Chapter II: Part 2

Now in all this one significant thing appears. Sensations had from the first the quality of being agreeable or disagreeable. The baby could not wish, prefer, and choose, for she had not learned to remember and compare; but she could like and dislike. And this was shown plainly from the first hour by expressions of face--reflex facial movements, so firmly associated in the human race with liking and disliking that the most inexperienced observer recognizes their meaning at once. It is said that facial expression comes by imitation, and that the blind are therefore deficient in it; but this is not true of these simplest expressions: they come by inheritance, and are present in the first hour of life. A look of content or discontent, the monotonous cry, and vague movements of limbs, head, and features,--these are the limits of expression of feeling in the earliest days.

It would seem that in this sense condition there was nothing that could give the baby any feeling of inner or outer, of space or locality. We have some glimpse of the like condition ourselves,--when people say after an explosion, for instance, that it “seemed to be inside their own heads,” or when we try to locate a cicada’s note, or when we feel diffused warmth.

Here is the conception I gathered of the dim life on which the little creature entered at birth. She took in with a dull comfort the gentle light that fell on her eyes, seeing without any sort of attention or comprehension the moving blurs of darkness that varied it. She felt motions and changes; she felt the action of her own muscles; and, after the first three or four days, disagreeable shocks of sound now and then broke through the silence, or perhaps through an unnoticed jumble of faint noises. She felt touches on her body from time to time, but without the least sense of the place of the touch (this became evident enough later, as I shall relate in its order); and steady slight sensations of touch from her clothes, from arms that held her, from cushions on which she lay, poured in on her.

From time to time sensations of hunger, thirst, and once or twice of pain, made themselves felt through all the others, and mounted till they became distressing; from time to time a feeling of heightened comfort flowed over her, as hunger and thirst were satisfied, or release from clothes, and the effect of the bath and rubbing on her circulation, increased the net sense of well-being. She felt slight and unlocated discomforts from fatigue in one position, quickly relieved by the watchful nurse. For the rest, she lay empty-minded, neither consciously comfortable nor uncomfortable, yet on the whole pervaded with a dull sense of well-being. Of the people about her, of her mother’s face, of her own existence, of desire or fear, she knew nothing.

Yet this dim dream was flecked all through with the beginnings of later comparison and choice. The light was varied with dark; the feelings of passive motion, of muscular action, of touch, of sound, were all unlike each other; the discomforts of hunger, of pain, of fatigue, were different discomforts. The baby began from the first moment to accumulate varied experience, which before long would waken attention, interest, discrimination, and vivid life.

IV

THE EARLIEST DEVELOPMENTS

Out of 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 it _could_ stop 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 gully till 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 the time, 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 water heightened 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,--I never 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 past experience 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 see it 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 to catch 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 for this 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 human face (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 showed that 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 the face 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, waving vaguely 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 my eyes 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 know much 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.

V

BEGINNINGS OF EMOTION AND PROGRESS IN SENSE POWERS

The baby entered on her second month well content with her fragmentary little world of glancing lights and shining surfaces, chords and voices, disconnected touches and motions. Her smiles began to be frequent and jolly. It was always at faces that she smiled now: nothing else seemed half as entertaining. The way in which a baby, in these early weeks, gazes and gazes up into one’s face, and smiles genially at it, wiles the very heart out of one; but the baby means little enough by it.

In this fortnight her pleasures were enlarged by introduction to a baby carriage. The outdoor sights and sounds were of course wasted on her at this stage of her seeing and hearing powers; but she liked the feeling of the motion, and lay and enjoyed it with a tranquilly beatific look. Perhaps also the fresher air and larger light sent some dim wave of pleasant feeling through her body.

