The Mind of the Child Part 11

A wide-spread prejudice declares, "Without language, no understanding"!

Subtile distinctions between understanding and reason have limited the statement to the latter term. But even in the restricted form, "Without verbal language, no reason," it is at least unproved.

_Is there any thinking without words?_ The question takes this shape.

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 a.s.sociated 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 p.r.o.nunciation 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 a.s.serts 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.

Long before the thirtieth week, healthy children distinguish human faces definitely from one another; first, the faces of the mother and the nurse, then the face of the father, seen less often; and all three of these from every strange face. Probably faces are the first thing frequently perceived clearly by the eye. It has been found surprising that infants so much earlier recognize human faces and forms, and follow them with the gaze, than they do other objects. But human forms and faces, being large, moving objects, awaken interest more than other objects do; and on account of the manner of their movements, and because they are the source from which the voice issues, are essentially different from other objects in the field of vision. "In these movements they are also characterized as a coherent whole, and the face, as a whitish-reddish patch with the two sparkling eyes, is always a part of this image that will be easy to recognize, even for one who has seen it but a few times" (Helmholtz).

Hence the memory for faces is established earlier than that for other visual impressions, and with this the ability to recognize members of the family. A little girl, who does not speak at all, looks at pictures with considerable interest in the seventh month, "and points meantime with her little forefinger to the heads of the human figures" (Frau von Strumpell).

My child in the second month could already localize the face and voice of his mother, but the so-called knowing ("Erkennen") is a recognition (Wiedererkennen) which presupposes a very firm _a.s.sociation of the memory-images_. This fundamental function attached to the memory can have but a slow development, because it demands an acc.u.mulation of memory-images and precision in them.

In the second three months it is so far developed, at least, that strange faces are at once known as strange, and are distinguished from those of parents and nurse; for they excite astonishment or fear (crying) while the faces of the latter do not. But the latter, if absent, are not yet, at this period, missed by most children. Hence it is worthy of note that a girl in her twelfth month recognized her nurse after six days' absence, immediately, "with sobs of joy," as the mother reports (Frau von Strumpell); another recognized her father, after a separation of four days, even in the tenth month (Lindner).

In the seventh month my child did _not_ recognize his nurse, to whom he had for months been accustomed, after an absence of four weeks.

Another child, however, at four months noticed at evening the absence of his nurse, who had been gone only a day, and cried l.u.s.tily upon the discovery, looking all about the room, and crying again every time after searching in vain (Wyma, 1881). At ten months the same child used to be troubled by the absence of his parents, though he bore himself with indifference toward them when he saw them again. At this period a single nine-pin out of the whole set could not be taken away without his noticing it, and at the age of a year and a half this child knew at once whether one of his ten animals was missing or not.

In the nineteenth and twenty-first months my boy recognized his father immediately from a distance, after a separation of several days, and once after two weeks' absence; and in his twenty-third month his joy at seeing again his playthings after an absence of eleven and a half weeks (with his parents) was very lively, great as was the child's forgetfulness in other respects at this period. A favorite toy could often be taken from him without its being noticed or once asked for.

But when the child--in his eighteenth month--after having been accustomed to bring to his mother two towels which he would afterward carry back to their place, on one occasion had only one towel given back to him, he came with inquiring look and tone to get the second.

This observation, which is confirmed by some similar ones, proves that at a year and a half the memory for visual and motor ideas that belong together was already well developed without the knowledge of the corresponding words. But artificial a.s.sociations of this sort need continual renewing, otherwise they are soon forgotten; the remembrance of them is speedily lost even in the years of childhood.

It is noteworthy, in connection with this, that what has been lately acquired, e. g., verses learned by heart, can be recited more fluently during sleep than in the waking condition. At the age of three years and five months a girl recited a stanza of five lines on the occasion of a birthday festival, not without some stumbling, but one night soon after the birthday she repeated the whole of the rhymes aloud in her sleep without stumbling at all (Frau von Strumpell).

