion
reached? I cannot learn that there is any such idea in primitive
folk-lore, and this suggests that children find their way to it, in part
at least, by the suggestions of older people’s words. A child may, no
doubt, notice that old people stoop, and look small, and the fairy book
with little old women may strengthen the tendency to think of shrinkage.
But I cannot bring myself to believe that this would suffice to produce
the idea in so many cases.
That there is much in what the little folk hear us say fitted to raise
in their minds an idea of shrinking back into child-form is certain.
Many children must, at some time or another, have overheard their elders
speaking of old feeble people getting childish; and we must remember
that even the attributive ‘silly’ applied to old people might lead a
child to infer a return to childhood; for if there is one thing that
children—true unsophisticated children—believe in it is the
all-knowingness of grown-ups as contrasted with the know-nothingness of
themselves. C.’s belief in the preternatural calculating powers of
Goliath is an example of this correlation in the child’s consciousness
between size and intelligence.[49]
-----
Footnote 49:
That this is not the complete explanation is suggested by a story told
by Perez. His nephew, over four years, on meeting a little old man
said to his uncle: “When I shall be a little old man, will you be
young?” (_L’Enfant de trois à sept ans_, p. 219).
-----
But I suspect that there is a further source of this characteristic
product of early thought, involving still more of the child’s
philosophizing. As we have seen, a child cannot accept an absolute
beginning of things, and we shall presently find that he is equally
incapable of believing in an absolute ending. He knows that we begin our
earthly life as babies. Well, the babies must come from something, and
when we die we must pass into something. What more natural, then, than
the idea of a rhythmical alternation of cycles of existence, babies
passing into grown-ups, and these again into babies, and so the race
kept going? Does this seem too far-fetched an explanation? I think it
will be found less so if it is remembered that according to our way of
instructing these active little brains, people are brought to earth as
babies in angels’ arms, and that when they die they are taken back also
in angels’ arms. Now as the angel remains of constant size,—for this
their pictures vouch—it follows that old people, when they are dead at
least, must have shrivelled up to nursable dimensions; and as the child,
when he philosophizes, knows nothing of miraculous or cataclasmic
changes, he naturally supposes that this shrivelling up is gradual like
that of flowers and other things when they fade.[50]
-----
Footnote 50:
Perhaps, too, our way of playfully calling children little old men and
women favours the supposition that they are old people turned young
again.
-----
I am disposed to think, then, that in this idea of senile shrinkage we
have one of the most interesting and convincing examples of a child’s
philosophizing, of his impulse to reflect on what he sees and hears
about with a view to systematise. Yet the matter requires further
observation. Is it thoughtful, intelligent children, who excogitate this
idea? Would it be possible to get the child’s own explanation of it
before he has completely outgrown it?[51]
-----
Footnote 51:
Egger quotes a remark of a little girl: “I shall carry Emile (her
older brother) when he gets little”. This may, as Egger suggests, have
been merely a confusion of the conditional and the future. But the
idea about old people’s shrinking cannot be dismissed in this summary
way (see Perez, _First Three Years of Childhood_, p. 224).
-----
The origin of babies and young animals furnishes the small brain, as we
have seen, with much food for speculation. Here the little thinker is
not often left to excogitate a theory for himself. His inconvenient
questionings in this direction have to be firmly checked, and various
and truly wonderful are the ways in which the nurse and the mother are
wont to do this. Any fiction is supposed to be good enough for the
purpose. Divine action, as remarked above, is commonly called in, the
questioner being told that the baby has been sent down from heaven in
the arms of an angel and so forth. Fairy stories with their pretty
conceits, as that of the child Thumbkin growing out of a flower in Hans
Andersen’s book, contribute their suggestions, and so there arises a
mass of child-lore about babies in which we can see that the main ideas
are supplied by others, though now and again we catch a glimpse of the
child’s own contributions. Thus according to Stanley Hall’s report the
Boston children said, among other things, that God makes babies in
heaven, lets them down or drops them for the women and doctors to catch
them, or that he brings them down a wooden ladder backwards and pulls it
up again, or that mamma, nurse or doctor goes up and fetches them in a
balloon. They are said by some to grow in cabbages or to be placed by
God in water, perhaps in the sewer, where they are found by the doctor,
who takes them to sick folks that want them. Here we have delicious
touches of childish fancy, quaint adaptations of fairy and Bible lore,
as in the use of Jacob’s ladder and of the legend of Moses placed among
the bulrushes, this last being enriched by the thorough master-stroke of
child-genius, the idea of the dark, mysterious, wonder-producing sewer.
In spite too of all that others do to impress the traditional notions of
the nursery here, we find that a child will now and again think out the
whole subject for himself. The little boy C. is not the only one I find
who is of the opinion that babies are got at a shop. Another little boy,
I am informed, once asked his mamma in the abrupt childish manner,
“Mamma, vere did Tommy (his own name) tum (come) from?” and then with
the equally childish way of sparing you the trouble of answering his
question, himself observed, quite to his own satisfaction, “Mamma did
tie (buy) Tommy in a s’op (shop)”. Another child, seeing the
announcement “Families Supplied” in a grocer’s shop, begged his mother
to get him a baby. This looks like a real childish idea. To the young
imagination the shop is a veritable wonderland, an Eldorado of
valuables, and it appears quite reasonable to the childish intelligence
that babies like dolls and other treasures should be procurable there.
The ideas partly communicated by others, partly thought out for
themselves are carried over into the beginnings of animal life. Thus, as
we have seen, one little boy supposed that God helps pussy to have
“’ickle kitties,” seeing that she hasn’t any kitties in eggs given her
to sit upon.
_Psychological Ideas._
We may now pass to some of the characteristic modes of child-thought
about that standing mystery, the self. As our discussion of the child’s
ideas of origin, growth and final shrinkage suggests, a good deal of his
most earnest thinking is devoted to problems relating to himself.
The date of the first thought about self, of the first dim stage of
self-awareness, probably varies considerably in the case of different
children according to rapidity of mental development and circumstances.
The little girl, who was afterwards to be known as George Sand, may be
supposed to have had an exceptional development; and the accident of
infancy to which she refers as having aroused the earliest form of
self-consciousness was, of course, exceptional too. There are probably
many robust and dull children, knowing little of life’s misery, and
allowed in general to have their own way, who have but little more of
self-consciousness than that, say, of a young, well-favoured porker.
The earliest idea of self seems to be obtained by the child through an
examination by the senses of touch and sight of his own body. A child
has been observed to study his fingers attentively in the fourth and
fifth month, and this scrutiny goes on all through the second year and
even into the third.[52] Children seem to be impressed quite early by
the fact that in laying hold of a part of the body with the hand they
get a different kind of experience from that which they obtain when they
grasp a foreign object. Through these self-graspings, self-strikings,
self-bitings, aided by the very varied, and often extremely disagreeable
operations of the nurse and others on the surface of their bodies, they
probably reach during the first year the idea that their body is
different from all other things, is ‘me’ in the sense that it is the
living seat of pain and pleasure. The growing power of movement of limb,
especially when the crawling stage is reached, gives a special
significance to the body as that which can be moved, and by the
movements of which interesting and highly impressive changes in the
environment, _e.g._, bangs and other noises, can be produced.
-----
Footnote 52:
For the facts see Preyer, _op. cit._, cap. xxii.; Tracy, _The
Psychology of Childhood_, p. 47.
-----
It is probable that the first ideas of the bodily self are ill-defined.
It is evident that the head and face are not known at first as a
_visible_ object. The upper limbs by their movement across the field of
vision would come in for the special notice of the eye. We know that the
baby is at an early date wont to watch its hands. The lower limbs,
moreover, seem to receive special attention from the exploring and
examining hand.
There is some reason to think, however, that in spite of these
advantages, the limbs form a less integral and essential part of the
bodily self than the trunk. A child in his second year was observed to
bite his own finger till he cried with pain. He could hardly have known
it as a part of his sensitive body. Preyer tells us of a boy of nineteen
months who when asked to give his foot seized it with both hands and
tried to hand it over. A like facility in casting off from the self or
alienating the limbs is illustrated in a story in the Worcester
Collection of a child of three and a half years who on finding his feet
stained by some new stockings observed: “Oh, mamma! these ain’t my feet,
these ain’t the feet I had this morning”. This readiness to detach the
limbs shows itself still more plainly in the boy C.’s complaining when
in bed and trying to wriggle into a snug position that his legs came in
the way of himself. Here the legs seem to be half transformed into
foreign persons; and this tendency to personify the limbs seems to be
further illustrated in Laura Bridgman’s pastime of spelling a word
wrongly with one hand and then slapping that hand with the other.
Why, it may be asked, should a child attach this supreme importance to
the trunk, when his limbs are always forcing themselves on his notice by
their movements, and when he is so deeply interested in them as the
parts of the body which do things? I suspect that the principal reason
is that a child soon learns to connect with the trunk the recurrent and
most impressive of his feelings of comfort and discomfort, such as
hunger, thirst, stomachic pains and the corresponding reliefs. We know
that the “vital sense” forms the sensuous basis of self-consciousness in
the adult, and it is only reasonable to suppose that in the first years
of life, when it fills so large a place in the consciousness, it has
most to do with determining the idea of the sentient or feeling body.
Afterwards the observation of maimed men and animals would confirm the
idea that the trunk is the seat and essential portion of the living
body. The language of others too by identifying ‘body’ and ‘trunk’ would
strengthen the tendency.