Some days earlier, when carried out in arms for her first outdoor visit, she had found the light dazzling, and kept her eyes tight shut. In all I have said of babies’ pleasure in light, I have meant moderate light: the little eyes are easily hurt by a glare. There are nursemaids, and even mothers, who will wheel a baby along the street with the sun blazing full in his face, and who will keep a light burning all night for their own convenience in tending him; and in later years his schoolbooks will get the credit of having weakened his eyes. Nature protects the little one somewhat at the outset, for at first the eyes open by a narrow slit, which admits but scanty light: our baby was just beginning, at a month old, to open her eyes like other folk.

Pleased though the baby was with her new powers, her life at this period was not all of placid content. Ambition had entered in. It had already seemed as if the mechanical lifting of the head was passing into real effort to raise it; and day by day the intention grew clearer, and the head was held up better. Now, too, appeared the first sign of control over the legs. Laid on her face on the lounge, the baby did not cry, but turned her head sidewise and freed her face, and at the same time propped her body with her knees. This was on the first day of the month. A few days later she was propping herself with her knees in the bath every day.

With increase of joy and power came also the beginning of tears. This, too, was on the first day of the month. The tears were shed because she had waked and cried some time without being heard. When she was at last taken up, her eyes were quite wet. As every nurse knows, wee babies do not cry tears. When they do, it does not mean that any higher emotional level has been gained, only that the tear glands have begun to act. Nor have I any reason to suppose that in this case the baby felt fear at being left alone. It was simply that she was uncomfortable, and needed attention; and the attention delaying, the discomfort mounted, till it provoked stronger and stronger reflex expressions.

The first fright did occur, however, a few days later in the same week; but it was in a much more primitive form than fear of solitude. The baby was lying half asleep on my lap when her tin bath was brought in and set down rather roughly, so that the handles clashed on the sides. At this she started violently, with a cry so sharp that it brought her grandfather anxiously in from two rooms’ distance; she put up her lip at the same time, with the regular crying grimace known to every nursery,--the first time she had done this,--and it was fully five minutes before her face was tranquil again.

There had been reflex starting at sounds from the first week, and Professor Preyer calls this an expression of fright; but to me (and Professor Sully regards it in the same way) it seemed purely mechanical. Our baby would even start and cry out in her sleep at a sound without waking. But now there was clearly something more than reflex starting. It was not yet true fear, for fear means a sense of danger, an idea of coming harm, and the baby could have had no such idea. But there was some element of emotion to be seen, akin to fear; and (if we regard pleasure and pain as psychologists are disposed to do, not as emotions in themselves, but only as a quality of agreeableness or disagreeableness in our feelings) here was the first dawn of any emotion. Fright, that was but a step above mere physical shock, led the way into the emotional life.

This probably gives a true hint of the history of emotional development in the race: for in the animal world, too, fear appears earliest of all the emotions, and in the simplest forms of fright is hardly to be distinguished from mere reflex action; and it is caused oftener by sound than by anything else. When we remember the theory that hearing is developed from the more ancient motion sense, we are tempted to trace the origin of fright still farther back, to the very primitive reflex sensibility to jarring movement, of which I have spoken before.

And now the baby had come to six weeks old, and could hold up her head perfectly for a quarter of a minute at a time, and liked greatly to be held erect or in sitting position. Apparently all this was for the sake of seeing better, for her joys still centred in her eyes. She had made no advance in visual power, however, except that within a few days she could follow with her eyes the motion of a person passing near her.

Human faces were still the most entertaining of all objects. She gazed at them with her utmost look of intentness, making movements with her hands, and panting in short, audible breaths. Nothing else had ever excited her so, except once a spot of sunlight on her white bed.

There were signs that her experiences gathered more and more into groups in her mind, by association. I have spoken of her earlier association between the nursing position and being fed; now she would check her hungry crying as soon as she felt herself lifted; and a few days later, as soon as her mouth was washed out--a ceremony that invariably came before nursing. At seven weeks old she opened her mouth for the nipple on being laid in the proper position. The food association group was enlarging; but sight did not yet enter into it: the look of the breast did not seem to bring the faintest suggestion of satisfied hunger, and the baby would lie and cry with her lips an inch from it. This is natural, for she could never really have seen it at this stage of the development of vision.

