Psychological Ideas
We may now pass to some of the characteristic modes of child-thought about that standing mystery, the self. As our discussion of the child’s ideas of origin, growth and final shrinkage suggests, a good deal of his most earnest thinking is devoted to problems relating to himself.
The date of the first thought about self, of the first dim stage of self-awareness, probably varies considerably in the case of different children according to rapidity of mental development and circumstances. The little girl, who was afterwards to be known as George Sand, may be supposed to have had an exceptional development; and the accident of infancy to which she refers as having aroused the earliest form of self-consciousness was, of course, exceptional too. There are probably many robust and dull children, knowing little of life’s misery, and allowed in general to have their own way, who have but little more of self-consciousness than that, say, of a young, well-favoured porker.
The earliest idea of self seems to be obtained by the child through an examination by the senses of touch and sight of his own body. A child has been observed to study his fingers attentively in the fourth and fifth month, and this scrutiny goes on all through the second year and even into the third.52 Children seem to be impressed quite early by the fact that in laying hold of a part of the body with the hand they get a different kind of experience from that which they obtain when they grasp a foreign object. Through these self-graspings, self-strikings, self-bitings, aided by the very varied, and often extremely disagreeable operations of the nurse and others on the surface of their bodies, they probably reach during the first year the idea that their body is different from all other things, is ‘me’ in the sense that it is the living seat of pain and pleasure. The growing power of movement of limb, especially when the crawling stage is reached, gives a special significance to the body as that which can be moved, and by the movements of which interesting and highly impressive changes in the environment, e.g., bangs and other noises, can be produced.
It is probable that the first ideas of the bodily self are ill-defined. It is evident that the head and face are not known at first as a visible object. The upper limbs by their movement across the field of vision would come in for the special notice of the eye. We know that the baby is at an early date wont to watch its hands. The lower limbs, moreover, seem to receive special attention from the exploring and examining hand.
There is some reason to think, however, that in spite of these advantages, the limbs form a less integral and essential part of the bodily self than the trunk. A child in his second year was observed to bite his own finger till he cried with pain. He could hardly have known it as a part of his sensitive body. Preyer tells us of a boy of nineteen months who when asked to give his foot seized it with both hands and tried to hand it over. A like facility in casting off from the self or alienating the limbs is illustrated in a story in the Worcester Collection of a child of three and a half years who on finding his feet stained by some new stockings observed: “Oh, mamma! these ain’t my feet, these ain’t the feet I had this morning”. This readiness to detach the limbs shows itself still more plainly in the boy C.’s complaining when in bed and trying to wriggle into a snug position that his legs came in the way of himself. Here the legs seem to be half transformed into foreign persons; and this tendency to personify the limbs seems to be further illustrated in Laura Bridgman’s pastime of spelling a word wrongly with one hand and then slapping that hand with the other.
Why, it may be asked, should a child attach this supreme importance to the trunk, when his limbs are always forcing themselves on his notice by their movements, and when he is so deeply interested in them as the parts of the body which do things? I suspect that the principal reason is that a child soon learns to connect with the trunk the recurrent and most impressive of his feelings of comfort and discomfort, such as hunger, thirst, stomachic pains and the corresponding reliefs. We know that the “vital sense” forms the sensuous basis of self-consciousness in the adult, and it is only reasonable to suppose that in the first years of life, when it fills so large a place in the consciousness, it has most to do with determining the idea of the sentient or feeling body. Afterwards the observation of maimed men and animals would confirm the idea that the trunk is the seat and essential portion of the living body. The language of others too by identifying ‘body’ and ‘trunk’ would strengthen the tendency.
About this interesting trunk-body, what is inside it, and how it works, the child speculates vastly. References to the making of bone, the work of the stomach, and so forth have to be understood somehow. It would be interesting to get at a child’s unadulterated view of his anatomy and physiology. The Worcester Collection illustrates what funny ideas a child can entertain of the mechanism of his body. A little girl between five and six thought it was the little hairs coming against the lids which made her sleepy.
