Part 12
To judge from a story for the truth of which I will not vouch children will turn the devil to the same useful account. A little girl was observed to write a letter and to bury it in the ground. The contents ran something like this: "Dear Devil, please come and take aunt—soon, I cannot stand her much longer". The burying is significant of the devil’s dwelling-place.
While this way of recognising God as the busy artificer is common, it is not universal. The child’s deity, like the man’s (as Feuerbach showed), is a projection of himself, and as there are lazy children, so there is a child’s God who is a luxurious person sitting in a lovely arm-chair all day, and at most putting out from heaven the moon and stars at night.
This admiration of God’s creative power is naturally accompanied by that of his skill. A little boy once said to his mother he would like to go to heaven to see Jesus. Asked why, he replied: “Oh! he’s a great conjurer”. The child had shortly before seen some human conjuring and used this experience in a thoroughly childish fashion by envisaging in a new light the New Testament miracle-worker.
The idea of God’s omniscience seems to come naturally to children. They are in the way of looking up to older folks as possessing boundless information. C.’s belief in the all-knowingness of the preacher, and his sister’s belief in the all-knowingness of the policeman, show how readily the child-mind falls in with the notion.
On the other hand I have heard of the dogma of God’s infinite knowledge provoking a sceptical attitude in the child-mind. This seems to be suggested in a rather rude remark of a boy of four, bored by the long Sunday discourse of his mother: “Mother, does God know when you are going to stop?” Our astute little zoologist, when five years and seven months old, in a talk with his mother, impiously sought to tone down the doctrine of omniscience in this way: “I know a ’ickle more than Kitty, and you know a ’ickle more than me; and God knows a ’ickle more than you, I s’pose; then he can’t know so very much after all”.
Another of the divine attributes does undoubtedly shock the childish intelligence: I mean God’s omnipresence. It seems, indeed, amazing that the so-called instructor of the child should talk to him almost in the same breath about God’s inhabiting heaven, and about his being everywhere present. Here, I think, we see most plainly the superiority of the child’s mind to the adult’s, in that it does not let contradictory ideas lie peacefully side by side, but makes them face one another. To the child, as we have seen, God lives in the sky, though he is quite capable of coming down to earth when he wishes or when he is politely asked to do so. Hence he rejects the idea of a diffused ubiquitous existence. The idea which is apt to be introduced early as a moral instrument, that God can always see the child, is especially resented by that small, sensitive, proud creature, to whom the ever-following eyes of the portrait on the wall seem a persecution. Miss Shinn, a careful American observer of children, has written strongly, yet not too strongly, on the repugnance of the child-mind to this idea of an ever-spying eye.[58] My observations fully confirm her conclusions here. Miss Shinn speaks of a little girl, who, on learning that she was under this constant surveillance, declared that she “would _not_ be so tagged”. A little English boy of three, on being informed by his older sister that God can see and watch us while we cannot see him, thought awhile, and then in an apologetic tone said: “I’m very sorry, dear, I can’t (b)elieve you”. What the sister, aged fifteen, thought of this is not recorded. An American boy of five, learning that God was in the room and could see even if the shutters were closed, said: “I know, it’s jugglery”.
Footnote 58:
_Overland Monthly_, Jan., 1894, p. 12.
When the idea is accepted odd devices are excogitated for the purpose of making it intelligible. Thus one child thought of God as a very small person who could easily pass through the keyhole. The idea of God’s huge framework illustrated above is probably the result of an attempt to figure the conception of omnipresence. Curious conclusions too are sometimes drawn from the supposition. Thus a little girl of three years and nine months one day said to her mother in the abrupt childish manner: “Mr. C. (a gentleman she had known who had just died) is in this room”. Her mother, naturally a good deal startled, answered: “Oh, no!” Whereupon the child resumed: “Yes, he is. You told me he is with God, and you told me God was everywhere, so as Mr. C. is with God he must be in this room.” With such trenchant logic does the child’s intelligence cut through the tangle of incongruous ideas which we try to pass off as methodical instruction.
It might easily be supposed that the child’s readiness to pray to God is inconsistent with what has just been said. Yet I think there is no real inconsistency. Children’s idea of prayer is, probably, that of sending a message to some one at a distance. The epistolary manner noticeable in many prayers seems to illustrate this.[59] The mysterious whispering is, I suspect, supposed in some inscrutable fashion known only to the child to transmit itself to the divine ear.
Footnote 59:
_Cf._ the story of writing a letter to the devil given above.
