A very noticeable improvement took place in the forming of sentences. All sorts of questions (writes the chronicler) are now put correctly and neatly, as, ‘Where are you going to?’ ‘Where did that come from?’ He is now striking out most ambitiously in new and difficult directions, not fighting shy even of such school-horrors as conditional clauses (as they used to be called, at least). Very funny it must have been to watch these efforts, and the ingenuities of construction to which the little learner found himself driven. For example, he happened one morning (end of fourth month) when in his father’s bedroom to hear a knocking in the adjoining room. He walked about the room remarking to himself, ‘I can’t make out somebody,’ which seemed his own original fashion of avoiding the awkwardness of our elaborate form, “I can’t make out who the person is (that is knocking)”. A still quainter illustration of the skill with which he found his way out of linguistic difficulties is the following. His sister once said to him (first week of fifth month), ‘You had better not do that,’ whereupon he replied, “I think me better will”. Here is a sample of his mode of dealing with conditionals (end of sixteenth month), “If him (a tree) would be small, I would climb up”.
His highly individualised language, remarks the father, was rendered more picturesque by the recurrence of certain odd expressions which he picked up and applied in his own royal fashion. One of these was, “Well, it might be different,” which he often used when corrected for a fault, and on other occasions as a sort of formula of protestation against what he thought to be an exaggerated statement.
We may now notice some new manifestations of thinking power. All thought, we are told, proceeds by the finding out of similarities and dissimilarities. C. continued to note the resemblances of things. Thus one day (end of second month) he noticed the dog Jingo breathing quickly after a smart run and observed, ‘Like puff-puff’. But what was much more noticeable this year was the boy’s impulse to draw distinctions and contrasts. It may certainly be said in his case that likeness was distinctly apprehended before difference, that in the development of his rhetoric the antithesis followed the simile. One of the first contrasts to impress[impress] the tender consciousness of children is that of size. This comes out among other ways in their habit of setting their own puny persons in antithesis to big grown-up folk, a habit sufficiently attested by the recurring expressions, “When I am big,” “When I am a man”. C., like other children, took to denoting a contrast of size by a figurative extension of the relation, mamma—baby. Thus it was noted (end of seventh month) that he would call a big tree “mamma tree,” and a shrub “baby tree”. One day he pointed to the clock on the mantel-piece and talked of the ‘big mamma clock’. He had, it seems, just before been playing with his father’s watch, which he also called clock.[[312]]
This love of contrasting appeared in a striking manner in connexion with the use of propositions. If, for example (third month), his father says, “That’s a little watch,” he at once brings out the point of the statement by adding, ‘That not a big watch’. The same perception of contrast would sometimes help him to take the edge off a disagreeable prohibition when unguardedly worded. Thus when told one day not to make much noise, he considered and rejoined, “Make little noise”.
A more subtle perception of contrast betrayed itself towards the end of the ninth month. His father had been speaking to him of the little calf which made a big noise. He mentally turned over this astonishing bit of contrariness in the order of things, and then observed with a sage gravity, “Big calf not make little noise,” which so far as the limited faculties of the observer could say appeared to mean that the contrast between size and sound did not hold all round, that the big sound emerging from the little thing was an exception to the order of nature.
In connexion with this habit of opposing qualities and statements reference may be made to the curious manner in which the boy expressed negation. It was evidently a difficulty for him to get hold of the negative particle, and to deny straight away, so to speak. At first (beginning of the year) he seemed to indicate negation or rejection merely by tone of voice. Thus he would say about something which he evidently did not like, ‘Ningi like that,’ with a peculiar querulous tone which was apparently equivalent to the appendage ‘N.B. ironical’. About a fortnight later he expressed negation by first making the correlative affirmation and adding ‘No,’ thus: "Ningi like go in water—no!" A week later, it is noted, ‘no’ was prefixed to the statement, as when he shouted, ‘No, no, naughty Jingo,’ in contradiction of somebody who had called the dog naughty. Towards the end of the third month ‘not’ came to be used as an alternative for ‘no’ which little by little it displaced.