About this interesting trunk-body, what is inside it, and how it works,
the child speculates vastly. References to the making of bone, the work
of the stomach, and so forth have to be understood somehow. It would be
interesting to get at a child’s unadulterated view of his anatomy and
physiology. The Worcester Collection illustrates what funny ideas a
child can entertain of the mechanism of his body. A little girl between
five and six thought it was the little hairs coming against the lids
which made her sleepy.
At a later stage of the child’s development, no doubt, when he comes to
form the idea of a conscious thinking ‘I,’ the head will become a
principal portion of the bodily self. In the evolution of the self-idea
in the race, too, we find that the soul was lodged in the trunk long
before it was assigned a seat in the head. As may be seen in C.’s case
children are quite capable of finding their way, partly at least, to the
idea that the soul has its lodgment in the head. But it is long before
this thought grows clear. This may be seen in children’s talk, as when a
girl of four spoke of her dolly as having no sense in her _eyes_. Even
when a child learns from others that we think with our brains he goes on
supposing that our thoughts travel down to the mouth when we speak.
Very interesting in connexion with the first stages of development of
the idea of self is the experience of the mirror. It would be absurd to
expect a child when first placed before a mirror to recognise his own
face. He will smile at the reflexion as early as the tenth week, though
this is probably merely an expression of pleasure at the sight of a
bright object. If held in the nurse’s or father’s arms to a glass when
about six months old a baby will at once show that he recognises the
image of the familiar face of the latter by turning round to the real
face, whereas he does not recognise his own. He appears at first and for
some months to take it for a real object, sometimes smiling to it as to
a stranger and even kissing it, or, as in the case of a little girl
(fifteen months old), offering it things and saying ‘Ta’ (sign of
acceptance). In many cases curiosity prompts to an attempt to grasp the
mirror-figure with the hand, to turn up the glass, or to put the hand
behind it in order to see what is really there. This is very much like
the behaviour of monkeys before a mirror, as described by Darwin and
others. Little by little the child gets used to the reflexion, and then
by noting certain agreements between his bodily self and the image, as
the movement of his hands when he points, and partly, too, by a kind of
inference of analogy from the doubling of other things by the mirror, he
reaches the idea that the reflexion belongs to himself. By the sixtieth
week Preyer’s boy had associated the name of his mother with her image,
pointing to it when asked where she was. By the twenty-first month he
did the same thing in the case of his own image.[53]
-----
Footnote 53:
See the very full account of the mirror experiment in Preyer’s book,
p. 459 _seq._
-----
An infant will, we know, take a shadow to be a real object and try to
touch it. Some children on noticing their own and other people’s shadows
on the wall are afraid as at something uncanny. Here, too, in time the
strange phenomenon is taken as a matter of course and referred to the
sun.
We are told that the phenomena of reflexions and shadows, along with
those of dreams, had much to do with the development, in the early
thought of the race, of the animistic conception that everything has a
double nature and existence. Do children form similar ideas? We can see
from the autobiography of George Sand how a clever girl, reflecting on
the impressive experience of the echo, excogitates such a theory of her
double existence; and we know, too, that the boy Hartley Coleridge
distinguished among the ‘Hartleys’ a picture Hartley and a shadow
Hartley. C.’s biography suggests that being photographed may appear to a
child as a transmutation, if not a doubling, of the self. But much more
needs to be known about these matters.
The prominence of the bodily pictorial element in the child’s first idea
of self is seen in the tendency to restrict personal identity within the
limits of an unchanged bodily appearance. The child of six, with his
shock of curls, refuses to believe that he is the same as the hairless
baby whose photograph the mother shows him. How different, how new, a
being a child feels on a Sunday morning after the extra weekly cleansing
and brushing and draping. The bodily appearance is a very big slice of
the content of most people’s self-consciousness, and to the child it is
almost everything.
But in time the conscious self, which thinks and suffers and wills,
comes to be dimly discerned. I believe that a real advance towards this
true self-consciousness is marked by the appropriation and use of the
difficult forms of language, ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine’. This will be dealt with
in another essay.
Sometimes the apprehension of the existence of a hidden self distinct
from the body comes as a sudden revelation, as to little George Sand.
Such a swift awakening of self-consciousness is apt to be an
epoch-making and memorable moment in the history of the child.
A father sends me the following notes on the development of
self-consciousness: “My girl, three years old, makes an extraordinary
distinction between her body and herself. Lying in bed she shut her eyes
and said: ‘Mother, you can’t see me now’. The mother replied: ‘Oh, you
little goose, I can see you but you can’t see me’. To which she
rejoined: ‘Oh, yes, I know you can see _my body_, mother, but you can’t
see _me_’.” The same child about the same time was concerned about the
reality of her own existence. One day playing with her dolls she asked
her mother: “Mother, am _I_ real, or only a pretend like my dolls?” Here
again, it is plain, the emphasis was laid on something non-corporeal,
something that animated the body, and not a mere bit of mechanism put
inside it. Two years later she showed a still finer intellectual
differentiation of the visible and the invisible self. Her brother
happened to ask her what they fed the bears on at the Zoo. She answered
impulsively: “Dead babies and that sort of thing”. On this the mother
interposed: “Why, F., you don’t think mothers would give their dead
babies to the animals?” To this she replied: “Why not, mother? It’s only
their bodies. I shouldn’t mind your giving mine.” This contempt for the
body is an excellent example of the way in which a child when he gets
hold of an idea pushes it to its logical extreme. This little girl
by-the-bye was she who, about the same age, took compassion on the poor
autumn leaves dying on the ground, so that we may suppose her mind to
have been brooding at this time on the conscious side of existence.
The mystery of self-existence has probably been a puzzle to many a
thoughtful child. A lady, a well-known writer of fiction, sends me the
following recollection of her early thought on this subject: “The
existence of other people seemed natural: it was the ‘I’ that seemed so
strange to me. That I should be able to perceive, to think, to cause
other people to act, seemed to me quite to be expected, but the power of
feeling and acting and moving about myself, under the guidance of some
internal self, amazed me continually.”
It is of course hard to say how exactly the child thinks about this
inner self. It seems to me probable that, allowing for the great
differences in reflective power, children in general, like uncivilised
races, tend to materialise it, thinking of it dimly as a film-like
shadow-like likeness of the visible self. The problem is complicated for
the child’s consciousness by religious instruction with its idea of an
undying soul.
As may be seen in the recollections just quoted, this early thought
about self is greatly occupied with its action on the body. Among the
many things that puzzled the much-questioning little lad already
frequently quoted was this: “How do my thoughts come down from my brain
to my mouth: and how does my spirit make my legs walk?” C.’s sister when
four years and ten months old wanted to know how it is we can move our
arm and keep it still when we want to, while the curtain can’t move
except somebody moves it. The first attempts to solve the puzzle are of
course materialistic, as may be seen in our little questioner’s
delightful notion of thoughts travelling through the body. This form of
materialism, however, I find surviving in grown-ups and even in students
of psychology, who are rather fond of talking about sensations
travelling up the nerves to the brain.
Very curious are the directions of the first thought about the past
self. The idea of personal identity, so dear to philosophers, does not
appear to be fully reached at first. On the contrary, as we shall see in
the case of C., the past self is divorced from the present under the
image of the opposite sex in the odd expression: “when I was a little
girl”. This probably illustrates the importance of the bodily appearance
as a factor in the self, for C. had, I believe, been photographed when
in the petticoat stage, and no doubt looked back on this person in
skirts as a girl. This is borne out by the fact that another little boy
when about three and a half years old asked his mother: “Was I a girl
when I was small?” and that the little questioner whom I have called our
zoologist was also accustomed to say: “When I was a ’ickle dirl (girl)”.
But discarded petticoats do not explain all the child’s ideas about his
past self. This same little zoologist would also say, “When I was a big
man,” to describe the state of things long, long ago. What does this
mean? In discussing the quaint idea of senile shrinkage I have suggested
that a child may think of human existence as a series of transformations
from littleness to bigness, and the reverse, and here we have lighted on
another apparent evidence of it. For though we are apt to call children
‘old men’ we do not suggest to them that they are or have been big men.
The difficulty to the child of conceiving of his remote past, is
surpassed by that of trying to understand the state of things before he
was born. The true mystery of birth for the child, the mystery which
fascinates and holds his mind, is that of his beginning to be. This is
illustrated in C.’s question: “Where was I a hundred years ago? Where
was I before I was born?” It remains a mystery for all of us, only that
after a time we are wont to put it aside. The child, on the other hand,
is stung, so to say, by the puzzle, his whole mind being roused to
passionate questioning.
It is curious to note the differences in the attitude of children’s
minds towards the mystery. The small person accustomed to petting, to be
made the centre of others’ thought and action, may be struck with the
blank in the common home life before his arrival. A lady was talking to
her little girl H., aged three years, about something she had done when
she was a child. H. then wanted to know what she was doing then, and was
told by her mother: “Oh, you were not here at all”. She seemed quite
amazed at this, and said: “And what did you do without H.? Did you cry
all day for her?” On being informed that this was not the case, she
seemed quite unable to realise how her mother could have existed without
her. There is something of the charming egoism of the child here, but
there is more: there is the vague expression of the unifying integrating
work of love. Lovers, one is told, are wont to think in the same way
about the past before they met, and became all in all to one another.
