“Papa!” hoping to hasten her understanding of the word. This same day
she imitated the motion of the lips, and seemed to find the feeling
very funny, for she laughed, and laughed whenever she heard the sound
explosively uttered during the next fortnight; she stopped in the midst
of crying to laugh at it. Her amusement had not the faintest connection
with the meaning of the word; indeed, she chuckled aloud with even
more gayety when I ejaculated “poo-poo!” or “boo-boo!” instead. It was
something in the explosive labial sound that struck her as comical.
In this beginning of discrimination in articulate sounds, we see the
root of the later understanding of speech. But it was by another road
that the baby now began to move toward human communication: by the way,
that is, of signs and inarticulate cries. One day when she was four
and a half months old, she raised a strange little clamor on catching
sight of her grandfather, as if on purpose to call his attention, and
was satisfied when she got it; she began to hold out her arms of her
own accord, instead of merely to meet ours, held out to her; and in the
very last days of the fifth month she made a sound of request when she
wished to be taken, a whimpering, coaxing sound, leaning and looking
toward her mother, instead of the mere fretting sounds of desire,
addressed to nobody, which she had made for weeks.
When I have spoken before of the baby’s “addressing” her little noises
to us, I have not meant that there was really anything of language in
them. Some expression of interest in our presence, some sort of social
feeling, there must have been, but no more than in her kicking up her
feet or chuckling at our attentions. These first asking sounds and
motions, on the contrary, were beginnings of real language--not yet of
human language, but of such as the baby shares with all the beasts and
birds.
A sort of intelligence shared with the beasts and birds, too, appeared
in these same closing days of the fifth month--what may be called
“adaptive intelligence,” the use of means to an end--in the patient
devices by which the baby manœuvred her toe into her mouth; but this
was a sort of anticipation of a development that belonged really to the
next month, and so I shall leave the account of it to the next.
The increasing ownership of her body that this toe feat showed was
evident in several other ways. The baby’s sitting up grew imperceptibly
firmer and more independent of support: at nineteen weeks old, she was
sitting alone in our laps a quarter of a minute at a time; four days
later, a minute at a time, provided she did nothing to upset herself,
such as flourishing her arms, or reaching after things; two days later
yet, she balanced successfully for a few seconds on the table--and
this was real sitting alone at last, for on the table there could be no
least support from the yielding of the surface under her. All babies
can sit alone earlier on the lap or a cushion than on a perfectly flat,
hard surface.
At just about nineteen weeks old, too, the baby began to roll over to
her side when she was laid on her back on the floor, and to squirm and
bend around into a variety of positions, instead of lying where she was
put.
The period was coming to an end in which the main activity of
development was in the senses, and in coming through the coöperation of
the senses to a bodily consciousness of herself in a world of objects,
of distances, and directions. Now the baby had to learn to use that
body, and explore that world. But before this second great period of
activity fully began, there was a transition month, a month of vigorous
practice in the powers already gained, and of gathering forces for the
new developments.
IX
THE DAWN OF INTELLIGENCE
The sixth month, though it lay between two great development
periods,--that of learning to use the senses, and that of learning to
carry the body,--was not in itself a period of suspended development.
It is true that its progress, being more purely mental, could not be
so continuously traced as that which came before and after, but rather
cropped up to the surface every now and then in a more or less broken
way; still, no doubt, it really went on in the same gradual method, one
thread and another knitting together into the fabric of new powers.
It was to this month, as I said in closing the last chapter, that the
beginnings of adaptive intelligence belonged; and this alone marks it a
great epoch.
There is a great deal of discussion about the use of the words
“intelligence,” “reason,” “instinct,” “judgment,” “inference,” and the
like: what these faculties and acts really are, how they come about,
where the line is to be drawn between their manifestations (in the
minds of animals and of man, for instance), and many other problems.
But I think that all agree upon recognizing two types of action that
come under the discussion: one, that which shows merely the ability to
adapt means to ends, to use one’s own wit in novel circumstances; the
other, that which rests on the higher, abstract reasoning power, such
as is hardly possible without carrying on a train of thought in words.
Whether these two types are to be called intelligence and reason, as
Professor Lloyd Morgan calls them, or whether both come under the head
of reason, lower and higher, we need not trouble to decide. If we call
them adaptive intelligence and higher or abstract reason, we are safe
enough.
Even if it be true that any glimmer of the higher reason penetrates
back into the grades of life below the attainment of speech, it must
be only into those just below, and is not to be looked for in our baby
for a long time yet. But the mere practical intelligence that I am now
speaking of seems to appear in babies close on the completion of a fair
mastery of their senses, about the middle of the first year, and it
goes pretty far down in the animal kingdom. Darwin thought the lowest
example of it he knew was in the crab, who would remove shells that
were thrown near the mouth of his burrow, apparently realizing that
they might fall in.
