little world of glancing lights and shining surfaces, chords and
voices, disconnected touches and motions. Her smiles began to be
frequent and jolly. It was always at faces that she smiled now: nothing
else seemed half as entertaining. The way in which a baby, in these
early weeks, gazes and gazes up into one’s face, and smiles genially at
it, wiles the very heart out of one; but the baby means little enough
by it.
In this fortnight her pleasures were enlarged by introduction to a baby
carriage. The outdoor sights and sounds were of course wasted on her at
this stage of her seeing and hearing powers; but she liked the feeling
of the motion, and lay and enjoyed it with a tranquilly beatific look.
Perhaps also the fresher air and larger light sent some dim wave of
pleasant feeling through her body.
Some days earlier, when carried out in arms for her first outdoor
visit, she had found the light dazzling, and kept her eyes tight
shut. In all I have said of babies’ pleasure in light, I have meant
moderate light: the little eyes are easily hurt by a glare. There are
nursemaids, and even mothers, who will wheel a baby along the street
with the sun blazing full in his face, and who will keep a light
burning all night for their own convenience in tending him; and in
later years his schoolbooks will get the credit of having weakened his
eyes. Nature protects the little one somewhat at the outset, for at
first the eyes open by a narrow slit, which admits but scanty light:
our baby was just beginning, at a month old, to open her eyes like
other folk.
Pleased though the baby was with her new powers, her life at this
period was not all of placid content. Ambition had entered in. It had
already seemed as if the mechanical lifting of the head was passing
into real effort to raise it; and day by day the intention grew
clearer, and the head was held up better. Now, too, appeared the first
sign of control over the legs. Laid on her face on the lounge, the baby
did not cry, but turned her head sidewise and freed her face, and at
the same time propped her body with her knees. This was on the first
day of the month. A few days later she was propping herself with her
knees in the bath every day.
With increase of joy and power came also the beginning of tears. This,
too, was on the first day of the month. The tears were shed because
she had waked and cried some time without being heard. When she was
at last taken up, her eyes were quite wet. As every nurse knows, wee
babies do not cry tears. When they do, it does not mean that any
higher emotional level has been gained, only that the tear glands
have begun to act. Nor have I any reason to suppose that in this case
the baby felt fear at being left alone. It was simply that she was
uncomfortable, and needed attention; and the attention delaying, the
discomfort mounted, till it provoked stronger and stronger reflex
expressions.
The first fright did occur, however, a few days later in the same week;
but it was in a much more primitive form than fear of solitude. The
baby was lying half asleep on my lap when her tin bath was brought in
and set down rather roughly, so that the handles clashed on the sides.
At this she started violently, with a cry so sharp that it brought
her grandfather anxiously in from two rooms’ distance; she put up her
lip at the same time, with the regular crying grimace known to every
nursery,--the first time she had done this,--and it was fully five
minutes before her face was tranquil again.
There had been reflex starting at sounds from the first week, and
Professor Preyer calls this an expression of fright; but to me
(and Professor Sully regards it in the same way) it seemed purely
mechanical. Our baby would even start and cry out in her sleep at a
sound without waking. But now there was clearly something more than
reflex starting. It was not yet true fear, for fear means a sense
of danger, an idea of coming harm, and the baby could have had no
such idea. But there was some element of emotion to be seen, akin
to fear; and (if we regard pleasure and pain as psychologists are
disposed to do, not as emotions in themselves, but only as a quality of
agreeableness or disagreeableness in our feelings) here was the first
dawn of any emotion. Fright, that was but a step above mere physical
shock, led the way into the emotional life.
This probably gives a true hint of the history of emotional development
in the race: for in the animal world, too, fear appears earliest of
all the emotions, and in the simplest forms of fright is hardly to be
distinguished from mere reflex action; and it is caused oftener by
sound than by anything else. When we remember the theory that hearing
is developed from the more ancient motion sense, we are tempted to
trace the origin of fright still farther back, to the very primitive
reflex sensibility to jarring movement, of which I have spoken before.
And now the baby had come to six weeks old, and could hold up her head
perfectly for a quarter of a minute at a time, and liked greatly to be
held erect or in sitting position. Apparently all this was for the sake
of seeing better, for her joys still centred in her eyes. She had made
no advance in visual power, however, except that within a few days she
could follow with her eyes the motion of a person passing near her.
Human faces were still the most entertaining of all objects. She gazed
at them with her utmost look of intentness, making movements with her
hands, and panting in short, audible breaths. Nothing else had ever
excited her so, except once a spot of sunlight on her white bed.
