Part 36

It must be confessed that our diary does not give us much that is startling in the way of original generalisation. So far as we can judge, C. was a steady-going baby, not given to wanton caprices. Yet though not a genius he had his moments of invention. One of the earliest illustrations of a free working of the generalising impulse was the extension of the sound “ŏt” (hot). At first he employed this sign in the conventional manner to indicate that his milk or other viand was disagreeably warm. When, however, he was seventeen and a half months old he struck out an original extension of meaning. He happened to have placed before him cold milk. On tasting this he at once exclaimed, “Ot!” It looks as though the sound now meant something unpleasant to taste, though, as we shall see presently, the boy had another sound (“kaka”) for expressing this idea.[300] But “ot” was being extended in another way by a process of association. This was illustrated a month later, when the boy pointed to an engraving of Guido’s _Aurora_, and exclaimed, “Ot!” His dull parents could not at first comprehend this bold metaphoric use of language, until they bethought them that the clouds on which the aeronauts are sailing are a good deal like a volume of ascending steam.

Footnote 300:

It has been found that the sensations of hot and cold are readily confused even by adults.

The sounds “kĕ,” “kă,” and “kăkă” were employed by C. from about the same age (seventeen and a half months) to express what is actually known or simply suspected to be disagreeable to taste or smell, such as a pipe held near him, a glass of beer, a vinegar bottle, and so forth. He had smelt the beer, and learnt its disagreeable odour, and in pronouncing the untried vinegar “kăkă” he was really carrying out a form of reasoning of a simple kind. This sound came to represent a much higher effort of abstraction some weeks later, when it was applied to things so unlike in themselves as milk spilt on the cloth, crumbs on the floor, soiled hands, etc. The idea here seized was plainly that of something soiled or dirty. But this half-æsthetic, half-ethical idea was reached largely by the help of others, more particularly perhaps his sister, who, as elder sisters are wont to do, supplemented the parental discipline by a vigorous inculcation of the well-recognised proprieties.

Another extension of the range of application of names used by others occurred about the same time (end of twentieth month). He employed the sound ‘ga’ (glass) so as to include a plated drinking cup, which of course others always called ‘cup’. This was curious as showing at this stage the superior interest of use (that of drinking utensil) to that of form and colour.

The generalisations just touched on have to do with those qualities and relations of things which strongly impress the baby mind, because they bear on the satisfaction of his wants and his feelings of pleasure and pain. In order to watch the calm movements of the intellect, when no longer urged by appetite and sense, we must turn to the child’s first detection of similarities in the objective attributes of things, as their shape, size, colour, and so forth. Here the first generalisations respecting the forms of bodies are a matter of peculiar interest to the scientific observer. The young thinker, with whom we are now specially concerned, achieved his first success in geometric abstraction, or the consideration of pure form, when just seventeen months old. He had learnt the name of his india-rubber ball. Having securely grasped this, he went on calling oranges “bŏ”. This left the father in some doubt whether the child was attending exclusively to form, as a geometrician should, for he was wont to make a toy of an orange, as when rolling it on the floor. This uncertainty was, however, soon removed. One day C. was sitting at table beside his sire, while the latter was pouring out a glass of beer. Instantly the ready namer of things pointed to the bubbles on the surface, and exclaimed, “Bŏ!” This was repeated on many subsequent occasions. As the child made no attempt to handle the bubbles, it was evident that he did not view them as possible playthings. As he got lost in contemplation, muttering, “Bŏ! bŏ!” his father tells us that he had the satisfaction of feeling sure that the young mind was already learning to turn away from the coarseness of matter, and fix itself on the refined attribute of form.

Although this was the most striking instance of pure or abstract consideration of form, attention to the shape of things was proved by many of the simple ideas reached at this stage. It is obvious, indeed, that a ready recognition of any member of a species of animals, as dog, in spite of considerable variations in size and colour, implies a power of singling out for special attention what we call relations of form. And this conclusion is borne out by the fact that by the end of the eighteenth month C. was quite an adept in recognising uncoloured drawings of animal and other familiar forms.

Colour is of course in itself of much more interest to a child than form, since it gives a keen sensuous enjoyment. Our diary furnishes a curious illustration of a propensity to classify things according to their colour. In his nineteenth month C. was observed to designate by the sound “appoo” (apple) a patch of reddish colour on the mantelpiece, which bore in its form no discoverable resemblance to an apple. At the same time, the effect of growing experience and of a deeper scrutiny of things in bringing out the superior significance of form is seen in the fact that this same word “appoo” came subsequently to be habitually applied to things of unlike colours, namely, apples, oranges, lemons, etc. It may be added that the history of this word “appoo” illustrates a process analogous to what Archbishop Trench (if I remember rightly) has called the degradation of words. When C. first used this name it designated objects simply as visible and tangible ones; he knew nothing of their taste. After he was permitted to try their flavours, the less worthy sensations now added naturally contributed a prominent ingredient to the meaning of the word. Thus, he began to use “appoo” for all edible fruits, including such shapeless masses as stewed apples.