For this little girl with her strong sense of human attachment, the idea
of a real life without that which gave it warmth and gladness was a
contradiction.
Sometimes again, in the more metaphysical sort of child, the puzzle
relates to the past existence of the outer world. We have all been
perplexed by the thought of the earth and sky, and other folk existing
before we were, and going on to exist after we cease to be; though here
again, save in the case of the philosopher perhaps, we get used to the
puzzle. Children may be deeply impressed with this apparent
contradiction. Jean Ingelow in her interesting reminiscences thus writes
of her puzzlings on this head: "I went through a world of cogitation as
to whether it was really true that anything had been and lived before I
was there to see it.... I could think there might have been some day
when I was very little—as small as the most tiny pebble on the road—but
not to have been at all was so very hard to believe." A little boy of
five who was rather given to saying ‘clever’ things, was one day asked
by a visitor, who thought to rebuke what she took to be his conceit:
“Why, M., however did the world go round before you came into it?” M. at
once replied: “Why, it _didn’t_ go round. It only began five years ago.”
Was this, as perhaps nine persons out of ten would say, merely a bit of
dialectic smartness, the evasion of an awkward question by denying the
assumed fact? I am disposed to think that there was more, that the
virtuous intention of the visitor had chanced to discover a hidden
child-thought; for the child is naturally a Berkeleyan, in so far at
least that for him the reality of things is reality for his own
sense-perceptions. A world existent before he was on the spot to see it,
seems to the child’s intelligence a contradiction.
A child will sometimes use theological ideas as an escape from this
puzzle. The myth of babies being brought down from heaven is
particularly helpful. The quick young intelligence sees in this pretty
idea a way of prolonging existence backwards. The same little boy that
was so concerned to know what his mother had done without him, happened
one day to be passing a street pump with his mother, when he stopped and
observed with perfect gravity: “There are no pumps in heaven where I
came from”. He had evidently thought out the legend of the God-sent baby
to its logical consequences.
Children appear to have very vague ideas about time. Their minds cannot
at first of course rise to the abstraction, time, or duration, or to its
measured portions, as a day. They talk about the days as if they were
things. Thus to-day, yesterday, and to-morrow, which, as we may see in
C.’s way of talking about time, are used very vaguely for present, past
and future, are spoken of as things which move. A girl of four asked:
‘Where is yesterday gone to?’ and ‘Where will to-morrow come from?’ The
boy C. as well as other children, as we saw, asked where all the days go
to. Such expressions may of course be figurative, a child having no
other way of describing the sequence yesterday and to-day, to-day and
to-morrow; yet I am disposed to think that these are examples of the
child’s ‘concretism,’ his reduction of our abstractions to living
realities.[54]
-----
Footnote 54:
A child quoted by P. Lombroso thought of a year as a round thing
having the different festivals on it, and bringing these round in due
order by its rotation (_op. cit._, p. 49).
-----
It is equally noticeable that children have no adequate mental
representations of our time-measurements. As in the case of space, so in
that of time their standard is not ours: an hour, say the first morning
at school, may seem an eternity to a child’s consciousness. The days,
the months, the years seem to fly faster and faster as we get older. On
the other hand, as in the case of space-judgments, too, the child
through his inability to represent time on a large scale is apt to bring
the past too near the present. Mothers and young teachers would be
surprised if they knew how children interpreted their first historical
instruction introduced by the common phrase, ‘Many years ago,’ or
similar expression. A child of six years when crossing the Red Sea asked
to be shown Pharaoh and his hosts. This looks like the effect of a vivid
imagination of the scene, which even in grown people may beget an
expectation of seeing it here and now. The following anecdote of a boy
of five and a half years sent me by his aunt more clearly illustrates a
child’s idea of the historical past. “H. was beginning to have English
history read to him and had got past the ‘Romans’ as he said. One day he
noticed a locket on my watch-chain, and desired that it should be
opened. It contained the hair of two babies both dead long before. He
asked about them. I told him they died before I was born. ‘Did father
know them?’ he asked. ‘No, they died before _he_ was born.’ ‘Then who
knew them and when did they live?’ he asked, and as I hesitated for a
moment, seeking how to make the matter plain, ‘Was it in the time of the
Romans?’ he gravely asked.” The odd-looking historical perspective here
was quite natural. He had to localise the babies’ existence somewhere,
and he could only do it conjecturally by reference to the one far-off
time of which he had heard, and which presumably covered all that was
before the life-time of himself and of those about him.
_Theological Ideas._
We may now pass to another group of children’s ideas, a group already
alluded to, those which have to do with the invisible world, with death
and what follows this—God and heaven. Here we find an odd patchwork of
thought, the patchwork-look being due to the heterogeneous sources of
the child’s information, his own observations of the visible world on
the one hand, and the ideas supplied him by what is called religious
instruction on the other. The characteristic activity of the child-mind,
so far as we can disengage it, is seen in the attempt to co-ordinate the
disparate and seemingly contradictory ideas into something like a
coherent system.
Like the beginning of life, its termination, death, is one of the
recurring puzzles of childhood. This might be illustrated from almost
any autobiographical reminiscences of childhood. Here indeed the
mystery, as may be seen in C.’s case, is made the more impressive and
recurrent to consciousness by the element of dread. A little girl of
three and a half years asked her mother to put a great stone on her
head, because she did not want to die. She was asked how a stone would
prevent it, and answered with perfect childish logic: “Because I shall
not grow tall if you put a great stone on my head; and people who grow
tall get old and then die”.
Death seems to be thought of by the unsophisticated child as the body
reduced to a motionless state, devoid of breath and unable any longer to
feel or think. This is the idea suggested by the sight of dead animals,
which but few children, however closely shielded, can escape.
The first way of envisaging death seems to be as a temporary state like
sleep, which it so closely resembles. A little boy of two and a half
years, on hearing from his mother of the death of a lady friend, at once
asked: “Will Mrs. P. still be dead when we go back to London?”
The knowledge of burial gives a new and terrible turn to his idea of
death. He now begins to speculate much about the grave. The instinctive
tendency to carry over the idea of life and sentience to the buried body
is illustrated in C.’s fear lest the earth should be put over his eyes.
The following observation from the Worcester Collection illustrates the
same tendency. “A few days ago H. (aged four years four months) came to
me and said: ‘Did you know they’d taken Deacon W. to Grafton?’ I. ‘Yes.’
H. ‘Well, I s’pose it’s the best thing. His folks (meaning his children)
are buried there, and they wouldn’t know he was dead if he was buried
here.’” This reversion to savage notions of the dead in speaking of a
Christian deacon has a certain grim humour. All thoughts of heaven were
here forgotten in the absorbing interest in the fate of the body.
Do children when left to themselves work out a theory of another life,
that of the soul away from the dead deserted body? It is of course
difficult to say, all children receiving some instruction at least of a
religious character respecting the future. One of the clearest
approaches to spontaneous child-thought that I have met with here is
supplied by the account of the Boston children. "Many children (writes
Professor Stanley Hall) locate all that is good and imperfectly known in
the country, and nearly a dozen volunteered the statement that good
people when they die go to the country—even here from Boston." The
reference to good people shows that the children are here trying to give
concrete definiteness to something that has been said by another. These
children had not, one suspects, received much systematic religious
instruction. They had perhaps gathered in a casual way the information
that good people when they die are to go to a nice place. Children pick
up much from the talk of their better-instructed companions which they
only half understand. In any case it is interesting to note that they
placed their heaven in the country, the unknown beautiful region, where
all sorts of luxuries grow. One is reminded of the idea of the happy
hunting grounds to which the American Indian consigns his dead chief. It
would have been interesting to examine these Boston children as to how
they combined this belief in going to the country with the burial of the
body in the city.
In the case of children who pick up something of the orthodox religious
creed the idea of going to heaven has somehow to be grasped and put side
by side with that of burial. How the child-mind behaves here it is hard
to say. It is probable that there are many comfortable and stupid
children who are not troubled by any appearance of contradiction. As we
saw in the remark of the American child about the deacon, the child-mind
may oscillate between the native idea that the man lives on in a sense
underground, and the alien idea that he has passed into heaven. Yet
undoubtedly the more thoughtful kind of child does try to bring the two
ideas into agreement. The boy C. attempted to do this first of all by
supposing that the people who went to heaven (the good) were not buried
at all; and later by postponing the going to heaven, the true entrance
being that of the body by way of the tomb. Other ways of getting a
consistent view of things are also hit upon. Thus a little girl of five
years thought that the _head_ only passed to heaven. This was no doubt a
way of understanding the communication from others that the ‘body’ is
buried. This inference is borne out by another story of a boy of four
and a half who asked how much of his legs would have to be cut off when
he was buried. The legs were not the ‘body’. But the idea of the head
passing to heaven meant more than this. It pretty certainly involved a
localisation of the soul in the crown of the body, and it may possibly
have been helped by pictures of cherub heads. Sometimes this process of
child-thought reflects that of early human thought, as when a little boy
of six said that God took the breath to heaven (_cf._ the ideas
underlying _spiritus_ and πνεῦμα).
In what precise manner children imagine the entrance into heaven to take
place I do not feel certain. The legend of being borne by angels through
the air probably assists here. As we have seen, children tend to think
of people when they die as shrinking back to baby-dimensions so as to be
carried in the angels’ arms.
