Sixth Year
The sixth year, the last with which the diary attempts to deal, is very meagrely represented. The observation was plainly becoming intermittent and lax. I have, however, thought it worth while to complete this sketch of a child’s mental development by a reference to this fragmentary chapter.
The child continued to be observant of the forms of things. He began to attend the Kindergarten at the beginning of this year, and this probably served to develop his visual observation. We have, however, no very striking illustrations of his perceptual powers. It might interest the naturalist to know that he compared the head of Mr. Darwin, which he saw in a photograph, to that of an elephant, and being asked why he thought them like one another, answered: “Because it is so far from the top of the head to the ear”. Perhaps admirers of our great naturalist may be ready to pardon the likening of their hero’s head to that of one of the most intelligent of the large animal family which he showed to be our kinsfolk.
Another remark of his at about the same date seems to show that he still entertained a particularly gross form of the animistic conception that things are double, and that there is a second filmy body within the solid tangible one. He was looking at the pictures in Darwin’s Descent of Man, and came on some drawings of the human embryo. His mother asked him what they looked like, and he replied: “Why, like the inside of persons of course”. Asked to explain this he pointed to the head, the eye, the stomach, and so forth.
He spontaneously began to talk (middle of eighth month) about opposition of colours. He was looking at his coloured soldiers and talking to himself in this wise: “Which colour is most opposite colour to blue?” He said that red was its opposite, not yellow as suggested by his father, in which opinion he probably has a good many older people on his side. He also observed to his father at the same date: “I tell you, papa, what two colours are very like one another, blue and green”. The father remarks, however, that he was now mixing pigments and using them, and that the knowledge so gained probably made him bring blue and green nearer to one another than he used to do.
An opportunity of testing his memory occurred at the beginning of the sixth month. He met a gentleman who had been kind to him during that memorable visit to the sea-side village D—— just three and a half years before, and whom he had not seen since. His father asked the child whether he knew Mr. S. He looked at him steadily, and answered yes. Asked where he had seen him, he answered: “Down at ——”. He had forgotten the name of the place. On his father further asking him what he remembered about him he said: “He made me boats and sailed them in a pool”. This was quite correct. So far as the father can say the fact had not been spoken of to him since the time. If this is so, it seems worth recording that a child of five and a half should recall such distinct impressions of what had occurred when he was only just two.
Fancy, the old frisky, wonder-working fancy, was now getting less active. At least, we meet this year with none of the pretty fairy-myths of earlier years. So far as the journal tells us, it was only in sleep that C. entered the delightful region of wonderland. Here is a quaint dream of his (end of fifth month). It was Christmas time, and he had been seeing a huge prize-ox, a shaggy Highland fellow with big head and curled horns. He had taken a violent fancy to it and wanted his father to draw it for him. A morning or two afterwards he told his father that he had had a funny dream. Both his father and his mother were turned into oxen, and it was a “very nice dream”.
For the rest, the brain of our little Kindergärtner was being engrossed with the business of getting knowledge, and, as a result of this fancy, was being taken in hand by sober understanding and drilled to the useful and necessary task of discovering truth.
We get one or two pretty glimpses of the boy trundling his hoop beside his father in a late evening walk and now and again stopping to ask questions. Here is one (end of third month): They were walking home together across the sands at Hunstanton at the rosy sun-set hour. C. was much impressed and began asking his father how far off the sun was. On finding out that the clouds were not a hard substance but could be passed through, he wanted to know what was on the other side. “Is it another world, papa, like this?”
Shortly after this date he was talking about the size of the sun, when he remarked: “I s’pose the sun’s big enough to put on the world and make see-saw”. He seemed to think of the sun as a disc, and imagined that it might be balanced on the earth-globe.
What with home instruction and the ‘lessons’ at the Kindergarten his little brain was being confronted with quite a multitude of new problems. It was interesting, remarks the father, to note how he would try to piece together the various scraps of knowledge he thus gathered. For instance, we find him in the ninth month trying hard to make something out of the motley presentations of the ‘world’ which he had got from classical myths as known through the Tanglewood Tales and from his elementary geography lessons. He asked whether Atlas could stand in the middle of the sea and not be drowned. On his father’s trying to evade this awkward question, the boy inquired whether the sea came half way up the world. Asked to explain what he meant, he continued: “You know the shore gets lower and lower or else the sea would not go out; and out in the middle it goes down very deep. Now, where the sea comes in, is that half way up the world?” One would like to know how the father met this dark inquiry.