It is customary, generally, to a.s.sume that the memory of adults does not extend further back than to the fourth year of life. Satisfactory observations on this point are not known to exist. But it is certainly of the first consequence, in regard to the development of the faculty of memory, whether the later experiences of the child have any characteristic in common with the earlier experiences. For many of these experiences no such agreement exists; nothing later on reminds us of the once existing inability to balance the head, or of the former inability to turn around, to sit, to stand, to walk, of the inborn difficulty of hearing, inability to accommodate the eye, and to distinguish our own body from foreign objects; hence, no man, and no child, remembers these states. But this is not true of what is acquired later. My child when less than three years old remembered very well--and would almost make merry over himself at it--the time when he could not yet talk, but articulated incorrectly and went imperfectly through the first, often-repeated performances taught by his nurse, "How tall is the child?" and "Where is the rogue?" If I asked him, after he had said "Fruhstucken" correctly, how he used to say it, he would consider, and would require merely a suggestion of accessory circ.u.mstances, in order to give the correct answer _Fritick_ and so with many words difficult to p.r.o.nounce. The child of three and even of four years can remember separate experiences of his second year, and a person that will take the pains to remind him frequently of them will be able easily to carry the recollections of the second and third years far on into the more advanced years of childhood. It is merely because no one makes such a useless experiment that older children lose the memory-images of their second year. These fade out because they are not combined with new ones.

At what time, however, the first natural a.s.sociation of a particular idea with a new one that appears weeks or months later, takes place without being called up by something in the mean time, is very hard to determine. On this point we must first gather good observations out of the second and third half-years, like the following:

"In the presence of a boy a year and a half old it was related that another boy whom he knew, and who was then in the country far away, had fallen and hurt his knee. No one noticed the child, who was playing as the story was told. After some weeks the one who had fallen came into the room, and the little one in a lively manner ran up to the new-comer and cried, 'Fall, hurt leg!'" (Stiebel, 1865).

Another example is given by G. Lindner (1882): "The mother of a two-year-old child had made for it out of a postal-card a sled (Schlitten), which was destroyed after a few hours, and found its way into the waste-basket. Just four weeks later another postal-card comes, and it is taken from the carrier by the child and handed to the mother with the words,'_Mamma, Litten!_' This was in summer, when there was nothing to remind the child of the sled. Soon after the same wish was expressed on the receipt of a letter also."

I have known like cases of attention, of recollection, and of intelligence in the third year where they were not suspected. The child, unnoticed, hears all sorts of things said, seizes on this or that expression, and weeks after brings into connection, fitly or unfitly, the memory-images, drawing immediately from an insufficient number of particular cases a would-be general conclusion.

Equally certain with this fact is the other, less known or less noticed, that, _even before the first attempts at speaking, such a generalizing and therefore concept-forming combination of memory-images regularly takes place_.

All children in common have inborn in them the ability to combine all sorts of sense-impressions connected with food, when these appear again individually, with one another, or with memory-images of such impressions, so that adaptive movements suited to the obtaining of fresh food arise as the result of this a.s.sociation. In the earlier months these are simple and easier to be seen, and I have given several examples (Vol. I, pp. 250, 260, 329, 333). Later such movements, through the perfecting of the language of gesture and the growth of this very power of a.s.sociation, become more and more complicated: e. g., in his sixteenth month my boy saw a closed box, out of which he had the day before received a cake; he at once made with his hands a begging movement, yet he could not speak a word. In the twenty-first month I took out of the pocket of a coat which was hanging with many others in the wardrobe a biscuit and gave it to the child. When he had eaten it, he went directly to the wardrobe and looked in the right coat for a second biscuit. At this period also the child can not have been thinking in the unspoken words, "Get biscuit--wardrobe, coat, pocket, look," for he did not yet know the words.

Even in the sixth month an act of remarkable _adaptiveness_ was once observed, which can not be called either accidental or entirely voluntary, and if it was fully purposed it would indicate a well-advanced development of understanding in regard to food without knowledge of words. When the child, viz., after considerable experience in nursing at the breast, discovered that the flow of milk was less abundant, he used to place his hand hard on the breast as if he wanted to force out the milk by pressure. Of course there was here no insight into the causal connection, but it is a question whether the firm laying on of the little hand was not repeated for the reason that the experience had been once made accidentally, that after doing this the nursing was less difficult.

On the other hand, an unequivocal complicated act of deliberation occurred in the seventeenth month. The child could not reach his playthings in the cupboard, because it was too high for him; he ran about, brought a traveling-bag, got upon it, and took what he wanted.

