VII SHE LEARNS TO GRASP, AND DISCOVERS THE WORLD OF THINGS

The baby had finished her first quarter year. A few days before, as we have seen, she had looked for a person out of sight; and now, just at the end of the third month, she showed that she could bring together the testimony of sight and hearing, by turning to look in the direction of a sound.

Here seems evidence that by this time (whether she had done so before or not) she “externalized” her impressions more or less: that is, when waves of sound struck on her tympanum, or of light on her retina, she did not simply feel the resulting sensation, but threw it back, so to speak, along the line of the wave, and seemed to herself to perceive something outside there, away from her. For when she looked around, seeking what she did not yet see, expecting sight sensations and hearing sensations to come from the same source, it is impossible to think she did not have a feeling of something really there, outside herself.

Step by step with the sense of outsideness there must have come a sense of insideness, of self, for the two are only opposite sides of one feeling—that is, the feeling of difference between oneself and the outer world. We must not suppose that before the baby externalized her impressions she felt everything as happening inside her: she must have just felt things, with no inside or outside about it.

This may seem impossible, but really the sense of insideness and outsideness is not hard to upset, even at our time of life. Dizziness or mental shock will do it. Sometimes on waking from deep sleep we find our sense of a separate bodily self gone, and gather it slowly back. We may almost lose ourselves by lying idly, without thought or care, in some great, continuous sound, like the roar of a cataract, till we do not know which is ourself and which is the outward sound. Mystics and ecstatics have made an art of changing the bodily feelings by fasting and other means, till the usual marks of difference among impressions, by which we externalize some and refer others to our own bodies, are lost; and with them the sense of being in the body, surrounded by an outer world.

Though she externalized sight and sound, it is not likely that the baby at this stage distinguished external and internal in touch impressions, unless about her face. She had not at all learned the bounds of her own body yet. Below her arms, her control of it was almost nothing. She could not turn herself over. She had never passed her hands over her own surface, and knew it only by chance touches. She understood so little her relation even to her hands, which were fairly under control, that when they met by chance, each hand would seize the other, and try to take it to her mouth. She was often aggrieved by the unexpected result when she tried to flourish her arm and go on sucking her thumb at the same time, and could not imagine what had suddenly snatched the cherished thumb away. Her feeling of herself must have been very different from ours: more like that of a conventional cherub, all but her head dissolved away into oneness with the outside world.

Did she, then, seeing the vision of the world, see it as a world of things—solid objects, visible and tangible? Probably not. Her whole behavior showed that she had never blended the feel of a thing and the look of a thing into the perception of the thing itself. If her body was touched anywhere, she never looked toward the place to see what touched her. When she groped on her tray, she seemed to be merely repeating motions that had formerly brought sensations, not seeking for things that she supposed were there; she never looked for them, nor even looked at them as she held them; she seemed to have no suspicion that the feeling in her hand was due to a visible object there.

Nor could she well have had any idea of an object, even as one may get it from touch alone, without sight; for she did not feel over the things she held—she was conscious only of the part that touched her. If she laid hold of her rattle one day by one part, and another day by another, she could not have known it was the same object, except as she learned a little about it in fumbling for a better hold. In short, the things she touched and held can hardly have been to her definite objects, but only disjointed touch and weight sensations.

With no more material than this, children born blind do build up in time the idea of a world of things; but seeing children have a much quicker and completer way.

Just at the end of the third month the baby had once gazed at her rattle as she held it in her hand; but it was not till the second week of the fourth month that she seemed really to learn that when she felt the familiar touch in her hand, she could see something by looking. Then her eyes began to rest on things while she picked them up; but in a blank and passive way—the eyes looking on like outsiders, while the awkward little hands fumbled just as they would have done in the dark. The baby seemed to have no idea that what she saw was the same thing as what she felt.

There was about a fortnight of this. Then, on one great day, when three weeks of the month had passed, the baby looked at her mother’s hand, held up before her, and made fumbling motions toward it, keeping her eyes on it, till her hand struck it; then took hold of it. She had formed an association between the sight of an object and the groping movement of her hand toward it.