Recent psychologists have shown strong reason for thinking that such
acts as this are at bottom only the same old hit and miss trick that
we have seen from the first, of repeating lucky movements; only in
a higher stage, as the associations that guide the movements become
more delicate and complicated, and memory and imagination enter in.
However this may be as a matter of theoretic analysis, there is in
practice a clear test of difference between the unintelligent earlier
type of actions and those that all agree in calling intelligent: I have
indicated it above, in saying that in intelligent action one’s own wit
must be used “in novel circumstances.” The case must be such that one
cannot fall back on race instinct nor on his own previous habit.
Our baby, for instance, first used her intelligence to steer her toe
into her mouth, and the way she did it, compared with the way she
slowly settled on the proper movements for getting her rattle into her
mouth, shows clearly the practical difference between unintelligent
and intelligent action, even if both are at bottom made of the same
psychological stuff.
It was just before the sixth month began that the baby accomplished
this feat, but it belongs with the developments of that month. She was
already fond of playing with her toes; and sitting unclad that evening
in her mother’s lap, she first tried to pull them straight to her
mouth. This was, of course, the mere repetition of a frequent movement,
learned by simple association. But when it failed--for the toes would
kick away, just as her arms used to do, carrying the thumb from her
lips--the little one put her mind on corralling them. She took them in
one hand, clasped the other hand about her instep, and so brought the
foot safely up. Still it escaped, and at last she clasped ankle and
heel firmly, one with each hand, and after several attempts brought the
elusive toe triumphantly into her mouth. It is true that by looking up
to us for sympathy in her success, and relaxing attention, she promptly
lost it once more; but she recaptured it, and from this time on, for
weeks, had immense satisfaction in it every time she was undressed.
There may have been a certain element of instinct in this--getting the
toe to the mouth is so persistent a habit with babies that it seems
as if there must be some inheritance about it; but inheritance could
hardly have given the special devices for managing the insubordinate
foot; there was clearly some use of individual intelligence. All
through the process of learning to manage the body, the baby showed
instinct and intelligence most intricately mingled; and, indeed, we do
so ourselves our lives long.
Of all a baby’s doings this toe business is the one that people find it
most impossible to regard with scientific seriousness. But its indirect
usefulness is considerable. The coöperation of different parts of the
body that it teaches is remarkable; and it must have great influence in
extending the sense of self to the legs and feet, where it has hitherto
seemed but weakly developed. This is important in getting the body
ready for standing and walking.
The baby now showed intelligence in her actions in several little ways,
such as tugging with impatient cries at her mother’s dress when she
wanted her dinner, and leaning over to pluck at the carriage blanket,
under which her mother had laid some flowers to keep them from her. She
slipped a long-handled spoon farther down in her hand to get the end of
the handle into her mouth (almost exactly the same act as the one that
Darwin thought first showed “a sort of practical reflection” in his
child at about the same age: the boy slipped his hand down his father’s
finger, in order to get the finger tip into his mouth). In the second
week of the month she began to watch things as they fell, and then to
throw them down purposely, to watch them falling.
I have already mentioned certain doubtful imitations in the fourth
month, and a clearer one in the fifth. Now the baby began to imitate
unmistakably. Her uncle had a fashion of slapping his hand down on the
table by way of a salutation to her, and one day (when she had passed a
week of her sixth month) she slapped down her little hand in return.
The next day as soon as her uncle came in, she began to slap her hand
down, watching him, delighted to repeat the movement back and forth, as
long as he would keep it up. She would imitate me also when I did it;
and in the course of the month several other little imitations occurred.
I have already spoken of the great importance psychologists attach
to imitation. Professor Baldwin makes it the great principle of
development in child and race--all evolution one long history of
its workings; but he uses the word in a far wider sense than the
ordinary one, tracing “imitation” from the mechanical repetition
of life-preserving motions by the lowest living things, up to the
spiritual effort of men and women to live up to their own highest
ideals. Even using the word in its ordinary sense, we know what a
potent force in the little one’s education imitation is. The age,
however, at which it is most efficient is considerably later than the
sixth month, and it did not count for much yet with our baby.
Her sounds had been more various and expressive from the first days
of the month. She had taken up a curious puppy-like whine of desire
or complaint, and a funny little ecstatic sniffing and catching her
breath, to express some shades of delight; and she had also begun to
pour out long, varied successions of babbling sounds, which expressed
content, interest, or complaint very clearly. She would “talk to” any
interesting object (a hedge in gorgeous bloom, for instance) with this
expressive babble, sometimes holding out her arms to it at the same
time. But now, in the second week of the month, the day after the
first decisive imitation, a surprising advance beyond these means of
communication took place.
