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Chapter 13,382 wordsPublic domain

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STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD

JAMES SULLY, M. A., LL. D.

GROTE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND LOGIC, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON AUTHOR OF OUTLINES OF PSYCHOLOGY, ETC.

NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1896

PREFACE.

The following Studies are not a complete treatise on child-psychology, but merely deal with certain aspects of children’s minds which happen to have come under my notice, and to have had a special interest for me. In preparing them I have tried to combine with the needed measure of exactness a manner of presentation which should attract other readers than students of psychology, more particularly parents and young teachers.

A part of these Studies has already appeared elsewhere. The Introductory Chapter was published in the _Fortnightly Review_ for November, 1895. The substance of those from II. to VIII. has been printed in the _Popular Science Monthly_ of New York. Portions of the “Extracts from a Father’s Diary” appeared in the form of two essays, one on “Babies and Science” in the _Cornhill Magazine_ in 1881, and the other on “Baby Linguistics” in the _English Illustrated Magazine_ in 1884. The original form of these, involving a certain disguise—though hardly one of impenetrable thickness—has been retained. The greater part of the study on “George Sand’s Childhood” was published as two articles in _Longmans’ Magazine_ in 1889 and 1890.

Like all others who have recently worked at child-psychology I am much indebted to the pioneers in the field, more particularly to Professor W. Preyer. In addition to these I wish to express my obligations to my colleague, Dr. Postgate, of Trinity College, Cambridge, for kindly reading through my essay on children’s language, and giving me many valuable suggestions; to Lieutenant-General Pitt Rivers, F.R.S., and Mr. H. Balfour, of the Museum, Oxford, for the friendly help they rendered me in studying the drawings of savages, and to Mr. E. Cooke for many valuable facts and suggestions bearing on children’s modes of drawing. Lastly, I would tender my warm acknowledgments to the parents who have sent me notes on their children’s mental development. To some few of these sets of observations, drawn up with admirable care, I feel peculiarly indebted, for without them I should probably not have written my book.

J. S.

HAMPSTEAD, November, 1895.

CONTENTS.

PAGE I. INTRODUCTORY, 1

II. THE AGE OF IMAGINATION, 25 Why we call Children Imaginative, 25 Imaginative Transformation of Objects, 28 Imagination and Play, 35 Free Projection of Fancies, 51 Imagination and Storyland, 54

III. THE DAWN OF REASON, 64 The Process of Thought, 64 The Questioning Age, 75

IV. PRODUCTS OF CHILD-THOUGHT, 91 The Child’s Thoughts about Nature, 91 Psychological Ideas, 109 Theological Ideas, 120

V. THE LITTLE LINGUIST, 133 Prelinguistic Babblings, 133 Transition to Articulate Speech, 138 Beginnings of Linguistic Imitation, 147 Transformation of our Words, 148 Logical Side of Children’s Language, 160 Sentence-building, 170 Getting at our Meanings, 183

VI. SUBJECT TO FEAR, 191 Children’s Sensibility, 191 Startling Effect of Sounds, 194 Fear of Visible Things, 198 The Fear of Animals, 207 Fear of the Dark, 211 Fears and their Palliatives, 219

VII. RAW MATERIAL OF MORALITY, 228 Primitive Egoism, 228 Germs of Altruism, 242 Children’s Lies, 251

VIII. UNDER LAW, 267 The Struggle with Law, 267 On the Side of Law, 277 The Wise Law-giver, 290

IX. THE CHILD AS ARTIST, 298 First Responses to Natural Beauty, 300 Early Attitude Towards Art, 307 Beginnings of Art-production, 317

X. THE YOUNG DRAUGHTSMAN, 331 First Attempts to Draw, 331 First Drawings of the Human Figure, 335 Front and Side View of Human Figure, 356 First Drawings of Animals, 372 Men on Horseback, etc., 377 Résumé of Facts, 382 Explanation of Facts, 385

XI. EXTRACTS FROM A FATHER’S DIARY, 399 First Year, 400 Second Year, 416 Third Year, 436 Fourth Year, 452 Fifth Year, 464 Sixth Year, 480

XII. GEORGE SAND’S CHILDHOOD, 489 The First Years, 489 A Self-evolved Religion, 506

Bibliography, 515 Index, 519

STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD.

