Now, for the thinker, who has long since forgotten the time when he himself learned to speak, it is difficult, or even impossible, to give a decided answer. For the thinking person can not admit that he has been thinking without words; not even when he has caught himself arriving at a logical result without a continuity in his unexpressed thought. A break occurred in the train. There was, however, a train of thought. Breaks alone yield no thought; they arise only after words have been associated with thoughts, and so they can by no means serve as evidence of a thinking without words, although the ecstasy of the artist, the profundity of the meta-physician, may attain the last degree of unconsciousness, and a dash may interrupt the thought-text.
But the child not yet acquainted with verbal language, who has not been prematurely artificialized by training and by suppression of his own attempts to express his states of mind, who learns of himself to think, just as he learns of himself to see and hear—such a child shows plainly to the attentive observer that long before knowledge of the word as a means of understanding among men, and long before the first successful attempt to express himself in articulate words—nay, long before learning the pronunciation of even a single word, he combines ideas in a logical manner—i. e., he thinks. Thinking is, it is true, "internal speech," but there is a speech without words.
Facts in proof of this have already been given in connection with other points (Vol. I, pp. 88, 327, 328); others are given further on.
It will not be superfluous, however, to put together several observations relating to the development of the childish intellect without regard to the acquirement of speech; and to present them separately, as a sort of introduction to the investigation of the process of learning to speak.
Memory; a causative combination of the earliest recollections, or memory-images; purposive, deliberate movements for the lessening of individual strain—all these come to the child in greater or less measure independently of verbal language. The, as it were, embryonic logic of the child does not need words. A brief explanation of the operation of these three factors will show this. Memory takes the first place in point of time.
Without memory no intellect is possible. The only material at the disposal of the intellect is received from the senses. It has been provided solely out of sensations. Now a sensation in itself alone, as a simple fundamental experience affecting primarily the one who has the sensation, can not be the object of any intellectual operation whatever. In order to make such activity possible there must be several sensations: two of different kinds, of unequal strength; or two of different kinds, of the same strength; or two of the same kind unequally strong; in any case, two unlike sensations (cf. my treatise "Elemente der reinen Empfindungslehre," Jena, 1876), if the lowest activity of the intellect, comparison, is to operate. But because the sensations that are to be compared can not all exist together, recollection of the earlier ones is necessary (for the comparison); that is, individual or personal memory.
This name I give to the memory formed by means of individual impressions (occurrences, experiences) in contrast with the phyletic memory, or instinct, the memory of the race, which results from the inheritance of the traces of individual experiences of ancestors; of this I do not here speak.
All sensations leave traces behind in the brain; weak ones leave such as are easy to be obliterated by others; strong ones, traces more enduring.
At the beginning of life it seems to be the department of taste (sweet) and of smell (smell of milk) in which memory is first operative (Vol. I, p. 124). Then comes the sense of touch (in nursing). Next in order the sense of sight chiefly asserts itself as an early promoter of memory. Hearing does not come till later.
If the infant, in the period from three to six months of age, is brought into a room he has not before seen, his expression changes; he is astonished. The new sensations of light, the different apportionment of light and dark, arouse his attention; and when he comes back to his former surroundings he is not astonished. These have lost the stimulus of novelty—i. e., a certain reminiscence of them has remained with the child, they have impressed themselves upon him.