I must explain that the wise grandma, who believed in encouraging
babies to creep, as the best possible preparation for standing and
walking, had begun to set the little one on her hands and knees on
the big dining-table, putting a hand against her feet as a brace in
case she should be moved to struggle forward. The baby had a habit of
pushing with her feet when she felt anything against her soles; and
pushing thus, thrust herself forward; and as the table-cover slid with
her movement, she would half slide with it, half shove herself, across
the table, grunting with exertion, and highly pleased.
On the day in question I was sitting with her by this table, and she
pulled at the table-cover, as she was wont to pull and handle anything
she could reach. Suddenly she threw herself back on my arm, and looked
earnestly in my face; sat up and pulled at the cover again, then threw
herself back and looked at me again.
“What does she want?” I said, surprised, and hardly able to think
that the little thing could really be trying to say something to me.
But grandma interpreted easily, and when I put the baby on the table
accordingly, to make her sliding sprawl across the surface, she was
satisfied.
This remarkable advance in sign language comes well under our
definition of intelligent action: it was not a stereotyped sign,
already fixed in her mind in association with a certain wish, like
holding out her arms to be taken, but a device of her own, to meet the
special occasion.
Her increased power of communication was not the only way in which
her mind showed itself more wide awake to other people. A rather
uncomfortable phase of this development was timidity. In the first
week of the month, she was frightened by some one who came in suddenly
between her and her mother, in a strange house, and spoke abruptly,
in a deep, unfamiliar voice; and after that she often cried or became
uneasy when strange men took her, or came near her, especially if they
were abrupt. She drew distinct lines, according to some principle of
her own, and certain people were affably accepted at once, while
others, no more terrific that we could see, made the little lip quiver
every time they came near. This timidity toward people was not at all
deeply fixed in her temperament, and though it lasted all this month,
it was never very marked afterward.
Some indications of the dawn of affection also appeared now. The baby’s
desire to touch our faces with her mouth and hands seemed to have a
certain element of attachment in it. The touches were often soft and
caressing, and they were bestowed only on her especial friends, or on
one or two strangers that she had taken at once into notable favor.
Once she leaned out of her baby carriage, calling and reaching to me,
as if she wished to be taken; but when I came to her, she wanted only
to get hold of me, to put her hands and mouth softly on my face.
Up to about the middle of the month, in spite of her daily exercises
with her toe, the baby had not altogether annexed her legs to her
conscious self and brought them under her orders. She still had to
hold the foot forcibly with her hands all the time her toe was in
her mouth, or it would have kicked away from her as if it was none
of hers. It is likely, too, that she had scarcely any idea of those
parts of her body which she could not see and did not often touch.
Indeed, the psychologists tell us that we ourselves have a decidedly
inferior bodily consciousness in such parts--say between the shoulder
blades. Even her own head must have been mainly unknown territory to
the baby still, in spite of the curiosity she had felt about it the
month before. But now she discovered by a chance touch that she could
investigate it with her hands, and proceeded at once to do so, with a
serious face.
In the latter half of the month, she went a good deal farther toward
getting a roughly complete knowledge and control of her body. She
investigated her ear, her cheek, and the back and sides of her head,
from time to time. She became quite expert in using legs and hands,
head and mouth, together, in get getting hold of her toe. She sat alone
longer and longer, and by the end of the month could have done so by
the half hour, if she had not always upset herself in five minutes or
so by turning and reaching about. She had become very free in bending,
squirming, and changing her position when she lay on the floor, and
early in the third week of the month she had turned clear over, from
back to stomach, in reaching after something. She followed up the
lesson at once, and soon was rolling over whenever she wished--at
first having much ado to get her arm disentangled from under her, but
managing it nicely before long.
It is possible she would have begun creep creeping at this time but for
the impediment of her clothes. She did stumble once upon almost the
right movement, in trying to get forward to something she wanted; but
her feet and knees became entangled in her skirts, and she gave it
up. A week later, she was put into short skirts, but by that time the
ability to roll over had diverted her mind from creeping.
Babies must lose a great deal of their normal activity through clothes.
They are retracing a stage of human history in which clothes had no
part, and this new element must hamper the repetition immensely.
Clothes they must wear--they do not live in tropic forests nor own hair
coverings; but we ought to leave the little limbs as free as we can
without risk from cold. A chance to roll about nude in a room that is
safely warm is a great thing for a baby.
She did not again use any sign language as advanced as when she had
asked to be put on the table; that incident was a sort of herald of a
later stage of development. But in the latter part of the month her
regular means of communication were decidedly better developed than in
the first part. She would coax for a frolic by leaning forward with
an urgent “Oo! oo!” and expressive movements of her body; but if she
was asking instead for an object she wished, or to be taken into her
mother’s arms, there were small but quite definite differences in tone,
expression, and movement, so that we usually knew at once which she
meant.
