VIIITHE ERA OF HANDLING THINGS
Shesprang into this era suddenly, within four days. It was not infrequently thus, and perhaps more and more as the little brain grew complex. Some power that had been slowly developing would leap up into completion, unlocking a dozen other doors of mental life. To put it physiologically, some one new connection established between brain cells would bring a whole network of others into coöperation—the more easily as ancestral nerve paths seemed often to open up at a touch.
When the baby had passed ten days of her fifth month, she was still grasping half mechanically. On the eleventh day, lying on her back, she held her rattle above her and looked at it carefully. Her attentionhad turned to the things that she grasped. She had come before to the perception of a world of objects, but apparently only now to the realization of it. And thereupon, that very day, I saw that she was no longer using eyes and hands merely as means of getting mouth sensations; she was holding objects, looking at them, and pulling them about, for some moments, before they went to her mouth.
The pleasure of this handling seemed to be in the free movement of the objects (seen and felt at the same time), not especially in the touch sensations. When this new pleasure was exhausted, things went to the mouth as before for the enjoyment of touch. It was long before the fingers rivaled the lips in pure æsthetic touch enjoyment; perhaps they never do, else the dandy would finger his cane knob, instead of mouthing it, girls would smooth rose-leaves across their finger tips, not their lips, and a kiss would have no higher rank than a hand-clasp. Butfor grasping purposes the supremacy now passed promptly over to the hands, and from this week the habit of grasping with the mouth by head movements declined and disappeared.
In a few hours the baby was reaching for everything near her, and in three days more her desire to lay hold on things was the dominant motive of her life. Her grasping was still oftener with both hands than one, and was somewhat slow, but always accurate. Some babies learn to grasp more suddenly than she did, and often miss their aim; but with her cautious method of bringing down her hands toward an object from either side, penning it in between, she could hardly make errors. The thing once corralled, she would pull it around, perhaps a minute, then put it to her mouth.
It is an epoch of tremendous importance when the baby first, with real attention, brings sight and touch and muscle feeling to bear together on an object. “In a verydeep sense,” says John Fiske, “all human science is but the increment of the power of the eye, and all human art is the increment of the power of the hand. Vision and manipulation—these in their countless indirect and transfigured forms are the two coöperating factors in all intellectual progress.” And the first great result of this coöperation is the completion of vision itself. It cannot be doubted that it is mainly by studying objects with eye and hand together that we get our ability to see solid form. A colt grasping his ear of corn with his teeth, even a puppy licking and turning his bone all over, or a kitten tapping a spool to and fro and hugging it in her paws, without losing sight of it—none of these can bring the united powers of three senses to bear on an object so perfectly as a monkey or human baby can, holding it in the most convenient positions, turning it this way and that, seeing every part, feeling it with finger tips and mouth; and it is doubtful if the quadrupedsever attain to as clear a sense of form as we do.
In these first days of the passion for grasping at things, the baby reached for flat figures as readily as for solid objects; but (to look ahead a little) she learned to discriminate with surprising ease, and after the first week I have only three or four notes of her trying to pick up such things as pictures on a page, roses on a quilt, shadows in the sun. Yet I do not think this was because she gained quickly any such sense of the difference between plane and solid form as we have, but rather that she learned quickly to associate a certain look about an object with the experience of being able to get hold of it.
The reason that I think so is that even weeks later, when she was six months old, she showed signs of having no real ability to judge form by the eye. At that age she turned a round cracker round and round at her lips, trying to find the corner to bite, asshe was used to doing with square ones. And the only time she was ever taken in by a flat figure afterward was when (at nine months old) she tried a long time to capture the swaying shadow of a rope end on the deck of a yacht; things that moved could always be taken hold of in her experience, and she went solely by experience, not by any general ideas of form.
But such general ideas really require a good deal of development of reason—so much that it is likely the lower animals never rise to them. We must think of the baby’s seeing, therefore, as rounding out but slowly to full equality with ours in such matters as estimates of form, distance, and size, where much experience and some reason are required.
To go back to those swift four days in which the baby came into realization of her power of using hands and eyes together,—they had been preceded by a marked advance in the use of eyes alone (or jointly with thesense of motion in being carried about) to get the relations of things about her more clearly arranged in her mind. The day before the baby held up her rattle to look at, she had declined to go to sleep in her mother’s arms, and kept lifting her head to look at me, till I crossed the room and put myself out of sight. Presently she lifted her head again, turned round, and searched persistently the quarter of the room toward which she had seen me disappear. She had gained much in sense of direction and in association of ideas when she could look along the line in which I had been seen to move moments before, expecting to see me somewhere there.
Later, the same day, she sat in my lap, watching with an intent and puzzled face the back and side of her grandmother’s head. Grandma turned from her knitting and chirruped to her, and the little one’s jaw dropped and her eyebrows went up with an expression of blank surprise. Presently I began to swing her on my foot, and at every pause inthe swinging she would sit gazing at the puzzling head till grandma turned, and nodded or chirruped to her; then she would turn away satisfied and want more swinging.
