The Mind of the Child Part 23

How little clearness there is in his conceptions of animal and machine, however, appears from the fact that both are addressed in the same way.

When his father's brother comes, the child says, turning to his father, _neuer_ (new) _Papa_; he has not, therefore, the slightest idea of that which the word "father" signifies. Naturally he can have none. Yet selfhood (Ichheit) has come forth at this period in considerably sharper manifestation. He cries, _Das Ding haben! das will ich, das will ich, das will ich, das Spiel mocht ich haben!_ (Have the thing! I want it, I should like the game.) To be sure, when one says "komm, ich knopfs dir zu" (come, I will b.u.t.ton it for you), the child comes, and says, as an echo, _ich knopfs dir zu_ (I will b.u.t.ton it for you), evidently meaning, "b.u.t.ton it for me"! He also confounds _zu viel_ (too much) with _zu wenig_ (too little), _nie_ (never) with _immer_ (always), _heute_ (to-day) with _gestern_ (yesterday); on the contrary, the words _und_, _sondern_, _noch_, _mehr_, _nur_, _bis_, _wo_ (and, but, still, more, only, till, where) are always used correctly. The most striking mistakes are those of conjugation, which is still quite erroneous (e. g., _getrinkt_ and _getrunkt_ along with _getrunken_), and of articulation, the "sch" (_dsen_ for "schon") being only seldom pure, mostly given as "s" or "ts." "Toast" is called _Toos_ and _Dose_.

After the first thousand days of his life had pa.s.sed, the observation of him was continued daily, but not the record in writing. Some particulars belonging to the following months may be noted:

Many expressions accidentally heard by the child that excited the merriment of the family when once repeated by him, were rehea.r.s.ed times without number in a laughing, roguish, obtrusive manner, thus, _du liebe Zeit_. The child also calls out the name of his nurse, _Marie_, often without meaning, over and over again, even in the night. He calls others also by this name in manifest distraction of mind, often making the correction himself when he perceives the mistake.

More and more seldom does the child speak of himself in the third person, and then he calls himself by his name, never saying "he" any more. Usually he speaks of himself as "I," especially "I will, I will have that, I can not." Gradually, too, he uses _Du_ in address, e. g., _Was fur hubsen Rock hast Du_ (What a handsome coat you have)! Here the manner of using the "Was" is also new.

On the ten hundred and twenty-eighth day _warum_ (why?) was first used in a question. I was watching with the closest attention for the first appearance of this word. The sentence ran, _Warum nach Hause gehen? ich will nicht nach Hause_ (Why go home? I don't want to go home). When a wheel creaked on the carriage, the child asked, _Was macht nur so_ (What makes that)? Both questions show that at last the instinct of causality, which manifested itself more than a year before in a kind of activity of inquiry, in experimenting, and even earlier (in the twelfth week) in giving attention to things, is expressed _in language_; but the questioning is often repeated in a senseless way till it reaches the point of weariness. _Warum wird das Holz gesnitten?_ (for "gesagt"--Why is the wood sawed?) _Warum macht der Frodrich die [Blumen] Topfe rein?_ (Why does Frederick clean the flower-pots?) are examples of childish questions, which when they receive an answer, and indeed whatever answer, are followed by fresh questions just as idle (from the standpoint of adults); but they testify plainly to a far-reaching independent activity of thought. So with the frequent question, _Wie macht man das nur?_ (How is that done?)

It is to be said, further, that I found the endeavor impracticable to ascertain the order of succession in which the child uses the different interrogative words. It depends wholly on the company about him at what time first this or that turn of expression or question is repeated and then used independently. "Why" is heard by him, as a rule, less often than "What?" and "How?" and "Which?" Still, it seems remarkable that I did not once hear the child say "When?" until the close of the third year. The sense of s.p.a.ce is, to be sure, but little developed at that time, but the sense of time still less. The use of the word "forgotten"

(_ich habe vergessen_) and of "I shall" (do this or that) is exceedingly rare.

The articulation was speedily perfected; yet there was no success at all in the repet.i.tion of French nasal sounds. In spite of much pains "salon"

remained _salo_, "orange" _orose_; and the French "je" also presented insuperable difficulties. Of German sounds, "sch" alone was seldom correct. It was still represented by _s_; for example, in _sloss_ for "Schloss," _ssooss_ for "Schooss."

His fondness for singing increases, and indeed all sorts of meaningless syllables are repeated with pleasure again and again, much as in the period of infancy, only more distinctly; but, just as at that time, they can not all be represented on paper or even be correctly reproduced by adults. For a considerable time he was fond of _[=e]-la_, _[=e]-la_, _la_, _la_, _la_, _la_, in higher and higher pitch, and with unequal intervals, _lalla-lalla_, _lilalula_. In this it was certainly more the joy over the increasing compa.s.s and power of his voice that stimulated him to repet.i.tion than it was the sound of the syllables; yet in the thirty-sixth month he showed great pleasure in his singing, of which peculiar, though not very pleasing, melodies were characteristic. The singing over of songs sung to him was but very imperfectly successful.