At a later stage of the child’s development, no doubt, when he comes to form the idea of a conscious thinking ‘I,’ the head will become a principal portion of the bodily self. In the evolution of the self-idea in the race, too, we find that the soul was lodged in the trunk long before it was assigned a seat in the head. As may be seen in C.’s case children are quite capable of finding their way, partly at least, to the idea that the soul has its lodgment in the head. But it is long before this thought grows clear. This may be seen in children’s talk, as when a girl of four spoke of her dolly as having no sense in her eyes. Even when a child learns from others that we think with our brains he goes on supposing that our thoughts travel down to the mouth when we speak.
Very interesting in connexion with the first stages of development of the idea of self is the experience of the mirror. It would be absurd to expect a child when first placed before a mirror to recognise his own face. He will smile at the reflexion as early as the tenth week, though this is probably merely an expression of pleasure at the sight of a bright object. If held in the nurse’s or father’s arms to a glass when about six months old a baby will at once show that he recognises the image of the familiar face of the latter by turning round to the real face, whereas he does not recognise his own. He appears at first and for some months to take it for a real object, sometimes smiling to it as to a stranger and even kissing it, or, as in the case of a little girl (fifteen months old), offering it things and saying ‘Ta’ (sign of acceptance). In many cases curiosity prompts to an attempt to grasp the mirror-figure with the hand, to turn up the glass, or to put the hand behind it in order to see what is really there. This is very much like the behaviour of monkeys before a mirror, as described by Darwin and others. Little by little the child gets used to the reflexion, and then by noting certain agreements between his bodily self and the image, as the movement of his hands when he points, and partly, too, by a kind of inference of analogy from the doubling of other things by the mirror, he reaches the idea that the reflexion belongs to himself. By the sixtieth week Preyer’s boy had associated the name of his mother with her image, pointing to it when asked where she was. By the twenty-first month he did the same thing in the case of his own image.53
An infant will, we know, take a shadow to be a real object and try to touch it. Some children on noticing their own and other people’s shadows on the wall are afraid as at something uncanny. Here, too, in time the strange phenomenon is taken as a matter of course and referred to the sun.
We are told that the phenomena of reflexions and shadows, along with those of dreams, had much to do with the development, in the early thought of the race, of the animistic conception that everything has a double nature and existence. Do children form similar ideas? We can see from the autobiography of George Sand how a clever girl, reflecting on the impressive experience of the echo, excogitates such a theory of her double existence; and we know, too, that the boy Hartley Coleridge distinguished among the ‘Hartleys’ a picture Hartley and a shadow Hartley. C.’s biography suggests that being photographed may appear to a child as a transmutation, if not a doubling, of the self. But much more needs to be known about these matters.
The prominence of the bodily pictorial element in the child’s first idea of self is seen in the tendency to restrict personal identity within the limits of an unchanged bodily appearance. The child of six, with his shock of curls, refuses to believe that he is the same as the hairless baby whose photograph the mother shows him. How different, how new, a being a child feels on a Sunday morning after the extra weekly cleansing and brushing and draping. The bodily appearance is a very big slice of the content of most people’s self-consciousness, and to the child it is almost everything.
But in time the conscious self, which thinks and suffers and wills, comes to be dimly discerned. I believe that a real advance towards this true self-consciousness is marked by the appropriation and use of the difficult forms of language, ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine’. This will be dealt with in another essay.
Sometimes the apprehension of the existence of a hidden self distinct from the body comes as a sudden revelation, as to little George Sand. Such a swift awakening of self-consciousness is apt to be an epoch-making and memorable moment in the history of the child.
A father sends me the following notes on the development of self-consciousness: “My girl, three years old, makes an extraordinary distinction between her body and herself. Lying in bed she shut her eyes and said: ‘Mother, you can’t see me now’. The mother replied: ‘Oh, you little goose, I can see you but you can’t see me’. To which she rejoined: ‘Oh, yes, I know you can see my body, mother, but you can’t see me’.” The same child about the same time was concerned about the reality of her own existence. One day playing with her dolls she asked her mother: “Mother, am I real, or only a pretend like my dolls?” Here again, it is plain, the emphasis was laid on something non-corporeal, something that animated the body, and not a mere bit of mechanism put inside it. Two years later she showed a still finer intellectual differentiation of the visible and the invisible self. Her brother happened to ask her what they fed the bears on at the Zoo. She answered impulsively: “Dead babies and that sort of thing”. On this the mother interposed: “Why, F., you don’t think mothers would give their dead babies to the animals?” To this she replied: “Why not, mother? It’s only their bodies. I shouldn’t mind your giving mine.” This contempt for the body is an excellent example of the way in which a child when he gets hold of an idea pushes it to its logical extreme. This little girl by-the-bye was she who, about the same age, took compassion on the poor autumn leaves dying on the ground, so that we may suppose her mind to have been brooding at this time on the conscious side of existence.