It is not to be expected that children in their first attempts at scrutinising objects should be able to take in completely a complex form, as that of an animal, with all its parts and their relations one to another. C. gave ample proof of the fact that the first generalisations respecting form are apt to be rough and ready, grounded simply on a perception of one or two salient points. Thus, his first use of “bow-wow” showed that the name meant for him simply a four-legged creature. About the fifteenth month this word was thrown about in the most reckless way. Later on, when the canine form began to be disengaged in his mind from those of other quadrupeds, the pointed nose of the animal seems to have become a prominent feature in the meaning of the word. Thus, in his eighteenth month, C. took to applying the name ‘bow-wow’ to objects, such as fragments of bread or biscuit, as well as drawings, having something of a triangular form with a sharp angle at the apex. It is probable that if our little thinker had been able at this stage to define his terms, he would have said that a “bow-wow” was a four-legged thing with a pointed nose.

Here, however, it is only fair to C. to mention that his mind had at this time become prepossessed with the image of “bow-wow”. Not long before the date referred to he had been frightened by a small dog, which had crept unobserved into the room behind a lady visitor, lain quiet for some time under the table, and then, forgetting good manners, suddenly darted out and barked. There were many facts which supported the belief that the child’s mind was at this period haunted by images of dogs which approximated in their vividness to hallucinations; and this persistence of the canine image in the child’s brain naturally disposed him to see the “bow-bow” form in the most unpromising objects.

The use of the word “gee-gee,” which towards the end of the second year competed with “bow-wow” for the first place in C.’s vocabulary, illustrates the same fact. A horse was first of all distinguished from other quadrupeds by the length of his neck. Thus, when twenty months old, C. in a slovenly way, no doubt, applied the name “gee-gee” to the drawing of an ostrich, and also to a bronze figure representing a stork-like bird. This is particularly curious, as showing how a comparatively unimportant detail of form, as length of neck, overshadowed in his mind at this time what we should consider the much more important feature, the possession of four legs. The following are selected from among many other illustrations of the imperfect observation of complex forms. When twenty-one and a half months old he took to calling all triangular objects, including drawings, “ship”. The feature of the ship—as seen in real life and in his picture-books—which had fixed itself in his mind was the triangular sail.[301] A similar propensity to select one characteristic feature was illustrated in another quaint observation of the diary. When twenty-three months old C.’s mother showed him a number of drawings of patterns of dresses, some surmounted by faces, some not. He pointed to one of the latter and said: “No nose!” From this, writes the father, lapsing again into his frivolous vein, it would seem that at this early age he had acquired a dim presentiment of the supreme dignity of the nasal organ among the features of the human countenance.

Footnote 301:

I think this supposition more probable than that the child saw the whole form—hull, masts and sails—as a triangle.

Progress in the accurate use of words was curiously illustrated in C.’s way of looking at and talking about his fellow-creatures. Oddly enough he began apparently by confusing his two parents, extending the name “ma” to his father till such time as he learnt “papa”. Then he proceeded after the manner of other children to embrace within the term “papa” all male adults, whether known to him or not. Thus he applied the name to photographs of distinguished savants, artists, and poets, which he found in his father’s album. When just eighteen months old he was observed to introduce the word ‘man’. For instance, he took to calling an etching of a recent British philosopher, and a terra-cotta cast of an ancient Roman one, “man,” as well as “papa”. Oddly enough, however, members of the other sex were still called exclusively by the name “mamma,” though the words “woman” and “lady” were certainly used at least as frequently as “man” in his hearing. This earlier discrimination of individual men than of individual women leads the father into some jocose observations about the more strongly marked individuality of men than of women, observations which would do very well in the mouth of a misogynist of the old school, but are altogether out of date in this advanced age.

By the twentieth month the extension of the name “papa” to other men was discontinued. His father tried him at this date with a photographic album. “Man” was now instantly applied to all male adults, except old ones with a grey beard. To these he invariably applied the name of an old gentleman, a friend of his. A woman was still called “mamma,” though the term “lady” (“’ady”) was clearly beginning to displace it; and no distinction was drawn between women of different ages. Finally, children were distinguished as boys or girls, apparently according as they were or were not dressed in petticoats.