Of the child’s belief in God’s goodness it is needless to say much. For these little worshippers he is emphatically the friend in need who can help them out of their difficulties in a hundred ways. Our small zoologist thanked God for making “the sea, the holes with crabs in them, and the trees, the fields, and the flowers,” and regretted that he did not follow up the making of the animals we eat by doing the cooking also. As their prayers show he is ever ready to make nice presents, from a fine day to a toy-gun, and will do them any kindness if only they ask prettily. Happy the reign of this untroubled optimism. For many children, alas, it is all too short, the colour of their life making them lose faith in all kindness, and think of God as cross and even as cruel.
One of the real difficulties of theology for the child’s intelligence is the doctrine of God’s eternity. Puzzled at first with the fact of his own beginning, he comes soon to be troubled with the idea of God’s having had no beginning. C. showed a common trend of childish thought in asking what God was like in his younger days. The question, “Who made God?” seems to be one to which all inquiring young minds are led at a certain stage of child-thought. The metaphysical impulse of the child to follow back the chain of events _ad infinitum_ finds the ever-existent unchanging God very much in the way. He wants to get behind this “always was” of God’s existence, just as at an earlier stage of his development he wanted to get behind the barrier of the blue hills. This is quaintly illustrated in the reasoning of a child observed by M. Egger. Having learnt from his mother that before the world there was only God the Creator, he asked: “And before God?” The mother having replied, “Nothing,” he at once interpreted her answer by saying: “No; there must have been the place (_i.e._, the empty space) where God is”. So determined is the little mind to get back to the ‘before,’ and to find something, if only a prepared place.
Other mysteries of which the child comes to hear find their characteristic solution in the busy little brain. A friend tells me that when a child he was much puzzled by the doctrine of the Trinity. He happened to be an only child, and so he was led to put a meaning into it by assimilating it to the family group, in which the Holy Ghost became the mother.
I have tried to show that children seek to bring meaning, and a consistent meaning, into the jumble of communications about the unseen world to which they are apt to be treated. I agree with Miss Shinn that children about three and four are not disposed to theologise, and are for the most part simply confused by the accounts of God which they receive. Many of the less bright of these small minds may remain untroubled by the incongruities lurking in the mixture of ideas, half mythological or poetical, half theological, which is thus introduced. Such children are no worse than many adults, who have a wonderful power of entertaining contradictory ideas by keeping them safely apart in separate chambers of their brain. The intelligent thoughtful child on the other hand tries at least to reconcile and to combine in an intelligible whole. His mind has not, like that of so many adults, become habituated to the water-tight compartment arrangement, in which there is no possibility of a leakage of ideas from one group into another. Hence his puzzlings, his questionings, his brave attempts to reduce the chaos to order. I think it is about time to ask whether parents are doing wisely in thus adding to the perplexing problems of early days.
V. THE LITTLE LINGUIST.
_Prelinguistic Babblings._
No part of the life of a child appeals to us more powerfully perhaps than the first use of our language. The small person’s first efforts in linguistics win us by a certain graciousness, by the friendly impulse they disclose to get mentally near us, to enter into the full fruition of human intercourse. The difficulties, too, which we manage to lay upon the young learner of our tongue, and the way in which he grapples with these, lend a peculiar interest, half pathetic, half humorous, to this field of infantile activity. To the scientific observer of infancy, moreover, the noting of the stages in the acquisition of speech is of the first importance. Language is sound moulded into definite forms and so made vehicular of ideas; and we may best watch the unfoldings of childish thought by attending to the way in which the word-sculptor takes the plastic sound-material and works it into its picturesque variety of shapes.
A special biological and anthropological interest attaches to the child’s first essays in the use of words. Language is that which most obviously marks off human from animal intelligence. One of the most interesting problems in the science of man’s origin and early development is how he first acquired the power of using language-signs. If we proceed on the biological principle that the development of the individual represents in its main stages that of the race, we may expect to find through the study of children’s use of language hints as to how our race came by the invaluable endowment. How far it is reasonable to expect from a study of nursery linguistics a complete explanation of the process by which man became speechful, _homo articulans_, will appear later on. But an examination of these linguistics ought surely to be of some suggestive value here.
While there is this peculiar scientific interest in the first manifestations of the speech-faculty in the child, they are of a kind to lend themselves particularly well to a methodic and exact observation. Articulate sounds are sensible objects having well-defined characters which may be accurately noted and described where the requisite fineness of ear and quickness of perception are present. The difficulties are no doubt great here: but they are precisely the difficulties to sharpen the appetite of the true naturalist. Hence we need not wonder that early articulation fills a large place in the naturalist’s observation of infant life. Preyer, for example, devotes one of the three sections of his well-known monograph to this subject, and gives us a careful and elaborate account of the progress of articulation and of speech up to the end of the period dealt with (first three years).
