Part 34

I may begin my sketch of the early history of this boy by remarking that he appears to have been a normal and satisfactory specimen of his class,—healthy, good-natured, and given to that infantile way of relieving the pressure of his animal spirits which is, I believe, known as crowing. Not believing in the classifications of temperament adopted by the physiologists of a past age, the father forbears from describing his child’s. For my lady readers I may add that he seems, at least by his father’s account, to have been a good-sized, chubby little fellow, fair and rosy in tint, with bright blue eyes, and a limited crop of golden hair of an exceptionally rich, I don’t know how many carat gold, hue. I shall speak of him under his initial, C.

_First Year._

The early pages of the record do not, one must confess, yield any very striking observations. This is, no doubt, due to the circumstance that the observer, not being a naturalist, was not specially interested in the dim mindless life of the first weeks. For the first few days Master C. appears to have been content to vegetate like other babies of a similar age. Although a bonny boy, he began life in the usual way—with a good cry; though we now know, on scientific authority, that this, being a purely reflex act, has not the deep significance which certain pessimistic philosophers have attributed to it. Science would probably explain in a similar way a number of odd facial movements which this baby went through on the second day of his earthly career, and which, the father characteristically remarks, were highly suggestive of a cynical contempt for his new surroundings.

Yet, though content in this early stage to do little but perform the vegetal functions of life, the infant comes endowed with a nervous system and organs of sense, and these are very soon brought into active play. According to this record, the sense of touch is the first to manifest itself.[286] Even when only two hours old, at a period of life when there is certainly no sound for the ear and possibly no light for the eye, C. immediately clasped the parental finger which was brought into the hollow of its tiny hand. The functional activity of touch was observed still more plainly on the second day, when the child was seen to carry out awkwardly enough what looked like exploring movements of the hands over his mouth and face. This early development in the child of the tactual sense agrees, says the biographer, with what Aristotle long since taught respecting the fundamental character of this sense, an idea to which the modern doctrine of evolution has given a new significance.

Footnote 286:

Taste, as involved in the necessary act of taking nourishment, is probably at first hardly differentiated from touch.

A distinct step is taken during the first four days towards acquiring knowledge of things through a progressive use of the eyes and hands. C.’s father noticed on the second day that a good deal of ocular movement was forthcoming. Much of this was quite irregular, each eye following its own path. Sometimes, however, the eyes moved harmoniously or symmetrically now to this side, now to that, and now and again seemed to converge and fix themselves on some near object in front of them. Sufficiently loud sounds increased these ocular movements.

On the third day the father, when chuckling and calling to the child at a short distance, fondly supposed that his offspring showed appreciation of these attentions by regarding him with a sweet expression and something like the play of a smile about the lips and eyelids. But it is possible that this apparent amiability was nothing but a purely animal satisfaction after a good meal. As to _seeing_ his father’s face at that early age, there is room for serious doubt. Preyer found that long before the close of the first day his child wore a different expression when his face, turned towards the window, was suddenly deprived of light by the intervention of the professor’s hand. If the child is thus sensible to the pleasure of light it is, of course, conceivable that C.’s eyes, happening in their aimless wanderings to be brought together opposite the bright patch of the father’s face, might maintain that attitude under the stimulus of the pleasure. The father argues in favour of this view by quoting the fact that C.’s sister was observed on the fourth day to have her eyes arrested by a light or the father’s face if brought pretty near the child; yet such blank staring at mere brightness is, of course, a long way off from distinct vision of an object.

On the fourth day, continues the sanguine father, the child showed a distinct advance in the use of the hands. Having clasped his sire’s finger he now moved it in what looked like an abortive attempt to carry it to his mouth. There follow some remarks on the impulse of infants to carry objects to their mouths, in which again there seems an approach to frivolity in the conjecture that the human animal previous to education is all-devouring. It is to be noted, however, that these early movements are probably quite accidental. As we shall see, it is some weeks before the child learns to carry objects to his mouth. As to the connexion between this movement and infantile greed our observer is not so poor a psychologist as not to see that it may be due to the circumstance that the lips and the tip of the tongue form one of the most delicate parts of the _tactual_ organ. It is not improbable that in the evolution of man before the tactual sensibility of the hand was developed these parts were chiefly employed as a tactual apparatus in distinguishing and rejecting what is hard, gritty and so forth in food. However this be, it is probable that, as Stanley Hall has suggested, an infant may get a kind of “æsthetic” pleasure by bringing objects into contact with the lips and the gums.