On the other hand, the copying of the manner of speaking, of accent, cadence, and ring of the voices of adults was surprising, although echolalia proper almost ceased or appeared again only from time to time.

Grammatical errors are already becoming more rare. A stubborn fault in declension is the putting of _am_ in place of _dem_ and _der_, e. g., _das am Mama geben_. Long sentences are formed correctly, but slowly and with pauses, without errors, e. g., _die Blume--ist ganz durstig--mocht auch n bischen Wa.s.ser haben_ (The flower is quite thirsty--would like a little water). If I ask now, "From whom have you learned that?" the answer comes regularly, _das hab ich alleine gelernt_ (I learned it alone). In general the child wants to manage for himself without a.s.sistance, to pull, push, mount, climb, water flowers, crying out repeatedly and pa.s.sionately, _ich mocht ganz alleine_ (I want to [do it]

all alone). In spite of this independence and these ambitious inclinations, there seldom appears an invention of his own in language.

Here belongs, e. g., the remark of the child, _das Bett ist zu holzhart_ (the bed is too wooden-hard), after having hit himself against the bed-post. Further, to the question, "Do you like to sleep in the large room?" he answered, _O ja ganz lieberich gern_; and when I asked, "Who, pray, speaks so?" the answer came very slowly, with deliberation and with pauses, _nicht-nicht-nicht-nicht-nicht-niemand_ (not--n.o.body).

How far advanced is the use of the participles, which are hard to master, is shown by the sentence, _die Milch ist schon heiss gemacht worden_ (the milk has already been made hot).

The child's manner of speaking when he was three years old approximated more and more rapidly to that of the family through continued listening to them and imitation of them, so that I gave up recording it; besides, the abundant--some may think too abundant--material already presented supplies facts enough to support the foundations of the history of the development of speech in the child as I have attempted to set it forth.

A systematic, thorough-going investigation requires the combined labor of many, who must all strive to answer the same questions--questions which in this chronological survey are, in regard to one single individual, in part answered, but in part could merely be proposed.

To observe the child every day during the first thousand days of his life, in order to trace the historical development of speech, was possible only through self-control, much patience, and great expenditure of time; but such observations are necessary, from the physiological, the psychological, the linguistic, and the pedagogic point of view, and nothing can supply their place.

In order to secure for them the highest degree of trustworthiness, I have adhered strictly, without exception, to the following rules:

1. I have not adopted a single observation of the accuracy of which I was not _myself_ most positively convinced. Least of all can one rely on the reports of nurses, attendants, and other persons not practiced in scientific observing. I have often, merely by a brief, quiet cross-examination, brought such persons to see for themselves the erroneous character of their statements, particularly in case these were made in order to prove how "knowing" the infants were. On the other hand, I owe to the mother of my child, who has by nature a talent for observation such as is given to few, a great many communications concerning his mental development which have been easily verified by myself.

2. Every observation must _immediately_ be entered in writing in a diary that is always lying ready. If this is not done, details of the observations are often forgotten; a thing easily conceivable, because these details in themselves are in many ways uninteresting--especially the meaningless articulations--and they acquire value only in connection with others.

3. In conducting the observations every artificial strain upon the child is to be avoided, and the effort is to be made as often as possible to observe without the child's noticing the observer at all.

4. All training of the one-year-old and of the two-year-old child must be, so far as possible, prevented. I have in this respect been so far successful that my child was not until late acquainted with such tricks as children are taught, and was not vexed with the learning by heart of songs, etc., which he was not capable of understanding. Still, as the record shows, not all unnecessary training could be avoided. The earlier a little child is constrained to perform ceremonious and other conventional actions, the meaning of which is unknown to him, so much the earlier does he lose the poetic naturalness which, at any rate, is but brief and never comes again; and so much the more difficult becomes the observation of his unadulterated mental development.

5. Every interruption of one's observation for more than a day demands the subst.i.tution of another observer, and, after taking up the work again, a verification of what has been perceived and noted down in the interval.

6. Three times, at least, every day the same child is to be observed, and everything incidentally noticed is to be put upon paper, no less than that which is methodically ascertained with reference to definite questions.

In accordance with these directions, tested by myself, all my own observations in this book, and particularly those of this chapter, were conducted. Comparison with the statements of others can alone give them a general importance.

What has been furnished by earlier observers in regard to children's learning to speak is, however, not extensive. I have collected some data in an appendix.

CHAPTER XIX.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEELING OF SELF, THE "I"-FEELING.