The idea of people going to heaven is, as we know, pushed by the little
brain to its logical consequences. Animals when they die pass to another
place also. A boy three years and nine months asked whether birds,
insects, and so forth go to heaven where people go when they die. Yet a
materialistic tendency shows itself here, especially in connexion with
the observation that animals are eaten. A little American boy in his
fifth year was playing with a tadpole till it died. Immediately the
other tadpoles ate it up, and the child burst out crying. His elder
sister with the best of intentions tried to comfort him by saying:
‘Don’t cry, William, he’s gone to a better place’. To which rather
ill-timed assurance he retorted sceptically: ‘Are his brothers and
sisters’ stomachs a better place?’
Coming now to ideas of supernatural beings, it is to be noted that
children do not wholly depend for their conceptions of these on
religious or other instruction. The liveliness of their imagination and
their impulses of dread and trust push them on to a spontaneous creation
of invisible beings. In C.’s haunting belief in the wolf we see a sort
of survival of the tendency of the savage to people the unseen world
with monsters in the shape of demons. Another little boy of rather more
than two years who had received no religious instruction acquired a
similar haunting dread of ‘cocky,’ the name he had given to the cocks
and hens when in the country. He localised this evil thing in the
bathroom of the house, and he attributed pains in the stomach to the
malign influence of ‘cocky’.[55] Fear created the gods according to
Lucretius, and in this invention of evil beings bent on injuring him the
child of a modern civilised community may reproduce the process by which
man’s thoughts were first troubled by the apprehension of invisible and
supernatural agents.
-----
Footnote 55:
See _Mind_, vol. xi., p. 149.
-----
On the other hand we find that the childish impulse to seek aid leads to
a belief in a more benign sort of being. C.’s staunch belief in his
fairies who could do the most wonderful things for him, and more
especially his invention of the rain-god (the “Rainer”), are a clear
illustration of the working of this impulse.
Even here, of course, while we can detect the play of a spontaneous
impulse, we have to recognise the influence of instruction. C.’s
tutelary deities, the fairies, were no doubt _suggested_ by his fairy
stories; even though, as in the myth of the Rainer, we see how his
active little mind proceeded to work out the hints given him into quite
original shapes. This original adaptation shows itself on a large scale
where something like systematic religious instruction is supplied. An
intelligent child of four or five will in the laboratory of his mind
turn the ideas of God and the devil to strange account. It would be
interesting, if we could only get it, to have a collection of all the
hideous eerie forms by which the young imagination has endeavoured to
interpret the notion of the devil. His renderings of the idea of God
appear to show hardly less of picturesque diversity.[56]
-----
Footnote 56:
According to Professor Earl Barnes, the Californian children seem to
occupy themselves but little with the devil and hell. See his
interesting paper, “Theological Life of a Californian Child,”
_Pedagogical Seminary_, ii., 3, p. 442 _seq._
-----
It is to be noted at the outset that for the child’s intelligence the
ideas introduced by religious instruction at once graft themselves on to
those of fairy-lore. Mr. Spencer has somewhere ridiculed our university
type of education with its juxtaposition of classical polytheism and
Hebrew monotheism. One might, perhaps, with still greater reason,
satirise the mixing up of fairy-story and Bible-story in the instruction
of a child of five. Who can wonder that the little brain should throw
together all these wondrous invisible forms, and picture God as an angry
or amiable old giant, the angels as fairies and so forth? In George
Sand’s child-romance of _Corambé_ we see how far this blending of the
ideas of the two domains of the invisible world can be carried.
For the rest, the child in his almost pathetic effort to catch the
meaning of this religious instruction proceeds in his characteristic
matter-of-fact way by reducing the abstruse symbols to terms of familiar
every-day experience. He has to understand and he can only understand by
assimilating to homely terrestrial facts. Hence the undisguised
materialism of the child’s theology. According to Stanley Hall’s
collection of observations, God was imaged by one child as a man
preternaturally big—a big blue man; by another as a huge being with
limbs spread all over the sky; by another as so immensely tall that he
could stand with one foot on the ground, and touch the clouds,—strong
like the giant, his prototype. He is commonly, in conformity with what
is told, supposed to dwell in heaven, that is just the other side of the
blue and white floor, the sky. He is so near the clouds that according
to one small boy (our little friend the zoologist) these are a sort of
pleasaunce, composed of hills and trees, which he has made to saunter
in. But some children are inventive even in respect of God’s
whereabouts. He has been regarded as inhabiting one of the stars. One of
Mr. Kratz’s children localised him ‘up in the moon,’ an idea which
probably owes something to observation of the man in the moon. We note,
too, a tendency to approximate heaven and earth, possibly in order to
account for God’s frequent presence and activity here. Thus one of Mr.
Kratz’s children said that God was “up on the hill,” and one little girl
of five was in the habit of climbing an old apple tree to visit him and
tell him what she wanted.
Differences of feeling, as well as differences in the mode of
instruction and in intelligence, seem to reflect themselves in these
ideas of the divine dwelling-place. As we have seen, the childish
intelligence is apt to envisage God as a sort of grand lord with a house
or mansion. Two different tendencies show themselves in the thought
about this dwelling-place. On the one hand the feeling of childish
respect, which led a German girl of seven to address him in the polite
form, ‘Ich bitte Sie,’ leads to a beautifying of his house. According to
some of the Bostonian children he has birds, children, and Santa Claus
living with him. Others think of him as having a big park or pleasaunce
with trees, flowers, as well as birds. The children are perhaps our dead
people who in time will be sent back to earth. Whether the birds, that I
find come in again and again in the ideas of heaven, are dead birds, I
am not sure. While however there is this half-poetical adorning of God’s
palace, we see also a tendency to humanise it, to make it like our
familiar houses. This is quaintly illustrated in the following prayer of
a girl of seven whose grandfather had just died: “Please, God, grandpapa
has gone to you. Please take great care of him. Please always mind and
shut the door, because he can’t stand the draughts.” We see the same
leaning to homely conceptions in the question of a little girl of four:
‘Isn’t there a Mrs. God?’
While thus relegated to the sublime regions of the sky God is supposed
to be doing things, and of course doing them for us, sending down rain
and so forth. What seems to impress children most, especially boys, in
the traditional account of God is his power of making things. He is
emphatically the artificer, the demiurgos, who not only has made the
world, the stars, etc., but is still kept actively employed by human
needs. According to the Boston children he fabricates all sorts of
things from babies to money, and the angels work for him. The boy has a
great admiration for the maker, and our small zoologist when three years
and ten months old, on seeing a group of working men returning from
their work, asked his astonished mother: “Mamma, is these gods?” “God!”
retorted his mother, “why?” “Because,” he went on, “they makes houses,
and churches, mamma, same as God makes moons, and people, and ’ickle
dogs.” Another child watching a man repairing the telegraph wires that
rested on a high pole at the top of a lofty house, asked if he was God.
In this way the child is apt to think of God descending to earth in
order to make things. Indeed, in their prayers, children are wont to
summon God as a sort of good genius to do something difficult for them.
A boy of four and a half years was one day in the kitchen with his
mother, and would keep taking up the knives and using them. At last his
mother said: “L., you will cut your fingers, and if you do they won’t
grow again”. He thought for a minute and then said with a tone of deep
conviction: “But God would make them grow. He made _me_, so he could
mend my fingers, and if I were to cut the ends off I should say, ‘God,
God, come to your work,’ and he would say, ‘All right’.”[57]
-----
Footnote 57:
To judge from a story for the truth of which I will not vouch children
will turn the devil to the same useful account. A little girl was
observed to write a letter and to bury it in the ground. The contents
ran something like this: "Dear Devil, please come and take aunt—soon,
I cannot stand her much longer". The burying is significant of the
devil’s dwelling-place.
-----
While this way of recognising God as the busy artificer is common, it is
not universal. The child’s deity, like the man’s (as Feuerbach showed),
is a projection of himself, and as there are lazy children, so there is
a child’s God who is a luxurious person sitting in a lovely arm-chair
all day, and at most putting out from heaven the moon and stars at
night.
This admiration of God’s creative power is naturally accompanied by that
of his skill. A little boy once said to his mother he would like to go
to heaven to see Jesus. Asked why, he replied: “Oh! he’s a great
conjurer”. The child had shortly before seen some human conjuring and
used this experience in a thoroughly childish fashion by envisaging in a
new light the New Testament miracle-worker.
The idea of God’s omniscience seems to come naturally to children. They
are in the way of looking up to older folks as possessing boundless
information. C.’s belief in the all-knowingness of the preacher, and his
sister’s belief in the all-knowingness of the policeman, show how
readily the child-mind falls in with the notion.
On the other hand I have heard of the dogma of God’s infinite knowledge
provoking a sceptical attitude in the child-mind. This seems to be
suggested in a rather rude remark of a boy of four, bored by the long
Sunday discourse of his mother: “Mother, does God know when you are
going to stop?” Our astute little zoologist, when five years and seven
months old, in a talk with his mother, impiously sought to tone down the
doctrine of omniscience in this way: “I know a ’ickle more than Kitty,
and you know a ’ickle more than me; and God knows a ’ickle more than
you, I s’pose; then he can’t know so very much after all”.