At this period, the diary remarks, the child was very cross for some weeks and not a good subject for observation. This new difficulty, added to that of overcoming natural scruples in his guardians, appears to have baffled the observer for a time, for the next observations recorded take up the thread of the child’s history at the sixth week.

About this date, the father notes, the power of directing the eyes had greatly improved. The child could now converge his eyes comfortably and without going through a number of unpleasant squinting-like failures on a near object. The range of sight had greatly increased, so that the boy’s universe, instead of consisting merely of a tiny circle of near objects, as his mother’s face held close to him, began to embrace distant objects, as the clock, the window, and so forth. He was observed, too, to carry out more precise movements of the head and eyes in correspondence with the direction of sounds. This ability to look towards the direction of a sound is an important attainment as implying that the infant mind has now come to learn that things may exist when not actually seen.

This new command of the visual apparatus led to a marked increase in observation. The boy may indeed be said to have begun about this date something like a serious scrutiny of objects. Like other children he was greatly attracted by brightly coloured objects. When just seven weeks old he acquired a fondness for a cheap showy card with crudely brilliant colouring and gilded border. When carried to the place where it hung, above the glass over the fire-place, he would look up to it and greet his first-love in the world of art with a pretty smile. By the ninth or tenth week, the father adds, he began to notice the pattern of the wall-paper and the like.

In these growing intervals of observation between the discharge of the vegetal functions of feeding and sleeping, C. was observed to examine not only any foreign object, such as his mamma’s dress, which happened to be within sight, but also the visible parts of his own organism. In the ninth week of his existence he was first surprised in the act of surveying his own hands. Why he should at this particular moment have woke up to the existence of objects which had all along lain within easy reach of the eye, is a question which has evidently greatly exercised the father’s ingenuity. He hints, but plainly in a half-hearted, sceptical way, at a possible dim recognition by the little contemplator of the fact that these objects belong to himself, forming, indeed, the outlying portion of the Ego. He also asks (and here he seems to grow positively frivolous) whether the child is taking after the somewhat extravagant ways of his mother and beginning to dote on the exquisite modelling of his tiny members.

Psychologists are now agreed that our knowledge of the properties of material objects is largely obtained by what they call _active_ touch, that is, by moving the hands over objects and exploring the space around them. This is borne out by the observations made on C. at this period of his existence. While viewing things about him he actively manipulated them. The organs of sight and touch worked indeed in the closest connexion. Thus our little visitor was no mere passive spectator of his new habitat; he actively took possession of his surroundings: like the Roman general, he at once saw and conquered. From the eighth to the tenth week his manual performances greatly improved in quality. He was rapidly learning to carry the organ of touch to the point of which his eye told him. An account of his progress in reaching objects may however be postponed till we come to speak of the development of his active powers.

The growing habit of looking at, reaching out to, and manually investigating objects, soon leads to the accumulation of a store of materials for the construction of those complex mental products which we call perceptions. And often-repeated perceptions, when they become more clearly distinguished, supply the basis of definite acts of recognition. The first object that is clearly recognised through a special act of attention is, of course, the face of the mother. In the case of C., the father’s face was apparently recognised about the eighth week—at least, the youngster first greeted his parent with a smile about this time—an event, I need hardly say, which is recorded in very large and easily legible handwriting. The occurrence gives rise to a number of odd reflexions in the parental mind. The observer’s belief in the necessary co-operation of sight and touch in the early knowledge of material objects leads him to remark that C.’s manual experience of his face, and more particularly of the bearded chin, has been extensive—an experience which, he adds, has left its recollection in his own mind, too, in the shape of a certain soreness. He then goes on to consider the meaning of the smile. “I cannot,” he writes, “be of any interest to him as a psychological student of his ways. No, it must be in the light of a bearded plaything that he regards my face.” Further observation bears out this argument by going to show that the recognition was not individual but specific: that it was simply a recognition of one of a class of bearded people; for when a perfect stranger also endowed with the entertaining appendage presented himself, C. wounded his father’s heart by smiling at him in exactly the same way. Here the diary goes off into some abstruse speculations about the first mental images being what Mr. Galton calls generic images—speculations into which we need not follow the writer. As we shall see, the father takes up the subject of childish generalisation more fully later on. The power of recognising objects appeared to undergo rapid development towards the end of the fourth month. The father remarks that the child would about this time recognise him in a somewhat dark room at a distance of three or four yards.[287]

Footnote 287:

The clear recognition of individual objects is said to show itself in average cases from about the sixth month (Tracy, _op. cit._, pp. 15-16).