The father remarks that C.’s sister had had a similar trick of opposing statements, e.g., “Dat E.’s cup, not mamma’s cup”. He then proceeds to observe in his somewhat heavy didactic manner that these facts are of curious psychological and logical interest, showing us that negation follows affirmation, and can at first only be carried out by a direct mental confronting of an affirmation, and so forth.[[313]]
As already shown by the reference to the use of ‘somebody’ C.’s thought was growing slightly more abstract. Yet how slow this advance was is illustrated in his way of dealing with time-relations, some of the most difficult, as it would seem, for the young mind to grapple with. At the end of the second month the ideas of time, we are told, were growing more exact, so far at least that he was able to distinguish a present time from both a past and a future. He called the present variously ‘now,’ ‘a day’ (to-day) or ‘dis morning’.[[314]] The present seemed, so far as the father could judge, to be conceived of as a good slice of time. ‘To-morrow’ and ‘by-and-by’ now served to express the idea of futurity, the former referring to a nearer and more definitely conceived tract of time than the latter. That the child had no clear apprehension of our time-divisions is seen not only in his loose employment of ‘dis morning,’ but in his habitual confusion of the names of meals, as in calling dinner ‘tea,’ tea ‘dinner’ or ‘breakfast,’ and so forth.
Another abstruse idea for the child’s mind is that of absence. It would seem as if this were thought of at first as a disappearance. As all mothers know, when a child is asked where somebody is he answers, ‘All gone’. C., on his return from D—— (end of second month), when asked where the people and the highly interesting Jingo were, would say, ‘All gone,’ and sometimes add picturesquely, ‘in the puff-puff’.[[315]]
The acquisition of clearer ideas about self and others has been touched on in connexion with the growth of the boy’s language. The first use of ‘I’ and the contemporaneous first use of ‘you’ (end of third month) seem to point to a new awakening of the intelligence to the mystery of self, and of its unique position in relation to other things. There is to the father evidently something pathetic in the gradual abandonment of the self-chosen name, ‘Ningi,’ of the early days, and the adoption of the common-place ‘I’ of other people. But we need not attend to his sentimental musings on this point. The exchange, we are told, was effected gradually, as if to make it easier to his hearers. At first (beginning of year) we have ‘me’ brought on the scene, which, be it observed, did duty both for ‘me’ and for ‘my’.[[316]] Later on followed ‘I,’ as an occasional substitute for ‘me,’ as if he were beginning to see a difference between the two, though unable to say wherein precisely it lay. Within less than a month, we are told, the child was beginning to use “Kikkie” as his name in place of “Ningi,” which “Kikkie” was afterwards improved into “Kifford”. “It was evident (writes the narrator) that in venturing on the slippery ground of ‘I’ and ‘you’ he experienced a sudden accession of manly spirit, as a result of which he began to despise the ‘Ningi’ of yore.” But dear old ‘Ningi’ did not go out all at once, and we read so late as the end of the third month of his amusing his mother when standing on the window-sill of the nursery by remarking thoughtfully, “How am I, Ningi, come down?” Here, it would seem evident, the addition of ‘Ningi’ was intended to help the faculties of his mother in case this still puzzling “I” should prove too much for them. By the end of the fourth month we read that ‘I’ was growing less shy, not merely coming on the scene in familiar and safe verbal companionship, as in expressions like ‘I can,’ but boldly pushing its way alone or in new combinations.[[317]] By the sixth month (æt. two and a half) the name Ningi may be said to have disappeared from his vocabulary. His rejection of it was formally announced at the age of two years seven and a half months. On being asked at this date whether he was Ningi he answered, “No, my name Kiffie”. He then added, “Ningi name of another little boy,” very much as in a remarkable case of double personality described by M. Pierre Janet, the transformed personality looking back on the original observed, “That good woman is not myself”. He looked roguish in saying this, as if there were something funny in the idea of altered personality. The determination to be conventional was shown at the same date in the fact that when, for example, the mother or father, following the old habit, would bid him go and ask the nurse to wash “Cliffie’s hands,” he would, in delivering the message, substitute “my hands”. By the end of the year ‘I’ came to be habitually used for self, as in answering a question, e.g., “Who did this or that?” Tyrannous custom had now completely prevailed over infantile preferences.