It was not till the last week of the month that she put out her hand directly to the thing she wanted, instead of clawing vaguely toward it; and even then it was doubtfully done. Still, it was real grasping, by guidance of the eye. She was coming to realize that what she saw was one with what she could feel; that there were things, which could be reached for and got hold of. That is, the sight-motor series and the touch-motor series were coalescing at last, and giving the baby a world of objects. She had an immensity to learn as to their form, weight, distance, and all that; but she had the key now for learning it.

The discovery of the new quality of tangibility in the visible world must have been gradual, however, and her new power of grasping hardly more at first than a blind use of association. In the next fortnight she grasped doubtfully, depending only partly on sight for guidance. She would put out her hand uncertainly, with fingers spread, not ready to grasp, and it was only when they touched the object that her movement became confident. Sometimes both little hands were brought cautiously down on either side of the thing she wished to get hold of.

In this fortnight she grasped better with the mouth than with the hands, and was more disposed to use it. She brought her mouth to the nipple easily by sight. She dived at me with her head to get the loose folds of my bodice into her mouth. In our arms, she would attack our faces with a sudden dive of her head and a funny doubling up movement of her body, and would mouth them over with satisfaction. One day, as she lay on her back, a rubber ring fell out of her mouth, and lay encircling her nose, resting on its bridge and on the upper lip; she made many efforts to reach it with her lips, stretching her mouth open ridiculously, but had no idea of using the little hands, which were fluttering wildly in helpless sympathy.

During this early period of grasping, the baby was far from appreciating what a world of delight had opened to her. Her great interest all the fourth month and on into the fifth was in the use of her eyes, in those eager surveys of things that I have spoken of; and absorbed in this, she had unconsciously and almost mechanically gathered together the associations of sight and feeling and muscle sense, till grasping had come about, merely as a more efficient way of getting things into the mouth.

Professor Preyer and most other observers have tried to account for this persistent drift of everything to the baby’s mouth by the theory of taste association: the baby’s most agreeable experience has been that of tasting milk, and so he connects all pleasure with the idea of getting things to his mouth. This seems to me quite untenable. An association between taste and the feeling of something in the mouth would not be formed unless the two occurred together quite regularly; and what with the washing out of a baby’s mouth each time he is nursed, and the frequent stumbling in of his hands, and later the deliberate sucking of fists, he finds tasteless objects there oftener than milk. Again, it is not the movement of the hands up to the mouth that would become associated with food, but rather the feeling of being laid at the breast (which our baby did in fact associate early with food, as I have related). And in the third place, there is not the least evidence that taste is the most agreeable experience of young babies; on the contrary, the tests go to show that they have a low taste sensibility.

The craving of hunger, of course, is an intense feeling in babies, and its satisfaction (rather than taste pleasure) is greatly enjoyed; but except just at the hungry moment, they pay far more attention to looking, and hearing, and feeling than to eating. Our baby, after the first edge of hunger was off, was always ready to desert the breast to look at something interesting. She would nurse a little, then throw herself back on her mother’s arm to smile up into her face. She cried quite as hard over being obliged to lie down, where she could not look around her, as over being hungry; and getting her meal caused no such marked signs of pleasure as light and motion, the bath, and the free use of her own powers.

Some babies are hungrier than ours was, and some are like her; but I think close observation would show all alike more taken up with their higher powers than with food. And as all alike put everything into their mouths when they first learn to grasp, we must find some other reason for the act than food association.

If we regard it as an exercise of the sense of touch, in what is at the time the main touch organ, we have an activity closely parallel with the constant interest in the use of sight in the early months. Observers have been misled by failing to realize that the mouth, not the hand, is the primitive touch organ. The baby behaves with the things in his mouth as if he was interested in feeling them, not in eating them. He does not try to swallow them (though he may be depended on to do it without trying, if they are small), but licks, sucks, mumbles them about, and in every way gets the utmost touch sensation out of them. Preyer saw a look of pleasure caused by sucking a pencil, before the baby had ever tasted food, when he could not have had the least taste association with the feeling. There is plenty of evidence that the act of sucking (the muscular sensation as well as that of touch) is in itself highly agreeable to babies.