The mystery of self-existence has probably been a puzzle to many a thoughtful child. A lady, a well-known writer of fiction, sends me the following recollection of her early thought on this subject: “The existence of other people seemed natural: it was the ‘I’ that seemed so strange to me. That I should be able to perceive, to think, to cause other people to act, seemed to me quite to be expected, but the power of feeling and acting and moving about myself, under the guidance of some internal self, amazed me continually.”
It is of course hard to say how exactly the child thinks about this inner self. It seems to me probable that, allowing for the great differences in reflective power, children in general, like uncivilised races, tend to materialise it, thinking of it dimly as a film-like shadow-like likeness of the visible self. The problem is complicated for the child’s consciousness by religious instruction with its idea of an undying soul.
As may be seen in the recollections just quoted, this early thought about self is greatly occupied with its action on the body. Among the many things that puzzled the much-questioning little lad already frequently quoted was this: “How do my thoughts come down from my brain to my mouth: and how does my spirit make my legs walk?” C.’s sister when four years and ten months old wanted to know how it is we can move our arm and keep it still when we want to, while the curtain can’t move except somebody moves it. The first attempts to solve the puzzle are of course materialistic, as may be seen in our little questioner’s delightful notion of thoughts travelling through the body. This form of materialism, however, I find surviving in grown-ups and even in students of psychology, who are rather fond of talking about sensations travelling up the nerves to the brain.
Very curious are the directions of the first thought about the past self. The idea of personal identity, so dear to philosophers, does not appear to be fully reached at first. On the contrary, as we shall see in the case of C., the past self is divorced from the present under the image of the opposite sex in the odd expression: “when I was a little girl”. This probably illustrates the importance of the bodily appearance as a factor in the self, for C. had, I believe, been photographed when in the petticoat stage, and no doubt looked back on this person in skirts as a girl. This is borne out by the fact that another little boy when about three and a half years old asked his mother: “Was I a girl when I was small?” and that the little questioner whom I have called our zoologist was also accustomed to say: “When I was a ’ickle dirl (girl)”. But discarded petticoats do not explain all the child’s ideas about his past self. This same little zoologist would also say, “When I was a big man,” to describe the state of things long, long ago. What does this mean? In discussing the quaint idea of senile shrinkage I have suggested that a child may think of human existence as a series of transformations from littleness to bigness, and the reverse, and here we have lighted on another apparent evidence of it. For though we are apt to call children ‘old men’ we do not suggest to them that they are or have been big men.
The difficulty to the child of conceiving of his remote past, is surpassed by that of trying to understand the state of things before he was born. The true mystery of birth for the child, the mystery which fascinates and holds his mind, is that of his beginning to be. This is illustrated in C.’s question: “Where was I a hundred years ago? Where was I before I was born?” It remains a mystery for all of us, only that after a time we are wont to put it aside. The child, on the other hand, is stung, so to say, by the puzzle, his whole mind being roused to passionate questioning.
It is curious to note the differences in the attitude of children’s minds towards the mystery. The small person accustomed to petting, to be made the centre of others’ thought and action, may be struck with the blank in the common home life before his arrival. A lady was talking to her little girl H., aged three years, about something she had done when she was a child. H. then wanted to know what she was doing then, and was told by her mother: “Oh, you were not here at all”. She seemed quite amazed at this, and said: “And what did you do without H.? Did you cry all day for her?” On being informed that this was not the case, she seemed quite unable to realise how her mother could have existed without her. There is something of the charming egoism of the child here, but there is more: there is the vague expression of the unifying integrating work of love. Lovers, one is told, are wont to think in the same way about the past before they met, and became all in all to one another. For this little girl with her strong sense of human attachment, the idea of a real life without that which gave it warmth and gladness was a contradiction.
