Part 9

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.