Before the child is in a condition to recognize as belonging to him the parts of his body that he can feel and see, he must have had a great number of experiences, which are for the most part a.s.sociated with _painful feelings_. How little is gained for the development of the notion of the "I" by means of the first movements of the hands, which the infant early carries to the mouth, and which must give him, when he sucks them, a different feeling from that given by sucking the finger of another person, or other suitable objects, appears from the fact that, e. g., my child for months tugged at his fingers as if he wanted to pull them off, and struck his own head with his hand by way of experiment. At the close of the first year he had a fancy for striking hard substances against his teeth, and made a regular play of gnashing the teeth. When on the four hundred and ninth day he stood up straight in bed, holding on to the railing of it with his hands, _he bit himself on his bare arm_, and that the upper arm, so that he immediately cried out with pain. The marks of the incisors were to be seen long afterward. The child did not a second time bite himself in the arm, but only bit his fingers, and inadvertently his tongue.

The same child, who likes to hold a biscuit to the mouth of any member of the family to whom he is favorably disposed, offered the biscuit in the same way, entirely of his own accord, to his own foot--sitting on the floor, holding the biscuit in a waiting att.i.tude to his toes--and this strange freak was repeated many times in the twenty-third month.

The child amused himself with it.

Thus, at a time when the attention to what is around is already very far developed, one's own person may not be distinguished from the environment. Vierordt thinks that a discrimination between the general feelings [i. e., those caused by bodily states] and the sensations that pertain to the external world exists in the third month. From my observations I can not agree with him; for, although the division may begin thus early, yet it does not become complete until much later. In the ninth month the feet are still eagerly felt of by the little hands, though not so eagerly as before, and the toes are carried to the mouth like a new plaything. Nay, even in the nineteenth month it is not yet clear how much belongs to one's own body. The child had lost a shoe. I said, "Give the shoe." He stooped, seized it, and gave it to me. Then, when I said to the child, as he was standing upright on the floor, "Give the foot," in the expectation that he would hold it out, stretch it toward me, he grasped at it with both hands, and labored hard to get it and hand it to me.

How little he understands, even after the first year of his life has pa.s.sed, the difference between the parts of his own body and foreign objects is shown also in some strange experiments that the child conducted quite independently. He sits by me at the table and strikes very often and rapidly with his hands successive blows upon the table, at first gently, then hard; then, with the right hand alone, hard; next, suddenly strikes himself with the same hand on the mouth; then he holds his hand to his mouth for a while, strikes the table again with the right hand, and then on a sudden strikes his own head (above the ear). The whole performance gave exactly the impression of his having for the first time noticed that it is one thing to strike oneself, one's own hard head, and another thing to strike a foreign hard object (forty-first week). Even in the thirteenth month the child often raps his head with his hand to try the effect, and seems surprised at the hardness of the head. In the sixteenth month he used not unfrequently to set the left thumb against the left side of the head, and at the same time the right thumb against the right side of the head, above the ears, with the fingers spread, and to push at the same time, putting on a strange, wondering expression of face, with wide-open eyes. This movement is not imitated and not inherited, but invented. The child is doubtless making experiments by means of it upon the holding of the head, head-shaking, resistance of his own body, perhaps also upon the management of the head, as at every thump of the thumbs against the temporal bones a dull sound was heard. The objectivity of the fingers was found out not much before this time by involuntary, painful biting of them, for as late as the fifteenth month the child bit his finger so that he cried out with pain. Pain is the most efficient teacher in the learning of the difference between subjective and objective.

Another important factor is the _perception of a change produced by ones own activity_ in all sorts of familiar objects that can be taken hold of in the neighborhood; and the most remarkable day, from a psychogenetic point of view, in any case an extremely significant day in the life of the infant, is the one in which he first experiences the _connection of a movement executed by himself with a sense-impression following upon it_. The noise that comes from the tearing and crumpling of paper is as yet unknown to the child. He discovers (in the fifth month) the fact that he himself in tearing paper into smaller and smaller pieces has again and again the new sound-sensation, and he repeats the experiment day by day and with a strain of exertion until this connection has lost the charm of novelty. At present there is not, indeed, as yet any clear insight into the nexus of cause; but the child has now had the experience that he can himself be the cause of a combined perception of sight and sound regularly, to the extent that when he tears paper there appears, on the one hand, the lessening in size; on the other hand, the noise. The patience with which this occupation--from the forty-fifth to the fifty-fifth week especially--is continued with pleasure is explained by the gratification at being a cause, at the perception that so striking a transformation as that of the newspaper into fragments has been effected by means of his own activity. Other occupations of this sort, which are taken up again and again with a persistency incomprehensible to an adult, are the shaking of a bunch of keys, the opening and closing of a box or purse (thirteenth month); the pulling out and emptying, and then the filling and pushing in, of a table-drawer; the heaping up and the strewing about of garden-mold or gravel; the turning of the leaves of a book (thirteenth to nineteenth month); digging and sc.r.a.ping in the sand; the carrying of footstools. .h.i.ther and thither; the placing of sh.e.l.ls, stones, or b.u.t.tons in rows (twenty-first month); pouring water into and out of bottles, cups, watering-pots (thirty-first to thirty-third months); and, in the case of my boy, the throwing of stones into the water. A little girl in the eleventh month found her chief pleasure in "rummaging" with trifles in drawers and little boxes. Her sister "played" with all sorts of things, taking an interest in dolls and pictures in the tenth month (Frau von Strumpell). Here, too, the eagerness and seriousness with which such apparently aimless movements are performed is remarkable.