In this case he could not possibly think in words, since he did not yet know words.

My child tries further (in the nineteenth and twentieth months) in a twofold fas.h.i.+on to make known his eager wish to leave the room, not being as yet able to speak. He takes any cloth he fancies and brings it to me. I put it about him, he wraps himself in it, and, climbing beseechingly on my knee, makes longing, pitiful sounds, which do not cease until after I have opened a door through which he goes into another room. Then he immediately throws away the cloth and runs about exulting.

The other performance is this: When the child feels the need of relieving his bowels, he is accustomed to make peculiar grunting sounds, by means of a strain of the abdomen, shutting the mouth and breathing loud, by jerks, through the nose. He is then taken away.

Now, if he is not suited with the place where he happens to be, at any time, he begins to make just such sounds. If he is taken away, no such need appears at all, but he is in high glee. Here is the expectation, "I shall be taken away if I make that sound."

Whether we are to admit, in addition, an intentional _deception_ in this case, or whether only a logical process takes place, I can not decide.

In the whole earlier and later behavior of the child there is no ground for the first a.s.sumption, and the fact that he employs this artifice while in his carriage, immediately after he has been waited on, is directly against it.

To how small an extent, some time previous to this, perceptions were made use of _to simplify his own exertions_, i. e., were combined and had motor effect, appears from an observation in the sixteenth month.

Earlier than this, when I used to say, "Give the ring," I always laid an ivory ring, that was tied to a thread, before the child, on the table. I now said the same thing--after an interval of a week--while the same ring was hanging near the chair by a red thread a foot long, so that the child, as he sat on the chair, could just reach it, but only with much pains. He made a grasp now, upon getting the sound-impression "ring,"

not at the thread, which would have made the seizure of the ring, hanging freely, very easy for him, but directly at the ring hanging far below him, and gave it to me. And when the command was repeated, it did not occur to him to touch the thread.

It is likewise a sign of small understanding that the mouth is always opened in smelling of a fragrant flower or perfume (Vol. I, p. 135).

Deficiencies of this kind are, indeed, quite logical from the standpoint of childish experience. Because, at an earlier period the pleasant smell (of milk) always came in connection with the pleasant taste, therefore, thinks the child, in every case where there is a pleasant smell there will also be something that tastes good. The common or collective concept _taste-smell_ had not yet (in the seventeenth month) been differentiated into the concepts taste and smell.

In the department of the sense of hearing the differentiation generally makes its appearance earlier; memory, as a rule, later. Yet children whose talent for music is developed early, retain _melodies_ even in their first year of life. A girl to whom some of the Froebel songs were sung, and who was taught appropriate movements of the hands and feet, always performed the proper movement when one of the melodies was merely hummed, or a verse was said (in the thirteenth month), without confounding them at all. This early and firm a.s.sociation of sound-images with motor-images is possible only when interest is attached to it--i. e., when the attention has been directed often, persistently, and with concentration, upon the things to be combined. Thus, this very child (in the nineteenth month), when her favorite song, "Who will go for a Soldier?" ("Wer will unter die Soldaten?") was sung to her, could not only join in the rhyme at the end of the verse, but, no matter where a stop was made, she would go on, in a manner imperfect, indeed, but easily intelligible (Frau Dr. Friedemann).

Here, however, in addition to memory and attention, heredity is to be considered; since such a talent is wholly lacking in certain families, but in others exists in all the brothers and sisters.

In performances of this kind, a superior understanding is not by any means exhibited, but a stronger memory and faculty of a.s.sociation. These a.s.sociations are not, however, of a logical sort, but are habits acquired through training, and they may even r.e.t.a.r.d the development of the intellect if they become numerous. For they may obstruct the formation, at an early period, of independent ideas, merely on account of the time they claim. Often, too, these artificial a.s.sociations are almost useless for the development of the intellect. They are too special. On this ground I am compelled to censure the extravagancies, that are wide-spread especially in Germany, of the Froebel methods of occupying young children.

The _logic of the child_ naturally operates at the beginning with much more extensive, and therefore less intensive, notions than those of adults, with notions which the adult no longer forms. But the child does not, on that account, proceed illogically, although he does proceed awkwardly. Some further examples may ill.u.s.trate.

