Children's Ways / Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matter

by James Sully

Very interesting in connection with the first stages of development of the idea of self is the experience of the mirror. It would be absurd to expect a child when first placed before a glass to recognise his own face. He will smile at the reflection as early as the tenth week, though this is probably merely an expression of pleasure at the sight of a bright object. If held when about six months old in somebody's arms before a glass a baby will at once show that he recognises the image of the familiar face of his carrier by turning round to the real face, whereas he does not recognise his own. He appears at first and for some months to take it for a real object, sometimes smiling to it as to a stranger and even kissing it, or, as in the case of a little girl (fifteen months old), offering it things.

An infant will, we know, take a shadow to be a real object and try to touch it. Some children on noticing their own and other people's shadows on the wall are afraid as at something uncanny. Here, too, in time, as with young animals, e.g., kittens, the strange appearance is taken as a matter of course.

Some children seem to follow out in part the line of thought of uncivilised races, and take reflections and shadows for a kind of "double" of the self. One of Dr. Stanley Hall's correspondents writes to him that he used to have small panics at his own shadow, trying to run away from it, and to stamp on it, thinking it might be his soul. We find another illustration of this doubling of the self in the autobiography of George Sand, which relates that when a child, reflecting on the impressive experience of the echo, she invented a theory of her double existence. We know, too, that the boy Hartley Coleridge distinguished among the "Hartleys" a picture Hartley and a shadow Hartley. To one little boy the idea of being photographed seemed uncanny, as if it were a robbing himself of something and the making of another self. But much more needs to be known about these matters.

The prominence of the bodily element in a child's first idea of himself is seen in the tendency to regard his sameness as limited by unaltered bodily appearance. A child of six, with his shock of curls, will, naturally enough, refuse to believe that he is the same as the hairless baby whose photograph the mother shows him. One boy who had attained to the dignity of knickerbockers used to speak of his petticoated predecessor as a little girl.

The Hidden Self.

In process of time, however, what we call the conscious self, that which thinks and suffers and wills, comes to be dimly discerned. It is probable that a real advance towards this true self-consciousness takes place towards the end of the third year, when the difficult forms of language, "I," "me," "mine," commonly come to be used with intelligence. This is borne out by the following story: A little girl of three lying in bed shut her eyes and said: "Mother, you can't see me now". The mother replied: "Oh, you little goose, I can see you but you can't see me". To which she rejoined: "Oh, yes, I know you can see my body, mother, but you can't see me". The "me" here was, I suppose, the expression of the inner self through the eyes. The same child at about the same age was concerned as to the reality of her own existence. One day playing with her dolls she asked her mother: "Mother, am I real, or only a pretend like my dolls?"

The first thought about self as something existing apart from all that is seen is apt to be very perplexing to the thoughtful child. As one lady puts it, writing to me of her childish experience: "The power of feeling and acting and moving about myself, under the guidance of some internal self, amazed me continually".

As may be seen by this quotation, the first thought about self is greatly occupied with its action on the body. Among the many things that puzzled one much-questioning little lad already quoted was this: "How do my thoughts come down from my brain to my mouth: and how does my spirit make my legs walk?" A girl in her fifth year wanted to know how it is we can move our arm and keep it still when we want to, while the curtain can't move except somebody moves it.

The Unreachable Past.

Very curious are the directions of the first thought about the past self. The idea of what we call personal identity does not appear to be fully reached at first; the little boy already quoted who referred to his past self by saying, "when I was a little girl," must have had a very hazy idea of his sameness with that small petticoated person. It would seem, indeed, as if a child found it easy to dissociate his present self from his past, to deny all kinship with it.