I have spoken of the great and active interest, at this time, in studying the visible world. By the end of the fourth month the baby had certainly learned the look of many things, and was well aware when it was in any way changed. In a strange room she would renew the eager and surprised staring about which had nearly ceased in familiar rooms; and if one of us appeared in a bonnet she would look with curiosity and interest at our changed aspect. She doubtless knew us all apart by this time, though she gave no clear evidence of it, except in the case of grandpa, whom she often greeted with cries of joy and flying hands.

From the middle of the fourth month she followed us constantly with her eyes as we moved about. Her eyes were thus drawn to greater distances, and her range of vision increased; before this she had hardly noticed anything across the room. In the latter part of the month she looked with especial curiosity at people’s faces on the other side of the room, and I guessed that it was because they looked so much smaller to her—as they would to us if we had not learned to allow for the distance. A face fifteen feet away can be completely hidden by a fifty cent piece held out at arm’s length; our friends shrink to small dolls in our eyes every time they cross the room, but we bring them up to their real size by trained imagination. The baby, who had not yet the trained imagination, must have seen strange shrinkings and swellings as people moved from her or toward her, and as she was carried about the room.

She saw a complete change of appearance, too, each time any one turned around, and each time she was carried from one side to another of a person, or of a piece of furniture. We have become so used to this that we do not notice it; but to the baby each side of an object must have looked like an entirely new thing. I think it was some time before she learned to associate together the different sides and the different sizes of each object—all the aspects one chair could take, for instance, gathering into one group in her mind, and all the aspects a table or a person could take, into another; but she was learning. It was an enormous piece of work for the baby brain, but babies are not lazy, and she enjoyed it.

The changes that people went through, as they moved about, were much more complicated than those of the furniture; but that only made them the more interesting. No wonder that as soon as the baby knew she could touch and feel what she saw, it was our faces she dived for with especial zeal, to explore their surfaces with her mouth; and a fortunate thing it is for the baby’s progress in knowledge that mothers do not mind having great and moist liberties taken with their faces. Our baby learned, too, at this time, with the connivance of her grandfather, and afterward her father, to fix her fingers in their beards and tug. This was doubtless educational, and it brought still another interest into the number that gathered about the faces of her fellow beings: but it led to trouble later, as her hands grew quicker and stronger in clutching.

She was a joyous and sociable little being in those days, and while her serious business was looking about and studying out the visible world, or exploring with her mouth the feeling of things, her delight was as always in people’s faces and attentions. She had become charmingly responsive, and answered to nods and prattle and cuddling with the gayest of smiles and crows, and lively flourishing of arms and legs. From early in the month she acquired an ecstatic little chuckle, and once or twice even broke into a genuine laugh when she was played with a little more boisterously than usual.

For by this time, and more and more every week, she began to like a frolic, and when she was tossed, rolled over, or slid down one’s knee, she crowed and beamed and chuckled in high delight. She was such a tiny baby for rough play that we tumbled her about most gingerly, but she seemed ready for anything herself. She was a baby singularly free from fear or nervous excitability, showing already quite clearly the temperament she has carried through her later childhood.

She was also physically strong, and once or twice in the fourth month sat quite alone on some one’s lap. I do not count this real sitting alone, however, for the lap gives under the baby’s weight, and steadies her a little: one should not record sitting alone till the baby has balanced successfully on a hard level, the floor or table. But as far as strength of back was concerned, our baby was now evidently ready to sit alone.

At this stage the babies of grandpa’s line have always been seated on the floor in a horse-collar, as befitted farm babies; and this latest one went into the collar at four months old, like the rest of us in our day, and spent much of her fifth month sitting there, sucking or brandishing her rattle, and looking happily about her. It is really a comfortable seat for a baby not yet quite ready to sit alone. When the collar is not brand new, one will of course scrub and disinfect it; and it is the better in any case for a blanket or thick shawl thrown over it. Also of course, one will never set a baby on the floor without seeing that all possible drafts, under doors or about loose window casings, are shut off with shawls and screens. Otherwise, there may be pneumonia to fight.