Another of the divine attributes does undoubtedly shock the childish
intelligence: I mean God’s omnipresence. It seems, indeed, amazing that
the so-called instructor of the child should talk to him almost in the
same breath about God’s inhabiting heaven, and about his being
everywhere present. Here, I think, we see most plainly the superiority
of the child’s mind to the adult’s, in that it does not let
contradictory ideas lie peacefully side by side, but makes them face one
another. To the child, as we have seen, God lives in the sky, though he
is quite capable of coming down to earth when he wishes or when he is
politely asked to do so. Hence he rejects the idea of a diffused
ubiquitous existence. The idea which is apt to be introduced early as a
moral instrument, that God can always see the child, is especially
resented by that small, sensitive, proud creature, to whom the
ever-following eyes of the portrait on the wall seem a persecution. Miss
Shinn, a careful American observer of children, has written strongly,
yet not too strongly, on the repugnance of the child-mind to this idea
of an ever-spying eye.[58] My observations fully confirm her conclusions
here. Miss Shinn speaks of a little girl, who, on learning that she was
under this constant surveillance, declared that she “would _not_ be so
tagged”. A little English boy of three, on being informed by his older
sister that God can see and watch us while we cannot see him, thought
awhile, and then in an apologetic tone said: “I’m very sorry, dear, I
can’t (b)elieve you”. What the sister, aged fifteen, thought of this is
not recorded. An American boy of five, learning that God was in the room
and could see even if the shutters were closed, said: “I know, it’s
jugglery”.
-----
Footnote 58:
_Overland Monthly_, Jan., 1894, p. 12.
-----
When the idea is accepted odd devices are excogitated for the purpose of
making it intelligible. Thus one child thought of God as a very small
person who could easily pass through the keyhole. The idea of God’s huge
framework illustrated above is probably the result of an attempt to
figure the conception of omnipresence. Curious conclusions too are
sometimes drawn from the supposition. Thus a little girl of three years
and nine months one day said to her mother in the abrupt childish
manner: “Mr. C. (a gentleman she had known who had just died) is in this
room”. Her mother, naturally a good deal startled, answered: “Oh, no!”
Whereupon the child resumed: “Yes, he is. You told me he is with God,
and you told me God was everywhere, so as Mr. C. is with God he must be
in this room.” With such trenchant logic does the child’s intelligence
cut through the tangle of incongruous ideas which we try to pass off as
methodical instruction.
It might easily be supposed that the child’s readiness to pray to God is
inconsistent with what has just been said. Yet I think there is no real
inconsistency. Children’s idea of prayer is, probably, that of sending a
message to some one at a distance. The epistolary manner noticeable in
many prayers seems to illustrate this.[59] The mysterious whispering is,
I suspect, supposed in some inscrutable fashion known only to the child
to transmit itself to the divine ear.
-----
Footnote 59:
_Cf._ the story of writing a letter to the devil given above.
-----
Of the child’s belief in God’s goodness it is needless to say much. For
these little worshippers he is emphatically the friend in need who can
help them out of their difficulties in a hundred ways. Our small
zoologist thanked God for making “the sea, the holes with crabs in them,
and the trees, the fields, and the flowers,” and regretted that he did
not follow up the making of the animals we eat by doing the cooking
also. As their prayers show he is ever ready to make nice presents, from
a fine day to a toy-gun, and will do them any kindness if only they ask
prettily. Happy the reign of this untroubled optimism. For many
children, alas, it is all too short, the colour of their life making
them lose faith in all kindness, and think of God as cross and even as
cruel.
One of the real difficulties of theology for the child’s intelligence is
the doctrine of God’s eternity. Puzzled at first with the fact of his
own beginning, he comes soon to be troubled with the idea of God’s
having had no beginning. C. showed a common trend of childish thought in
asking what God was like in his younger days. The question, “Who made
God?” seems to be one to which all inquiring young minds are led at a
certain stage of child-thought. The metaphysical impulse of the child to
follow back the chain of events _ad infinitum_ finds the ever-existent
unchanging God very much in the way. He wants to get behind this “always
was” of God’s existence, just as at an earlier stage of his development
he wanted to get behind the barrier of the blue hills. This is quaintly
illustrated in the reasoning of a child observed by M. Egger. Having
learnt from his mother that before the world there was only God the
Creator, he asked: “And before God?” The mother having replied,
“Nothing,” he at once interpreted her answer by saying: “No; there must
have been the place (_i.e._, the empty space) where God is”. So
determined is the little mind to get back to the ‘before,’ and to find
something, if only a prepared place.
Other mysteries of which the child comes to hear find their
characteristic solution in the busy little brain. A friend tells me that
when a child he was much puzzled by the doctrine of the Trinity. He
happened to be an only child, and so he was led to put a meaning into it
by assimilating it to the family group, in which the Holy Ghost became
the mother.
I have tried to show that children seek to bring meaning, and a
consistent meaning, into the jumble of communications about the unseen
world to which they are apt to be treated. I agree with Miss Shinn that
children about three and four are not disposed to theologise, and are
for the most part simply confused by the accounts of God which they
receive. Many of the less bright of these small minds may remain
untroubled by the incongruities lurking in the mixture of ideas, half
mythological or poetical, half theological, which is thus introduced.
Such children are no worse than many adults, who have a wonderful power
of entertaining contradictory ideas by keeping them safely apart in
separate chambers of their brain. The intelligent thoughtful child on
the other hand tries at least to reconcile and to combine in an
intelligible whole. His mind has not, like that of so many adults,
become habituated to the water-tight compartment arrangement, in which
there is no possibility of a leakage of ideas from one group into
another. Hence his puzzlings, his questionings, his brave attempts to
reduce the chaos to order. I think it is about time to ask whether
parents are doing wisely in thus adding to the perplexing problems of
early days.
V.
THE LITTLE LINGUIST.
_Prelinguistic Babblings._
No part of the life of a child appeals to us more powerfully perhaps
than the first use of our language. The small person’s first efforts in
linguistics win us by a certain graciousness, by the friendly impulse
they disclose to get mentally near us, to enter into the full fruition
of human intercourse. The difficulties, too, which we manage to lay upon
the young learner of our tongue, and the way in which he grapples with
these, lend a peculiar interest, half pathetic, half humorous, to this
field of infantile activity. To the scientific observer of infancy,
moreover, the noting of the stages in the acquisition of speech is of
the first importance. Language is sound moulded into definite forms and
so made vehicular of ideas; and we may best watch the unfoldings of
childish thought by attending to the way in which the word-sculptor
takes the plastic sound-material and works it into its picturesque
variety of shapes.
A special biological and anthropological interest attaches to the
child’s first essays in the use of words. Language is that which most
obviously marks off human from animal intelligence. One of the most
interesting problems in the science of man’s origin and early
development is how he first acquired the power of using language-signs.
If we proceed on the biological principle that the development of the
individual represents in its main stages that of the race, we may expect
to find through the study of children’s use of language hints as to how
our race came by the invaluable endowment. How far it is reasonable to
expect from a study of nursery linguistics a complete explanation of the
process by which man became speechful, _homo articulans_, will appear
later on. But an examination of these linguistics ought surely to be of
some suggestive value here.
While there is this peculiar scientific interest in the first
manifestations of the speech-faculty in the child, they are of a kind to
lend themselves particularly well to a methodic and exact observation.
Articulate sounds are sensible objects having well-defined characters
which may be accurately noted and described where the requisite fineness
of ear and quickness of perception are present. The difficulties are no
doubt great here: but they are precisely the difficulties to sharpen the
appetite of the true naturalist. Hence we need not wonder that early
articulation fills a large place in the naturalist’s observation of
infant life. Preyer, for example, devotes one of the three sections of
his well-known monograph to this subject, and gives us a careful and
elaborate account of the progress of articulation and of speech up to
the end of the period dealt with (first three years).
Since these studies are especially concerned with the characteristics of
the child after language has been acquired I shall not enter into the
history of his rudimentary speech at any great length. At the same time,
since language is a realm of activity in which the child betrays
valuable characteristics long after the third year, it deserves a
special study in this volume.
As everybody knows, long before the child begins to speak in the
conventional sense he produces sounds. These are at first cries and
wanting in the definiteness of true articulate sounds. Such cries are
expressive, that is, utterances of changing conditions of feeling, pain
and pleasure, and are also instinctive, springing out of certain
congenital nervous arrangements by which feeling acts upon the muscular
organs. This crying gradually differentiates itself into a rich variety
of expressions for hunger, cold, pain, joy and so forth, of which it is
safe to say that the majority of nurses and mothers have at best but a
very imperfect knowledge.
