so that no one need stay away from meals to look after her; really for
the sake of her jovial company at our sober grown-up board, where she
would sit, propped amid cushions in her high chair, gazing and smiling
sociably at our faces, crowing and flourishing her arms in joy at the
lights and the rattle of dishes, forming the sole topic of conversation
to an extent that her bachelor uncle had his private and lonely opinion
about. The high chair was one of those that have a wooden tray fastened
across the front, and here were placed several handy objects--rattle,
and ring, and string of spools. This was by the wisdom of grandma, who
saw the approach of the power of grasping. One may often see the little
hands fluttering empty, the little brain restless, craving its natural
development (for grasping is much more a matter of brain development,
through the forming of associations, than of hand development), when
there is no wise grandma to see that rattle and ring and spools lie
“handy by” a little _before_ the baby is ready to use them. To wait
till he knows how to grasp before giving him things to practice on is
like keeping a boy out of the water till he knows how to swim. Such
impeding of the natural activities is responsible for a good deal of
the fretting of babies.
It was not three days till I saw the little hands go fumbling across
the tray, seeking the objects they had become used to finding there;
and when they touched rattle or spool, they laid hold on it. Nor was
this the old mechanical clasping: it was voluntary action, and as
clumsy as new voluntary action is apt to be, compared to involuntary.
The baby did not know how to turn her hand and take up a thing neatly:
if she touched it in such fashion that she could shut down her fingers
on it somehow or anyhow, she would manage to lift it--stuck between two
fingers from behind, once, when the back of her hand had touched it; if
not, she would go on fumbling till she did. In two or three days more
she was laying hold on things and carrying them to her mouth with plain
intention.
Here was a sort of grasping, but it was grasping by feeling only. The
baby had yet no idea of an object, which she could locate with the
eye and then lay hold on with the hand. She had simply completed the
chain of association I spoke of above: she had learned, that is, that
after certain groping movements, feelings of touch appeared in her
hands; and that then, after movements of clasping and lifting, these
feelings reappeared in more lively and pleasing form in her mouth. She
never looked at the objects she touched. There is no reason to think
they could have been to her anything more than sensations in her own
hands and mouth. The sight-motor and touch-motor series had not yet
coalesced. But in these last days of the third month both had come to
the point where they were ready to begin the fusing process, and give
the baby her world of outer objects.
Before I go back to relate what had been going on meanwhile in the
sight-motor series, I must stop to speak of some other developments of
the month.
Memory, for one thing, had plainly advanced. By the tenth week the
baby had shown some doubtful signs of knowing one face from another;
and in the twelfth she plainly recognized her grandfather with a smile
and joyous cry, as he came in. Her first recognition, therefore (it is
worth while to notice), was not of the mother, the source of supplies,
but of the face that had offered most entertainment to the dawning
mental powers, not only because of the white beard, the spectacles, and
the shining bald brow, but because of the boyish abandon with which
grandpa played with her, ducking his face down to hers.
A few days later she showed that she knew at least the feeling of her
mother’s arms. For some weeks no one else had put her to sleep; and now
when sleepy she fretted in other arms, but nestled down contentedly
and went to sleep as soon as she felt herself in her mother’s. The
association of that especial feeling had become necessary to sleep.
The instinctive language of sign and sound had developed a good deal.
From the first day of the month, the baby’s joy in sights began to be
expressed more exuberantly, with flying arms and legs, with panting,
murmuring, and babbling, smiles and even small chuckles, and sometimes
little shouts and crows. A new look of grief, too, the parallelogram
shaped mouth that all babies make in crying, appeared.
In the tenth week she began to turn her head aside in refusal or
dislike--a gesture that one may see far down in the animal kingdom.
A dog, for instance, uses it very expressively. It comes plainly from
the simple effort to turn away from what is unpleasant, and develops
later to our shake of the head for “No;” and when we notice how early
the development of control over head and neck is, how much in advance
of any use of the hands, we see that it is natural for this to be the
oldest of all gestures.
