eyes as we moved about. Her eyes were thus drawn to greater distances,
and her range of vision increased; before this she had hardly noticed
anything across the room. In the latter part of the month she looked
with especial curiosity at people’s faces on the other side of the
room, and I guessed that it was because they looked so much smaller
to her--as they would to us if we had not learned to allow for the
distance. A face fifteen feet away can be completely hidden by a fifty
cent piece held out at arm’s length; our friends shrink to small dolls
in our eyes every time they cross the room, but we bring them up to
their real size by trained imagination. The baby, who had not yet the
trained imagination, must have seen strange shrinkings and swellings as
people moved from her or toward her, and as she was carried about the
room.
She saw a complete change of appearance, too, each time any one turned
around, and each time she was carried from one side to another of a
person, or of a piece of furniture. We have become so used to this
that we do not notice it; but to the baby each side of an object must
have looked like an entirely new thing. I think it was some time
before she learned to associate together the different sides and the
different sizes of each object--all the aspects one chair could take,
for instance, gathering into one group in her mind, and all the aspects
a table or a person could take, into another; but she was learning. It
was an enormous piece of work for the baby brain, but babies are not
lazy, and she enjoyed it.
The changes that people went through, as they moved about, were much
more complicated than those of the furniture; but that only made them
the more interesting. No wonder that as soon as the baby knew she
could touch and feel what she saw, it was our faces she dived for
with especial zeal, to explore their surfaces with her mouth; and
a fortunate thing it is for the baby’s progress in knowledge that
mothers do not mind having great and moist liberties taken with their
faces. Our baby learned, too, at this time, with the connivance of her
grandfather, and afterward her father, to fix her fingers in their
beards and tug. This was doubtless educational, and it brought still
another interest into the number that gathered about the faces of her
fellow beings: but it led to trouble later, as her hands grew quicker
and stronger in clutching.
She was a joyous and sociable little being in those days, and while her
serious business was looking about and studying out the visible world,
or exploring with her mouth the feeling of things, her delight was as
always in people’s faces and attentions. She had become charmingly
responsive, and answered to nods and prattle and cuddling with the
gayest of smiles and crows, and lively flourishing of arms and legs.
From early in the month she acquired an ecstatic little chuckle, and
once or twice even broke into a genuine laugh when she was played with
a little more boisterously than usual.
For by this time, and more and more every week, she began to like a
frolic, and when she was tossed, rolled over, or slid down one’s knee,
she crowed and beamed and chuckled in high delight. She was such a
tiny baby for rough play that we tumbled her about most gingerly, but
she seemed ready for anything herself. She was a baby singularly free
from fear or nervous excitability, showing already quite clearly the
temperament she has carried through her later childhood.
She was also physically strong, and once or twice in the fourth month
sat quite alone on some one’s lap. I do not count this real sitting
alone, however, for the lap gives under the baby’s weight, and steadies
her a little: one should not record sitting alone till the baby has
balanced successfully on a hard level, the floor or table. But as far
as strength of back was concerned, our baby was now evidently ready to
sit alone.
At this stage the babies of grandpa’s line have always been seated on
the floor in a horse-collar, as befitted farm babies; and this latest
one went into the collar at four months old, like the rest of us in
our day, and spent much of her fifth month sitting there, sucking or
brandishing her rattle, and looking happily about her. It is really a
comfortable seat for a baby not yet quite ready to sit alone. When the
collar is not brand new, one will of course scrub and disinfect it; and
it is the better in any case for a blanket or thick shawl thrown over
it. Also of course, one will never set a baby on the floor without
seeing that all possible drafts, under doors or about loose window
casings, are shut off with shawls and screens. Otherwise, there may be
pneumonia to fight.
I have just spoken of the baby’s boldness. She showed fear now and
then, however. About the middle of the fourth month she cried while a
caller was present, dressed in black, with a large hat. Ten days later
she was quite upset when her father leaned over suddenly, bringing
his face into view from one side. Here were the first eye fears,
considerably later than ear fears.