These cries disclose from the first a germ of articulate sound, _viz._,
according to Preyer an approach to the vowel sounds _u_ (oo) and _ä_
(Engl. _a_ in ‘made’). This articulate element becomes better defined
and more varied in the later cries, and serves in part to differentiate
them one from the other. Thus a difference of shade in the _a_ (in
‘ah’), difficult to describe, has been observed to mark off the cry of
pleasure and of pain. Along with this articulate sounds begin to appear
in periods of happy contentment under the form of infantile babbling or
‘la-la-ing’. Thus the child will bring out a string of _a_ and other
vowel sounds. In this baby-twittering the several vowel sounds of our
tongue become better distinguishable, and are strung together in queer
ways, as _ai-ā-au-â_. An attempt is made by Preyer and others to give
the precise order of the appearance of the several vowel sounds. It is
hardly to be expected that observers would agree upon a matter so
difficult to seize and to describe; and this is what we find.[60] After
allowing, however, for differences in the reading off, it seems probable
that there is a considerable diversity in the order of development in
the case of different children. This applies still more to the
appearance of the consonantal sounds which long before the end of the
sixth month become combined with the vowels into syllabic sounds, as
_pa_, _ma_, _mam_, and so forth. Thus, though the labials _b_, _p_, _m_,
seem to come first in most cases, they may be accompanied, if not
preceded, by others, as the back open sound _ch_ (in Scotch ‘loch’), or
(according to Preyer and others) by the corresponding voiced sound, the
hard _g_. Similarly, sounds as _l_ and _r_, which commonly appear late,
are said in some instances to occur quite early.[61] Attempts have been
made to show that the order of sounds here corresponds with that of
advancing physiological difficulty or amount of muscular effort
involved. Yet apart from the fact just touched on, that the order is not
uniform, it is very questionable whether the more common order obeys any
such simple physiological law.
-----
Footnote 60:
See Preyer, _op. cit._, Cap. 20; _cf._ the account given by De la
Calle, Perez, _First Three Years_, p. 248. Stanley Hall observes that
the first vocalisation of the infant could hardly be classified even
with the help of Bell’s phonic notation or with a phonograph
(_Pedagogical Seminary_, i., p. 132).
-----
Footnote 61:
Preyer’s boy first used consonants in the combinations _tahu_, _gö_,
(_rööö_ = the French _eu_), _op. cit._, p. 366; _cf._ Cap. 21.
-----
This primordial babbling is wonderfully rich and varied. According to
Preyer it contains most, if not all the sounds which are afterwards used
in speaking, and among these some which cause much difficulty later on.
It is thus a wondrous contrivance of nature by which the child is made
to rehearse months beforehand for the difficult performances of
articulate speech. It is a preliminary trying of the vocal instrument
throughout the whole of its register.
Though nurses are apt to fancy that in this pretty babbling the infant
is talking to itself there is no reason to think that it amounts even to
a rudiment of true speech. To speak is to use a sound intentionally as
the sign of an idea. The babbling baby of five months cannot be supposed
to be connecting all these stray sounds with ideas, if indeed it can be
said to have as yet any definite ideas. The only signification which
this primitive articulation can have is emotional. Undoubtedly, as we
have seen, it grows out of expressive cries. Even the happy bubblings
over of vowel sounds as the child lies on his back and ‘crows,’ may be
said to be expressive of his happiness like the movements of arms and
legs which accompany it. Yet it would be an exaggeration to suppose that
the elaborate phonation is merely expressive, that all the manifold and
subtle changes of sound are due to obscure variations of feeling.
The true explanation seems to be that the appearance of this infantile
babbling, just like that of the movements of the limbs which accompany
it, is the result of changes in the nervous system. As the centres of
vocalisation get developed, motor impulses begin to play on the muscles
of throat, larynx, and, later on, lips, tongue, etc., and in this way a
larger and larger variety of sound and sound-combination is produced.
Such phonation is commonly described as impulsive. It is instinctive,
that is to say, unlearnt, and due to congenital nervous connexions; and
at best it can only be said to express in its totality a mood or
relatively permanent state of feeling.
As this impulsive articulation develops it becomes complicated by a
distinctly intentional element. The child hears the sounds he produces
and falls in love with them. From this moment he begins to go on
babbling for the pleasure it brings. We see the germ of such a
pleasure-seeking babbling in the protracted iterations of the same
sound. The first reduplications and serial iterations, _a-a_, _ma-ma_,
etc., may be due to physiological inertia, the mere tendency to move
along any track that happens to be struck, the very same tendency which
makes a prosy speaker go on repeating himself. At the same time there is
without doubt in these infantile iterations a rudiment of
self-imitation. That is to say, the child having produced a sound, as
_na_ or _am_, impulsively proceeds to repeat the performance in order to
obtain a renewal of the sound-effect. This renewed impulse may be
supposed further to bring with it a germ of the pleasure of iteration of
sound, or assonance. The addition of a simple rhythmic character to the
series of sounds is a further indication of its pleasure-seeking
character. Indeed we have in this infantile ‘la-la-ing’ more a rudiment
of song and music than of articulate speech. The rude vocal music of
savages consists of a similar rhythmic threading of meaningless sounds
in which as in this infantile song changes of feeling reflect
themselves. We may best describe this infantile babbling then as
voice-play and as rude spontaneous singing, the utterance of a mood,
indulged in for the sake of its own delight, and serving by a happy
arrangement of nature as a preliminary practice in the production of
articulate or linguistic sounds.
_Transition to Articulate Speech._
Let us now seek to understand how this undesigned trying of the
articulate instrument passes into true significant articulation, how
this speech-protoplasm develops into the organism that we call language.
And here the question at once arises: Does the child tend to utilise the
sounds thus acquired as signs apart from the influence of education,
that is to say, of the articulate sounds produced by others and
impressed as signs upon his attention? The question is not easy to
answer owing to the early development of the imitative impulse and to
the constant and all-pervading influence of education in the nursery.
Yet I will offer a tentative answer.
That a child when he has reached a certain stage of intelligence would
be able to make use of signs quite apart from example and education is
what one might expect. Any one who has noticed how a young cat,
completely isolated from the influence of example, will spontaneously
hit on the gesture of touching the arm of a person sitting at a meal by
way of asking to be fed, cannot be surprised that children should prove
themselves capable of inventing signs. We know, too, that deaf-mutes
will, self-prompted, develop among themselves an elaborate system of
gesture-signs, and further express their feelings and desires by sounds,
which though not heard by themselves may be understood by others and so
serve as effective signs of their needs and wishes. The normal child,
too, in spite of the powerful influences which go to make him adopt as
signs the articulate sounds employed by others, shows a germ of
unprompted and original sign-making. The earliest of such unlearnt signs
are simple gesture-movements, such as stretching out the arms when the
child desires to be taken by the nurse.[62] Nobody has suggested that
these are learnt by imitation. The same is true of other familiar
gesture-movements, which appear towards the end of the first year or
later, as pulling your dress just as a dog does, when the child wants
you to go with him, touching the chair when he wants you to sit down, or
(as Darwin’s child did when just over a year) taking a bit of paper and
pointing to the fire by way of signifying his wish to see the paper
burnt. The gesture of pointing, though no doubt commonly aided by
example, is probably capable of being reached instinctively as an
outgrowth from the grasping movement.
-----
Footnote 62:
The nature of gesture, its relation to language proper, and its
prevalence in infancy, among imbecile children, deaf-mutes, etc., are
discussed by Romanes, _Mental Evolution in Man_, chap. vi.
-----
These gesture-signs, I find, play a larger part in the case of children
who are backward in talking, and so are nearer the condition of the
deaf-mute. Thus a lady in sending me notes on her three children remarks
that the one who was particularly backward in his speech made a free use
of gesture-signs. When sixteen months old he had certain _general_ signs
of this sort, using a sniff as a sign of flower, and a mimic kiss as a
sign of living things, _i.e._, all sorts of animals.[63]
-----
Footnote 63:
A charming example of pantomimic gesture on the part of a little girl
in describing to her father her first bath in the sea is given by
Romanes, _op. cit._, p. 220.
-----
Just as movements may thus be used instinctively, that is, without aid
from others’ example, both as expressing simple feelings and desires,
and also, as in the case just mentioned, as indicating ideas, so
spontaneously formed sounds may be used as signs. As pointed out above
the first self-prompted articulation is closely connected with feeling,
and we find that in the second half-year when the preliminary practice
has been gone through certain sounds take on a distinctly expressive
function. Thus one little boy when eight months old habitually used the
sound ‘ma-ma’ when miserable, and ‘da-da’ when pleased. Among these
instinctive expressive sounds one of the most important is that
indicative of hunger. I find again and again that a special sound is
marked off as a mode of expression or sign of this craving. This fact
will be referred to again presently.
True language-sounds significant of things grow out of this spontaneous
expressive articulation. Thus the demonstrative sign _da_ which
accompanies the pointing, and which seems to be frequently used with
slight modifications by German as well as by English children, is
probably in its inception merely an interjectional expression of the
faint shock of wonder produced by the appearance in the visual field of
a new object. But used as a concomitant of the pointing gesture it takes
on a demonstrative or indicative function, announcing the presence or
arrival of an object in a particular locality or direction. A somewhat
similar case is that of ‘ata’ or ‘tata,’ a sign used to denote the
departure or disappearance of an object. These signs are, as Preyer
shows, spontaneous and not imitative (_e.g._, of ‘there’ (da), ‘all
gone’). This is confirmed by the fact that they vary greatly. Thus
Preyer’s boy used for “there” ‘da,’ ‘nda,’ ‘nta,’ etc., and for “all
gone” ‘atta,’ ‘f-tu,’ ‘tuff,’ etc. Again, Tiedemann’s boy used the sound
‘ah-ah,’ and one of Stanley Hall’s children the sound ‘eh,’ when
pointing to an object. We may conclude then that there are spontaneous
vocal reactions expressive of the contrasting mental states answering to
the appearance or arrival and the disappearance or departure of an
impressive and interesting object, and that, further, these reactions
when recognised by others tend to become fixed as linguistic signs.[64]
-----
Footnote 64:
See Preyer, _op. cit._, pp. 353, 390, 391.