In the last days of the month came two notable evidences of growing
will. One was the baby’s persistent effort to get the tip of her
rattle (it was set on a slender ivory shaft) into her mouth. Sometimes
it went in by chance; sometimes it hit her lip, and in that case she
would stretch her mouth to take it in, moving her head rather than the
rattle. But if it brought up against her cheek, too far away to be
captured by such efforts, after trying a little, she would lower the
rattle, and make a fresh start for better luck.
This may seem highly unintelligent action; yet after all, as Professor
Morgan says, it is by the method of “trial and error” that most of our
acts of skill (and perhaps all such acts of the lower animals) are
learned. In trial after trial the baby associated the muscular feeling
of the successful movement with the feeling of the rattle tip in her
mouth, and repeated these movements more and more correctly, dropping
the unsuccessful ones. In just this way the sharpshooter, through
repeated trials and misses, learns to deflect his rifle barrel this way
and that with an infinite fineness of muscular contractions, which he
could never get by reasoning on it.
The other effort of will was in sitting up. During the whole month the
baby had insisted on a sitting position, and had wailed as vigorously
over being left flat on her back as over being left hungry. She had
soon tried to take the matter into her own hands, and made many efforts
to lift herself, sometimes by pulling on our fingers when we had laid
them in her hands, sometimes by sheer strain of the abdominal muscles.
She never succeeded in raising more than her head and shoulders till
the last week of the month: then she did once lift herself, and in the
following days tried with the utmost zeal to repeat the success. She
would strive and strain, with a grave and earnest face, her whole baby
soul evidently centred on the achievement. She would tug at our fingers
till her little face was crimson; she would lift her head and shoulders
and strain to rise higher, fall back and try it again, till she was
tired out. The day she was three months old, she tried twenty-five
times, with scarcely a pause, and even then, though she was beginning
to fret pitifully with disappointment, she did not stop of her own
accord.
Unless she began with a somewhat high reclining position, or her feet
or hips were held, her little legs would fly up, and she could not get
the leverage to lift her body. For that matter, even with us the legs
are lighter than the trunk, and few women can overcome the difference,
and lift themselves by sheer strength of the abdominal muscles, without
having the feet held: and a baby’s legs are so much lighter than ours
that it must be for several years a sheer impossibility for him to do
it.
However, in the few cases when the baby did manage, by some advantage
of position, or by holding to our fingers, to lift herself, she could
not balance in the least, and toppled over at once. What with this
discouragement, and restraint from her elders, who thought her back by
no means strong enough yet for sitting alone, she soon after gave up
the effort to raise herself, and waited till she was older.
It was in this same eventful thirteenth week that the baby first looked
about, searching for something that was out of sight. A lively young
girl with bright color and a charming pair of dangling eye-glasses was
visiting us, and stood by, laughing and prattling to the baby while
she was bathed. The little one, greatly interested, turned her head,
smiling and crowing, to watch Miss Charmian’s movements, and to look
for her when she was out of sight. In this, as in the definite efforts
to feel the rattle tip in her mouth, and to renew the sensations
of sitting up, we see action guided by an idea of that which is
absent, that is by imagination, to a certain extent at least; though
it is probable that there was still as much of the mere working of
association as of definite ideas. The memory that the baby showed when
she looked about, searching for an expected sight, instead of simply
turning to an accustomed place, is clearly more than mere habit memory.
Yet it was still not true memory: it was not an idea coming back to
the mind after an interval, but only a sort of after-shine of the
thing, held in the mind for a few moments after the thing itself had
disappeared.
And now to come back to the sight-motor series: Did the baby still see
objects only as blurs of light and shade? She had the full mechanism of
her eyes in working order as soon as accommodation was acquired; but it
is certain that it takes much practice to learn to use that mechanism.