I have said that in such associations there is a germ of memory. There is a sort of habit memory, too, that appears very early. Impressions that have been received over and over gather a sort of familiarity in the baby’s mind; and while he does not yet recognize the familiar things themselves, yet he feels a change from them as something strange--it jars somehow the even current of his feelings. Or where impressions have been especially agreeable, they are vaguely missed when they are absent. The consciousness of difference between society and solitude, which our baby had showed at the end of the first month, was habit memory of this sort.

Professor Preyer thinks that his baby showed habit memory as early as the first week, perceiving a new food to be different from the old. Our baby (who knew no food but mother’s milk) experienced a new taste once or twice, when dosed for colic, and never showed the faintest sense of novelty at it till she was six weeks old. Then she was given a little sugar for hiccoughs, and made a face of what seemed high disgust over it; but this particular face has been observed more than once, and is known to be common in babies at a new taste, even a pleasant one. It seems to be caused by a sort of surprise affecting the face muscles.

A few days later the baby showed surprise more plainly. She lay making cheerful little sounds, and suddenly, by some new combination of the vocal organs, a small, high crow came out--doubtless causing a most novel sensation in the little throat, not to speak of the odd sound. The baby fell silent instantly, and a ludicrous look of astonishment overspread her face. Here was not only evidence of the germs of memory, but also the appearance of a new emotion, that of genuine surprise; and, like fright, it is one that is closely related to simple nerve shock. From being startled to being surprised (as to being frightened) is not a long step.

I have just spoken of the baby as making little sounds. This was a new accomplishment. Until a few days before, she had made no sounds except some inarticulate fretting noises, the occasional short outcry when startled, and the “dismal and monotonous” cry that began with the first day. This original cry was clearly on the vowel _â_ (as in fair), with a nasal prefix--_ngâ_; but late in the sixth week it began to be varied a little. In the fretting, too, a few syllables appeared. The new sounds were mostly made in the open throat, and grew out of the old _ngâ_ by slight changes in the position of the vocal organs--_ng_, and _hng_, and _hng-â_; but now and then there was a short _wă_, _gă_, or _hă_, or even a lip sound, as _m-bă_.

It has been said that the broad Italian _ä_ is of all sounds the easiest, the one naturally made from an open throat: but the records show both German and American babies beginning with the flat _â_ or shorter _ă_. Our baby scarcely used any other vowel sound for weeks yet.

Little sounds of content, too, began in the sixth week--mainly inarticulate grunts and cooing murmurs; but in the course of the seventh week, besides the sudden crow, there were a few tiny shouts,--_a-a-ha_,--a gurgle, and some hard _g_ sounds, _ga_, and _g-g-g_, which passed in the eighth week into a roughened _gh_, a sort of scraping, gargling sound, not in the English language.

Our baby had a leaning to throat sounds; but other babies begin with the lip sounds, and some, it is said, with the trilling _l_ and _r_. It seems to be only chance what position of the vocal organs is first used; but after once beginning to articulate, the baby seems to pass from sound to sound by slight changes (probably made accidentally in using the old sounds), and so goes through the list with some regularity.

This practice in sounds may be at first quite without will, a mere overflow of energy into the vocal organs; but it is highly important none the less, for any creature that is to use human speech must get the speaking muscles into most delicate training. Think what fine and exact difference in muscular contractions we must make to be able to say “ball,” and be sure that it will not come out “pall”!

For a week or two now the baby made a good deal of progress in control of her body. She strove valiantly every day to keep her head erect, and made some little advance. In the bath she began to push with her feet against the foot of the tub, so hard that her mother could not keep the little head from bumping on the other end. She pulled downward with her arms when her mother held them up in wiping her. These pushing and pulling movements may have been made for the pleasure of the feeling, or they may have been involuntary. Perhaps they were accidental movements, passing gradually into voluntary ones. In either case, as they developed, the old irregular movements of legs and arms passed away, as those of the head and face had done before.