-----
Just as in the case of the gesture-movements, sniffing, kissing, so in
that of expressive vocal sounds we may see a tendency to take on the
function of true signs of ideas. One of the best illustrations of this
is to be found in the invention of a word-sound for things to eat. I
have pointed out that the state of hunger with its characteristic misery
becomes at an early stage marked off by a distinctive expressive sign.
At a later stage this or some other sound comes to be used intelligently
as a means of _asking_ for food. Darwin’s boy employed the sound _mum_
in this way; another English child used ‘numby,’ and yet another ‘nini’;
a French child observed by M. Taine made use of ‘ham’. The predominance
of the labial _m_ shows the early formation of these quasi-linguistic
signs, and suggests that they were developed out of the primary
instinctive ‘_m_’ sound.[65] Such sounds, coming to be understood by the
nurse, tend to become fixed as modes of asking for food.
-----
Footnote 65:
See the quotation from Lieber, in Taine’s _On Intelligence_, part ii.,
book iv., chap. i. The sign for ‘I want to eat’ is in some cases
formed by a generalising process out of a sound supplied by another,
as the name of a particular edible. See the example given by Preyer,
_op. cit._, p. 362.
-----
It seems but a step from the demand ‘Give me food’ to the pointing out
or naming of things as food. And so good an observer as Darwin says that
his boy used the sound ‘mum’ not only for conveying the demand or
command ‘Give me food,’ but also as a substantive ‘food’ of wide
application. He later went on to erect a rudimentary classification on
the basis of this substantive, calling sugar ‘shu-mum’ and even breaking
up this subdivision by calling liquorice “black shu-mum”.[66] This
however seems, so far as I can ascertain, to be exceptional. In most
vocabularies of children of two or three no generic term for food is
found, though names for particular kinds of food, _e.g._, milk, bread,
are in use. This agrees with the general order of development of
thought-signs, the names of easily distinguished species appearing in
the case of the individual as in that of the race before those of
comprehensive and ‘abstract’ genera such as ‘food’. It is probable,
therefore, that these early signs for food are but imperfectly developed
into true thought-symbols or names. They retain much of their primordial
character as expressions of desire and possibly of the volitional state
answering to a command. This is borne out by the fact that the child
spoken of by Taine used the sound ‘tem’ as a sort of general imperative
for ‘give!’ ‘take!’ ‘look!’ etc.[67]
-----
Footnote 66:
See _Mind_, vol. ii., p. 293.
Footnote 67:
See _Mind_, vol. ii., p. 255.
-----
Another early example of an emotional expression passing into a germinal
sign is that called forth at the sight of moving creatures. This acts as
a strong stimulus to the baby brain, and vigorous muscular reactions,
vocal and other, are wont to appear. One little boy of twelve and
three-quarter months usually expressed his excitement by the sound
“Dō-boo-boo,” which was used regularly for about ten days on the
appearance of a dog, a horse, a bird, and so forth. Here we have a
protoplasmic condition of the lingual organism which we call a name, a
condition destined never to pass into another and higher. Sometimes,
however, these explosives at the sight of animal life grow into
comparatively fixed signs of recognition.
In this spontaneous invention of quasi-linguistic sounds imitation plays
a considerable part. It is evident, indeed, that gestures are largely
imitative. Thus the sniff and the mimic kiss referred to just now are
plainly imitations of movements. The pointing gesture, too, may be said
to be a kind of imitation of the reaching and appropriating movement of
the arm. The sound ‘dō-boo-boo’ used on seeing an animal was probably
imitative. According to Preyer the sounds called forth by the sight of
moving objects, _e.g._, rolling balls and wheels, are imitative.[68]
Whether the signs of hunger, ‘mum,’ ‘numby,’ are due to modifications of
the movements carried out in sucking, seems to be more problematic.[69]
-----
Footnote 68:
_Op. cit._, p. 358.
Footnote 69:
A fact that appears to tell against imitation here is that one little
boy of seventeen months used the sound ‘did’n’ for anything to eat.
-----
In certain cases imitation is the one sufficient source of the sound. In
what are called onomatopoetic sounds the child seeks to mimic some
natural sound, and such imitation is capable of becoming a fruitful
source of original linguistic invention. A boy between nine and ten
months imitated the sound of young roosters by drawing in his breath,
and this noise became for a time a kind of name for any feathered
creature, including small birds. More commonly such onomatopoetic sounds
come to be distinctive recognition-signs of particular classes of
animals, such as ‘oua-oua’ or ‘bow-wow’ for the dog, ‘moo-moo’ for the
cow, ‘ouack-ouack’ or ‘kuack’ for the duck, and so forth.
It may, of course, be said that these mimic sounds are in part learnt
from the traditional vocabulary of the nursery, in which the nurse takes
good care to instruct the child. But it is to be remembered that the
traditional nursery language itself is largely an adoption of children’s
own sounds. There is, moreover, ample independent evidence to show that
children are zealous and indefatigable imitators of the sounds they hear
as of the movements they see. Towards the end of the first six months
and during the second half-year a child is apt to imitate eagerly any
sound you choose to produce before him. In the case of Preyer’s boy this
impulse to repeat the sounds he heard developed into a kind of echoing
mania. The acquisition of others’ language plainly depends on the
existence and the vigour of this mimetic impulse. And this same impulse
leads the child beyond the servile adoption of our conventional sounds
to the invention of new or onomatopoetic sounds. Thus one little child
discovered the pretty sound ‘tin-tin’ as a name for the bell. Another
child, a girl, quite unprompted, used a chirping sound for a bird, and a
curious clicking noise on seeing the picture of a horse (no doubt in
imitation of the sound of a horse’s hoofs); while a little boy used a
faint whistle to indicate a bird, and the sound ‘click-click’ to denote
a horse. In some cases a grown-up person’s imitation of a sound is
imitated. Thus a child of about two used the sound ‘afta’ as a name for
drinking, and also for drinking-vessel, “in imitation of the sound of
sucking in air which the nurse used to make when _pretending to
drink_”.[70]
-----
Footnote 70:
Quoted by Romanes, _Mental Evolution in Man_, p. 143.
-----
In these two sources of original child-language, expression of states of
feeling, desire, etc., and imitation, we have the two commonly assigned
origins of human language. Into the difficult question how man first
came to the use of language-sounds I do not propose to enter here.
Whatever view may be taken with respect to the first beginnings of human
speech, there seems little doubt that both expressive cries and
imitations of natural sounds have had their place. To this extent, then,
we may say that there is a parallelism between the early evolution of
language in the case of the individual and in that of the race. Not only
so, it may be said that our study of these tentatives of the child in
language-formation tends to confirm the conclusions of philology and
anthropology that the current of human speech did probably originate, in
main part at least, by way of these two tributaries.[71]
-----
Footnote 71:
The concerted cries during co-operative work to which Noirée ascribes
the origin of language-sounds would seem, while having a special
physiological cause as concomitant and probably auxiliary motor
processes, to be analogous at least to emotional cries, in so far as
they spring out of a peculiar condition of feeling, that of effort. On
the other hand, as _concerted_ they came under the head of imitative
movements. So far as I can learn the nursery supplies no analogies to
these utterances.
-----
While vocal sounds which are clearly traceable to emotional expressions
or to imitations form the staple of the normal child’s inventions they
do not exhaust them. Some of these early self-prompted linguistic sounds
cannot be readily explained. I find, for example, that children are apt
to invent names for their nurses and sometimes for themselves which, so
far as I can ascertain, bear no discoverable resemblance to the sounds
used by others. Thus the same little girl that invented ‘numby’ for food
and ‘afta’ for drinking called her nurse ‘Lee’ though no one else called
her by any other name than ‘nurse’. It is difficult to suppose that the
child was transforming the sound ‘nurse’ in this case. Preyer’s boy
called his nurse, whom others addressed as Marie, ‘Wolá,’ which Preyer
explains rather forcedly as deriving by inversion from the frequently
heard ‘Ja wohl!’ A lady friend informs me that her little boy when
thirteen months old called himself ‘Bla-a,’ though he was always
addressed by others as Jeffrey, and that he stuck to ‘Bla-a’ for six
months.[72] A germ of imitation is doubtless recognisable here in the
preservation of the syllabic form or structure (that of monosyllable or
dissyllable). Yet the amount of transformation is, to say the least,
surprising in children, who show themselves capable of fairly close
imitation. Possibly a child’s ear notes analogies of sound which escape
our more sophisticated organ. However this be, the fact of such
origination of names (other than those clearly onomatopoetic) is
noteworthy.
-----
Footnote 72:
His brother when one year old called his nurse, whose real name was
Maud, Bur, which was probably a rough rendering of ‘nurse’.
-----
Lastly a reference may be made to the fact that children have shown
themselves capable of inventing the rudiments of a simple kind of
language. Professor Horatio Hale of America has made a special study of
these spontaneous child-languages. One case is that of twin American
boys who when the talking age came employed not the English sounds that
they heard others speak but a language of their own. Another, and in
some ways more remarkable case, is that of a little girl who at the age
of two was backward in speaking, only using the names ‘papa’ and
‘mamma,’ and who, nevertheless, at that age, and in the first instance
without any stimulus or aid from a companion, proceeded to invent a
vocabulary and even simple sentence-forms of her own, which she
subsequently prevailed on an elder brother to use with her. The vocables
struck out, though suggesting some slight aural acquaintance with
French—which, however, was never spoken in her home—are apparently quite
arbitrary and not susceptible of explanation by imitation.[73]
-----
Footnote 73:
For a summary of Professor Hale’s researches see Romanes, _Mental
Evolution in Man_, p. 138 ff.