Sometimes again, in the more metaphysical sort of child, the puzzle relates to the past existence of the outer world. We have all been perplexed by the thought of the earth and sky, and other folk existing before we were, and going on to exist after we cease to be; though here again, save in the case of the philosopher perhaps, we get used to the puzzle. Children may be deeply impressed with this apparent contradiction. Jean Ingelow in her interesting reminiscences thus writes of her puzzlings on this head: “I went through a world of cogitation as to whether it was really true that anything had been and lived before I was there to see it.... I could think there might have been some day when I was very little—as small as the most tiny pebble on the road—but not to have been at all was so very hard to believe.” A little boy of five who was rather given to saying ‘clever’ things, was one day asked by a visitor, who thought to rebuke what she took to be his conceit: “Why, M., however did the world go round before you came into it?” M. at once replied: “Why, it didn’t go round. It only began five years ago.” Was this, as perhaps nine persons out of ten would say, merely a bit of dialectic smartness, the evasion of an awkward question by denying the assumed fact? I am disposed to think that there was more, that the virtuous intention of the visitor had chanced to discover a hidden child-thought; for the child is naturally a Berkeleyan, in so far at least that for him the reality of things is reality for his own sense-perceptions. A world existent before he was on the spot to see it, seems to the child’s intelligence a contradiction.
A child will sometimes use theological ideas as an escape from this puzzle. The myth of babies being brought down from heaven is particularly helpful. The quick young intelligence sees in this pretty idea a way of prolonging existence backwards. The same little boy that was so concerned to know what his mother had done without him, happened one day to be passing a street pump with his mother, when he stopped and observed with perfect gravity: “There are no pumps in heaven where I came from”. He had evidently thought out the legend of the God-sent baby to its logical consequences.
Children appear to have very vague ideas about time. Their minds cannot at first of course rise to the abstraction, time, or duration, or to its measured portions, as a day. They talk about the days as if they were things. Thus to-day, yesterday, and to-morrow, which, as we may see in C.’s way of talking about time, are used very vaguely for present, past and future, are spoken of as things which move. A girl of four asked: ‘Where is yesterday gone to?’ and ‘Where will to-morrow come from?’ The boy C. as well as other children, as we saw, asked where all the days go to. Such expressions may of course be figurative, a child having no other way of describing the sequence yesterday and to-day, to-day and to-morrow; yet I am disposed to think that these are examples of the child’s ‘concretism,’ his reduction of our abstractions to living realities.54
It is equally noticeable that children have no adequate mental representations of our time-measurements. As in the case of space, so in that of time their standard is not ours: an hour, say the first morning at school, may seem an eternity to a child’s consciousness. The days, the months, the years seem to fly faster and faster as we get older. On the other hand, as in the case of space-judgments, too, the child through his inability to represent time on a large scale is apt to bring the past too near the present. Mothers and young teachers would be surprised if they knew how children interpreted their first historical instruction introduced by the common phrase, ‘Many years ago,’ or similar expression. A child of six years when crossing the Red Sea asked to be shown Pharaoh and his hosts. This looks like the effect of a vivid imagination of the scene, which even in grown people may beget an expectation of seeing it here and now. The following anecdote of a boy of five and a half years sent me by his aunt more clearly illustrates a child’s idea of the historical past. “H. was beginning to have English history read to him and had got past the ‘Romans’ as he said. One day he noticed a locket on my watch-chain, and desired that it should be opened. It contained the hair of two babies both dead long before. He asked about them. I told him they died before I was born. ‘Did father know them?’ he asked. ‘No, they died before he was born.’ ‘Then who knew them and when did they live?’ he asked, and as I hesitated for a moment, seeking how to make the matter plain, ‘Was it in the time of the Romans?’ he gravely asked.” The odd-looking historical perspective here was quite natural. He had to localise the babies’ existence somewhere, and he could only do it conjecturally by reference to the one far-off time of which he had heard, and which presumably covered all that was before the life-time of himself and of those about him.