There were signs that her experiences gathered more and more into
groups in her mind, by association. I have spoken of her earlier
association between the nursing position and being fed; now she would
check her hungry crying as soon as she felt herself lifted; and a
few days later, as soon as her mouth was washed out--a ceremony that
invariably came before nursing. At seven weeks old she opened her
mouth for the nipple on being laid in the proper position. The food
association group was enlarging; but sight did not yet enter into it:
the look of the breast did not seem to bring the faintest suggestion of
satisfied hunger, and the baby would lie and cry with her lips an inch
from it. This is natural, for she could never really have seen it at
this stage of the development of vision.
I have said that in such associations there is a germ of memory. There
is a sort of habit memory, too, that appears very early. Impressions
that have been received over and over gather a sort of familiarity
in the baby’s mind; and while he does not yet recognize the familiar
things themselves, yet he feels a change from them as something
strange--it jars somehow the even current of his feelings. Or where
impressions have been especially agreeable, they are vaguely missed
when they are absent. The consciousness of difference between society
and solitude, which our baby had showed at the end of the first month,
was habit memory of this sort.
Professor Preyer thinks that his baby showed habit memory as early as
the first week, perceiving a new food to be different from the old. Our
baby (who knew no food but mother’s milk) experienced a new taste once
or twice, when dosed for colic, and never showed the faintest sense of
novelty at it till she was six weeks old. Then she was given a little
sugar for hiccoughs, and made a face of what seemed high disgust over
it; but this particular face has been observed more than once, and is
known to be common in babies at a new taste, even a pleasant one. It
seems to be caused by a sort of surprise affecting the face muscles.
A few days later the baby showed surprise more plainly. She lay making
cheerful little sounds, and suddenly, by some new combination of the
vocal organs, a small, high crow came out--doubtless causing a most
novel sensation in the little throat, not to speak of the odd sound.
The baby fell silent instantly, and a ludicrous look of astonishment
overspread her face. Here was not only evidence of the germs of memory,
but also the appearance of a new emotion, that of genuine surprise;
and, like fright, it is one that is closely related to simple nerve
shock. From being startled to being surprised (as to being frightened)
is not a long step.
I have just spoken of the baby as making little sounds. This was a
new accomplishment. Until a few days before, she had made no sounds
except some inarticulate fretting noises, the occasional short outcry
when startled, and the “dismal and monotonous” cry that began with the
first day. This original cry was clearly on the vowel _â_ (as in fair),
with a nasal prefix--_ngâ_; but late in the sixth week it began to be
varied a little. In the fretting, too, a few syllables appeared. The
new sounds were mostly made in the open throat, and grew out of the old
_ngâ_ by slight changes in the position of the vocal organs--_ng_, and
_hng_, and _hng-â_; but now and then there was a short _wă_, _gă_, or
_hă_, or even a lip sound, as _m-bă_.
It has been said that the broad Italian _ä_ is of all sounds the
easiest, the one naturally made from an open throat: but the records
show both German and American babies beginning with the flat _â_ or
shorter _ă_. Our baby scarcely used any other vowel sound for weeks
yet.
Little sounds of content, too, began in the sixth week--mainly
inarticulate grunts and cooing murmurs; but in the course of the
seventh week, besides the sudden crow, there were a few tiny
shouts,--_a-a-ha_,--a gurgle, and some hard _g_ sounds, _ga_, and
_g-g-g_, which passed in the eighth week into a roughened _gh_, a sort
of scraping, gargling sound, not in the English language.
Our baby had a leaning to throat sounds; but other babies begin with
the lip sounds, and some, it is said, with the trilling _l_ and _r_.
It seems to be only chance what position of the vocal organs is first
used; but after once beginning to articulate, the baby seems to pass
from sound to sound by slight changes (probably made accidentally
in using the old sounds), and so goes through the list with some
regularity.
This practice in sounds may be at first quite without will, a mere
overflow of energy into the vocal organs; but it is highly important
none the less, for any creature that is to use human speech must get
the speaking muscles into most delicate training. Think what fine and
exact difference in muscular contractions we must make to be able to
say “ball,” and be sure that it will not come out “pall”!
For a week or two now the baby made a good deal of progress in control
of her body. She strove valiantly every day to keep her head erect, and
made some little advance. In the bath she began to push with her feet
against the foot of the tub, so hard that her mother could not keep the
little head from bumping on the other end. She pulled downward with
her arms when her mother held them up in wiping her. These pushing and
pulling movements may have been made for the pleasure of the feeling,
or they may have been involuntary. Perhaps they were accidental
movements, passing gradually into voluntary ones. In either case, as
they developed, the old irregular movements of legs and arms passed
away, as those of the head and face had done before.
One new bit of muscular control was undoubtedly voluntary--a trick of
putting out and drawing back the tip of her tongue between her pursed
lips. And this was something more than just one new voluntary movement.
The important thing was that she was using the movement to _bring
together the evidence of two different senses into one perception_.