The germ of true imagination, of the formation of what Höffding calls a free or detached image of something not seen at the moment, appeared about the same time. The moment when the baby’s mind first passes on from the sight of his bottle to a foregrasping or imagination of the blisses of prehension and deglutition—a moment which appears to have been reached by C. in his tenth week—marks an epoch in his existence. He not only perceives what is actually present to his senses, he pictures or represents what is absent. This is the moment at which, to quote from the parent’s somewhat high-flown observations on this event, “mind rises above the limitations of the actual, and begins to shape for itself an ideal world of possibilities”.

This rise of the ideal to take the place of the real appeared in other ways too. Thus when just eighteen weeks old the child had been lying on his nurse’s lap and gazing on some pictures on the wall of which he was getting fond. The nurse happening to turn round suddenly put an end to his happiness. Still the child was not to be done, but immediately began twisting his head back in order to bring the pictures once more into his field of view. Here we have an illustration of a mental image appearing immediately after a perception, a rude form of what psychologists are now getting to call a primary memory-image.

The expression of the _gourmet’s_ delight at the sight of the bottle (tenth week) involves a simple process of association. Between the ages of five and six months the child’s progress in building up associations was very marked. Thus he would turn from a reflexion of the fire on the glass of a picture to the fire itself, and a little later would look towards a particular picture, Cherry Ripe, when the name was uttered. Further, not only had he now learnt to connect the sight of the bottle with the joys of a repast, but on seeing the basin in which his food is prepared he would glance towards the cupboard where the bottle is kept.

The diary contains but few observations on the growth of the power of understanding things and reasoning about them during the first year. One of the most interesting of these relates to the understanding of reflexions, shadows, etc. We know that these things played a considerable part in the development of the first racial ideas of the supernatural, and we might expect to see them producing an impression on the child’s mind. C. when he first began to notice reflexions of the fire and other objects in a mirror showed considerable marks of surprise. What quaint fancies he may have had respecting this odd doubling of things we cannot of course say. What is certain is that he distinctly connected the reflexion with the original, as is shown by the fact already mentioned, his turning from the first to the second. By the end of the sixth month the marks of surprise had visibly lessened, so that the child was apparently getting used to the miracle, even though he could not as yet be said to understand it. It is worth notice that though the experiment of showing him his own reflexion was repeated again and again he remained apparently quite indifferent to the image. Perhaps, suggests the father, he did not as yet know himself as visible object sufficiently to recognise nature’s portrait of him in the glass.

The above may perhaps serve as a sample of the observations made on the intellectual development of this privileged child during the first year of his earthly existence. I will now pass on to quote a remark or two on his emotional development. I may add that the record of this phase of the boy’s early mental life is certainly the most curious part of the document, containing many odd speculations on the course of primitive human history.

The earliest manifestations of the life of feeling are the elemental forms of pain and pleasure, crying and incipient laughing in the form of the smile.[288] In C.’s case, as in others, crying of the genuine miserable kind preceded smiling by a considerable interval. The child, remarks our observer, seems to need to learn to smile, whereas his crying apparatus is in good working order from the first.

Footnote 288:

With the smile there ought perhaps to be taken the infantile crow.

The growth of the smile is a curious chapter in child-psychology, and has been carefully worked out by Preyer. The observations on C. under this head are incomplete. The father thought he detected an attempt at a smile on the third day, when the child was lying replete with food, in answer to certain chuckling sounds with which he sought to amuse him. The movements constituting this quasi-smile are said to have been the following: a drawing in of the under lip; a drawing inwards and backwards of the corners of the mouth: increase of oblique line from the corner of the mouth upwards; and a furrowing or ridging of the eyelids. It is probable, however, that this was not a true smile, _i.e._, an expression of pleasure. He remarks, moreover, that in the case of the child’s sister the first approach to a smile was not observed before the tenth day, this, too, by-the-bye, in that state of blissful complaisance which follows a good meal. It may be added that in the case of the brother, too, the smile seems to have grown noticeably bright and significant about the same time (eighth to tenth week). At this stage the boy expressed his pleasure at seeing his father’s face not only by a “bright” smile, but by certain cooing sounds. At the same date a playful touch on the child’s cheek was sufficient to provoke a smile.[289]

Footnote 289:

Darwin puts the first true smile on the forty-fifth day. The first _quasi_-smiles are probably quite mechanical and destitute of meaning.