Here we seem to get a glimpse of the process I have spoken of, by which the baby gradually associates together the front and rear and side aspects of a person or thing, till at last they coalesce together in his mind as all one object. At first amazed to see the coil of silver hair and the curve of cheek turn suddenly into grandma’s front face, the baby watched for the repetition of the miracle till it came to seem natural, and the two aspects were firmly knit together in her mind.
She began, too, to watch people’s motions carefully for long spaces of time—all through the process of setting the table, for instance—with a serious little face, and an attention so absorbed that it was hardly possible to divert her if one tried (which one ought not to do, for power of attention is a precious attainment, and people have no business tomeddle with its growth for their own amusement). When her mother’s dark-eyed sister had a little reception in consequence of having married the minister, baby was in the thick of it, watching first the preparations, and then the comings and goings of people, with the closest attention and the deepest enjoyment, cheerfully willing to have her meals postponed, her nap broken, anything, if the fun would only go on.
There was a decided advance, too, in her acquaintance with her own body. Sitting as usual in her horse-collar, she was bending herself back over it, a thing that she had done before; but to-day she kept it up so persistently, and bent herself back with such exertion, that at last the back of her head touched the floor. She righted herself with an expression of great surprise. Evidently she had been experimenting in new muscular sensations only, and (as happens to all experimenters sometimes) had got an extra result that she did not bargain for and did notunderstand. She bent back again, with her head screwed around to see what had given her the touch. In this position, she did not reach the floor. She sat up again, looked at me with a perplexed face, and tried it over, a full dozen times, till her mother picked her up to stop it, on the ground that the baby was more valuable than the experiment, and that she would break her little back. For days, however, the baby returned to the investigation, doubling herself back over the arm of any one who held her till her head hung straight down, or over the horse-collar till it rested on the floor.
We may perhaps fairly guess that in this incident she had for the first time discovered the back of her head as a part of herself, and any of us might well be surprised to find himself extending off behind into space that way, if he had never known about it before. The baby had of course felt daily and hourly touches on the back of her head, from pillow and floor and lap, from cap and hair brush;but all her previous behavior, and her surprise now, indicate that this was the first time she had externalized these touches—which implies also the first time she had feltherselfas receiving them.
One of the first things she did when she began grasping zealously was to seize her own toes, and she bent her foot forward on the ankle to bring it better in reach. This may have been a purely instinctive coöperating act at first, but it helped on the control of feet and legs, and the recognition of them as parts of herself—the more as they were now for some time favorite playthings every time the baby was undressed.
Another significant movement the next day, also brought about by the advance in grasping, was the first attempt to scramble forward as she lay on her stomach, to get hold of something—a futile effort, but the forerunner of creeping.
These days of rapid unfolding were joyous days. The baby laughed aloud morethan ever before, and her daily frolics were as necessary to her as her meals, and were fretted for as persistently if she did not get them. The door of communion with fellow beings, too, was trembling on its hinges, ready to come ajar. The little thing began to look up into our faces as if for sympathy in pleasure or perplexity, as I have mentioned in the case of her surprise at discovering the back of her head; she did it laughing when she splashed in the bath, and with smiles of satisfaction when she listened to the piano. When her mother held out her arms to take her, she learned to put forward her little hands in response; and on the same day she took up the instinctive gesture of stretching out her arms toward an object in desire—always, I suspect (records are wanting), the next gesture after turning away the head. Neither of these reaching gestures was as yet used intentionally to convey ideas, but both entered later into genuine sign language. Both seem to grow naturally out of grasping movements.
In the baby’s absorption in grasping, most of her little sounds were abandoned; but she clung to a favorite long gurgle, and used it with an air of amiable response when people talked or nodded to her, often kicking her legs in the air or flinging up her arms, by way of emphasis. Sometimes she would look earnestly into your face and address you with the gurgle in all seriousness. Sometimes it would seem to occur to her suddenly, and she would burst out with it, with an impulsive movement of body and limbs.
In a few days she had become a different baby, with a new world of interests, and a wonderfully more varied and vivid life. After this, she went on smoothly to the end of the fifth month (and for that matter, through the sixth), absorbed in looking, feeling, and handling, reaching this way and that to lay hold of everything she saw, and improving steadily in skill. A small steel bell given her in the twenty-first week was at first pulled and shoved about on the table, pickedup with two fingers or more as might chance, and put into her mouth by any part that came handiest; but in three or four days it was taken up properly and rung. More and more all the time she found something to do with things besides putting them in her mouth.