It is an old story that people born blind, receiving their sight by
surgical operations, have to _learn_ to see. Professor Preyer quotes
from Dr. Home the case of a twelve year old boy who, nearly a month
after the operation, could not tell whether a square card had corners
or not by looking at it; and of another seven year old boy who had to
learn to recognize triangles and squares (which he knew well by touch)
by running his eye along the edges and counting the corners. It must
have taken immense practice for us all to learn to flash the eye so
quickly over and about an object that we seem to take in its shape with
one look. This was the task that lay before the baby now.
How long it took we can only guess. Some observers have taken it for
granted that the first recognition of a face showed clear seeing had
arrived. But the group of lights and shades is so different in each
face that a baby might well learn to know them apart without distinct
outlines. We have all seen French paintings in which the eyes, the
smile, some high lights on cheek, chin, and nose, and a cloudy
suggestion of hair and beard, are all that emerge from the dark canvas,
and yet we may see easily for whom the portrait is meant. Our baby
had recognized no face yet except her grandfather’s, where the beard,
spectacles, and shining bald brow made recognition easy without any
outline.
But in another direction we get a plainer hint. I have spoken above of
the joyous excitement roused in the baby by interesting sights (not
only faces now, but also sundry bright things, and dangling, moving
things) early in the month. By the middle of the month her smiles
were fewer, and she looked about her earnestly and soberly; and in the
last week I noted, without understanding, the expression of surprise
that had come into her face as she gazed this way and that. The wide,
surprised eyes must have meant that something new was before them. Were
things perhaps beginning to separate themselves off to the baby’s sight
in definitely bounded spaces?
I must go on into the record of the next month for more light on this
question: for the wonder grew day by day, and for weeks the baby was
looking about her silently, studying her world. She would inspect the
familiar room carefully for many minutes, looking fixedly at object
after object till the whole field of vision was reviewed, then she
would turn her head eagerly and examine another section; and when she
had seen all she could from one place, she would fret till she was
carried to another, and there begin anew her inspection of the room in
its changed aspect--always with the look of surprise and eagerness,
eyes wide and brows raised.
We can only guess what was going on in the baby mind all this time; but
I cannot resist the thought that I was looking on at that very process
which must have taken place somewhere about this time--the learning to
see things clear and separate, by running the eyes over their surfaces
and about their edges.
With this, sight and muscle sense alone, touch and muscle sense alone,
had done all they could to reveal the world to the baby, and there lay
close before her the further revelations that were to be made when
touch, sight, and muscle sense could be focused all together on the
objects about her. It was a wonderful sight to see, as the baby pressed
forward to the new understanding, eager, amazed, and absorbed.
VII
SHE LEARNS TO GRASP, AND DISCOVERS THE WORLD OF THINGS
The baby had finished her first quarter year. A few days before, as we
have seen, she had looked for a person out of sight; and now, just at
the end of the third month, she showed that she could bring together
the testimony of sight and hearing, by turning to look in the direction
of a sound.
Here seems evidence that by this time (whether she had done so before
or not) she “externalized” her impressions more or less: that is, when
waves of sound struck on her tympanum, or of light on her retina, she
did not simply _feel_ the resulting sensation, but threw it back,
so to speak, along the line of the wave, and seemed to herself to
perceive something outside there, away from her. For when she looked
around, seeking what she did not yet see, expecting sight sensations
and hearing sensations to come from the same source, it is impossible
to think she did not have a feeling of something really there, outside
herself.
Step by step with the sense of outsideness there must have come a sense
of insideness, of self, for the two are only opposite sides of one
feeling--that is, the feeling of _difference_ between oneself and the
outer world. We must not suppose that before the baby externalized her
impressions she felt everything as happening inside her: she must have
just felt things, with no inside or outside about it.