I. INTRODUCTORY.

Man has always had the child with him, and one might be sure that since he became gentle and alive to the beauty of things he must have come under the spell of the baby. We have evidence beyond the oft-quoted departure of Hector and other pictures of childish grace in early literature that baby-worship and baby-subjection are not wholly things of modern times. There is a pretty story taken down by Mr. Leland from the lips of an old Indian woman, which relates how Glooskap the hero-god, after conquering all his enemies, rashly tried his hand at managing a certain mighty baby, Wasis by name, and how he got punished for his rashness.[1]

Footnote 1:

Quoted by Miss Shinn. _Overland Monthly._ January, 1894.

Yet there is good reason to suppose that it is only within comparatively recent times that the more subtle charm and the deeper significance of infancy have been discerned. We have come to appreciate babyhood as we have come to appreciate the finer lineaments of nature as a whole. This applies, of course, more especially to the ruder sex. The man has in him much of the boy’s contempt for small things, and he needed ages of education at the hands of the better-informed woman before he could perceive the charm of infantile ways.

One of the first males to do justice to this attractive subject was Rousseau. He made short work with the theological dogma that the child is born morally depraved, and can only be made good by miraculous appliances. His watchword, return to nature, included a reversion to the infant as coming virginal and unspoilt by man’s tinkering from the hands of its Maker. To gain a glimpse of this primordial beauty before it was marred by man’s awkward touch was something, and so Rousseau set men in the way of sitting reverently at the feet of infancy, watching and learning.

For us of to-day, who have learned to go to the pure springs of nature for much of our spiritual refreshment, the child has acquired a high place among the things of beauty. Indeed, the grace of childhood may almost be said to have been discovered by the modern poet. Wordsworth has stooped over his cradle intent on catching, ere they passed, the ‘visionary gleams’ of ‘the glories he hath known’. Blake, R. L. Stevenson, and others, have tried to put into language his day-dreamings, his quaint fancyings. Dickens and Victor Hugo have shown us something of his delicate quivering heart-strings; Swinburne has summed up the divine charm of “children’s ways and wiles”. The page of modern literature is, indeed, a monument of our child-love and our child-admiration.

Nor is it merely as to a pure untarnished nature that we go back admiringly to childhood. The æsthetic charm of the infant which draws us so potently to its side and compels us to watch its words and actions is, like everything else which moves the modern mind, highly complex. Among other sources of this charm we may discern the perfect serenity, the happy ‘insouciance’ of the childish mind. The note of world-complaint in modern life has penetrated into most domains, yet it has not, one would hope, penetrated into the charmed circle of childish experience. Childhood has, no doubt, its sad aspect:—

Poor stumbler on the rocky coast of woe, Tutored by pain each source of pain to know:

neglect and cruelty may bring much misery into the first bright years. Yet the very instinct of childhood to be glad in its self-created world, an instinct which with consummate art Victor Hugo keeps warm and quick in the breast of the half-starved ill-used child Cosette, secures for it a peculiar blessedness. The true nature-child, who has not become _blasé_, is happy, untroubled with the future, knowing nothing of the misery of disillusion. As, with hearts chastened by many experiences, we take a peep over the wall of his fancy-built pleasance, we seem to be taken back to a real golden age. With Amiel, we say: “Le peu de paradis que nous aperçevons encore sur la terre est du à sa présence”. Yet the thought, which the same moment brings, of the flitting of the nursery visions, of the coming storm and stress, adds a pathos to the spectacle, and we feel as Heine felt when he wrote:—

Ich schau’ dich an, und Wehmuth Schleicht mir ins Herz hinein.

Other and strangely unlike feelings mingle with this caressing, half-pitiful admiration. We moderns are given to relieving the strained attitude of reverence and pity by momentary outbursts of humorous merriment. The child, while appealing to our admiration and our pity, makes a large and many-voiced appeal also to our sense of the laughter in things. It is indeed hard to say whether he is most amusing when setting at naught in his quiet, lordly way, our most extolled views, our ideas of what is true and false, of the proper uses of things, and so forth, or when labouring in his perfectly self-conceived fashion to overtake us and be as experienced and as conventional as ourselves. This ever new play of droll feature in childish thought and action forms one of the deepest sources of delight for the modern lover of childhood.