He would sometimes apply his newly-gained knowledge in an odd fashion. One day (middle of ninth month), he observed that his porridge was hottest in the middle, and remarked: “That’s just like the earth. It’s hottest in the middle. There’s real fire there.” This smacks just a little perhaps of pedantry, and the child, on entering the new world of school-lore, is, we know, apt to display the pride of learning. Yet we must beware, writes the ever-apologetic father, of judging the child’s ways too rigorously by our grown-up standards.
The progress in the more abstract kind of thinking and in the correlative use of abstract language was very noticeable at this stage. An odd example of an original way of expressing a newly attained relation of thought occurred towards the end of the third month. C. was at this time much occupied with the subject of the bearing-rein, the cruelty of which he had learnt from a favourite story, the autobiography of a horse, called Black Beauty. One day when walking out, and, as was his wont, vigilantly observant of all passing horses, he said: “That horse has bearing-rein at all,” by which he seems to have meant that the horse had it somewhere or wore it sometimes. The use of expressions like these, which at once made his statements more cautious and showed a better grasp of the full sweep of a proposition, was very characteristic at this period.
Even now, however, he found himself sometimes compelled to eke out his slender vocabulary by concrete and pictorial descriptions of the abstract. Thus one day (end of eighth month) he happened to overhear his father say that he should oppose a proposal of a member of the Library Committee to which he belonged. C., boy-like, interested in the prospect of a tussle, asked: “Who is the greatest man, you or Mr. ——?” Asked by his father, who imagined that the child was thinking of a physical contest with the honourable gentleman, “Do you mean taller?” he answered: “No. Who is most like a king?” In this wise, observes the chronicler, did he try to express his new idea of authority or influence over others.
While he thus pushed his way into the tangle of abstract ideas, he found himself now and again pulled up by a thorny obstacle. Some of us can remember how when young we had much trouble in learning to recognise the difference between the right and the left hand. C. experienced the same difficulty. One evening (towards the end of the eleventh month) after being put to bed he complained of a sore spot on his foot. Being asked on which foot, the right or the left, he said: “I can’t tell when in bed. I can’t say when my clothes are off. I know my right side by my pockets.” It would seem as if the differences in the muscular and other sensations by help of which we come to distinguish the one side of the body from the other are too slight to be readily recognised, and that a clear intuition of this simple and fundamental relation of position is the work of a prolonged experience.329
By the end of the fourth month—a month after joining the Kindergarten—he was able to count up to a century. His interest in counting, which was particularly lively just now, is illustrated in the fact that in the fifth month, after showing himself very curious about the word ‘fortnight,’ saying again and again that it was a funny word, and asking what it meant, he put the question: “Does it mean fourteen nights?”
About the same date he proffered a definition of one of the most difficult of subjects. His mother had been trying to explain the difference between poetry and prose by saying that the former describes beautiful things, when he suddenly interrupted her, exclaiming: “Oh yes, I know, it’s language with ornaments”. But here the diary has, it must be confessed, the look of wishing to display the boy’s accomplishments, a fault from which, on the whole, it is creditably free.
As might be expected, the boy’s reasoning was now much sounder, that is to say, more like our own. Yet now and again the old easy fashion of induction would crop up. Thus one day (towards end of ninth month) he was puzzled by the fact that boys of the same age might be of unequal size. This brought him to the old subject of growth, and he suggested quite seriously that the taller boys had had more sun. On his father saying: ‘The sun makes plants grow,’ he added: “And people too”.
His questionings took about this time the direction of origins or beginnings. As with other children, God did not appear to be the starting-point in the evolution of things, and he once asked quite seriously (end of sixth month): “What was God like in his younger days?” With a like impulse to go back to absolute beginnings he inquired about the same date, after learning that chicken-pox was only caught from other animals: “What was the person or thing that first had chicken-pox?” A little later (beginning of ninth month) he and a boy companion of nearly the same age were talking about the beginnings of human life. C. said “I can’t make out how the first man in the world was able to speak. A word, you know, has a sound, and how did he find out what sound to make?” His friend then said that his puzzle was how the first babies were nursed. This child seems to have set out with the supposition that the history of our race began with the arrival of babies.
Very little is told us in this unfinished chapter of the child’s emotional and moral development. As might be expected from the increase of intellectual activity the movements expressive of the feelings of strain and perplexity which accompany thought grew more distinct. In particular it was noticeable at this time that during the fits of thought the child’s face would take on a quaint old-fashioned look, the eye-brows being puckered up and the eye-lids twitching.