A still more advanced form of fear appeared two days later. The baby
had waked and cried alone in the dark for some minutes, and when she
was at last taken up, she had evidently become frightened, and was not
easily reassured; she kept leaning toward her mother, and uttering
troubled cries, and as it was some minutes before her mother took her,
she grew more and more disturbed, and finally broke into a wail, and
was soothed with difficulty, and all the evening she was anxious and
easily upset. The next night, waking alone at the same hour, she began
again to cry with the note of fright.
Here was not yet fear in the sense of definite expectation of harm. It
was still purely instinctive, a sort of vague panic, from a sense of
unfamiliarity. The darkness no doubt contributed to this unfamiliarity,
but I do not think there was yet anything that could be called fear of
the dark. It is doubtless, however, in large part from such experiences
that fear of the dark is born; each one leaves its trace in the nervous
system, and associations of terror with darkness and solitude are
quickly formed. In these days of leaving babies to wail themselves to
sleep for the good of their souls, and the convenience of mamma’s going
out evenings, innumerable such associations must be bred--and again the
schoolbooks take the blame when in later days the child proves nervous
and excitable.
During the latter part of the fourth month, the baby was greatly
interested in making sounds, and the one that most delighted her was
a sort of harsh cawing or croaking, made deep in the throat, on the
vowel â. She would lie and utter this sound at intervals, by the half
hour, with deep satisfaction. But when she had not been making it for
some hours, she was apt to forget just how, and to get it too high or
low in the throat, producing an extraordinary collection of squeaks
and grunts. She usually hit it at last; but after repeated losings, it
became quite dissolved away among the many new ones it had apparently
given rise to.
Later, she took much pains over some imperfect lip sounds; she would
lie looking earnestly at me, draw her breath, gather her lips into
shape, and finally explode the sound with a great expenditure of breath.
She made her little sounds often with an air of friendly response
when we prattled to her, giving back murmurs, croaks, and gurgles
for words. From the latter part of the fourth month, if we imitated
to her some of these sounds, she seemed to imitate them back. Preyer,
who records the same thing of his boy at the same age, thinks it marks
a most important epoch, the beginning of action guided by ideas; but
Baldwin, who considers the beginning of imitation even more important
than Preyer does, thinks it cannot be so early, and that the repeating
of the sounds must be mere coincidence.
This is likely enough, for a baby is always repeating his pet sounds,
and it is not safe to conclude that he means to imitate us, even if
he does chance to give back the same sound after us several times.
But as to action guided by ideas, we scarcely need wait for the first
imitation to see that. It appears in a simple form when the baby first
looks for an object out of sight. This our baby had done weeks before,
and by this time many of her actions seemed to be of ideomotor type.
The effort to recall her croak was an instance. In the early weeks of
the fifth month, she would seem to think suddenly of one of her little
sounds, and dash at it, bringing it out with a comical doubling up of
her body. In the same way she would have the happy thought, “Fingers in
mouth!” and up they would come with a jerk, her head diving forward to
meet them.
In the nineteenth week, she seemed to act once from something like
a definite memory. Her grandfather entered the room while she was
in her bath, and her usual joyous up and down movement of arms at
sight of him produced a novel and fascinating splashing. Next day the
baby splashed without suggestion, and again the next, looking up to
my face and smiling; and after that no one could teach her anything
about splashing. Yet even this was probably not really memory, but an
association formed by a single vivid occurrence.
During these weeks a note of real desire, unheard before, appeared in
her voice. Her face had at times, when she saw something new, or when
she gazed at us while we talked to her, an expression of inquiry and
effort to comprehend, with lips drawn in and brow tense. No one could
watch her and not see the beginnings of some sort of mental life.
VIII
THE ERA OF HANDLING THINGS
She sprang into this era suddenly, within four days. It was not
infrequently thus, and perhaps more and more as the little brain grew
complex. Some power that had been slowly developing would leap up into
completion, unlocking a dozen other doors of mental life. To put it
physiologically, some one new connection established between brain
cells would bring a whole network of others into coöperation--the more
easily as ancestral nerve paths seemed often to open up at a touch.