With the growth of a poetic or sentimental interest in childhood there has come a new and different kind of interest. Ours is a scientific age, and science has cast its inquisitive eye on the infant. We want to know what happens in these first all-decisive two or three years of human life, by what steps exactly the wee amorphous thing takes shape and bulk, both physically and mentally. And we can now speak of the beginning of a careful and methodical investigation of child-nature, by men trained in scientific observation. This line of inquiry, started by physicians, as the German Sigismund, in connection with their special professional aims, has been carried on by a number of fathers and others having access to the infant, among whom it may be enough to name Darwin and Preyer. A fuller list of writings on the subject will be given at the end of the volume.

This eagerness to know what the child is like, an eagerness illustrated further by the number of reminiscences of early years recently published, is the outcome of a many-sided interest which it may be worth while to analyse.

The most obvious source of interest in the doings of infancy lies in its primitiveness. At the cradle we are watching the beginnings of things, the first tentative thrustings forward into life. Our modern science is before all things historical and genetic, going back to beginnings so as to understand the later and more complex phases of things as the outcome of these beginnings. The same kind of curiosity which prompts the geologist to get back to the first stages in the building up of the planet, or the biologist to search out the pristine forms of life, is beginning to urge the student of man to discover by a careful study of infancy the way in which human life begins to take its characteristic forms.

The appearance of Darwin’s name among those who have deemed the child worthy of study suggests that the subject is closely connected with natural history. However man in his proud maturity may be related to Nature, it is certain that in his humble inception he is immersed in Nature and saturated with her. As we all know, the lowest races of mankind stand in close proximity to the animal world. The same is true of the infants of civilised races. Their life is outward and visible, forming a part of nature’s spectacle; reason and will, the noble prerogatives of humanity, are scarce discernible; sense, appetite, instinct, these animal functions seem to sum up the first year of human life.

To the evolutionist, moreover, the infant exhibits a still closer kinship to the natural world. In the successive stages of fœtal development he sees the gradual unfolding of human lineaments out of a widely typical animal form. And even after birth he can discern new evidences of this genealogical relation of the “lord” of creation to his inferiors. How significant, for example, is the fact recently established by a medical man, Dr. Louis Robinson, that the new-born infant is able just like the ape to suspend his whole weight by grasping a small horizontal rod.[2]

Footnote 2:

The _Nineteenth Century_ (1891). _Cf._ the somewhat fantastic and not too serious paper by S. S. Buckman on “Babies and Monkeys” in the same journal (1894).

Yet even as nature-object for the biologist the child presents distinctive attributes. Though sharing in animal instinct, he shares in it only to a very small extent. The most striking characteristic of the new-born offspring of man is its unpreparedness for life. Compare with the young of other animals the infant so feeble and incapable. He can neither use his limbs nor see the distance of objects as a new-born chick or calf is able to do. His brain-centres are, we are told, in a pitiable state of undevelopment—and are not even securely encased within their bony covering. Indeed, he resembles for all the world a public building which has to be opened by a given date, and is found when the day arrives to be in a humiliating state of incompleteness.

This fact of the special helplessness of the human offspring at birth, of its long period of dependence on parental or other aids—a period which, probably, tends to grow longer as civilisation advances—is rich in biological and sociological significance. For one thing, it presupposes a specially high development of the protective and fostering instincts in the human parents, and particularly the mother—for if the helpless wee thing were not met by these instincts, what would become of our race? It is probable, too, as Mr. Spencer and others have argued, that the institution by nature of this condition of infantile weakness has reacted on the social affections of the race, helping to develop our pitifulness for all frail and helpless things.