He continued very sensitive about the cruelties of the world, more especially towards animals. One day (at the end of the fifth month) his mother had been reading to him his favourite, Black Beauty, in which a war-horse describes to the equine author the horrors of war. C. was deeply affected by the picture, and at length exclaimed with much emphasis, “Oh, ma! why do they do such things? It’s a beastly, beastly world,” at the same time bursting into tears and hiding his face in his mother’s lap. “So hard,” writes the father, “did the boy still find it, notwithstanding his increased knowledge, to accept this human world as a right and just one.”
The religious thought and sentiment remained thoroughly childish. He was still puzzled about the relations of heaven and the grave. One day (end of sixth month) his father observed, looking at the Christmas pudding on the table wreathed with violet flame: “Oh, how I should like to be burned after death instead of being buried”. On this C. looking alarmed said: “I won’t be burned. I shouldn’t go to heaven then.” On his father remarking: “’Tisn’t your body that goes to heaven,” he continued: “But my head does”. Here, writes the father, we seem to perceive a transition from the old gross materialism of last year to a more refined form. C. was now, it may be presumed, localising the soul in the head, and clinging to the idea that at least that limited portion of our frame might manage to get away from the dark grave to the bright celestial regions. It may be too, he adds, that this fancy was aided by seeing pictures of detached cherub heads.330
A month or two later (beginning of ninth month) he began to attack the difficult problem of Divine fore-knowledge and free-will. His mother had been remonstrating with him about his naughty ways. He grew very miserable and said: “I can’t make out how it is God doesn’t make us good. I pray to him to make me good.” To this his mother replied that he must help himself to be good. This only drew from C. the following protest: “Then what’s the use of having God if we have to help ourselves”. “Even now,” writes the father, “it looks as if God and heaven were for him institutions, the raison d’être of which was their serviceableness to man.”
He brought to the consideration of prayer a childish sense of propriety which sometimes wore a quaint aspect. One day (end of third month) on his return from the Kindergarten he asked his mother: “Does God teach us?” and when bidden explain his question continued: “Because they said that at school” (“Teach us to be good”). He then added: “But anyhow that isn’t a proper way to speak to God”. His notion of what was the proper way was illustrated in his own practice. One evening (end of sixth month) after his bath he was kneeling with his head on his mother’s lap so that she might dry his hair. He began to pray half audibly in this wise: “Please, God, let me find out before my birthday, but at least on my birthday.... So now good-bye!” This ending, obviously borrowed from his sister’s letters, was varied on another occasion in this way: “With my love, good-bye”.331
It seems strange that the diary should break off at a time when there was so much of the quaint and pretty child-traits left to be observed. No explanation of the abrupt termination is offered, and I am only able to conjecture that the father was at this time pressed with other work, and that when he again found the needed leisure he discovered to his chagrin that time, aided by the school-drill, was already doing its work. We know that it is about this time that the artist, Nature, is wont to rub out the characteristic infantile lines in her first crude sketch of a human mind, and to elaborate a fuller and maturer picture. And while the onlooking parent may rejoice in the unfolding of the higher human lineaments, he cannot altogether suppress a pang at the disappearance of what was so delightfully fresh and lovely.
I will close these extracts, following the father’s own fashion, with a word of apology. C.’s doings and sayings have seemed to me worth recording, not because their author was in any sense a remarkable child, but solely because he was a true child. In spite of his habitual association with grown-up people he retained with childish independence his own ways of looking at things. No doubt something of the intellectual fop, of the assertive prig, peeps out now and again. Yet if we consider how much attention was given to his utterances, this is not surprising. For the greater part the sayings appear to me the direct naïve utterance of genuine childish conviction. And it is possible that the inevitable impulse of the parent to show off his child has done C. injustice by making too much, especially in the last chapter of the diary, of what looks smart. Heaven grant that our observations of the little ones may never destroy the delightful simplicity and unconsciousness of their ways, and turn them into disagreeable little performers, all conscious of their rôle, and greedy of admiration.
Notes
286. Taste, as involved in the necessary act of taking nourishment, is probably at first hardly differentiated from touch.
287. The clear recognition of individual objects is said to show itself in average cases from about the sixth month (Tracy, op. cit., pp. 15-16).
288. With the smile there ought perhaps to be taken the infantile crow.
289. Darwin puts the first true smile on the forty-fifth day. The first quasi-smiles are probably quite mechanical and destitute of meaning.
290. See above, p. 195 and p. 308.
291. Compare what was said above, p. 201.
292. Darwin tells us that his boy uttered a rude kind of laugh when only one hundred and ten days old, after a pinafore had been thrown over his head and suddenly withdrawn. C.’s sense of humour was hardly as precocious as this.