When the baby had passed ten days of her fifth month, she was still
grasping half mechanically. On the eleventh day, lying on her back, she
held her rattle above her and looked at it carefully. Her attention
had turned to the things that she grasped. She had come before to
the perception of a world of objects, but apparently only now to
the realization of it. And thereupon, that very day, I saw that she
was no longer using eyes and hands merely as means of getting mouth
sensations; she was holding objects, looking at them, and pulling them
about, for some moments, before they went to her mouth.
The pleasure of this handling seemed to be in the free movement of
the objects (seen and felt at the same time), not especially in the
touch sensations. When this new pleasure was exhausted, things went
to the mouth as before for the enjoyment of touch. It was long before
the fingers rivaled the lips in pure æsthetic touch enjoyment; perhaps
they never do, else the dandy would finger his cane knob, instead of
mouthing it, girls would smooth rose-leaves across their finger tips,
not their lips, and a kiss would have no higher rank than a hand-clasp.
But for grasping purposes the supremacy now passed promptly over to
the hands, and from this week the habit of grasping with the mouth by
head movements declined and disappeared.
In a few hours the baby was reaching for everything near her, and in
three days more her desire to lay hold on things was the dominant
motive of her life. Her grasping was still oftener with both hands than
one, and was somewhat slow, but always accurate. Some babies learn to
grasp more suddenly than she did, and often miss their aim; but with
her cautious method of bringing down her hands toward an object from
either side, penning it in between, she could hardly make errors. The
thing once corralled, she would pull it around, perhaps a minute, then
put it to her mouth.
It is an epoch of tremendous importance when the baby first, with
real attention, brings sight and touch and muscle feeling to bear
together on an object. “In a very deep sense,” says John Fiske,
“all human science is but the increment of the power of the eye, and
all human art is the increment of the power of the hand. Vision and
manipulation--these in their countless indirect and transfigured
forms are the two coöperating factors in all intellectual progress.”
And the first great result of this coöperation is the completion of
vision itself. It cannot be doubted that it is mainly by studying
objects with eye and hand together that we get our ability to see solid
form. A colt grasping his ear of corn with his teeth, even a puppy
licking and turning his bone all over, or a kitten tapping a spool to
and fro and hugging it in her paws, without losing sight of it--none
of these can bring the united powers of three senses to bear on an
object so perfectly as a monkey or human baby can, holding it in the
most convenient positions, turning it this way and that, seeing every
part, feeling it with finger tips and mouth; and it is doubtful if the
quadrupeds ever attain to as clear a sense of form as we do.
In these first days of the passion for grasping at things, the baby
reached for flat figures as readily as for solid objects; but (to look
ahead a little) she learned to discriminate with surprising ease, and
after the first week I have only three or four notes of her trying to
pick up such things as pictures on a page, roses on a quilt, shadows
in the sun. Yet I do not think this was because she gained quickly any
such sense of the difference between plane and solid form as we have,
but rather that she learned quickly to associate a certain look about
an object with the experience of being able to get hold of it.
The reason that I think so is that even weeks later, when she was six
months old, she showed signs of having no real ability to judge form
by the eye. At that age she turned a round cracker round and round at
her lips, trying to find the corner to bite, as she was used to doing
with square ones. And the only time she was ever taken in by a flat
figure afterward was when (at nine months old) she tried a long time to
capture the swaying shadow of a rope end on the deck of a yacht; things
that moved could always be taken hold of in her experience, and she
went solely by experience, not by any general ideas of form.
But such general ideas really require a good deal of development of
reason--so much that it is likely the lower animals never rise to them.
We must think of the baby’s seeing, therefore, as rounding out but
slowly to full equality with ours in such matters as estimates of form,
distance, and size, where much experience and some reason are required.