One new bit of muscular control was undoubtedly voluntary--a trick of putting out and drawing back the tip of her tongue between her pursed lips. And this was something more than just one new voluntary movement. The important thing was that she was using the movement to _bring together the evidence of two different senses into one perception_.

When something touches against our fingers, we have one sort of feeling in them, and quite another when we pass them over the thing and “feel of it;” and this other, clearer feeling is really a compound one, made up of the touch sensation in the skin and the muscle sensation in the moving fingers. It is called “active touch,” and it is a wonderful key to the world around us--so wonderful that with this alone it proved possible to educate Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller. This active touch the baby had now developed in tongue and lips; not yet in the fingers.

The passive sensation of light had already been blended with muscle sensation in something the same way, by the voluntary movement of turning and focusing the eyes; but that complete seeing which we might call “active sight” is a more complex power than active feeling, and there were other associations yet to be made before it could be fully built up. And I hope it will not spoil the interest of the story of the baby’s sense development if I say here that the plot is going to turn mainly on these two combinations, muscle sense with sight and muscle sense with touch; and then recombination of these two with each other--all welded together by voluntary movements, growing out of involuntary ones.

All this time the baby had had a daily source of placid pleasure in listening to chords on the piano--no longer heavy staccato chords, but flowing ones, in the middle octaves. The baby of theory cares for nothing but eating and sleeping; but our baby, even after she was already fretting with hunger, would forget all about it for ten minutes, if one would take her to the piano. Hunger, after it grew really strong, was a sensation that swept all before it; but on the whole, food was a matter of small interest compared with the world of light and touch and sound.

As for sleep, the baby slept, from the first, in pretty long periods,--six and seven hours was not uncommon,--and was wide awake between sleeps. At such times she would lie by the half hour, looking peacefully about her, or gazing into our faces with smiles. When we nodded, laughed, and talked to her, her smiles seemed like friendly responses; but this could have meant nothing, except that with our demonstrations those little constellations of high lights and glitters, our faces, bobbed and twinkled in a more amusing manner than ever.

At eight weeks old came the final stage in mastery of the mechanism of vision--the power of accommodation, or adjusting the lenses for different distances. It may have been present even earlier: it is a hard thing for the observer to know. But the indications are that it really did happen when I thought, the day the baby was eight weeks old. She was lying on her mother’s knees, fixing an unusually serious and attentive gaze on my face, and would not take her eyes away; indeed, as her mother turned her in undressing, she screwed her head around comically to keep her eyes fixed. At last, after some fifteen minutes, she turned her head clear over, and gazed as earnestly at her mother’s face. To see what she would do, her mother turned her again toward me, and once more she surveyed me for a time, and again turned her head and looked directly at her mother.

What was in the little mind? Was she beginning to discriminate and compare, for the first time setting apart as two separate things the two faces that had bent over her oftenest? Or was she simply using, on the most convenient object, a new power of adjusting her eyes, which filled her with serious interest by the new clearness it gave to what she saw? At all events, she would not have looked from one to the other with such long and attentive regard if she had not been able to focus both faces, at their different distances; so that I felt sure the power of accommodation was really there.

But there was more in the incident than just the advance in vision. Hitherto when the baby had turned her head to look, it had been only at something that she had already a glimpse of, off at the edge of the field of vision. Now she turned to look for something quite out of sight,--something, therefore, that must have been present as an _idea_ in the little mind, or she could not have looked for it. And in view of what I have said of the mother’s face as the great educational appliance in the early months, it is worth noticing that it was this which gave the baby her first idea, so far as I could detect.

We come a step nearer, too, to true memory, when the baby can keep thus, even for a few minutes, the idea of something formerly seen. It was still mainly habit memory, however. She looked for an accustomed sight in an accustomed place, bringing it to the point of clear vision by an accustomed movement of the neck muscles. There was no evidence till considerably later that she was capable of remembering a single, special experience.