This may seem impossible, but really the sense of insideness and
outsideness is not hard to upset, even at our time of life. Dizziness
or mental shock will do it. Sometimes on waking from deep sleep we find
our sense of a separate bodily self gone, and gather it slowly back. We
may almost lose ourselves by lying idly, without thought or care, in
some great, continuous sound, like the roar of a cataract, till we do
not know which is ourself and which is the outward sound. Mystics and
ecstatics have made an art of changing the bodily feelings by fasting
and other means, till the usual marks of difference among impressions,
by which we externalize some and refer others to our own bodies, are
lost; and with them the sense of being in the body, surrounded by an
outer world.
Though she externalized sight and sound, it is not likely that the baby
at this stage distinguished external and internal in touch impressions,
unless about her face. She had not at all learned the bounds of her
own body yet. Below her arms, her control of it was almost nothing.
She could not turn herself over. She had never passed her hands over
her own surface, and knew it only by chance touches. She understood
so little her relation even to her hands, which were fairly under
control, that when they met by chance, each hand would seize the
other, and try to take it to her mouth. She was often aggrieved by the
unexpected result when she tried to flourish her arm and go on sucking
her thumb at the same time, and could not imagine what had suddenly
snatched the cherished thumb away. Her feeling of herself must have
been very different from ours: more like that of a conventional cherub,
all but her head dissolved away into oneness with the outside world.
Did she, then, seeing the vision of the world, see it as a world of
_things_--solid objects, visible and tangible? Probably not. Her whole
behavior showed that she had never blended the feel of a thing and
the look of a thing into the perception of the thing itself. If her
body was touched anywhere, she never looked toward the place to see
what touched her. When she groped on her tray, she seemed to be merely
repeating motions that had formerly brought sensations, not seeking
for things that she supposed were there; she never looked for them, nor
even looked at them as she held them; she seemed to have no suspicion
that the feeling in her hand was due to a visible object there.
Nor could she well have had any idea of an object, even as one may
get it from touch alone, without sight; for she did not feel over the
things she held--she was conscious only of the part that touched her.
If she laid hold of her rattle one day by one part, and another day by
another, she could not have known it was the same object, except as
she learned a little about it in fumbling for a better hold. In short,
the things she touched and held can hardly have been to her definite
objects, but only disjointed touch and weight sensations.
With no more material than this, children born blind do build up in
time the idea of a world of things; but seeing children have a much
quicker and completer way.
Just at the end of the third month the baby had once gazed at her
rattle as she held it in her hand; but it was not till the second week
of the fourth month that she seemed really to learn that when she felt
the familiar touch in her hand, she could see something by looking.
Then her eyes began to rest on things while she picked them up; but in
a blank and passive way--the eyes looking on like outsiders, while the
awkward little hands fumbled just as they would have done in the dark.
The baby seemed to have no idea that what she saw was the same thing as
what she felt.
There was about a fortnight of this. Then, on one great day, when three
weeks of the month had passed, the baby looked at her mother’s hand,
held up before her, and made fumbling motions toward it, keeping her
eyes on it, till her hand struck it; then took hold of it. She had
formed an association between the sight of an object and the groping
movement of her hand toward it.
It was not till the last week of the month that she put out her hand
directly to the thing she wanted, instead of clawing vaguely toward it;
and even then it was doubtfully done. Still, it was real grasping, by
guidance of the eye. She was coming to realize that what she saw was
one with what she could feel; that there were _things_, which could be
reached for and got hold of. That is, the sight-motor series and the
touch-motor series were coalescing at last, and giving the baby a world
of objects. She had an immensity to learn as to their form, weight,
distance, and all that; but she had the key now for learning it.
The discovery of the new quality of tangibility in the visible world
must have been gradual, however, and her new power of grasping hardly
more at first than a blind use of association. In the next fortnight
she grasped doubtfully, depending only partly on sight for guidance.
She would put out her hand uncertainly, with fingers spread, not
ready to grasp, and it was only when they touched the object that her
movement became confident. Sometimes both little hands were brought
cautiously down on either side of the thing she wished to get hold of.