To go back to those swift four days in which the baby came into
realization of her power of using hands and eyes together,--they had
been preceded by a marked advance in the use of eyes alone (or jointly
with the sense of motion in being carried about) to get the relations
of things about her more clearly arranged in her mind. The day before
the baby held up her rattle to look at, she had declined to go to sleep
in her mother’s arms, and kept lifting her head to look at me, till
I crossed the room and put myself out of sight. Presently she lifted
her head again, turned round, and searched persistently the quarter
of the room toward which she had seen me disappear. She had gained
much in sense of direction and in association of ideas when she could
look along the line in which I had been seen to move moments before,
expecting to see me somewhere there.
Later, the same day, she sat in my lap, watching with an intent and
puzzled face the back and side of her grandmother’s head. Grandma
turned from her knitting and chirruped to her, and the little one’s jaw
dropped and her eyebrows went up with an expression of blank surprise.
Presently I began to swing her on my foot, and at every pause in the
swinging she would sit gazing at the puzzling head till grandma turned,
and nodded or chirruped to her; then she would turn away satisfied and
want more swinging.
Here we seem to get a glimpse of the process I have spoken of, by which
the baby gradually associates together the front and rear and side
aspects of a person or thing, till at last they coalesce together in
his mind as all one object. At first amazed to see the coil of silver
hair and the curve of cheek turn suddenly into grandma’s front face,
the baby watched for the repetition of the miracle till it came to seem
natural, and the two aspects were firmly knit together in her mind.
She began, too, to watch people’s motions carefully for long spaces of
time--all through the process of setting the table, for instance--with
a serious little face, and an attention so absorbed that it was
hardly possible to divert her if one tried (which one ought not to
do, for power of attention is a precious attainment, and people have
no business to meddle with its growth for their own amusement). When
her mother’s dark-eyed sister had a little reception in consequence
of having married the minister, baby was in the thick of it, watching
first the preparations, and then the comings and goings of people, with
the closest attention and the deepest enjoyment, cheerfully willing to
have her meals postponed, her nap broken, anything, if the fun would
only go on.
There was a decided advance, too, in her acquaintance with her own
body. Sitting as usual in her horse-collar, she was bending herself
back over it, a thing that she had done before; but to-day she kept it
up so persistently, and bent herself back with such exertion, that at
last the back of her head touched the floor. She righted herself with
an expression of great surprise. Evidently she had been experimenting
in new muscular sensations only, and (as happens to all experimenters
sometimes) had got an extra result that she did not bargain for and
did not understand. She bent back again, with her head screwed around
to see what had given her the touch. In this position, she did not
reach the floor. She sat up again, looked at me with a perplexed
face, and tried it over, a full dozen times, till her mother picked
her up to stop it, on the ground that the baby was more valuable than
the experiment, and that she would break her little back. For days,
however, the baby returned to the investigation, doubling herself back
over the arm of any one who held her till her head hung straight down,
or over the horse-collar till it rested on the floor.
We may perhaps fairly guess that in this incident she had for the
first time discovered the back of her head as a part of herself, and
any of us might well be surprised to find himself extending off behind
into space that way, if he had never known about it before. The baby
had of course felt daily and hourly touches on the back of her head,
from pillow and floor and lap, from cap and hair brush; but all her
previous behavior, and her surprise now, indicate that this was the
first time she had externalized these touches--which implies also the
first time she had felt _herself_ as receiving them.
One of the first things she did when she began grasping zealously was
to seize her own toes, and she bent her foot forward on the ankle to
bring it better in reach. This may have been a purely instinctive
coöperating act at first, but it helped on the control of feet and
legs, and the recognition of them as parts of herself--the more as they
were now for some time favorite playthings every time the baby was
undressed.
Another significant movement the next day, also brought about by the
advance in grasping, was the first attempt to scramble forward as she
lay on her stomach, to get hold of something--a futile effort, but the
forerunner of creeping.