293. Preyer’s boy perfected the action in the fifth month. For differences in precocity here, see F. Tracy, The Psychology of Childhood, pp. 12, 13.
294. This should be read in connexion with Study V.
295. This rather bald account of early vocal sounds should be contrasted with those of Preyer and others referred to in Study V.
296. Perez speaks of both the affirmative and negative movement of the head appearing about the fifteenth month (First Three Years of Childhood, Engl. transl., p. 21). Darwin finds that the sign of affirmation (nodding) is less uniform among the different races of men than that of negation. According to Preyer, while the gesture of negation appears under the form of a turning away or declining movement as an instinct in the first days of life, the accepting gesture of nodding (which afterwards becomes the sign of affirmation) is acquired and appears much later (see his full account of the growth of these movements, Die Seele des Kindes, p. 242).
297. Cf. above, p. 148 ff.
298. The supposition that ‘Ningi’ was easy seems reasonable. First of all it is in part a reduplication like his later name ‘Kikkie’. Again, we know that children often add the final y or ie sound, as in saying ‘dinnie’ for dinner, ‘beddie’ for bread. Once more, from the early appearances of ‘ng’ sound in ‘ang,’ ‘ung,’ etc., we may infer it to be easy. Indeed, one observer (Dr. Champneys) tells us that an infant’s cry is exactly represented by the sound ‘ngä’ as pronounced in Germany (Mind, vi., p. 105).
299. See above, p. 157 f.
300. It has been found that the sensations of hot and cold are readily confused even by adults.
301. I think this supposition more probable than that the child saw the whole form—hull, masts and sails—as a triangle.
302. He had been at the sea-side a year before this, but there was no evidence of his having remembered it.
303. Compare above, p. 162.
304. I find that another little boy when two years old used ‘two’ in this way for more than one.
305. Compare above, p. 171 f.
306. See above, p. 173.
307. Compare the similar instances given above, p. 287.
308. See above, p. 19 f.
309. Compare above, p. 254.
310. Later on towards the end of the year he oddly enough seemed disposed to reverse his early practice, using for example ‘she’ for ‘her,’ and even going to the length of correcting his sister for saying ‘Somebody gave her,’ by remarking with all the dogmatism of the most pedantic of grammarians, “No, E., you must say ‘Gave she’”.
311. Compare above, p. 176 f. C.’s father probably makes too much of the principle of economy here. Thus, like other children, the boy was wont to use double negatives, e.g., “Dare isn’t no water in dat cup,” where there is clearly a redundance.
312. Compare above, p. 163 f.
313. On the use of antithesis in children’s language and on the early forms of negation, see above, p. 174 f.
314. A note in the diary says that C.’s sister had also used ‘this morning’ in a similar way for any present. Can this curious habit arise, he asks, from the circumstance that children hear ‘this morning’ more frequently than ‘this afternoon’ and ‘this evening,’ or that they are more wakeful and observant in the early part of the day?
315. (Note of the father.) C., on leaving D——, had travelled by the train. He may, therefore, have intended merely to say “removed from sight through the agency of the locomotive”. From other examples, however, it would look as if the boy meant to explain all disappearance as a removal from his own local sphere.
316. The chronicler observes here that C.’s sister had also used the same expression for ‘I’ and ‘mine,’ viz., “my”. It looks as if the me and its belongings were not at first differentiated. Even of the later and maturer ideas of self a well-known American psychologist writes: “Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw”. Compare above, p. 181.
317. The same holds true of ‘me,’ which was first used only in particular connexions, as ‘Give me’.
318. This reminds one of the childish use of ‘broken’ and ‘mended,’ illustrated above, p. 98.
319. Compare above, p. 86 ff.
320. Compare above, p. 97 f.
321. Compare above, p. 96 ff.
322. Compare above, p. 273 f.
323. Compare above, p. 28 ff.
324. Compare what was said above, p. 119.
325. Compare what was said above, pp. 88, 104.
326. Compare above, p. 102 f.
327. Compare above, p. 283 f.
328. On children’s attempts to understand about being buried and going to heaven, see above, p. 120 ff.
329. According to Professor Baldwin’s observations the infant shows a decided right-handedness, that is, a disposition to reach out with the right hand rather than with the left, by the seventh or eighth month (quoted by Tracy, The Psychology of Childhood, p. 55). But of course this is a long way from a definite intuition and idea of the right and the left hand. Mr. E. Kratz finds that more than one-fourth of children of five coming to a primary school cannot distinguish the right hand from the left.
330. Compare above, p. 123.
331. Compare above, p. 283.