The reservation of the names “papa” and “mamma” for his parents naturally gave pleasure to these worthy persons. It was something, they said, to feel sure at length that they were individualised in the consciousness of their much-cared-for offspring. This restricted use of the terms may be supposed to have involved a dim apprehension of a special relation of things to the child. “Papa” now carried with it the idea of the man who stands in a particular connexion with C. or “Ningi”; or, to express it otherwise, “man” began to signify those papas who have nothing specially to do with this important personage. This antecedent conjecture is borne out by the fact that the act of distinguishing between his father and other men followed rapidly, certainly within two or three weeks, the first use of his own name “Ningi”. In other words, as soon as his attention began to direct itself to himself, as the centre of his little world-circle, he naturally went on to distinguish between those persons and things that had some special connexion with this centre and those that had not.

The consciousness of self was noticed to grow much more distinct in the second half of this year. As might be expected the first idea of ‘self’ was largely a mental picture of the body. Thus the father tells us that when eighteen months old the child would instantly point to himself when he heard his name. If his father touched his face asking who that was, he replied, ‘Ningi’. Here the corporeal reference is manifest. When just over nineteen months, however, he showed that the idea was becoming fuller and richer with the germ of what we mean by the word personality. Thus when asked to give up something he liked, as the remnant of a biscuit, he would say emphatically, ‘No, no! Ningi!’ Similarly, when he saw his sister wipe her hands, he would say ‘Ningi!’ and proceed to imitate the action. By the end of the twenty-first month the child began to substitute ‘me’ for ‘Ningi’.

As we saw above, the child and the poet have this in common, that they view things directly as they are, free from the superficial and arbitrary associations, the conventional trappings, by the additions of which we prosaic people are wont to separate them into compartments with absolutely impenetrable walls. Hence the freshness, the charming originality of their utterances.

For example, C., when eighteen months old, was watching his sister as she dipped her crust into her tea. He was evidently surprised by the rare sight, and after looking a moment or two, exclaimed, “Ba!” (bath), laughing with delight, and trying, as was his wont when deeply interested in a spectacle, to push his mother’s face round so that she too might admire it. The boy delighted in such a figurative use of words, now employing them as genuine similes, as when he said of a dog panting after a run, “Dat bow-wow like puff-puff,” and of the first real ship which he saw sailing with a rocking movement, “Dat ship go marjory-daw” (_i.e._, like marjory-daw in the nursery rhyme). Like many a poet he had his recurring or standing metaphors. Thus, as we have seen, “ship” was the figurative expression for all objects having a pyramidal form. A pretty example of his love of metaphor was his habit of calling the needle in a small compass of his father’s “bir” (bird). It needs a baby mind to detect here the faint resemblance to the slight fragile form and the fluttering movement of a bird poised on its wings.

C. illustrates the anthropocentric impulse to look at natural objects as though they specially aimed at furthering or hindering our well-being. Thus he would show all the signs of kingly displeasure when his serenity of mind was disturbed by noises. When he was taken to the sea-side (about twenty-four months old) he greatly disappointed his parent, expectant of childish wonder in his eyes, by merely muttering, “Water make noise”.[302] Again, he happened one day in the last week of this year to be in the garden with his father while it was thundering. On hearing the sound he said with an evident tone of annoyance, “Tonna mâ Ningi noi,” _i.e._, thunder makes noise for C., and he instantly added “Notty tonna!” (naughty thunder). Here, remarks the father, he was evidently falling into that habit of mind against which philosophers have often warned us, making man the measure of the universe.

Footnote 302:

He had been at the sea-side a year before this, but there was no evidence of his having remembered it.

The last quarter of this year was marked in C.’s case by a great enlargement of linguistic power. A marked advance was noticeable in the mastering of the mechanical difficulties of articulation. Thus he would surprise his father by suddenly bringing out new and difficult combinations of sound, as ‘flower,’ ‘water’ and ‘fetch’. Up to about the twenty-first month C.’s vocabulary had consisted almost entirely of what we should call substantives, such as, ‘papa,’ ‘man,’ which were used to express the arrival on the scene and the recognition of familiar objects. A few adjectives, as “ŏt” (hot), “co” (cold), “ni-ni” (nice), and “goo” (good), were frequently used, and were apparently beginning to have a proper attributive function assigned them. But these referred rather to the effect of things on the child’s feeling than to their inherent qualities. His father failed before this date to convey to him the meaning of “black” as applied to a dog. It is noteworthy that the child made considerable advance in the use of “me” and “my” before he was capable of qualifying objects by appending adjectives to them. The first use of an adjective for indicating some objective quality in a thing occurred at the end of the twenty-first month, when he exclaimed on seeing a rook fly over his head, “Big bir!”

At about the same date other classes of words came to be recognised and used as such, giving to the child’s language something of texture. Thus relations of place began to be set forth, as in using simple words like ‘up,’ ‘down,’ ‘on’. In some cases the designation of these relations was effected by original artifices which often puzzled the father. For instance the sound ‘da’ (or ‘dow’) was used from about the seventeenth month for the departure of a person, the falling of a toy on the ground, the completion of a meal. It seemed to be a general sign for ‘over’ or ‘gone’.[303] It is doubtful whether this implied a clear consciousness of a relation of place. Sometimes the attempt to express such a relation in the absence of the needed words would lead to a picturesque kind of circumlocution. Thus when about twenty-one months old C. saw his father walking in the garden when he and his sister were seated at the luncheon table. He shouted out, ‘Papa ’at off!’ thus expressing the desirability of his father’s entering and taking part in the family meal.