These days of rapid unfolding were joyous days. The baby laughed aloud
more than ever before, and her daily frolics were as necessary to her
as her meals, and were fretted for as persistently if she did not get
them. The door of communion with fellow beings, too, was trembling
on its hinges, ready to come ajar. The little thing began to look up
into our faces as if for sympathy in pleasure or perplexity, as I
have mentioned in the case of her surprise at discovering the back of
her head; she did it laughing when she splashed in the bath, and with
smiles of satisfaction when she listened to the piano. When her mother
held out her arms to take her, she learned to put forward her little
hands in response; and on the same day she took up the instinctive
gesture of stretching out her arms toward an object in desire--always,
I suspect (records are wanting), the next gesture after turning
away the head. Neither of these reaching gestures was as yet used
intentionally to convey ideas, but both entered later into genuine sign
language. Both seem to grow naturally out of grasping movements.
In the baby’s absorption in grasping, most of her little sounds were
abandoned; but she clung to a favorite long gurgle, and used it with
an air of amiable response when people talked or nodded to her,
often kicking her legs in the air or flinging up her arms, by way
of emphasis. Sometimes she would look earnestly into your face and
address you with the gurgle in all seriousness. Sometimes it would seem
to occur to her suddenly, and she would burst out with it, with an
impulsive movement of body and limbs.
In a few days she had become a different baby, with a new world of
interests, and a wonderfully more varied and vivid life. After this,
she went on smoothly to the end of the fifth month (and for that
matter, through the sixth), absorbed in looking, feeling, and handling,
reaching this way and that to lay hold of everything she saw, and
improving steadily in skill. A small steel bell given her in the
twenty-first week was at first pulled and shoved about on the table,
picked up with two fingers or more as might chance, and put into her
mouth by any part that came handiest; but in three or four days it
was taken up properly and rung. More and more all the time she found
something to do with things besides putting them in her mouth.
She liked hard, bright, and rattling things best to handle, and
preferred metal or bone to rubber. One can hardly think of a thing
less useful to a baby educationally at this stage than soft, colored
worsted balls; he needs something that he can feel, hard and definite,
in his hand; something with distinctly unlike sides that he can see as
he pulls and shakes it about; he loves glitter, but cares little for
color, perhaps does not yet see it; and any dyes and worsted shreds
that can come off in wet little mouths are conclusive against such a
toy.
On the other hand, bright metal objects are apt in the course of their
gyrations to deal bad thumps to little heads and noses; so one must
compromise on rubber--uninteresting, but safe--and on such bone, metal
(perhaps aluminum), and unpainted wooden toys as can be trusted to give
only very mild thumps, such as a baby had better take now and then
rather than be deprived of all really interesting toys.
This is one of the many dilemmas in which the baby is lucky who has a
grandma, or whose mamma can spare time to associate with him a great
deal; for no end of things can be trusted in the little hands, that
ache for everything in sight, if only vigilant fingers hover close,
ready to ward gently off any dangerous movement. Sitting in one’s
lap at the table, too, the baby may push and pull at many things not
safe for him to lift; or he may be allowed to handle something safely
tethered with a string. Certainly the wider liberty of holding and
handling he can by any device be allowed, the better; the instinct is
very strong, and wholly healthy, and the thwarting of normal instincts
is not good for any one’s nerves or mind.
In sight, important changes were no longer to be looked for: except
possibly in the matter of color sense, the baby’s seeing had now
passed through all the stages of development, and needed only practice
and mental growth to become as perfect as it would ever be. She was
evidently still at work somewhat, especially in new places, in reducing
confused appearances to order; but so much of this work was already
done that more and more she could sit and enjoy the varied spectacle.
More than once she spent half an hour gazing thus out of the window
with quiet pleasure.
There were for the first time signs that she could distinguish between
the sounds of voices. She looked and listened one day in the middle of
the month, as if she noticed something unusual, when I was hoarse with
a cold. Late in the month, as I read to her mother while she nursed
the baby, singing softly to her (a frequent custom), the baby suddenly
raised her head and looked curiously at me, evidently for the first
time distinguishing the two voices as separate sounds.