Since these studies are especially concerned with the characteristics of the child after language has been acquired I shall not enter into the history of his rudimentary speech at any great length. At the same time, since language is a realm of activity in which the child betrays valuable characteristics long after the third year, it deserves a special study in this volume.
As everybody knows, long before the child begins to speak in the conventional sense he produces sounds. These are at first cries and wanting in the definiteness of true articulate sounds. Such cries are expressive, that is, utterances of changing conditions of feeling, pain and pleasure, and are also instinctive, springing out of certain congenital nervous arrangements by which feeling acts upon the muscular organs. This crying gradually differentiates itself into a rich variety of expressions for hunger, cold, pain, joy and so forth, of which it is safe to say that the majority of nurses and mothers have at best but a very imperfect knowledge.
These cries disclose from the first a germ of articulate sound, _viz._, according to Preyer an approach to the vowel sounds _u_ (oo) and _ä_ (Engl. _a_ in ‘made’). This articulate element becomes better defined and more varied in the later cries, and serves in part to differentiate them one from the other. Thus a difference of shade in the _a_ (in ‘ah’), difficult to describe, has been observed to mark off the cry of pleasure and of pain. Along with this articulate sounds begin to appear in periods of happy contentment under the form of infantile babbling or ‘la-la-ing’. Thus the child will bring out a string of _a_ and other vowel sounds. In this baby-twittering the several vowel sounds of our tongue become better distinguishable, and are strung together in queer ways, as _ai-ā-au-â_. An attempt is made by Preyer and others to give the precise order of the appearance of the several vowel sounds. It is hardly to be expected that observers would agree upon a matter so difficult to seize and to describe; and this is what we find.[60] After allowing, however, for differences in the reading off, it seems probable that there is a considerable diversity in the order of development in the case of different children. This applies still more to the appearance of the consonantal sounds which long before the end of the sixth month become combined with the vowels into syllabic sounds, as _pa_, _ma_, _mam_, and so forth. Thus, though the labials _b_, _p_, _m_, seem to come first in most cases, they may be accompanied, if not preceded, by others, as the back open sound _ch_ (in Scotch ‘loch’), or (according to Preyer and others) by the corresponding voiced sound, the hard _g_. Similarly, sounds as _l_ and _r_, which commonly appear late, are said in some instances to occur quite early.[61] Attempts have been made to show that the order of sounds here corresponds with that of advancing physiological difficulty or amount of muscular effort involved. Yet apart from the fact just touched on, that the order is not uniform, it is very questionable whether the more common order obeys any such simple physiological law.
Footnote 60:
See Preyer, _op. cit._, Cap. 20; _cf._ the account given by De la Calle, Perez, _First Three Years_, p. 248. Stanley Hall observes that the first vocalisation of the infant could hardly be classified even with the help of Bell’s phonic notation or with a phonograph (_Pedagogical Seminary_, i., p. 132).
Footnote 61:
Preyer’s boy first used consonants in the combinations _tahu_, _gö_, (_rööö_ = the French _eu_), _op. cit._, p. 366; _cf._ Cap. 21.
This primordial babbling is wonderfully rich and varied. According to Preyer it contains most, if not all the sounds which are afterwards used in speaking, and among these some which cause much difficulty later on. It is thus a wondrous contrivance of nature by which the child is made to rehearse months beforehand for the difficult performances of articulate speech. It is a preliminary trying of the vocal instrument throughout the whole of its register.
Though nurses are apt to fancy that in this pretty babbling the infant is talking to itself there is no reason to think that it amounts even to a rudiment of true speech. To speak is to use a sound intentionally as the sign of an idea. The babbling baby of five months cannot be supposed to be connecting all these stray sounds with ideas, if indeed it can be said to have as yet any definite ideas. The only signification which this primitive articulation can have is emotional. Undoubtedly, as we have seen, it grows out of expressive cries. Even the happy bubblings over of vowel sounds as the child lies on his back and ‘crows,’ may be said to be expressive of his happiness like the movements of arms and legs which accompany it. Yet it would be an exaggeration to suppose that the elaborate phonation is merely expressive, that all the manifold and subtle changes of sound are due to obscure variations of feeling.
The true explanation seems to be that the appearance of this infantile babbling, just like that of the movements of the limbs which accompany it, is the result of changes in the nervous system. As the centres of vocalisation get developed, motor impulses begin to play on the muscles of throat, larynx, and, later on, lips, tongue, etc., and in this way a larger and larger variety of sound and sound-combination is produced. Such phonation is commonly described as impulsive. It is instinctive, that is to say, unlearnt, and due to congenital nervous connexions; and at best it can only be said to express in its totality a mood or relatively permanent state of feeling.
