Ich schau’ dich an, und Wehmuth
Schleicht mir ins Herz hinein.
Other and strangely unlike feelings mingle with this caressing, half-pitiful admiration. We moderns are given to relieving the strained attitude of reverence and pity by momentary outbursts of humorous merriment. The child, while appealing to our admiration and our pity, makes a large and many-voiced appeal also to our sense of the laughter in things. It is indeed hard to say whether he is most amusing when setting at naught in his quiet, lordly way, our most extolled views, our ideas of what is true and false, of the proper uses of things, and so forth, or when labouring in his perfectly self-conceived fashion to overtake us and be as experienced and as conventional as ourselves. This ever new play of droll feature in childish thought and action forms one of the deepest sources of delight for the modern lover of childhood.
With the growth of a poetic or sentimental interest in childhood there has come a new and different kind of interest. Ours is a scientific age, and science has cast its inquisitive eye on the infant. We want to know what happens in these first all-decisive two or three years of human life, by what steps exactly the wee amorphous thing takes shape and bulk, both physically and mentally. And we can now speak of the beginning of a careful and methodical investigation of child-nature, by men trained in scientific observation. This line of inquiry, started by physicians, as the German Sigismund, in connection with their special professional aims, has been carried on by a number of fathers and others having access to the infant, among whom it may be enough to name Darwin and Preyer. A fuller list of writings on the subject will be given at the end of the volume.
This eagerness to know what the child is like, an eagerness illustrated further by the number of reminiscences of early years recently published, is the outcome of a many-sided interest which it may be worth while to analyse.
The most obvious source of interest in the doings of infancy lies in its primitiveness. At the cradle we are watching the beginnings of things, the first tentative thrustings forward into life. Our modern science is before all things historical and genetic, going back to beginnings so as to understand the later and more complex phases of things as the outcome of these beginnings. The same kind of curiosity which prompts the geologist to get back to the first stages in the building up of the planet, or the biologist to search out the pristine forms of life, is beginning to urge the student of man to discover by a careful study of infancy the way in which human life begins to take its characteristic forms.
The appearance of Darwin’s name among those who have deemed the child worthy of study suggests that the subject is closely connected with natural history. However man in his proud maturity may be related to Nature, it is certain that in his humble inception he is immersed in Nature and saturated with her. As we all know, the lowest races of mankind stand in close proximity to the animal world. The same is true of the infants of civilised races. Their life is outward and visible, forming a part of nature’s spectacle; reason and will, the noble prerogatives of humanity, are scarce discernible; sense, appetite, instinct, these animal functions seem to sum up the first year of human life.
To the evolutionist, moreover, the infant exhibits a still closer kinship to the natural world. In the successive stages of fœtal development he sees the gradual unfolding of human lineaments out of a widely typical animal form. And even after birth he can discern new evidences of this genealogical relation of the “lord” of creation to his inferiors. How significant, for example, is the fact recently established by a medical man, Dr. Louis Robinson, that the new-born infant is able just like the ape to suspend his whole weight by grasping a small horizontal rod.[[2]]
Yet even as nature-object for the biologist the child presents distinctive attributes. Though sharing in animal instinct, he shares in it only to a very small extent. The most striking characteristic of the new-born offspring of man is its unpreparedness for life. Compare with the young of other animals the infant so feeble and incapable. He can neither use his limbs nor see the distance of objects as a new-born chick or calf is able to do. His brain-centres are, we are told, in a pitiable state of undevelopment—and are not even securely encased within their bony covering. Indeed, he resembles for all the world a public building which has to be opened by a given date, and is found when the day arrives to be in a humiliating state of incompleteness.
This fact of the special helplessness of the human offspring at birth, of its long period of dependence on parental or other aids—a period which, probably, tends to grow longer as civilisation advances—is rich in biological and sociological significance. For one thing, it presupposes a specially high development of the protective and fostering instincts in the human parents, and particularly the mother—for if the helpless wee thing were not met by these instincts, what would become of our race? It is probable, too, as Mr. Spencer and others have argued, that the institution by nature of this condition of infantile weakness has reacted on the social affections of the race, helping to develop our pitifulness for all frail and helpless things.