IVTHE EARLIEST DEVELOPMENTS
Outof the new-born baby’s dim life of passivity the first path was that of vision. I noticed about the end of the second week that her eyes no longer wandered altogether helplessly, but rested with a long and contented gaze on bright surfaces they chanced to encounter, such as the shining of the lamp on the white ceiling, or our faces turned toward the light as she lay on our knees. It was not active looking, with any power to direct the eyes, but mere staring; when the gaze fell by chance on the pleasant light, it clung there. But something must have come to pass, that itcouldstop and cling to what gave it pleasure.
I think no one has yet analyzed this earliest stage in progress toward real seeing,though Professor Sully touches on an explanation when he says that the eyes “maintain their attitude under stimulus of the pleasure.”
We know that muscular action is normally caused by stimulus received from the nerve centres, and that in the earliest days there seems to be a good deal of random discharge of stimulus, developed by the growth of the centres, and causing aimless movements. Now there are two fundamental and profoundly important things about this nervous discharge. One is that pleasure, attention, or intensity of sensation seems to have the power of increasing it, and thus influencing the action of the muscles. The other is that the discharge always tends to seek the same paths it has used before, and more and more easily each time; so that physiologists speak of it as a current deepening its channels. It is really nothing like a flowing liquid, nor the nerve threads along which it passes like channeled watercourses. Still, just as a current of water will deepen a gullytill it drains into itself all the water that had spread about in shallower ditches, so the wave of molecular change running along a nerve somehow so prepares that nerve that by and by, instead of spreading about through any fibres that come handy, the whole energy will drain into the accustomed ones. Then, of course, the muscles to which these run will perform more and more easily the accustomed acts. Some of these channels—even whole connected systems of them—are already well prepared by inheritance, and hence come instinctive and reflex actions; many are still to be deepened by the baby’s own experience.
Now suppose the aimless impulse straying to the baby’s eye muscles, making the eyes roam hither and yon; but as they reach a certain position, they fall upon a lighted surface, and a pleasant brightness flows back into the consciousness; and something stirs within that has power to send an intenser current through those same fibres. For thetime, at least, that channel is deepened, the wandering impulses are drained into it, and the eye muscles are held steady in that position. And, in fact, with the beginning of staring the irregular movements of head and eyes did decline, and gradually disappear.
It is an important moment that marks the beginning of even a passive power to control the movements; and when my grandmother handed down the rule that you should never needlessly interrupt a baby’s staring, lest you hinder the development of power of attention, she seems to have been psychologically sound.
A fuller and pleasanter life now seemed to pervade the whole little body. The grimaces of vague discomfort were disappearing, and the baby began to wear a look of satisfaction as she lay, warm and fed and dry, gazing at some light surface. In the bath, where the release from clothes and the stimulus to circulation from the warm waterheightened the pleasant condition of general sensation, her expression approached real delight; the movements of her limbs were freer, and all her muscles tenser.
The neck muscles, especially, were so far “innervated”—that is, supplied with nervous energy—as fairly to lift her head from the supporting hand. This was probably not as yet a real effort to hold up the head, only a drafting of surplus energy into the neck muscles, partly because of inherited aptitude, partly because the pleasure received from the lifted head and better seeing tended to draw the energy thither, just as it was drawn to the eye muscles in the case of the staring. At least one careful observer, Mrs. Edith Elmer Wood, records this action of the neck muscles on the first day.
It was at this period that the baby first smiled; but being forewarned of the “colic smile,” which counterfeits so exactly the earliest true smiles,—fleeting as these are, just touching the mouth and vanishing,—Inever felt sure whether the baby was smiling for general contentment with life, or whether a passing twinge had crossed her comfort and drawn her lips into the semblance of a smile; and so never dared to record the expression till it first occurred for unmistakable pleasure.
There must have been rapid progress going on in the clearness of muscular and touch sensations, and in the forming of associations in the baby’s mind; but no plain evidence of these inner processes came till the fourth week. Then I noticed that the baby, when crying with hunger, would hush as soon as she was taken in the arms in the position usual in nursing, as if she recognized the preliminaries, and knew she was about to be satisfied. She could not, in fact, have remembered or expected anything as yet; it was not memory, but a clear instance of the working of that great law of association by which the raw material of the senses was to be wrought up into an orderly mental life.
The substance of the law is that when experiences have repeatedly been had together, the occurrence of one of them (still more, of several out of a group, as in this case) tends to bring up into consciousness the others. It is a law that underlies psychic life as profoundly as the law that nerve energy seeks its old channels underlies physical life. Indeed, it is in a sense the psychic side of the same law; for it implies that when a group of nerve centres have formerly acted together, the action of one tends to bring on that of the rest. So, since the baby had often experienced the feeling of that particular position (a combination of tactile and muscular and organic sensations) in connection with the feeling of satisfied hunger, that comfortable feeling, the missing member of the group, came into her consciousness along with the rest, some moments in advance of the actual satisfaction.