When something touches against our fingers, we have one sort of feeling
in them, and quite another when we pass them over the thing and “feel
of it;” and this other, clearer feeling is really a compound one, made
up of the touch sensation in the skin and the muscle sensation in the
moving fingers. It is called “active touch,” and it is a wonderful key
to the world around us--so wonderful that with this alone it proved
possible to educate Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller. This active touch
the baby had now developed in tongue and lips; not yet in the fingers.
The passive sensation of light had already been blended with muscle
sensation in something the same way, by the voluntary movement of
turning and focusing the eyes; but that complete seeing which we might
call “active sight” is a more complex power than active feeling, and
there were other associations yet to be made before it could be fully
built up. And I hope it will not spoil the interest of the story of
the baby’s sense development if I say here that the plot is going to
turn mainly on these two combinations, muscle sense with sight and
muscle sense with touch; and then recombination of these two with each
other--all welded together by voluntary movements, growing out of
involuntary ones.
All this time the baby had had a daily source of placid pleasure in
listening to chords on the piano--no longer heavy staccato chords,
but flowing ones, in the middle octaves. The baby of theory cares
for nothing but eating and sleeping; but our baby, even after she
was already fretting with hunger, would forget all about it for ten
minutes, if one would take her to the piano. Hunger, after it grew
really strong, was a sensation that swept all before it; but on the
whole, food was a matter of small interest compared with the world of
light and touch and sound.
As for sleep, the baby slept, from the first, in pretty long
periods,--six and seven hours was not uncommon,--and was wide awake
between sleeps. At such times she would lie by the half hour, looking
peacefully about her, or gazing into our faces with smiles. When we
nodded, laughed, and talked to her, her smiles seemed like friendly
responses; but this could have meant nothing, except that with our
demonstrations those little constellations of high lights and glitters,
our faces, bobbed and twinkled in a more amusing manner than ever.
At eight weeks old came the final stage in mastery of the mechanism
of vision--the power of accommodation, or adjusting the lenses for
different distances. It may have been present even earlier: it is a
hard thing for the observer to know. But the indications are that it
really did happen when I thought, the day the baby was eight weeks old.
She was lying on her mother’s knees, fixing an unusually serious and
attentive gaze on my face, and would not take her eyes away; indeed,
as her mother turned her in undressing, she screwed her head around
comically to keep her eyes fixed. At last, after some fifteen minutes,
she turned her head clear over, and gazed as earnestly at her mother’s
face. To see what she would do, her mother turned her again toward me,
and once more she surveyed me for a time, and again turned her head and
looked directly at her mother.
What was in the little mind? Was she beginning to discriminate and
compare, for the first time setting apart as two separate things the
two faces that had bent over her oftenest? Or was she simply using, on
the most convenient object, a new power of adjusting her eyes, which
filled her with serious interest by the new clearness it gave to what
she saw? At all events, she would not have looked from one to the other
with such long and attentive regard if she had not been able to focus
both faces, at their different distances; so that I felt sure the power
of accommodation was really there.
But there was more in the incident than just the advance in vision.
Hitherto when the baby had turned her head to look, it had been only
at something that she had already a glimpse of, off at the edge of the
field of vision. Now she turned to look for something quite out of
sight,--something, therefore, that must have been present as an _idea_
in the little mind, or she could not have looked for it. And in view
of what I have said of the mother’s face as the great educational
appliance in the early months, it is worth noticing that it was this
which gave the baby her first idea, so far as I could detect.
We come a step nearer, too, to true memory, when the baby can keep
thus, even for a few minutes, the idea of something formerly seen. It
was still mainly habit memory, however. She looked for an accustomed
sight in an accustomed place, bringing it to the point of clear vision
by an accustomed movement of the neck muscles. There was no evidence
till considerably later that she was capable of remembering a single,
special experience.
The next day she was singularly bright and sunny, smiling all day at
every one. She stopped in the middle of nursing to throw her head back
and gaze at the bow at her mother’s neck, and would not go on with the
comparatively uninteresting business of food till the bow was put out
of sight. That night she slept eight hours at a stretch, longer than
she had ever done. Was the little brain, perhaps, wearied with the new
rush of impressions, which came with the new power of focusing?
The day after she would lie a while unusually silent and sober, looking
about her and moving her hands a little; then she would fret to be
lifted and held against one’s shoulder, where she could hold her
head up and look about. She was able now to hold it up a long time
by resting it for a few seconds every half minute or so, against my
cheek, which I held close to give her the chance. But to-day she was
not satisfied with having her head erect: she persistently straightened
her back up against the arm that supported her--a new set of muscles
thus coming under control of her will. As often as I pressed her down
against my shoulder, she would fret, and straighten up again and set to
work diligently looking about her.
After this her progress in holding up her head was suddenly rapid,
and by the end of the month, four days later, she could balance
it for many minutes, with a little wobbling. This uncertainty soon
disappeared, and the erect position of the head was accomplished for
life.
