Chapter III: Part 3

Memory, for one thing, had plainly advanced. By the tenth week the baby had shown some doubtful signs of knowing one face from another; and in the twelfth she plainly recognized her grandfather with a smile and joyous cry, as he came in. Her first recognition, therefore (it is worth while to notice), was not of the mother, the source of supplies, but of the face that had offered most entertainment to the dawning mental powers, not only because of the white beard, the spectacles, and the shining bald brow, but because of the boyish abandon with which grandpa played with her, ducking his face down to hers.

A few days later she showed that she knew at least the feeling of her mother’s arms. For some weeks no one else had put her to sleep; and now when sleepy she fretted in other arms, but nestled down contentedly and went to sleep as soon as she felt herself in her mother’s. The association of that especial feeling had become necessary to sleep.

The instinctive language of sign and sound had developed a good deal. From the first day of the month, the baby’s joy in sights began to be expressed more exuberantly, with flying arms and legs, with panting, murmuring, and babbling, smiles and even small chuckles, and sometimes little shouts and crows. A new look of grief, too, the parallelogram shaped mouth that all babies make in crying, appeared.

In the tenth week she began to turn her head aside in refusal or dislike--a gesture that one may see far down in the animal kingdom. A dog, for instance, uses it very expressively. It comes plainly from the simple effort to turn away from what is unpleasant, and develops later to our shake of the head for “No;” and when we notice how early the development of control over head and neck is, how much in advance of any use of the hands, we see that it is natural for this to be the oldest of all gestures.

In the last days of the month came two notable evidences of growing will. One was the baby’s persistent effort to get the tip of her rattle (it was set on a slender ivory shaft) into her mouth. Sometimes it went in by chance; sometimes it hit her lip, and in that case she would stretch her mouth to take it in, moving her head rather than the rattle. But if it brought up against her cheek, too far away to be captured by such efforts, after trying a little, she would lower the rattle, and make a fresh start for better luck.

This may seem highly unintelligent action; yet after all, as Professor Morgan says, it is by the method of “trial and error” that most of our acts of skill (and perhaps all such acts of the lower animals) are learned. In trial after trial the baby associated the muscular feeling of the successful movement with the feeling of the rattle tip in her mouth, and repeated these movements more and more correctly, dropping the unsuccessful ones. In just this way the sharpshooter, through repeated trials and misses, learns to deflect his rifle barrel this way and that with an infinite fineness of muscular contractions, which he could never get by reasoning on it.

The other effort of will was in sitting up. During the whole month the baby had insisted on a sitting position, and had wailed as vigorously over being left flat on her back as over being left hungry. She had soon tried to take the matter into her own hands, and made many efforts to lift herself, sometimes by pulling on our fingers when we had laid them in her hands, sometimes by sheer strain of the abdominal muscles. She never succeeded in raising more than her head and shoulders till the last week of the month: then she did once lift herself, and in the following days tried with the utmost zeal to repeat the success. She would strive and strain, with a grave and earnest face, her whole baby soul evidently centred on the achievement. She would tug at our fingers till her little face was crimson; she would lift her head and shoulders and strain to rise higher, fall back and try it again, till she was tired out. The day she was three months old, she tried twenty-five times, with scarcely a pause, and even then, though she was beginning to fret pitifully with disappointment, she did not stop of her own accord.

Unless she began with a somewhat high reclining position, or her feet or hips were held, her little legs would fly up, and she could not get the leverage to lift her body. For that matter, even with us the legs are lighter than the trunk, and few women can overcome the difference, and lift themselves by sheer strength of the abdominal muscles, without having the feet held: and a baby’s legs are so much lighter than ours that it must be for several years a sheer impossibility for him to do it.

However, in the few cases when the baby did manage, by some advantage of position, or by holding to our fingers, to lift herself, she could not balance in the least, and toppled over at once. What with this discouragement, and restraint from her elders, who thought her back by no means strong enough yet for sitting alone, she soon after gave up the effort to raise herself, and waited till she was older.