I have said that this is not memory, yet there is in it a germ of memory. A pastexperience is brought back to consciousness; and if it were brought back as a definite idea, instead of a vague feeling, it would be memory.
Close on this came another great advance in vision. This was on the twenty-fifth day, toward evening, when the baby was lying on her grandmother’s knee by the fire, in a condition of high well-being and content, gazing at her grandmother’s face with an expression of attention. I came and sat down close by, leaning over the baby, so that my face must have come within the indirect range of her vision. At that she turned her eyes to my face and gazed at it with the same appearance of attention, and even of some effort, shown by a slight tension of brows and lips, then turned her eyes back to her grandmother’s face, and again to mine, and so several times. The last time she seemed to catch sight of my shoulder, on which a high light struck from the lamp, and not only moved her eyes, but threw her head far back to seeit better, and gazed for some time, with a new expression on her face—“a sort of dim and rudimentary eagerness,” says my note. She no longer stared, but really looked.
Clear seeing, let us here recall, is not done with the whole retina, but only with a tiny spot in the centre, the so-called “yellow spot,” or “macula lutea.” If the image of an object falls to one side of this, especially if it is far to one side, we get only a shapeless impression that something is there; we “catch a glimpse of it,” as we say. In order really to look at it we turn our eyeballs toward the object till the image falls on the spot of clear vision. We estimate the distance through which to turn the balls, down to minute fractions of an inch, by the feeling in the eye muscles.
This was what the baby had done, and I do not dare to say how many philosophical and psychological discussions are involved in her doing it. Professor Le Conte thinks that it shows an inborn sense of direction,since the eyes are turned, not toward the side on which the ray strikes the retina, but toward the side from which the ray enters the eye; that is, the baby thinks out along the line of the ray to the object it comes from, thus putting the object outside himself, in space, as we do. Professor Wundt, the great German psychologist, is positive that the baby has no sense of space or direction, but gains it by just such measurements with the eye muscles; that there is no right nor left, up nor down, for him, but only associations between the look of things off at one side, and the feel of the eye action that brings them to central vision.
This means that before a baby can carry the eye always through just the right arc to look at an object, he must have made this association between the look of things and the feel of the action separately for each point of the retina. It is a great deal for a baby to have learned in three weeks; still, babies have to learn fast if they are ever tocatch up with the race; and in the early roamings of the eye they experience over and over all manner of transits of images to and fro across the retina. Probably, too, it was still only partially learned.
I watched now for what Preyer’s record had led me to expect as the next development in vision—the ability to follow a moving object with the eyes; that is, to hold the yellow spot fixed on the object as it moved, moving the eyeball in time with it in order to do so. I used my hand to move to and fro before the baby, and could not satisfy myself that she followed it, though she sometimes seemed to; but the day after she was a month old I tried a candle, and her eyes followed it unmistakably; she even threw her head back to follow it farther. In trying this experiment, one should always use a bright object, should make sure the baby’s eyes are fixed on it, and then should move it very slowly indeed, right and left.
So far, there is no necessary proof of will.Longet found that the eyes and head of a pigeon whose cerebrum had been removed would follow a moving light. We ourselves can sit absorbed in thought or talk, yet follow unconsciously with our eyes the movement of a lantern along a dark road; and if something appears on the outer edge of our vision we often turn quite involuntarily to look. But the baby’s new expression of intelligence and interest showed that whether she willed the movements or not, she attended to the new impressions she was getting.
Professor Preyer noticed the same dawn of intelligence in his baby’s face at about the same stage. And it is worth while to observe that when I came to study my record I was surprised to find how often such an awakening look, an access of attention, wonder, or intelligence, in the baby’s face, had coincided with some marked step in development and signalized its great mental importance. I should advise any one who is observing a baby to be on the lookout forthis outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual unfolding.
In both these visual developments the baby had proved able to use her neck in coöperation with her eyes, throwing back her head to see farther. It began at the same time to seem that she was really and deliberately trying to hold up her head for the same purpose of seeing better. She not only straightened it up more and more in the bath, but when she was laid against one’s breast she would lift her head from the shoulder, sometimes for twenty seconds at a time, and look about. Preyer sets this down as the first real act of will.