In this fortnight she grasped better with the mouth than with the
hands, and was more disposed to use it. She brought her mouth to the
nipple easily by sight. She dived at me with her head to get the loose
folds of my bodice into her mouth. In our arms, she would attack our
faces with a sudden dive of her head and a funny doubling up movement
of her body, and would mouth them over with satisfaction. One day,
as she lay on her back, a rubber ring fell out of her mouth, and lay
encircling her nose, resting on its bridge and on the upper lip; she
made many efforts to reach it with her lips, stretching her mouth open
ridiculously, but had no idea of using the little hands, which were
fluttering wildly in helpless sympathy.
During this early period of grasping, the baby was far from
appreciating what a world of delight had opened to her. Her great
interest all the fourth month and on into the fifth was in the use
of her eyes, in those eager surveys of things that I have spoken of;
and absorbed in this, she had unconsciously and almost mechanically
gathered together the associations of sight and feeling and muscle
sense, till grasping had come about, merely as a more efficient way of
getting things into the mouth.
Professor Preyer and most other observers have tried to account for
this persistent drift of everything to the baby’s mouth by the theory
of taste association: the baby’s most agreeable experience has been
that of tasting milk, and so he connects all pleasure with the idea
of getting things to his mouth. This seems to me quite untenable. An
association between taste and the feeling of something in the mouth
would not be formed unless the two occurred together quite regularly;
and what with the washing out of a baby’s mouth each time he is nursed,
and the frequent stumbling in of his hands, and later the deliberate
sucking of fists, he finds tasteless objects there oftener than milk.
Again, it is not the movement of the hands up to the mouth that would
become associated with food, but rather the feeling of being laid at
the breast (which our baby did in fact associate early with food, as I
have related). And in the third place, there is not the least evidence
that taste is the most agreeable experience of young babies; on the
contrary, the tests go to show that they have a low taste sensibility.
The craving of hunger, of course, is an intense feeling in babies,
and its satisfaction (rather than taste pleasure) is greatly enjoyed;
but except just at the hungry moment, they pay far more attention to
looking, and hearing, and feeling than to eating. Our baby, after the
first edge of hunger was off, was always ready to desert the breast to
look at something interesting. She would nurse a little, then throw
herself back on her mother’s arm to smile up into her face. She cried
quite as hard over being obliged to lie down, where she could not look
around her, as over being hungry; and getting her meal caused no such
marked signs of pleasure as light and motion, the bath, and the free
use of her own powers.
Some babies are hungrier than ours was, and some are like her; but I
think close observation would show all alike more taken up with their
higher powers than with food. And as all alike put everything into
their mouths when they first learn to grasp, we must find some other
reason for the act than food association.
If we regard it as an exercise of the sense of touch, in what is at
the time the main touch organ, we have an activity closely parallel
with the constant interest in the use of sight in the early months.
Observers have been misled by failing to realize that the mouth, not
the hand, is the primitive touch organ. The baby behaves with the
things in his mouth as if he was interested in feeling them, not in
eating them. He does not try to swallow them (though he may be depended
on to do it without trying, if they are small), but licks, sucks,
mumbles them about, and in every way gets the utmost touch sensation
out of them. Preyer saw a look of pleasure caused by sucking a pencil,
before the baby had ever tasted food, when he could not have had the
least taste association with the feeling. There is plenty of evidence
that the act of sucking (the muscular sensation as well as that of
touch) is in itself highly agreeable to babies.
I have spoken of the great and active interest, at this time, in
studying the visible world. By the end of the fourth month the baby
had certainly learned the look of many things, and was well aware when
it was in any way changed. In a strange room she would renew the eager
and surprised staring about which had nearly ceased in familiar rooms;
and if one of us appeared in a bonnet she would look with curiosity and
interest at our changed aspect. She doubtless knew us all apart by this
time, though she gave no clear evidence of it, except in the case of
grandpa, whom she often greeted with cries of joy and flying hands.