During these last days of the month the baby was possessed by the most
insatiate impulse to be up where she could see. It was hard to think
that her fretting and even wailing when forced to lie down could mean
only a formless discontent, and not a clear idea of what she wanted.
Still, it is not uncommon, when an instinct is thwarted, to feel a dim
distress that makes us perfectly wretched without knowing why. As soon
as she was held erect, or propped up sitting amid cushions, she was
content; but the first time that she was allowed to be up thus most
of the day, she slept afterward nine unbroken hours, recuperating,
probably, quite as much from the looking and the taking in that the
little brain and eyes had been doing as from any muscular fatigue there
may have been in the position.
Such is the “mere life of vegetation” the baby lived during the first
two months. No grown person ever experiences such an expansion of
life, such a progress from power to power in that length of time. Nor
was our little girl’s development anything unusual for a healthy,
well-conditioned child, so far as other records give material for
comparison. Preyer’s boy was later than she in getting his head
balanced, but he arrived at full accommodation (and that is the most
important work of the first two months) at almost exactly the same age
as she; and so did Mrs. Hall’s boy. I do not know of any other records
that make a clear statement on this point.
VI
PROGRESS TOWARD GRASPING.
The baby’s development, as I have said, consisted now mainly in forming
association groups in her mind in two series, which we might call a
sight-motor series and a touch-motor series. There had been a leap
forward in the sight-motor series when “accommodation” was learned. Now
the touch-motor series came to the front, and step by step led on to
the great accomplishment of grasping.
First, when we laid the baby’s face up against ours, her little tongue
was put out to lick the cheek that she felt, warm and smooth, against
her lips. This was a more advanced use of active feeling than the mere
passing of her tongue over her own lips, for that must have been done
accidentally many times before she began to do it on purpose; and the
association between the movement and the feeling had been helped by the
double sensation--one feeling in the lips and another in the tongue
every time they touched.
This doubling of sensation, which occurs every time one part of the
body touches another part, often seemed to wake special attention in
the baby, and thus help on a development. Later, it had a great part to
play in teaching her the boundaries of her own body, and the difference
between the Me and the Not-me. Even now, she must have been somewhat
aware of a different feeling when she passed her tongue over her own
sensitive lips, and when she passed it over the unresponsive cheek of
some one else.
So far, the tongue, not the hand, was her organ of touch. But now
the fingers were showing the first faint sign of their future
powers--nothing more than a little special sensibility, such as the
lips had shown in the first month: we would see the baby holding her
finger tips together prettily (when by chance they had collided), as if
there were a feeling there that interested her. Here again there was
double sensation.
In these same early days of the third month there was beginning another
development that was to end by making the hand the successful rival
of lips and tongue for purposes of grasping and feeling. The baby was
trying to get her fists to her mouth.
The movement of the hands toward the head is a common one in the first
weeks, by reason of prenatal habit, and thus it had often happened that
the little fists, or as much of them as could be accommodated, had
blundered into the mouth; and interesting sensations (double sensations
again, in fists and mouth) had been experienced. The baby had at the
same time felt in her arms the movement that always went with these
interesting sensations, and now she was trying to repeat it. Within
a week she had mastered it, and could mumble and suck her fists at
will--a great addition, naturally, to the comfort of life.
Meanwhile the reflex clasping, which had always taken place when an
object was laid in the baby’s palm, was growing firmer and longer,
and more like conscious holding; and I noticed that the thumb was now
“opposed” in clasping--that is, shut down opposite the fingers, an
important element in the skill of human grasping. And now, when the
fingers came in contact with convenient things--folds of the towel, for
instance--the hands would clasp them mechanically, just as the lips,
since the first month, had laid hold on a breast or cheek that touched
them.
This had an important result. The little hand would presently go to the
mouth, still mechanically clasping the fold of towel or dress, which
in consequence was sucked and mumbled, too. In this way the baby got
sundry novel sensations, and a chain of associations began to form:
she was to learn thus, by and by, that when she felt touch sensations
in her fingers, she could get livelier ones in her mouth (and also the
pleasant muscular feeling of sucking), by the movements of clasping,
and of lifting her arm. But she had not yet learned it: objects (except
her own hands) were still carried to her mouth only by accident.
By the twelfth week the baby had found that her thumb was better for
sucking purposes than chance segments of fist, and could turn her hand
and get the convenient little projection neatly into her mouth. She got
hold of it more by diving her head down to it than by lifting the hand
to the mouth. Seizing with the mouth, by motions of the head, like a
dog, instead of using the hand to wait on the mouth, seemed still her
natural way.
But the hands were gaining. In this same twelfth week I saw the little
finger tips go fumbling and feeling over our hands and dresses. They,
too, had learned active touch, as the tongue had learned it more than a
month before.