The next day she was singularly bright and sunny, smiling all day at every one. She stopped in the middle of nursing to throw her head back and gaze at the bow at her mother’s neck, and would not go on with the comparatively uninteresting business of food till the bow was put out of sight. That night she slept eight hours at a stretch, longer than she had ever done. Was the little brain, perhaps, wearied with the new rush of impressions, which came with the new power of focusing?

The day after she would lie a while unusually silent and sober, looking about her and moving her hands a little; then she would fret to be lifted and held against one’s shoulder, where she could hold her head up and look about. She was able now to hold it up a long time by resting it for a few seconds every half minute or so, against my cheek, which I held close to give her the chance. But to-day she was not satisfied with having her head erect: she persistently straightened her back up against the arm that supported her--a new set of muscles thus coming under control of her will. As often as I pressed her down against my shoulder, she would fret, and straighten up again and set to work diligently looking about her.

After this her progress in holding up her head was suddenly rapid, and by the end of the month, four days later, she could balance it for many minutes, with a little wobbling. This uncertainty soon disappeared, and the erect position of the head was accomplished for life.

During these last days of the month the baby was possessed by the most insatiate impulse to be up where she could see. It was hard to think that her fretting and even wailing when forced to lie down could mean only a formless discontent, and not a clear idea of what she wanted. Still, it is not uncommon, when an instinct is thwarted, to feel a dim distress that makes us perfectly wretched without knowing why. As soon as she was held erect, or propped up sitting amid cushions, she was content; but the first time that she was allowed to be up thus most of the day, she slept afterward nine unbroken hours, recuperating, probably, quite as much from the looking and the taking in that the little brain and eyes had been doing as from any muscular fatigue there may have been in the position.

Such is the “mere life of vegetation” the baby lived during the first two months. No grown person ever experiences such an expansion of life, such a progress from power to power in that length of time. Nor was our little girl’s development anything unusual for a healthy, well-conditioned child, so far as other records give material for comparison. Preyer’s boy was later than she in getting his head balanced, but he arrived at full accommodation (and that is the most important work of the first two months) at almost exactly the same age as she; and so did Mrs. Hall’s boy. I do not know of any other records that make a clear statement on this point.

VI

PROGRESS TOWARD GRASPING.

The baby’s development, as I have said, consisted now mainly in forming association groups in her mind in two series, which we might call a sight-motor series and a touch-motor series. There had been a leap forward in the sight-motor series when “accommodation” was learned. Now the touch-motor series came to the front, and step by step led on to the great accomplishment of grasping.

First, when we laid the baby’s face up against ours, her little tongue was put out to lick the cheek that she felt, warm and smooth, against her lips. This was a more advanced use of active feeling than the mere passing of her tongue over her own lips, for that must have been done accidentally many times before she began to do it on purpose; and the association between the movement and the feeling had been helped by the double sensation--one feeling in the lips and another in the tongue every time they touched.

This doubling of sensation, which occurs every time one part of the body touches another part, often seemed to wake special attention in the baby, and thus help on a development. Later, it had a great part to play in teaching her the boundaries of her own body, and the difference between the Me and the Not-me. Even now, she must have been somewhat aware of a different feeling when she passed her tongue over her own sensitive lips, and when she passed it over the unresponsive cheek of some one else.

So far, the tongue, not the hand, was her organ of touch. But now the fingers were showing the first faint sign of their future powers--nothing more than a little special sensibility, such as the lips had shown in the first month: we would see the baby holding her finger tips together prettily (when by chance they had collided), as if there were a feeling there that interested her. Here again there was double sensation.

In these same early days of the third month there was beginning another development that was to end by making the hand the successful rival of lips and tongue for purposes of grasping and feeling. The baby was trying to get her fists to her mouth.

The movement of the hands toward the head is a common one in the first weeks, by reason of prenatal habit, and thus it had often happened that the little fists, or as much of them as could be accommodated, had blundered into the mouth; and interesting sensations (double sensations again, in fists and mouth) had been experienced. The baby had at the same time felt in her arms the movement that always went with these interesting sensations, and now she was trying to repeat it. Within a week she had mastered it, and could mumble and suck her fists at will--a great addition, naturally, to the comfort of life.

