About this interesting trunk-body, what is inside it, and how it works, the child speculates vastly. References to the making of bone, the work of the stomach, and so forth have to be understood somehow. It would be interesting to get at a child’s unadulterated view of his anatomy and physiology. The Worcester Collection illustrates what funny ideas a child can entertain of the mechanism of his body. A little girl between five and six thought it was the little hairs coming against the lids which made her sleepy.
At a later stage of the child’s development, no doubt, when he comes to form the idea of a conscious thinking ‘I,’ the head will become a principal portion of the bodily self. In the evolution of the self-idea in the race, too, we find that the soul was lodged in the trunk long before it was assigned a seat in the head. As may be seen in C.’s case children are quite capable of finding their way, partly at least, to the idea that the soul has its lodgment in the head. But it is long before this thought grows clear. This may be seen in children’s talk, as when a girl of four spoke of her dolly as having no sense in her eyes. Even when a child learns from others that we think with our brains he goes on supposing that our thoughts travel down to the mouth when we speak.
Very interesting in connexion 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 mirror to recognise his own face. He will smile at the reflexion as early as the tenth week, though this is probably merely an expression of pleasure at the sight of a bright object. If held in the nurse’s or father’s arms to a glass when about six months old a baby will at once show that he recognises the image of the familiar face of the latter 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 and saying ‘Ta’ (sign of acceptance). In many cases curiosity prompts to an attempt to grasp the mirror-figure with the hand, to turn up the glass, or to put the hand behind it in order to see what is really there. This is very much like the behaviour of monkeys before a mirror, as described by Darwin and others. Little by little the child gets used to the reflexion, and then by noting certain agreements between his bodily self and the image, as the movement of his hands when he points, and partly, too, by a kind of inference of analogy from the doubling of other things by the mirror, he reaches the idea that the reflexion belongs to himself. By the sixtieth week Preyer’s boy had associated the name of his mother with her image, pointing to it when asked where she was. By the twenty-first month he did the same thing in the case of his own image.[[53]]
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 the strange phenomenon is taken as a matter of course and referred to the sun.
We are told that the phenomena of reflexions and shadows, along with those of dreams, had much to do with the development, in the early thought of the race, of the animistic conception that everything has a double nature and existence. Do children form similar ideas? We can see from the autobiography of George Sand how a clever girl, reflecting on the impressive experience of the echo, excogitates such a theory of her double existence; and we know, too, that the boy Hartley Coleridge distinguished among the ‘Hartleys’ a picture Hartley and a shadow Hartley. C.’s biography suggests that being photographed may appear to a child as a transmutation, if not a doubling, of the self. But much more needs to be known about these matters.
The prominence of the bodily pictorial element in the child’s first idea of self is seen in the tendency to restrict personal identity within the limits of an unchanged bodily appearance. The child of six, with his shock of curls, refuses to believe that he is the same as the hairless baby whose photograph the mother shows him. How different, how new, a being a child feels on a Sunday morning after the extra weekly cleansing and brushing and draping. The bodily appearance is a very big slice of the content of most people’s self-consciousness, and to the child it is almost everything.
But in time the conscious self, which thinks and suffers and wills, comes to be dimly discerned. I believe that a real advance towards this true self-consciousness is marked by the appropriation and use of the difficult forms of language, ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine’. This will be dealt with in another essay.
Sometimes the apprehension of the existence of a hidden self distinct from the body comes as a sudden revelation, as to little George Sand. Such a swift awakening of self-consciousness is apt to be an epoch-making and memorable moment in the history of the child.
A father sends me the following notes on the development of self-consciousness: “My girl, three years old, makes an extraordinary distinction between her body and herself. Lying in bed she 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 same child about the same time was concerned about 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?” Here again, it is plain, the emphasis was laid on something non-corporeal, something that animated the body, and not a mere bit of mechanism put inside it. Two years later she showed a still finer intellectual differentiation of the visible and the invisible self. Her brother happened to ask her what they fed the bears on at the Zoo. She answered impulsively: “Dead babies and that sort of thing”. On this the mother interposed: “Why, F., you don’t think mothers would give their dead babies to the animals?” To this she replied: “Why not, mother? It’s only their bodies. I shouldn’t mind your giving mine.” This contempt for the body is an excellent example of the way in which a child when he gets hold of an idea pushes it to its logical extreme. This little girl by-the-bye was she who, about the same age, took compassion on the poor autumn leaves dying on the ground, so that we may suppose her mind to have been brooding at this time on the conscious side of existence.
The mystery of self-existence has probably been a puzzle to many a thoughtful child. A lady, a well-known writer of fiction, sends me the following recollection of her early thought on this subject: “The existence of other people seemed natural: it was the ‘I’ that seemed so strange to me. That I should be able to perceive, to think, to cause other people to act, seemed to me quite to be expected, but the power of feeling and acting and moving about myself, under the guidance of some internal self, amazed me continually.”