I have just spoken of the baby’s boldness. She showed fear now and then, however. About the middle of the fourth month she cried while a caller was present, dressed in black, with a large hat. Ten days later she was quite upset when her father leaned over suddenly, bringing his face into view from one side. Here were the first eye fears, considerably later than ear fears.

A still more advanced form of fear appeared two days later. The baby had waked and cried alone in the dark for some minutes, and when she was at last taken up, she had evidently become frightened, and was not easily reassured; she kept leaning toward her mother, and uttering troubled cries, and as it was some minutes before her mother took her, she grew more and more disturbed, and finally broke into a wail, and was soothed with difficulty, and all the evening she was anxious and easily upset. The next night, waking alone at the same hour, she began again to cry with the note of fright.

Here was not yet fear in the sense of definite expectation of harm. It was still purely instinctive, a sort of vague panic, from a sense of unfamiliarity. The darkness no doubt contributed to this unfamiliarity, but I do not think there was yet anything that could be called fear of the dark. It is doubtless, however, in large part from such experiences that fear of the dark is born; each one leaves its trace in the nervous system, and associations of terror with darkness and solitude are quickly formed. In these days of leaving babies to wail themselves to sleep for the good of their souls, and the convenience of mamma’s going out evenings, innumerable such associations must be bred—and again the schoolbooks take the blame when in later days the child proves nervous and excitable.

During the latter part of the fourth month, the baby was greatly interested in making sounds, and the one that most delighted her was a sort of harsh cawing or croaking, made deep in the throat, on the vowel â. She would lie and utter this sound at intervals, by the half hour, with deep satisfaction. But when she had not been making it for some hours, she was apt to forget just how, and to get it too high or low in the throat, producing an extraordinary collection of squeaks and grunts. She usually hit it at last; but after repeated losings, it became quite dissolved away among the many new ones it had apparently given rise to.

Later, she took much pains over some imperfect lip sounds; she would lie looking earnestly at me, draw her breath, gather her lips into shape, and finally explode the sound with a great expenditure of breath.

She made her little sounds often with an air of friendly response when we prattled to her, giving back murmurs, croaks, and gurgles for words. From the latter part of the fourth month, if we imitated to her some of these sounds, she seemed to imitate them back. Preyer, who records the same thing of his boy at the same age, thinks it marks a most important epoch, the beginning of action guided by ideas; but Baldwin, who considers the beginning of imitation even more important than Preyer does, thinks it cannot be so early, and that the repeating of the sounds must be mere coincidence.

This is likely enough, for a baby is always repeating his pet sounds, and it is not safe to conclude that he means to imitate us, even if he does chance to give back the same sound after us several times. But as to action guided by ideas, we scarcely need wait for the first imitation to see that. It appears in a simple form when the baby first looks for an object out of sight. This our baby had done weeks before, and by this time many of her actions seemed to be of ideomotor type. The effort to recall her croak was an instance. In the early weeks of the fifth month, she would seem to think suddenly of one of her little sounds, and dash at it, bringing it out with a comical doubling up of her body. In the same way she would have the happy thought, “Fingers in mouth!” and up they would come with a jerk, her head diving forward to meet them.

In the nineteenth week, she seemed to act once from something like a definite memory. Her grandfather entered the room while she was in her bath, and her usual joyous up and down movement of arms at sight of him produced a novel and fascinating splashing. Next day the baby splashed without suggestion, and again the next, looking up to my face and smiling; and after that no one could teach her anything about splashing. Yet even this was probably not really memory, but an association formed by a single vivid occurrence.

During these weeks a note of real desire, unheard before, appeared in her voice. Her face had at times, when she saw something new, or when she gazed at us while we talked to her, an expression of inquiry and effort to comprehend, with lips drawn in and brow tense. No one could watch her and not see the beginnings of some sort of mental life.