Meanwhile the reflex clasping, which had always taken place when an object was laid in the baby’s palm, was growing firmer and longer, and more like conscious holding; and I noticed that the thumb was now “opposed” in clasping--that is, shut down opposite the fingers, an important element in the skill of human grasping. And now, when the fingers came in contact with convenient things--folds of the towel, for instance--the hands would clasp them mechanically, just as the lips, since the first month, had laid hold on a breast or cheek that touched them.

This had an important result. The little hand would presently go to the mouth, still mechanically clasping the fold of towel or dress, which in consequence was sucked and mumbled, too. In this way the baby got sundry novel sensations, and a chain of associations began to form: she was to learn thus, by and by, that when she felt touch sensations in her fingers, she could get livelier ones in her mouth (and also the pleasant muscular feeling of sucking), by the movements of clasping, and of lifting her arm. But she had not yet learned it: objects (except her own hands) were still carried to her mouth only by accident.

By the twelfth week the baby had found that her thumb was better for sucking purposes than chance segments of fist, and could turn her hand and get the convenient little projection neatly into her mouth. She got hold of it more by diving her head down to it than by lifting the hand to the mouth. Seizing with the mouth, by motions of the head, like a dog, instead of using the hand to wait on the mouth, seemed still her natural way.

But the hands were gaining. In this same twelfth week I saw the little finger tips go fumbling and feeling over our hands and dresses. They, too, had learned active touch, as the tongue had learned it more than a month before.

Just at this time we began to bring the baby to the table--nominally so that no one need stay away from meals to look after her; really for the sake of her jovial company at our sober grown-up board, where she would sit, propped amid cushions in her high chair, gazing and smiling sociably at our faces, crowing and flourishing her arms in joy at the lights and the rattle of dishes, forming the sole topic of conversation to an extent that her bachelor uncle had his private and lonely opinion about. The high chair was one of those that have a wooden tray fastened across the front, and here were placed several handy objects--rattle, and ring, and string of spools. This was by the wisdom of grandma, who saw the approach of the power of grasping. One may often see the little hands fluttering empty, the little brain restless, craving its natural development (for grasping is much more a matter of brain development, through the forming of associations, than of hand development), when there is no wise grandma to see that rattle and ring and spools lie “handy by” a little _before_ the baby is ready to use them. To wait till he knows how to grasp before giving him things to practice on is like keeping a boy out of the water till he knows how to swim. Such impeding of the natural activities is responsible for a good deal of the fretting of babies.

It was not three days till I saw the little hands go fumbling across the tray, seeking the objects they had become used to finding there; and when they touched rattle or spool, they laid hold on it. Nor was this the old mechanical clasping: it was voluntary action, and as clumsy as new voluntary action is apt to be, compared to involuntary. The baby did not know how to turn her hand and take up a thing neatly: if she touched it in such fashion that she could shut down her fingers on it somehow or anyhow, she would manage to lift it--stuck between two fingers from behind, once, when the back of her hand had touched it; if not, she would go on fumbling till she did. In two or three days more she was laying hold on things and carrying them to her mouth with plain intention.

Here was a sort of grasping, but it was grasping by feeling only. The baby had yet no idea of an object, which she could locate with the eye and then lay hold on with the hand. She had simply completed the chain of association I spoke of above: she had learned, that is, that after certain groping movements, feelings of touch appeared in her hands; and that then, after movements of clasping and lifting, these feelings reappeared in more lively and pleasing form in her mouth. She never looked at the objects she touched. There is no reason to think they could have been to her anything more than sensations in her own hands and mouth. The sight-motor and touch-motor series had not yet coalesced. But in these last days of the third month both had come to the point where they were ready to begin the fusing process, and give the baby her world of outer objects.

Before I go back to relate what had been going on meanwhile in the sight-motor series, I must stop to speak of some other developments of the month.