“Children, and those who are ill-acquainted with the language they desire to speak, or the matter whereof they discourse, make use of general terms, such as thing, animal, plant, in lieu of the proper terms which are wanting to them; and it is certain that all proper or individual names were originally appellative or general.”[23]
The problem cannot be accepted under this form by contemporary psychology. It is equivocal. Its capital error is in applying to the embryonic state of intelligence and of language, formulæ that are appropriate to adult life only—to the growing mind, categories valid for the formed intellect alone. A reference to the physiology of the human embryo will render this more intelligible. Has this embryo, up to three months, a nose or mouth? Is it male or female? etc. Students of the development of intra-uterine life in its first phases are very cautious in propounding these and similar questions in such a manner; they do not admit of definite answers. That which is in the state of envelopment and of incessant becoming, can only be compared remotely with that which is fixed and developed.
The sole permissible formula is this: Intelligence progresses from the indefinite to the definite. If “indefinite” is taken as synonymous with general, it may be said that the particular does not appear at the outset; but neither does the general in any exact sense: the vague would be more appropriate. In other words, no sooner has the intellect progressed beyond the moment of perception and of its immediate reproduction in memory, than the generic image makes its appearance, i. e., a state intermediate between the particular and the general, participating in the nature of the one and of the other—a confused simplification.
Recent works on the psychology of infancy abound in examples of these abstractions and inferior generalisations, which appear very early.[24] A few examples will suffice.
Preyer’s child (aged thirty-one weeks) interested itself exclusively in bottles, water-jugs, and other transparent vases with white contents; it had thus seized upon a characteristic mark of one thing that was important to it, to wit—milk. At a later period it designated these by the syllable môm. Taine records an analogous case of a child to whom mm and um, and then nim at first signified the pleasure of seeing its pap, and subsequently everything eatable. We are assisting at the genesis of the sign; the crude sound attached to a group of objects becomes at a later period the sign of those objects, and later still an instrument of substitution. Sigismund showed his son, aged less than one year, and incapable of pronouncing a single word, a stuffed grouse, saying “bird.” The child immediately looked across to the other side of the room where there was a stuffed owl. Another child having listened first with its right ear, then with its left, to the ticking of a watch, stretched out its arms gleefully towards the clock on the chimney-piece (auditory, not vocal, generic image).
Without multiplying examples known to every one, which give peremptory proof of the existence of abstraction (partial dissociation), and of generalisation, prior to speech, let us rather consider the heterogeneous nature of these generic images, the result of their mode of formation. They are in fact constructed arbitrarily,—as it were by accident, depending partly on the apprehension of gross resemblances, partly, and chiefly, on subjective causes, emotional dispositions, practical interests. More rarely they are based upon essential qualities.
John Stuart Mill affirms that the majority of animals divide everything into two categories: that which is, and that which is not edible. Whatever we may think of this assertion, we should probably feel much astonishment if we could penetrate and comprehend certain animal generalisations. In the case of children we can do more than assume. Preyer’s son employed the interjection ass (which he had forged or imitated) first for his wooden horse, mounted on wheels, and covered with hair; next for everything that could be displaced or that moved (carts, animals, his sister, etc.), and that had hair. Taine’s little girl (twelve months), who had frequently been shown a copy of an infant Jesus, from Luini, and had been told at the same time, “That is the baby,” would in another room, on hearing anyone ask her, “Where is the baby?” turn to any of the pictures or engravings, no matter what they were. Baby signified to her some general thing: something which she found in common in all these pictures, engravings of landscapes, and figures, i. e., if I do not mistake, some variegated object in a shining frame. Darwin communicated the following observation on one of his grandsons to Romanes:
“The child, who was just beginning to speak, called a duck ‘quack,’ and, by special association, it also called water ‘quack.’ By an appreciation of the resemblance of qualities, it next extended the term ‘quack’ to denote all birds and insects on the one hand, and all fluid substances on the other. Lastly, by a still more delicate appreciation of resemblance, the child eventually called all coins ‘quack,’ because on the back of a French sou it had once seen the representation of an eagle.”[25]
In this case, to which we shall return later, there was a singular mixture of intellectual operations: creation of a word by onomatopœia (resemblance) and finally an unbridled extension of analogy.