Very early in the infant’s course the germs of some of our most characteristic human feelings begin to appear. One of the earliest is anger, which though common to man and many of the higher animals, takes on a peculiar form in his case. Angry revolt against the order of things showed itself early in C.’s case as in that of his sister, the occasion being in each instance a momentary difficulty in seizing the means of appeasing appetite. It is of course difficult to say at what moment the mere vexation of disappointment passes into true wrath, but in this boy’s case the father is compelled to admit that the ugly emotion displayed itself distinctly by the third week.

To detect the first clear signs of a _humane_ feeling, of kindliness and sympathy, is still more difficult. Reference has already been made to the signs of pleasure, the smile and the cooing sounds, which C. manifested at the sight of his father’s face. About the same time, _viz._, the ninth and tenth weeks, he began to show himself particularly responsive to soothing sounds. The impulse to imitate soft low sounds was of great service in checking his misery. When utterly broken by grief he would often pull himself together if appealed to by the right soothing sound and join in a short plaintive duet. Such responses like the early imitative smile may, it is true, be nothing but a mechanical imitation, destitute of any emotive significance. It is probable, however, that the first crude form of fellow-feeling, of the impulse to accept and to give sympathy in joy and grief, takes its rise in such simple imitative movements. The first advance to signs of a truer fellow-feeling was made when the child was six and a half months old. His father pretended to cry. Thereupon C. bent his head down so that his chin touched his breast and began to paw his father’s face, very much after the manner of a dog in a fit of tenderness. Oddly enough, adds the chronicler, there was no trace of sadness in the child’s face. The experiment was repeated and always with a like result. A smile on the termination of the crying completed the curious little play. Who would venture to interpret that falling of the head and that caressing movement of the hand? The father saw here something of a divine tenderness; and I am not disposed to question his interpretation.

Emotion soon begins to manifest itself, too, in connexion with the child’s peerings into his new world. As the little brain grows stronger and the organs of sense come under better management, the child spends more time in examining things, and this examination is accompanied by a profound wonder. C. would completely lose himself in marvelling at some new mystery, as the face of a clock, to which he appeared to talk as to something alive, or the play of the sunlight on the wall of his room; and the closeness of his attention was indicated by the occurrence of a huge sigh when the strain was over.

The directions of this early childish attention are, as in the example of the clock and the sunlight, towards what has some attraction of brightness, or other stimulating quality. The fascination of bright colour for C. has already been referred to. Sounds, too, very soon began to capture his attention and hold it spellbound. Thus it is recorded that in the tenth week the sound produced by striking a wine-glass excited an agreeable wonder. The sound of the piano, by-the-bye, made him cry the first time he heard it, presumably because it was strange and disconcertingly voluminous. But he soon got to like it, and his mother remarked that when his father played the child seemed to grow heavier in her lap, as if all his muscles were relaxed in a delicious self-abandonment.[290]

Footnote 290:

See above, p. 195 and p. 308.

Certain things became favourite objects of this quasi-æsthetic contemplation. When six weeks old the child got into the way of taking special note of one or two rather showy coloured pictures on the wall. In these it seemed to be partly the brightness of colouring in the picture or the frame, partly the reflexions of objects in the glass covering, which attracted him. Other things which appeared to give him repeated and endless enjoyment of a quiet sort were the play of sunlight and of shadow on the walls of his room, the reflexion of the shooting fire-flame sent back by the window-pane or the glass covering of a picture, the swaying of trees, and the like. He soon got to know the locality of some of his favourite works of art, and to look out expectantly, when taken into the right room, for his daily show.

Yet the new does not always awaken this pleasurable admiration. The child’s organism soon begins to adapt itself to what is customary, and sudden departures from the usual order of things come as a shock, jar the nerves, and produce the first crude form of fear. C.’s sensitiveness to the disturbing effect of new and loud sounds has been referred to in speaking of the first impression of the piano. A strong wind making uproar in the trees quite upset him when he was about five months old, though he soon got over his dislike and would laugh at the wind even when it blew cold. In like manner he appeared to be much put out by the voices of strangers, especially when these were loud. A similar effect of shock showed itself when something in the familiar scene was suddenly transmuted. For example, when just twelve weeks old, he was quite upset by his mother donning a red jacket in place of the usual flower-spotted dress. He was just proceeding to take his breakfast when he noticed the change, at the discovery of which all thoughts of feasting deserted him, his lips quivered, and he only became reassured of his whereabouts after taking a good look at his mother’s face.