The satisfaction they afford must be very great, and it probably has its basis in the feeling of his own power generated by the movements originated by the child himself (changes of place, of position, of form) and in the proud feeling of being a cause.

This is not mere playing, although it is so called; it is _experimenting_. The child that at first merely played like a cat, being amused with color, form, and movement, has become a _causative being_. Herewith the development of the _"I"-feeling_ enters upon a new phase; but it is not yet perfected. Vanity and ambition come in for the further development of it. Above all, it is _attention_ to the _parts of his own body_ and the _articles of his dress_, the nearest of all objects to the child's eye, that helps along the separation in thought of the child's body from all other objects.

I therefore made special observation of the directing of his look toward his own body and toward the mirror. In regard to the first I took note, among other facts, of the following:

_17th week._--In the seizing movements, as yet imperfect, the gaze is fixed partly on the object, partly on _his own hand_, especially if the hand has once seized successfully.

_18th week._--The very attentive regarding of the fingers in seizing is surprising, and is to be observed daily.

_23d week._--When the infant, who often throws his hands about at random in the air, accidentally gets hold of one hand with the other, he regards attentively both his hands, which are often by chance folded.

_24th week._--In the same way the child fixes his gaze for several minutes alternately upon a glove held by himself in his hands and upon his own fingers that hold it.

_32d week._--The child, lying on his back, _looks_ very frequently _at_ his _legs_ stretched up vertically, especially at his _feet_, as if they were something foreign to him.

_35th week._--In every situation in which he can do so, the child tries to grasp a foot with both hands and carry it to his mouth, often with success. This monkey-like movement seems to afford him special pleasure.

_36th week._--His own hands and feet are no more so frequently observed by him without special occasion. Other new objects attract his gaze and are seized.

_39th week._--The same as before. In the bath, however, the child sometimes looks at and feels of _his own skin_ in various places, evidently taking pleasure in doing so. Sometimes he directs his gaze to his legs, which are bent and extended in a very lively manner in the most manifold variety of positions.

_55th week._--The child looks for a long time attentively at a person eating, and follows with his gaze every movement; grasps at the person's face, and then, after _striking himself on the head_, fixes his gaze on his own hands. He is fond of playing with the fingers of the persons in the family, and delights in the bendings and extensions, evidently comparing them with those of his own fingers.

_62d week._--Playing with his own fingers (at which he looks with a protracted gaze) as if he would pull them off. Again, one hand is pressed down by the other flat upon the table until it hurts, as if the hand were a wholly foreign plaything, and it is still looked at wonderingly sometimes.

From this time forth the gazing at the parts of his own body was perceptibly lessened. The child _knew_ them as to their form, and gradually learned to distinguish them from foreign objects as parts belonging to him; but in this he by no means arrives at the point of considering, "The hand is mine, the thing seized is not," or "The leg belongs to me," and the like; but because all the visible parts of the child's body, on account of very frequently repeated observation, no longer excite the optic center so strongly and therefore appear no longer interesting--because the experiences of touch combined with visual perceptions always recur in the same manner--the child has gradually become accustomed to them and _overlooks_ them when making use of his hands and feet. He no longer represents them to himself separately, as he did before, whereas every new object felt, seen, or heard, is very interesting to him and is separately represented in idea.

Thus arises the definite separation of object and subject in the child's intellect. In the beginning the child is new to himself, namely, to the representational apparatus that gets its development only after birth; later, after he has become acquainted with himself, after he, namely, his body, has lost the charm of novelty for him, i. e., for the representational apparatus in his brain, a dim feeling of the "I"

exists, and by means of further abstraction the concept of the "I" is formed.

The progress of the intellect in the act of _looking into the mirror_ confirms this conclusion drawn from the above observations.

For the behavior of the child toward his image in the gla.s.s shows unmistakably the gradual growth of the consciousness of self out of a condition in which objective and subjective changes are not yet distinguished from each other.