Nor is this all. The existence of the infant, with its large and imperative claims, has been a fact of capital importance in the development of social customs. Ethnological researches show that communities have been much exercised with the problem of infancy, have paid it the homage due to its supreme sacredness, girding it about with a whole group of protective and beneficent customs.[3]

Footnote 3:

See, for example, the works of H. Ploss, _Das Kind in Brauch und Sitte_, and _Das kleine Kind_.

Enough has been said, perhaps, to show the far-reaching significance of babyhood to the modern savant. It is hardly too much to say that it has become one of the most eloquent of nature’s phenomena, telling us at once of our affinity to the animal world, and of the forces by which our race has, little by little, lifted itself to so exalted a position above this world; and so it has happened that not merely to the perennial baby-worshipper, the mother, and not merely to the poet touched with the mystery of far-off things, but to the grave man of science the infant has become a centre of lively interest.

Nevertheless, it is not to the mere naturalist that the babe reveals all its significance. Physical organism as it seems to be more than anything else, hardly more than a vegetative thing indeed, it carries with it the germ of a human consciousness, and this consciousness begins to expand and to form itself into a truly human shape from the very beginning. And here a new source of interest presents itself. It is the human psychologist, the student of those impalpable, unseizable, evanescent phenomena which we call “state of consciousness,” who has a supreme interest, and a scientific property in these first years of a human existence. What is of most account in these crude tentatives at living after the human fashion is the play of mind, the first spontaneous manifestations of recognition, of reasoning expectation, of feelings of sympathy and antipathy, of definite persistent purpose.

Rude, inchoate, vague enough, no doubt, are these first groping movements of a human mind: yet of supreme value to the psychologist just because they are the first. If, reflects the psychologist, he can only get at this baby’s consciousness so as to understand what is passing there, he will be in an infinitely better position to find his way through the intricacies of the adult consciousness. It may be, as we shall see by-and-by, that the baby’s mind is not so perfectly simple, so absolutely primitive as it at first looks. Yet it is the simplest type of human consciousness to which we can have access. The investigator of this consciousness can never take any known sample of the animal mind as his starting point if for no other reason for this, that while possessing many of the elements of the human mind, it presents these in so unlike, so peculiar a pattern.

In this genetic tracing back of the complexities of man’s mental life to their primitive elements in the child’s consciousness, questions of peculiar interest will arise. A problem which though having a venerable antiquity is still full of meaning concerns the precise relation of the higher forms of intelligence and of sentiment to the elementary facts of the individual’s life-experience. Are we to regard all our ideas, even those of God, as woven by the mind out of its experiences, as Locke thought, or have we certain ‘innate ideas’ from the first? Locke thought he could settle this point by observing children. To-day, when the philosophic emphasis is laid not on the date of appearance of the ‘innate’ intuition, but on its originality and spontaneity, this method of interrogating the child’s mind may seem less promising. Yet if of less philosophical importance than was once supposed, it is of great psychological importance. There are certain questions, such as that of how we come to see things at a distance from us, which can be approached most advantageously by a study of infant movements. In like manner I believe the growth of a moral sentiment, of that feeling of reverence for duty to which Kant gave so eloquent an expression, can only be understood by the most painstaking observation of the mental activities of the first years.

There is, however, another, and in a sense a larger, source of psychological interest in studying the processes and development of the infant mind. It was pointed out above that to the evolutional biologist the child exhibits man in his kinship to the lower sentient world. This same evolutional point of view enables the psychologist to connect the unfolding of an infant’s mind with something which has gone before, with the mental history of the race. According to this way of looking at infancy the successive phases of its mental life are a brief _resumé_ of the more important features in the slow upward progress of the species. The periods dominated successively by sense and appetite, by blind wondering and superstitious fancy, and by a calmer observation and a juster reasoning about things, these steps mark the pathway both of the child-mind and of the race-mind.

This being so, the first years of a child, with their imperfect verbal expression, their crude fanciful ideas, their seizures by rage and terror, their absorption in the present moment, acquire a new and antiquarian interest. They mirror for us, in a diminished distorted reflection no doubt, the probable condition of primitive man. As Sir John Lubbock and other anthropologists have told us, the intellectual and moral resemblances between the lowest existing races of mankind and children are numerous and close. They will be illustrated again and again in the following studies.