As this impulsive articulation develops it becomes complicated by a distinctly intentional element. The child hears the sounds he produces and falls in love with them. From this moment he begins to go on babbling for the pleasure it brings. We see the germ of such a pleasure-seeking babbling in the protracted iterations of the same sound. The first reduplications and serial iterations, _a-a_, _ma-ma_, etc., may be due to physiological inertia, the mere tendency to move along any track that happens to be struck, the very same tendency which makes a prosy speaker go on repeating himself. At the same time there is without doubt in these infantile iterations a rudiment of self-imitation. That is to say, the child having produced a sound, as _na_ or _am_, impulsively proceeds to repeat the performance in order to obtain a renewal of the sound-effect. This renewed impulse may be supposed further to bring with it a germ of the pleasure of iteration of sound, or assonance. The addition of a simple rhythmic character to the series of sounds is a further indication of its pleasure-seeking character. Indeed we have in this infantile ‘la-la-ing’ more a rudiment of song and music than of articulate speech. The rude vocal music of savages consists of a similar rhythmic threading of meaningless sounds in which as in this infantile song changes of feeling reflect themselves. We may best describe this infantile babbling then as voice-play and as rude spontaneous singing, the utterance of a mood, indulged in for the sake of its own delight, and serving by a happy arrangement of nature as a preliminary practice in the production of articulate or linguistic sounds.
_Transition to Articulate Speech._
Let us now seek to understand how this undesigned trying of the articulate instrument passes into true significant articulation, how this speech-protoplasm develops into the organism that we call language. And here the question at once arises: Does the child tend to utilise the sounds thus acquired as signs apart from the influence of education, that is to say, of the articulate sounds produced by others and impressed as signs upon his attention? The question is not easy to answer owing to the early development of the imitative impulse and to the constant and all-pervading influence of education in the nursery. Yet I will offer a tentative answer.
That a child when he has reached a certain stage of intelligence would be able to make use of signs quite apart from example and education is what one might expect. Any one who has noticed how a young cat, completely isolated from the influence of example, will spontaneously hit on the gesture of touching the arm of a person sitting at a meal by way of asking to be fed, cannot be surprised that children should prove themselves capable of inventing signs. We know, too, that deaf-mutes will, self-prompted, develop among themselves an elaborate system of gesture-signs, and further express their feelings and desires by sounds, which though not heard by themselves may be understood by others and so serve as effective signs of their needs and wishes. The normal child, too, in spite of the powerful influences which go to make him adopt as signs the articulate sounds employed by others, shows a germ of unprompted and original sign-making. The earliest of such unlearnt signs are simple gesture-movements, such as stretching out the arms when the child desires to be taken by the nurse.[62] Nobody has suggested that these are learnt by imitation. The same is true of other familiar gesture-movements, which appear towards the end of the first year or later, as pulling your dress just as a dog does, when the child wants you to go with him, touching the chair when he wants you to sit down, or (as Darwin’s child did when just over a year) taking a bit of paper and pointing to the fire by way of signifying his wish to see the paper burnt. The gesture of pointing, though no doubt commonly aided by example, is probably capable of being reached instinctively as an outgrowth from the grasping movement.
Footnote 62:
The nature of gesture, its relation to language proper, and its prevalence in infancy, among imbecile children, deaf-mutes, etc., are discussed by Romanes, _Mental Evolution in Man_, chap. vi.
These gesture-signs, I find, play a larger part in the case of children who are backward in talking, and so are nearer the condition of the deaf-mute. Thus a lady in sending me notes on her three children remarks that the one who was particularly backward in his speech made a free use of gesture-signs. When sixteen months old he had certain _general_ signs of this sort, using a sniff as a sign of flower, and a mimic kiss as a sign of living things, _i.e._, all sorts of animals.[63]
Footnote 63:
A charming example of pantomimic gesture on the part of a little girl in describing to her father her first bath in the sea is given by Romanes, _op. cit._, p. 220.
Just as movements may thus be used instinctively, that is, without aid from others’ example, both as expressing simple feelings and desires, and also, as in the case just mentioned, as indicating ideas, so spontaneously formed sounds may be used as signs. As pointed out above the first self-prompted articulation is closely connected with feeling, and we find that in the second half-year when the preliminary practice has been gone through certain sounds take on a distinctly expressive function. Thus one little boy when eight months old habitually used the sound ‘ma-ma’ when miserable, and ‘da-da’ when pleased. Among these instinctive expressive sounds one of the most important is that indicative of hunger. I find again and again that a special sound is marked off as a mode of expression or sign of this craving. This fact will be referred to again presently.