She liked hard, bright, and rattling things best to handle, and preferred metal or bone to rubber. One can hardly think of a thing less useful to a baby educationally at this stage than soft, colored worsted balls; he needs something that he can feel, hard and definite, in his hand; something with distinctly unlike sides that he can see as he pulls and shakes it about; he loves glitter, but cares little for color, perhaps does not yet see it; and any dyes and worsted shreds that can come off in wet little mouths are conclusive against such a toy.
On the other hand, bright metal objects are apt in the course of their gyrations to deal bad thumps to little heads and noses;so one must compromise on rubber—uninteresting, but safe—and on such bone, metal (perhaps aluminum), and unpainted wooden toys as can be trusted to give only very mild thumps, such as a baby had better take now and then rather than be deprived of all really interesting toys.
This is one of the many dilemmas in which the baby is lucky who has a grandma, or whose mamma can spare time to associate with him a great deal; for no end of things can be trusted in the little hands, that ache for everything in sight, if only vigilant fingers hover close, ready to ward gently off any dangerous movement. Sitting in one’s lap at the table, too, the baby may push and pull at many things not safe for him to lift; or he may be allowed to handle something safely tethered with a string. Certainly the wider liberty of holding and handling he can by any device be allowed, the better; the instinct is very strong, and wholly healthy, and the thwarting of normal instincts is not good for any one’s nerves or mind.
In sight, important changes were no longer to be looked for: except possibly in the matter of color sense, the baby’s seeing had now passed through all the stages of development, and needed only practice and mental growth to become as perfect as it would ever be. She was evidently still at work somewhat, especially in new places, in reducing confused appearances to order; but so much of this work was already done that more and more she could sit and enjoy the varied spectacle. More than once she spent half an hour gazing thus out of the window with quiet pleasure.
There were for the first time signs that she could distinguish between the sounds of voices. She looked and listened one day in the middle of the month, as if she noticed something unusual, when I was hoarse with a cold. Late in the month, as I read to her mother while she nursed the baby, singing softly to her (a frequent custom), the baby suddenly raised her head and looked curiouslyat me, evidently for the first time distinguishing the two voices as separate sounds.
Her mother and grandmother had been saying to her a great deal, “Papa!” hoping to hasten her understanding of the word. This same day she imitated the motion of the lips, and seemed to find the feeling very funny, for she laughed, and laughed whenever she heard the sound explosively uttered during the next fortnight; she stopped in the midst of crying to laugh at it. Her amusement had not the faintest connection with the meaning of the word; indeed, she chuckled aloud with even more gayety when I ejaculated “poo-poo!” or “boo-boo!” instead. It was something in the explosive labial sound that struck her as comical.
In this beginning of discrimination in articulate sounds, we see the root of the later understanding of speech. But it was by another road that the baby now began to move toward human communication: by the way, that is, of signs and inarticulate cries.One day when she was four and a half months old, she raised a strange little clamor on catching sight of her grandfather, as if on purpose to call his attention, and was satisfied when she got it; she began to hold out her arms of her own accord, instead of merely to meet ours, held out to her; and in the very last days of the fifth month she made a sound of request when she wished to be taken, a whimpering, coaxing sound, leaning and looking toward her mother, instead of the mere fretting sounds of desire, addressed to nobody, which she had made for weeks.
When I have spoken before of the baby’s “addressing” her little noises to us, I have not meant that there was really anything of language in them. Some expression of interest in our presence, some sort of social feeling, there must have been, but no more than in her kicking up her feet or chuckling at our attentions. These first asking sounds and motions, on the contrary, were beginnings of real language—not yet of humanlanguage, but of such as the baby shares with all the beasts and birds.
A sort of intelligence shared with the beasts and birds, too, appeared in these same closing days of the fifth month—what may be called “adaptive intelligence,” the use of means to an end—in the patient devices by which the baby manœuvred her toe into her mouth; but this was a sort of anticipation of a development that belonged really to the next month, and so I shall leave the account of it to the next.
The increasing ownership of her body that this toe feat showed was evident in several other ways. The baby’s sitting up grew imperceptibly firmer and more independent of support: at nineteen weeks old, she was sitting alone in our laps a quarter of a minute at a time; four days later, a minute at a time, provided she did nothing to upset herself, such as flourishing her arms, or reaching after things; two days later yet, she balanced successfully for a few seconds onthe table—and this was real sitting alone at last, for on the table there could be no least support from the yielding of the surface under her. All babies can sit alone earlier on the lap or a cushion than on a perfectly flat, hard surface.
At just about nineteen weeks old, too, the baby began to roll over to her side when she was laid on her back on the floor, and to squirm and bend around into a variety of positions, instead of lying where she was put.
The period was coming to an end in which the main activity of development was in the senses, and in coming through the coöperation of the senses to a bodily consciousness of herself in a world of objects, of distances, and directions. Now the baby had to learn to use that body, and explore that world. But before this second great period of activity fully began, there was a transition month, a month of vigorous practice in the powers already gained, and of gathering forces for the new developments.