-----
I think the facts here brought together testify to the originality of
the child in the field of linguistics. It may be said that in none of
these cases is the effect of education wholly absent. A child, as we all
know, is taught the names of objects and actions long before he can
articulate. Thus Darwin’s boy knew the name of his nurse five months
before he invented the vocable ‘mum’. It is obvious indeed that wherever
children are subjected to normal training their sign-making impulse is
stimulated by the example of others. At the same time the facts here
given show that the working of this impulse may, in a certain number of
children at least, strike out original lines of its own independently of
the direct action of example and education. What is wanted now is to
experiment carefully with an intelligent child, encouraging him to make
signs by patient attention and ready understanding, but at the same time
carefully abstaining from giving the lead or even taking up and adopting
the first utterances so as to bring in the influence of imitation. I
think there is little doubt that a child so situated might develop the
rudiments of a vocal language. The experiment would be difficult to
carry out, as it would mean the depriving of the child for a time of the
advantages of education.[74]
-----
Footnote 74:
Of course, as Max Müller says (_The Science of Language_, i., p. 481
f.), the facts ascertained do not prove that ‘infants _left to
themselves_ would invent a language’. The influence of example, the
appeal to the imitative impulse, has been at work before the
inventions appear. Yet they do, I think, show that they have the
sign-making instinct, and might develop this to some extent even were
the educative influence of others’ language removed.
-----
_Beginnings of Linguistic Imitation._
The learning of the mother-tongue is one of the most instructive and,
one may add, the most entertaining chapters in the history of the
child’s education. The brave efforts to understand and follow, the
characteristic and quaint errors that often result, the frequent
outbursts of originality in bold attempts to enrich our vocabulary and
our linguistic forms—all this will repay the most serious study, while
it will provide ample amusement.
As pointed out above the learning of the mother-tongue is essentially a
kind of imitation. The process is roughly as follows. The child hears a
particular sound used by another, and gradually associates it with the
object, the occurrence, the situation, along with which it again and
again presents itself. When this stage is reached he can understand the
word-sound as used by another though he cannot as yet use it. Later, by
a considerable interval, he learns to connect the particular sound with
the appropriate vocal action required for its production. As soon as
this connexion is formed his sign-making impulse imitatively
appropriates it by repeating it in circumstances similar to those in
which he has heard others employ it.
The imitation of others’ articulate sounds begins, as already remarked,
very early and long before the sign-making impulse appropriates them as
true words. The impulse to imitate others’ movements seems first to come
into play about the end of the fourth month; and traces of imitative
movements of the mouth in articulation are said to have been observed in
certain cases about this time. But it is only in the second half-year
that the imitation of sounds becomes clearly marked. At first this
imitation is rather of tone, rise and fall of voice, and apportioning of
stress or accent than of articulate quality; but gradually the imitation
takes on a more definite and complete character.[75]
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Footnote 75:
Preyer’s boy gave the first distinct imitative response to articulate
sound in the eleventh month. This is, so far as I can ascertain,
behind the average attainment.
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Towards the end of the year, in favourable cases, true linguistic
imitation commences. That is to say, word-sounds gathered from others
are used as such. Thus, a boy of ten months would correctly name his
mother, ‘Mamma,’ his aunt, ‘Addy’ (Aunty), and a person called Maggie,
‘Azzie’.[76] As already suggested, this imitative reproduction of
others’ words synchronises, roughly at least, with the first
onomatopoetic imitation of natural sounds.
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Footnote 76:
Tracy, _The Psychology of Childhood_, p. 71.
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_Transformations of our Words._
As is well known the first tentatives in the use of the common
speech-forms are very rough. The child in reproducing transforms, and
these transformations are often curious and sufficiently puzzling.
The most obvious thing about these first infantile renderings of the
adult’s language is that they are a simplification. This applies to all
words alike. Monosyllables if involving a complex mass of sound are
usually reduced, as when ‘dance’ is shortened to ‘da’. This clearly
illustrates the difficulty of certain sound-combinations, a point to be
touched on presently. More striking is the habitual reduction of
dissyllables and polysyllables. Here we note that the child concentrates
his effort on the reproduction of a part only of the syllabic series,
which part he may of course give but very imperfectly. The shortening
tends to go to the length of reducing to a monosyllable. Thus ‘biscuit’
becomes ‘bik,’ ‘Constance’ ‘tun,’ ‘candle’ ‘ka,’ ‘bread and butter’
‘bup’ or ‘bŭ’. Polysyllables, though occasionally cut down to
monosyllables, as when ‘hippopotamus’ became ‘pots,’ are more frequently
reduced to dissyllables, as when ‘periwinkle’ was shortened to ‘pinkle’.
Handkerchief is a trying word for the English child, and for obvious
reasons has to be learnt. It was reduced by the eldest child of a family
to ‘hankish,’ by the two next to ‘hamfisch’ and by the last two to
‘hanky’. The little girl M. also reduced the last two syllables to
‘fish,’ making the sound ‘hanfish’.
There seems to be no simple law governing these reductions of verbal
masses. The accentuated syllable, by exciting most attention, is
commonly the one reproduced, as when ‘nasturtium’ became ‘turtium’.[77]
In the case of long words the position of a syllable at the beginning or
at the end of the word seems to give an advantage in this competition of
sounds, the former by impressing the sound as the first heard (compare
the way in which we note and remember the initial sound of a name),[78]
the latter by impressing it as the last heard, and therefore best
retained. The unequal articulatory facility of the several
sound-combinations making up the word may also have an influence on this
unconscious selection. I think it not unlikely, too, that germs of a
kind of æsthetic preference for certain sounds as new, striking or fine,
may co-operate here.[79]
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Footnote 77:
In the reduction of ‘Constance’ to ‘tun’ the same thing is seen, for
this child uniformly turned _k_’s into _t_’s. _Cf._ Preyer, _op.
cit._, p. 397.
Footnote 78:
It has been pointed out to me by Dr. Postgate that the secondary
stress on the first syllable of English words over four syllables (and
some four-syllabled words) may assist in impressing the first
syllable.
Footnote 79:
Recent psychological experiments show that similar influences are at
work when a person attempts to repeat a long series of verbal sounds,
say ten or twelve nonsense syllables. Initial or final position or
accent may favour the reproduction of a member of such a series.
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Such simplification of words is from the first opposed, and tends in
time to be counteracted, by the growth of a feeling for their general
form as determined by the number of syllables, as well as the
distribution of stress and any accompanying alterations of tone or
pitch. The infant’s first imitations of the sounds ‘good-bye,’ ‘all
gone,’ and so forth, by couples which preserve hardly anything of the
articulatory character, though they indicate the syllabic form, position
of stress, and rising and falling inflection, illustrate the early
development of this feeling. Hence we find in general an attempt to
reproduce the number of syllables, and also to give the proper
distribution of stress. Thus ‘biscuit’ becomes ‘bítchic,’ ‘cellar’
‘sítoo,’ ‘umbrella’ ‘nobélla,’ ‘elephant’ ‘étteno,’ or (by a German
child) ‘ewebón,’ ‘kangaroo’ ‘kógglegoo,’ ‘hippopotamus’ ‘ippenpótany,’
and so forth.[80]
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Footnote 80:
Here again we see a similarity between a child’s repetition of a name
heard, and an adult’s attempt to repeat a long series of syllabic
sounds. In the latter case also there is a general tendency to
preserve the length and rhythmic form of the whole series.
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As suggested above there goes from the first with the cutting down of
the syllabic series a considerable alteration of the single constituent
sounds. The vowel sounds are rarely omitted; yet they may be greatly
modified, and these modifications occur regularly enough to suggest that
the child finds certain nuances of vowel sounds comparatively hard to
reproduce. Thus the short _ă_ in hat, and the long _ī_ (ai), seem to be
acquired only after considerable practice.[81] But it is among the
consonants that most trouble arises. Many of these, as the sibilants or
‘hisses,’ _s_, _sh_, the various _l_ and _r_ sounds, the dentals, the
“point-teeth-open” _th_ and _dh_ (in ‘thin,’ ‘this’), the back or
guttural ‘stops,’ _i.e._, _k_ and hard _g_, and others as _j_ or soft
_g_ (as in ‘James,’ ‘gem’), appear, often at least, to cause difficulty
at the beginning of the speech period. With these must be reckoned such
combinations as _st_, _str_.
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Footnote 81:
With the diphthong or glide _ī_ may be taken _oi_, which was first
mastered by the child M. at the age of two years three months.
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In many cases the difficult sounds are merely dropped. Thus ‘poor’ may
become ‘poo,’ ‘look’ ‘ook,’ ‘Schulter’ (German) ‘Ulter’. In the case of
awkward combinations this dropping is apt to be confined to the
difficult sound, provided, that is to say, the other is manageable
alone. Thus ‘dance’ becomes ‘dan,’ ‘trocken’ (German) becomes ‘tokko’.
More particularly _s_ and _sh_ are apt to be omitted before other
consonants. Thus ‘stair’ becomes ‘tair,’ ‘sneeze’ ‘neeze,’ ‘schneiden’
(German) ‘neida,’ and so forth.