There are composites of sensation which the baby experiences very early. There is the feeling of clothes, for instance, made up of warmth, of touch and pressure sensations all over his skin, and of changes in the muscular feelings from constraint, and in the internal feelings from the effect on circulation. There are feelings of fatigue in one position, made up of sensations of touch, of the pressure of the body’s weight on the under surfaces of skin, of some muscular tensions, and perhaps of several other elements. Our baby’s nurse saved her much fretting by simply changing the position of the little body from time to time. We ourselves are constantly moving and shifting our positions, to relieve a pressure on the skin here, or a muscular tension there, but the wee baby cannot so much as turn his head or move a limb at will.
Vaguest and most composite of all is what is called “common sensation,” or “general sensation”—that feeling of comfort or discomfort, vigor or languor, diffused through the whole body, with which we are all familiar. It seems to be very primitive in origin—indeed, the speculation is that this dim, pervasive feeling is the original one, the primitive way in which animal tissue responded to light and heat and everything, before the special senses developed, gathering the light sensations to one focus, the sound sensations to another, and so on. But in its present development it is also largely made up of the sum of all the organic sensations, and even of dim overflows of feeling from the special senses.
It is with older people notably connected with emotional states. It varies, of course, with health and external conditions; yet each person seems from birth to be held to a certain fixed habit in this complex underlying condition of feeling—pleasant with one, unpleasant with another. This fixed habit of general sensation is perhaps the secret of what we call temperament; while its surface variations seem to be mainly responsible for moods.
Our baby showed temperament—luckily of the easy-going and cheerful kind—from her first day (though we could hardly see this except by looking back afterward); and there is no reason to doubt that she experienced some general sensation from the first. It was evidently of a pretty neutral sort, however: the definite appearance of high comfort and well-being did not come till later; nor were moods apparent at first.
Now in all this one significant thing appears. Sensations had from the first the quality of being agreeable or disagreeable. The baby could not wish, prefer, and choose, for she had not learned to remember and compare; but she could like and dislike. And this was shown plainly from the first hour by expressions of face—reflex facial movements, so firmly associated in the human race with liking and disliking that the most inexperienced observer recognizes their meaning at once. It is said that facial expression comes by imitation, and that the blind are therefore deficient in it; but this is not true of these simplest expressions: they come by inheritance, and are present in the first hour of life. A look of content or discontent, the monotonous cry, and vague movements of limbs, head, and features,—these are the limits of expression of feeling in the earliest days.
It would seem that in this sense condition there was nothing that could give the baby any feeling of inner or outer, of space or locality. We have some glimpse of the like condition ourselves,—when people say after an explosion, for instance, that it “seemed to be inside their own heads,” or when we try to locate a cicada’s note, or when we feel diffused warmth.
Here is the conception I gathered of the dim life on which the little creature entered at birth. She took in with a dull comfort the gentle light that fell on her eyes, seeing without any sort of attention or comprehension the moving blurs of darkness that varied it. She felt motions and changes; she felt the action of her own muscles; and, after the first three or four days, disagreeable shocks of sound now and then broke through the silence, or perhaps through an unnoticed jumble of faint noises. She felt touches on her body from time to time, but without the least sense of the place of the touch (this became evident enough later, as I shall relate in its order); and steady slight sensations of touch from her clothes, from arms that held her, from cushions on which she lay, poured in on her.
From time to time sensations of hunger, thirst, and once or twice of pain, made themselves felt through all the others, and mounted till they became distressing; from time to time a feeling of heightened comfort flowed over her, as hunger and thirst were satisfied, or release from clothes, and the effect of the bath and rubbing on her circulation, increased the net sense of well-being. She felt slight and unlocated discomforts from fatigue in one position, quickly relieved by the watchful nurse. For the rest, she lay empty-minded, neither consciously comfortable nor uncomfortable, yet on the whole pervaded with a dull sense of well-being. Of the people about her, of her mother’s face, of her own existence, of desire or fear, she knew nothing.
Yet this dim dream was flecked all through with the beginnings of later comparison and choice. The light was varied with dark; the feelings of passive motion, of muscular action, of touch, of sound, were all unlike each other; the discomforts of hunger, of pain, of fatigue, were different discomforts. The baby began from the first moment to accumulate varied experience, which before long would waken attention, interest, discrimination, and vivid life.