It was in this same eventful thirteenth week that the baby first looked about, searching for something that was out of sight. A lively young girl with bright color and a charming pair of dangling eye-glasses was visiting us, and stood by, laughing and prattling to the baby while she was bathed. The little one, greatly interested, turned her head, smiling and crowing, to watch Miss Charmian’s movements, and to look for her when she was out of sight. In this, as in the definite efforts to feel the rattle tip in her mouth, and to renew the sensations of sitting up, we see action guided by an idea of that which is absent, that is by imagination, to a certain extent at least; though it is probable that there was still as much of the mere working of association as of definite ideas. The memory that the baby showed when she looked about, searching for an expected sight, instead of simply turning to an accustomed place, is clearly more than mere habit memory. Yet it was still not true memory: it was not an idea coming back to the mind after an interval, but only a sort of after-shine of the thing, held in the mind for a few moments after the thing itself had disappeared.

And now to come back to the sight-motor series: Did the baby still see objects only as blurs of light and shade? She had the full mechanism of her eyes in working order as soon as accommodation was acquired; but it is certain that it takes much practice to learn to use that mechanism. It is an old story that people born blind, receiving their sight by surgical operations, have to _learn_ to see. Professor Preyer quotes from Dr. Home the case of a twelve year old boy who, nearly a month after the operation, could not tell whether a square card had corners or not by looking at it; and of another seven year old boy who had to learn to recognize triangles and squares (which he knew well by touch) by running his eye along the edges and counting the corners. It must have taken immense practice for us all to learn to flash the eye so quickly over and about an object that we seem to take in its shape with one look. This was the task that lay before the baby now.

How long it took we can only guess. Some observers have taken it for granted that the first recognition of a face showed clear seeing had arrived. But the group of lights and shades is so different in each face that a baby might well learn to know them apart without distinct outlines. We have all seen French paintings in which the eyes, the smile, some high lights on cheek, chin, and nose, and a cloudy suggestion of hair and beard, are all that emerge from the dark canvas, and yet we may see easily for whom the portrait is meant. Our baby had recognized no face yet except her grandfather’s, where the beard, spectacles, and shining bald brow made recognition easy without any outline.

But in another direction we get a plainer hint. I have spoken above of the joyous excitement roused in the baby by interesting sights (not only faces now, but also sundry bright things, and dangling, moving things) early in the month. By the middle of the month her smiles were fewer, and she looked about her earnestly and soberly; and in the last week I noted, without understanding, the expression of surprise that had come into her face as she gazed this way and that. The wide, surprised eyes must have meant that something new was before them. Were things perhaps beginning to separate themselves off to the baby’s sight in definitely bounded spaces?

I must go on into the record of the next month for more light on this question: for the wonder grew day by day, and for weeks the baby was looking about her silently, studying her world. She would inspect the familiar room carefully for many minutes, looking fixedly at object after object till the whole field of vision was reviewed, then she would turn her head eagerly and examine another section; and when she had seen all she could from one place, she would fret till she was carried to another, and there begin anew her inspection of the room in its changed aspect--always with the look of surprise and eagerness, eyes wide and brows raised.

We can only guess what was going on in the baby mind all this time; but I cannot resist the thought that I was looking on at that very process which must have taken place somewhere about this time--the learning to see things clear and separate, by running the eyes over their surfaces and about their edges.

With this, sight and muscle sense alone, touch and muscle sense alone, had done all they could to reveal the world to the baby, and there lay close before her the further revelations that were to be made when touch, sight, and muscle sense could be focused all together on the objects about her. It was a wonderful sight to see, as the baby pressed forward to the new understanding, eager, amazed, and absorbed.

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.

VIII

THE ERA OF HANDLING THINGS

She sprang 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 attention had 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. But for 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 very deep 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 quadrupeds ever 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, as she 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 the sense 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 in the 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 to meddle 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 not understand. 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 felt _herself_ as 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 more than 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, picked up 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 curiously at 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 human language, 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.