About a week before the end of the month a great step toward
intercommunication by speech took place. We began to suspect that the
baby knew her own name, she turned to look so often just after it had
been spoken. To test it I stood behind her, and in an ordinary tone
accosted her as Bobby, Tom, Kitten, Mary, Jacob, Baby, and all sorts of
other names. Whenever I said Ruth, Toodles, or Toots, she turned and
looked expectantly at me, but not at any other name. Now, Ruth is our
baby’s proper name; so it was evident that she really did have some
inkling of the sound that meant her.
Not that she could rise yet to any such abstract conception as that
of a person or of a name. But she had learned that this sound was
connected with interesting experiences--with frolics, and caresses, and
trips outdoors, with relief from discomforts, with dinners, and all the
other things that happened when people were attending to her. It was
out of such a beginning as this that full understanding of articulate
speech, in all its logical intricacy, was to develop.
One of the most marked traits of the latter weeks of this month was the
surprising rapidity with which things were grouping themselves in the
baby’s mind by association, in a way that came nearer and nearer to
definite memory. She coaxed for a spoon, and when she got it was still
discontented, till we found that she wished it to have milk in, as she
knew befitted a spoon--though for the milk itself she did not care at
all. She understood what particular frolic was to be expected from
each of us. She turned, when she saw reflections, to look for the real
object. She made demonstrations of joy when she saw her baby carriage,
knowing well what it portended.
In two or three cases, there was at last unmistakable evidence of true
memory, for at least a few minutes. For instance, in the last week of
the month, sitting on her mother’s lap, the baby caught sight of a knot
of loops that adorned the centre of an ottoman close by, and reached
her arms for it. By way of a joke on her, her mother set her on the
ottoman. It was quite beyond the baby’s sense of locality to divine
what had become of the knot, and she looked all about her diligently to
find it, leaning this way and that. By and by her mother took her back
into her arms to nurse; but all the time she was nursing, she would
stop now and then, sit up, and lean over to look for the lost knot.
At another time, when her mother came into the room with a new hat on,
she reached out her hands for it with delight; her mother retreated
at once, and put the hat safely out of sight, but when some minutes
later the baby saw her again, her first look was at the top of her
head, and seeing it now bare of lace and buttercups, she broke into a
disappointed whimper.
All this time practice in her earlier attainments went vigorously
on. She was watching, handling, reaching after things, all day long.
Especially she watched all the movements of people; often, now, as they
went in and out of doors, as they were seen through windows, came into
sight or disappeared around corners. She must have been getting thus
some idea of the way walls acted in shutting out her view, and of the
relation of visible and invisible positions.
She had perhaps more troubles in this month than ever before, what with
some fear of people, and the discomforts connected with her first pair
of teeth, and also with the beginning of the weaning period. There
were a number of days when her health and spirits were considerably
depressed, and there was a good deal of fretting. When the teeth were
fairly through, and the insufficient food supplemented, her spirits
came up with a bound, and she was more joyous than ever.
She had her first skin pain in this month--a scratched finger from a
clasp on my shoulder--and wailed with vigor; yet it was forgotten in
a few moments, and never thought of again. It was evident that skin
sensitiveness was still low, and that hurts left no after soreness.
It was about ten days before the end of the month that she first showed
a decided emotional dependence on her mother. She had been separated
from her for some time (by a tedious dentist’s engagement), had become
hungry and sleepy, and had been frightened by an abrupt stranger. At
last she settled into a pitiful, steady crying--stopping at every angle
in the corridor where I walked with her, and watching eagerly till it
was turned, then breaking out anew when her mother did not prove to be
around the corner. This tragic experience left a much deeper mark than
the physical woes, and for some days the baby watched her mother rather
anxiously, as if she feared she might lose her again unless she kept
her eyes constantly upon her.
And so she was come to the end of her first half year. The breathing
automaton had become an eager and joyous little being, seeing and
hearing and feeling much as we do, knowing her own body somewhat, and
controlling it throughout to a certain extent, laughing and frolicking,
enjoying the vision of the world with a delicious zest, clinging to
us not so much for physical protection as for human companionship,
beginning to show a glimmer of intelligence, and to cross over with
sign and sound the abyss between spirit and spirit.
X
BEGINNINGS OF LOCOMOTION
When a baby has learned to see things clearly, and has known the joys
of handling them, it is natural that he should soon come to feel the
need of getting to them when they chance to lie beyond arm reach.
Apparently the first impulse to move the whole body does always come
from this desire to get at something; but I doubt if this remains a
very important motive throughout the whole process of learning. There
is so much in that process that is instinctive that the baby seems to
be in great part taken up and carried on by a current of blind impulse.
Then, too, the whole structure of bone, and joint, and muscle is so
fitted to certain positions and movements that in the mere chance
exercising of his limbs he is steadily brought nearer to the great
race acts of balance and locomotion.