Footnote 303:

Compare above, p. 162.

Similar make-shifts would be resorted to in designating other and more subtle relations. Sometimes, indeed, the child would expect his hearers to supply the sign of relation, as when after having smelt the pepper box he put it away with an emphatic ‘Papa!’ which seemed to the somewhat biassed observer an admirably concise way of expressing the judgment that the pepper might suit his father, but it certainly did not suit him. A month later (_æt._ twenty-two months) he condescended to be more explicit. Having been told by his father that the cheese was bad for Ningi, he indulged a growing taste for antithesis by adding, ‘Good, papa!’

His ideas of time-relations were at this date of the haziest. He seems to have got a dim inkling of the meaning of ‘by-and-by’. His father had managed to stop his crying for a thing by promising it ‘by-and-by’. After this when crying he would suddenly pull up, and with a heroic effort to catch his breath would exclaim, ‘By-’n’-by!’ “What (asks the father) was the equivalent of this new symbol in the child’s consciousness? Was he already beginning to seize the big boundless future set over against the fleeting point of the present moment and holding in its ample bosom consolatory promises for myriads of these unhappy presents?” and so forth; but here he seems to grow even less severely scientific than usual. It may be added that about the same time (twenty-one months) the child began to use the word ‘now’. Thus after drinking his milk he would point to a little remainder at the bottom of his cup and say, ‘Milk dare now,’ that is presumably ‘there is still milk there’.

His ideas of number at this time were equally rudimentary. Oddly enough it was just as he was attaining to plurality of years that he began to distinguish with the old Greeks the one from the many. One was correctly called ‘one’. Any number larger than one, on the other hand, was sometimes styled ‘two,’[304] sometimes ‘three,’ and sometimes ‘two, three, four’. He had been taught to say ‘one, two, three, four,’ by his mother, but the first lesson in counting had clearly failed to convey more than the difference between unity and multitude. The series of verbal sounds, ‘two, three, four,’ probably helped him to realise the idea of number, and in any case it was a forcible way of expressing it.

Footnote 304:

I find that another little boy when two years old used ‘two’ in this way for more than one.

As suggested above, primitive substantive-forms probably do duty as verbs in the language of the child as in that of primitive man. True verbs as differentiated signs of action came into use at the date we are speaking of, and these began to give to the boy’s embryonic speech something of the structure, the sentence.

As one might naturally conjecture from the disproportionate amount of attention manifestly bestowed on this child, he had all the masterfulness of his kind, and the first form of the verb to be used was the imperative. Thus by the end of the twentieth month he had quite a little vocabulary for giving effect to his sovereign volitions, such as, ‘On!’ (get on), ‘Ook!’ (look). It was in the use of commands that he showed some of his finest inventiveness. Thus when just seventeen months old he wanted his mother to get up. He began by lifting his hands and saying, ‘Ta, ta!’ (sign of going out). Finding this to be ineffective, he tried, with a comical simulation of muscular strength, to pull or push her up, at the same time exclaiming, “Up!” The lifting of the hands looked like a bit of picturesque gesture-language. In his twenty-first month he acquired a new and telling word of command, _viz._, ‘Way’ (_i.e._, out of my way), as well as the invaluable sign of prohibition, ‘Dō’ (_i.e._, don’t), both of which, it need hardly be said, he began to bandy about pretty freely, especially in his dealings with his sister.

A landmark in C.’s intellectual development is set by the father at the age of nineteen and a half months. Before this date he had only made rather a lame attempt at sentence-building by setting his primitive names in juxtaposition, _e.g._, ‘Tit, mamma, poo,’ which being interpreted means, ‘Sister and mamma, have pudding’. But now he took a very decided step in advance, and by a proper use of a verb as such constructed what a logician calls a proposition with its subject and predicate. He happened to observe his sister venting some trouble in the usual girlish fashion, and exclaimed, ‘Tit ki’ (sister is crying), following up the assertion by going towards her and trying to stop her. Another example of a sentence rather more complex in structure which occurred a fortnight later had also to do with his sister. He saw her lying on her back on the grass, and exclaimed with all the signs of joyous wonder, ‘Tit dow ga!’ (_i.e._, sister is down on the grass). Evidently the unpredictable behaviour of this member of his family deeply impressed the young observer. It is noticeable that these first exceptional efforts in assertion were prompted by feeling.[305]

Footnote 305:

Compare above, p. 171 f.