The adult does not ordinarily try whether a door that he has just bolted is fast; but the one-year-old child tests carefully the edge of the door he has shut, to see whether it is really closed, because he does not understand the effect of lock and bolt. For even in the eighteenth month he goes back and forth with a key, to the writing-desk, with the evident purpose of opening it. But at twelve months, when he tries whether it is fast, he does not think of the key at all, and does not yet possess a single word.

An adult, before watering flowers with a watering-pot, will look to see whether there is water in it. The child of a year and a half, who has seen how watering is done, finds special pleasure in going from flower to flower, even with an empty watering-pot, and making the motions of pouring upon each one separately, as if water would really come out. For him the notion "watering-pot" is identical with the notion "filled watering-pot," because at first he was acquainted with the latter only.

Much of what is attributed to imagination in very young children rests essentially on the formation of such vague concepts, on the inability to combine constant qualities into sharply defined concepts. When, in the twenty-third month, the child holds an empty cup to his mouth and sips and swallows, and does it repeatedly, and with a serene, happy expression, this "play" is founded chiefly on the imperfect notion "filled cup." The child has so often perceived something to drink, drinking-vessel, and the act of drinking, in combination with one another, that the one peremptorily demands the other when either appears singly; hence the pleasure in pouring out from empty pitchers into empty cups, and in drinking out of empty cups (in second to fifth years).

When adults do the same in the play of the theatre, this action always has a value as language, it signifies something for other persons; but with the child, who plays in this fas.h.i.+on entirely alone, the pleasure consists in the production of familiar ideas together with agreeable feelings, which are, as it were, crystallized with comparative clearness out of the dull ma.s.s of undefined perceptions. These memory-images become real existences, like the hallucinations of the insane, because the sensuous impressions probably impress themselves directly--without reflection--upon the growing brain, and hence the memory-images of them, on account of their vividness, can not always be surely distinguished from the perceptions themselves. Most of the plays that children invent of themselves may be referred to this fact; on the other hand, the play of hide-and-seek (especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth months), and, nearly allied to this, the hunting after sc.r.a.ps of paper, bits of biscuit, b.u.t.tons, and other favorite objects (in the fifteenth month), const.i.tute an intellectual advance.

By practice in this kind of seeking for well-known, purposely concealed objects, the intelligence of little children can easily be increased to an astonis.h.i.+ng degree, so that toward the end of the second year they already understand some simple tricks of the juggler; for example, making a card disappear. But after I had discontinued such exercises for months, the ordinary capacity for being duped was again present.

This ease with which children can be deceived is to be attributed to lack of experience far more than to lack of intelligence. When the child of a year and a half offers leaves to a sheep or a stag, observes the strange animal with somewhat timid astonishment, and a few days after holds out some hastily plucked gra.s.s-blades to a chaffinch he sees hopping across the road, supposing that the bird will likewise take them from his hand and eat them--an observation that I made on my child exactly as Sigismund did on his--it is not right to call such an act "stupid"; the act shows ignorance--i. e., inexperience--but it is not illogical. The child would be properly called stupid only in case he did not _learn_ the difference between the animals fed. When, on the other hand, the child of two and a half years, entirely of his own accord, holds a watch first to his left ear, then to his right, listens both times, and then says, "The watch goes, goes too!" then, pointing with his finger to a clock, cries with delight, "The clock goes too," we rightly find in such independent induction a proof of intellect. For the swinging of the pendulum and the ticking had indeed often been perceived, but to connect the notion of a "going clock" with the visible but noiseless swinging, just as with the audible but invisible ticking of the watch, requires a pretty well advanced power of abstraction.

That the ability to _abstract_ may show itself, though imperfectly, even in the first year, is, according to my observations, certain. Infants are struck by a quality of an object--e. g., the white appearance of milk. The "taking away" or "abstracting" then consists in the isolating of this quality out of innumerable other sight-impressions and the blending of the impressions into a concept. The _naming_ of this, which begins months later, by a rudimental word, like _mum_, is an outward sign of this abstraction, which did not at all lead to the formation of the concept, but followed it, as will be shown in detail further on (in the two following chapters).