The baby’s increased interest in seeing centred especially on the faces about her, at which she gazed with rapt interest. Even during the period of mere staring, faces had oftenest held her eyes, probably because they were oftener brought within the range of her clearest seeing than other light surfaces. The large, light, moving patch of the humanface (as Preyer has pointed out) coming and going in the field of vision, and oftener chancing to hover at the point of clearest seeing than any other object, embellished with a play of high lights on cheeks, teeth, and eyes, is calculated to excite the highest degree of attention a baby is capable of at a month old. So from the very first—before the baby has yet really seen his mother—her face and that of his other nearest friends become the most active agents in his development, and the most interesting things in his experience.
Our baby was at this time in a way aware of the difference between companionship and solitude. In the latter days of the first month she would lie contentedly in the room with people near by, but would fret if left alone. But by the end of the month she was apt to fret when she was laid down on a chair or lounge, and to become content only when taken into the lap. This was not yet distinct memory and desire, but it showedthat associations of pleasure had been formed with the lap, and that she felt a vague discomfort in the absence of these.
Just before she was a month old came an advance in hearing. So far this sense had remained little more than a capacity for being startled or made restless by harsh sounds. I had tested it on the twenty-third day, and found that the baby scarcely noticed the sound of an ordinary call bell unless it was struck within about six inches of her ear, and suddenly and sharply at that; and on the twenty-sixth day she showed no sign of hearing single notes of the piano, struck close to her, from the highest to the lowest. But the next day, at the sound of chords, strongly struck, she hushed when fretting with hunger, and listened quietly for five minutes—her first pleasant experience through the sense of hearing.
In the following days she would lie and take in the sound of the chords with a look of content, staring at the same time into theface of the person who held her, as if she associated the sound with that. Only a few days later, when she was a month old, I thought that her pleasure in companionship was increased if she was talked and crooned to; and it is likely that by this time, though she had not hitherto noticed voices, she was beginning to get them associated with the human face—probably to the enhancement of its charm.
There were signs now, too, that touch sensations, in their principal seat, the lips, were becoming a source of pleasure. The first smile that I could conscientiously record occurred the day before the baby was a month old, and it was provoked by the touch of a finger on her lip; and a day or two later she smiled repeatedly at touches on her lip. The day before she was a month old, also, when her lips were brought up to the nipple, she laid hold upon it with them—the first seizing of any sort, for her hands were still in their original helplessness, wavingvaguely about at the will of the nerve currents.
It is plain that the eyes led in the development of the psychic life. Yet the baby was still far from real seeing. Professor Preyer believes that there is at this stage no “accommodation” of the eyes to near and far, although they can now be focused for right and left: that is, both yellow spots can be brought to bear in unison on an object, but the lenses do not yet adjust themselves to different distances. Though the baby may have perceived direction, then, she could not have perceived depth in space. It was only when an object chanced to be at the distance for which her eyes were naturally adjusted that she could have seen it clearly.
Nor is it likely that even then she saw anything as a definite outline, but only as an undefined patch. The spot of clear vision in our eyes is very small (a twenty-five cent piece would cover all the letters I can take in at once on this page, if I do not let myeyes move in the least), and the only way we ourselves see anything in definite outline is by running our eyes swiftly over its surface and around its edges, with long trained and unconscious skill. The baby had not yet learned to do this. Her world of vision, much as it pleased her, was still only patches of light and dark, with bits of glitter and motion. She could turn her eyes and lift her head a little to make the vision clearer; but except about her neck, eyes, and in a slight degree her lips, she had no control of her body. She had gained much in grouping and associating together her experiences, yet on the whole she still lived among disjointed impressions.
In the light of such interpretations, the speculative attempts to arrange a system of cradle education become futile. What can a swinging ball do for a pupil whose sense apparatus is not yet in condition to see the outline of the ball definitely? Froebel himself could not have been expected to knowmuch of the condition of a baby’s sense apparatus; but modern Froebelians would be better apostles of his almost Messianic inspiration if they were willing to throw frankly aside his unfounded speculations and his obsolete science. The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.
Meanwhile, nature has provided an educational appliance almost ideally adapted to the child’s sense condition, in the mother’s face, hovering close above him, smiling, laughing, nodding, with all manner of delightful changes in the high lights; in the thousand little meaningless caressing sounds, the singing, talking, calling, that proceed from it; the patting, cuddling, lifting, and all the ministrations that the baby feels while gazing at it, and associates with it, till finally they group together and round out into the idea of his mother as a whole.
Our baby’s mother rather resented the idea of being to her baby only a collection of detached phenomena, instead of a mamma;but the more you think of it the more flattering it is to be thus, as it were, dissolved into your elements and incorporated item by item into the very foundations of your baby’s mental life. Herein is hinted much of the philosophy of personality; and Professor Baldwin has written a solid book, mainly to show from the development of babies and little children that all other people are part of each of us, and each of us is part of all other people, and so there is really no separate personality, but we are all one spirit, if we did but know it.