I am disposed to think, then, that in this idea of senile shrinkage we have one of the most interesting and convincing examples of a child’s philosophizing, of his impulse to reflect on what he sees and hears about with a view to systematise. Yet the matter requires further observation. Is it thoughtful, intelligent children, who excogitate this idea? Would it be possible to get the child’s own explanation of it before he has completely outgrown it?[[51]]
The origin of babies and young animals furnishes the small brain, as we have seen, with much food for speculation. Here the little thinker is not often left to excogitate a theory for himself. His inconvenient questionings in this direction have to be firmly checked, and various and truly wonderful are the ways in which the nurse and the mother are wont to do this. Any fiction is supposed to be good enough for the purpose. Divine action, as remarked above, is commonly called in, the questioner being told that the baby has been sent down from heaven in the arms of an angel and so forth. Fairy stories with their pretty conceits, as that of the child Thumbkin growing out of a flower in Hans Andersen’s book, contribute their suggestions, and so there arises a mass of child-lore about babies in which we can see that the main ideas are supplied by others, though now and again we catch a glimpse of the child’s own contributions. Thus according to Stanley Hall’s report the Boston children said, among other things, that God makes babies in heaven, lets them down or drops them for the women and doctors to catch them, or that he brings them down a wooden ladder backwards and pulls it up again, or that mamma, nurse or doctor goes up and fetches them in a balloon. They are said by some to grow in cabbages or to be placed by God in water, perhaps in the sewer, where they are found by the doctor, who takes them to sick folks that want them. Here we have delicious touches of childish fancy, quaint adaptations of fairy and Bible lore, as in the use of Jacob’s ladder and of the legend of Moses placed among the bulrushes, this last being enriched by the thorough master-stroke of child-genius, the idea of the dark, mysterious, wonder-producing sewer. In spite too of all that others do to impress the traditional notions of the nursery here, we find that a child will now and again think out the whole subject for himself. The little boy C. is not the only one I find who is of the opinion that babies are got at a shop. Another little boy, I am informed, once asked his mamma in the abrupt childish manner, “Mamma, vere did Tommy (his own name) tum (come) from?” and then with the equally childish way of sparing you the trouble of answering his question, himself observed, quite to his own satisfaction, “Mamma did tie (buy) Tommy in a s’op (shop)”. Another child, seeing the announcement “Families Supplied” in a grocer’s shop, begged his mother to get him a baby. This looks like a real childish idea. To the young imagination the shop is a veritable wonderland, an Eldorado of valuables, and it appears quite reasonable to the childish intelligence that babies like dolls and other treasures should be procurable there.
The ideas partly communicated by others, partly thought out for themselves are carried over into the beginnings of animal life. Thus, as we have seen, one little boy supposed that God helps pussy to have “’ickle kitties,” seeing that she hasn’t any kitties in eggs given her to sit upon.
Psychological Ideas.
We may now pass to some of the characteristic modes of child-thought about that standing mystery, the self. As our discussion of the child’s ideas of origin, growth and final shrinkage suggests, a good deal of his most earnest thinking is devoted to problems relating to himself.
The date of the first thought about self, of the first dim stage of self-awareness, probably varies considerably in the case of different children according to rapidity of mental development and circumstances. The little girl, who was afterwards to be known as George Sand, may be supposed to have had an exceptional development; and the accident of infancy to which she refers as having aroused the earliest form of self-consciousness was, of course, exceptional too. There are probably many robust and dull children, knowing little of life’s misery, and allowed in general to have their own way, who have but little more of self-consciousness than that, say, of a young, well-favoured porker.
The earliest idea of self seems to be obtained by the child through an examination by the senses of touch and sight of his own body. A child has been observed to study his fingers attentively in the fourth and fifth month, and this scrutiny goes on all through the second year and even into the third.[[52]] Children seem to be impressed quite early by the fact that in laying hold of a part of the body with the hand they get a different kind of experience from that which they obtain when they grasp a foreign object. Through these self-graspings, self-strikings, self-bitings, aided by the very varied, and often extremely disagreeable operations of the nurse and others on the surface of their bodies, they probably reach during the first year the idea that their body is different from all other things, is ‘me’ in the sense that it is the living seat of pain and pleasure. The growing power of movement of limb, especially when the crawling stage is reached, gives a special significance to the body as that which can be moved, and by the movements of which interesting and highly impressive changes in the environment, e.g., bangs and other noises, can be produced.
It is probable that the first ideas of the bodily self are ill-defined. It is evident that the head and face are not known at first as a visible object. The upper limbs by their movement across the field of vision would come in for the special notice of the eye. We know that the baby is at an early date wont to watch its hands. The lower limbs, moreover, seem to receive special attention from the exploring and examining hand.
There is some reason to think, however, that in spite of these advantages, the limbs form a less integral and essential part of the bodily self than the trunk. A child in his second year was observed to bite his own finger till he cried with pain. He could hardly have known it as a part of his sensitive body. Preyer tells us of a boy of nineteen months who when asked to give his foot seized it with both hands and tried to hand it over. A like facility in casting off from the self or alienating the limbs is illustrated in a story in the Worcester Collection of a child of three and a half years who on finding his feet stained by some new stockings observed: “Oh, mamma! these ain’t my feet, these ain’t the feet I had this morning”. This readiness to detach the limbs shows itself still more plainly in the boy C.’s complaining when in bed and trying to wriggle into a snug position that his legs came in the way of himself. Here the legs seem to be half transformed into foreign persons; and this tendency to personify the limbs seems to be further illustrated in Laura Bridgman’s pastime of spelling a word wrongly with one hand and then slapping that hand with the other.
Why, it may be asked, should a child attach this supreme importance to the trunk, when his limbs are always forcing themselves on his notice by their movements, and when he is so deeply interested in them as the parts of the body which do things? I suspect that the principal reason is that a child soon learns to connect with the trunk the recurrent and most impressive of his feelings of comfort and discomfort, such as hunger, thirst, stomachic pains and the corresponding reliefs. We know that the “vital sense” forms the sensuous basis of self-consciousness in the adult, and it is only reasonable to suppose that in the first years of life, when it fills so large a place in the consciousness, it has most to do with determining the idea of the sentient or feeling body. Afterwards the observation of maimed men and animals would confirm the idea that the trunk is the seat and essential portion of the living body. The language of others too by identifying ‘body’ and ‘trunk’ would strengthen the tendency.