Milicent Washburn Shinn

“ Meanwhile, nature has provided an educational appliance almost ideally adapted to the child’s sense condition, in the mother’s face, hovering close above him, smiling, laughing, nodding, with all manner of delightful changes in the high lights; in the thousand little meaningless caressing sounds, the singing, talking, calling, that proceed from it; the patting, cuddling, lifting, and all the ministrations that the baby feels while gazing at it, and associates with it, till finally they group together and round out into the idea of his mother as a whole. ”

“ Can we help suspecting a period, somewhere in the remote ages, when the baby’s ancestry dwelt amid the treetops, and learned to stand by balancing on one branch while they held by a higher one? when they edged along the branch, holding on above, but dropped to all-fours and crept when they came to the ground now and then to get from tree to tree? The whole history of the baby’s movements points to this: the strong arms and clinging hands, from birth; the intense impulse to pull up, even from the beginning of sitting; the way in which standing always begins, by laying hold above and pulling up ”

“ Even when there is plainly an idea, as in “All gone,” it is a big, vague blur of an idea, slowly taking form in the little mind, as the blurs of light and dark slowly outlined themselves into objects before the little eyes months before.
At this point the modern baby catches the trick of helping himself to our words ready made, and (though many glimpses of primitive speech show through the whole process of learning to talk) he thus saves himself in the main the long task of developing them, through which his ancestors toiled. ”

“ During these last days of the month the baby was possessed by the most insatiate impulse to be up where she could see. It was hard to think that her fretting and even wailing when forced to lie down could mean only a formless discontent, and not a clear idea of what she wanted. Still, it is not uncommon, when an instinct is thwarted, to feel a dim distress that makes us perfectly wretched without knowing why. ”

“ I have already spoken of the great importance psychologists attach to imitation. Professor Baldwin makes it the great principle of development in child and race—all evolution one long history of its workings; but he uses the word in a far wider sense than the ordinary one, tracing “imitation” from the mechanical repetition of life-preserving motions by the lowest living things, up to the spiritual effort of men and women to live up to their own highest ideals. Even using the word in its ordinary sense, we know what a potent force in the little one’s education imitation is. ”

“ This was by the wisdom of grandma, who saw the approach of the power of grasping. One may often see the little hands fluttering empty, the little [105] brain restless, craving its natural development (for grasping is much more a matter of brain development, through the forming of associations, than of hand development) , when there is no wise grandma to see that rattle and ring and spools lie “handy by” a little before the baby is ready to use them. To wait till he knows how to grasp before giving him things to practice on is like keeping a boy out of the water till he knows how to swim. ”

“ It cannot be doubted that it is mainly by studying objects with eye and hand together that we get our ability to see solid form. A colt grasping his ear of corn with his teeth, even a puppy licking and turning his bone all over, or a kitten tapping a spool to and fro and hugging it in her paws, without losing sight of it—none of these can bring the united powers of three senses to bear on an object so perfectly as a monkey or human baby can, holding it in the most convenient positions, turning it this way and that, seeing every part, feeling it with finger tips and mouth ”

“ She was coming to realize that what she saw was one with what she could feel; that there were things, which could be reached for and got hold of. That is, the sight-motor series and the touch-motor series were coalescing at last, and giving the baby a world of objects. She had an immensity to learn as to their form, weight, distance, and all that; but she had the key now for learning it.
The discovery of the new quality of tangibility in the visible world must have been gradual, however, and her new power of grasping hardly more at first than a blind use of association. ”

“ We ourselves can sit absorbed in thought or talk, yet follow unconsciously with our eyes the movement of a lantern along a dark road; and if something appears on the outer edge of our vision we often turn quite involuntarily to look. But the baby’s new expression of intelligence and interest showed that whether she willed the movements or not, she attended to the new impressions she was getting. ”

“ There are nursemaids, and even mothers, who will wheel a baby along the street with the sun blazing full in his face, and who will keep a light burning all night for their own convenience in tending him; and in later years his schoolbooks will get the credit of having weakened his eyes. Nature protects the little one somewhat at the outset, for at first the eyes open by a narrow slit, which admits but scanty light: our baby was just beginning, at a month old, to open her eyes like other folk. ”

“ If I should find out that a thousand babies learned to stand at an average age of forty-six weeks and two days, I should not know as much that is important about standing, as a stage in human progress, as I should after watching a single baby carefully through the whole process of achieving balance on his little soles. ”

“ More and more all the time she found something to do with things besides putting them in her mouth.
She liked hard, bright, and rattling things best to handle, and preferred metal or bone to rubber. One can hardly think of a thing less useful to a baby educationally at this stage than soft, colored worsted balls; he needs something that he can feel, hard and definite, in his hand; something with distinctly unlike sides that he can see as he pulls and shakes it about; he loves glitter, but cares little for color, perhaps does not yet see it ”

“ Sometimes on waking from deep sleep we find our sense of a separate bodily self gone, and gather it slowly back. We may almost lose ourselves [120] by lying idly, without thought or care, in some great, continuous sound, like the roar of a cataract, till we do not know which is ourself and which is the outward sound. Mystics and ecstatics have made an art of changing the bodily feelings by fasting and other means, till the usual marks of difference among impressions, by which we externalize some and refer others to our own bodies, are lost ”

“ True seeing, such as we ourselves have, is not just a matter of opening the eyes and letting the vision pour in; it requires a great deal of minute muscular adjustment, both of the eyeballs and of the lenses, and it is impossible that a baby should see anything but blurs of light and dark (without even any distinction of distance) till he has learned the adjustments. Not colored blurs, but light and dark only, for no trace of color sense has ever been detected within the first fortnight of life, no certain evidence of it even within the first year. ”

“ The baby had yet no idea of an object, which she could locate with the eye and then lay hold on with the hand. She had simply completed the chain of association I spoke of above: she had learned, that is, that after certain groping movements, feelings of touch appeared in her hands; and that then, after movements of clasping and lifting, these feelings reappeared in more lively and pleasing form in her mouth. She never looked at the objects she touched. There is no reason to think they could have been to her anything more [107] than sensations in her own hands and mouth. ”

“ All through the process of learning to manage the body, the baby showed instinct and intelligence most intricately mingled; and, indeed, we do so ourselves our lives long.
Of all a baby’s doings this toe business is the one that people find it most impossible to regard with scientific seriousness. But its indirect usefulness is considerable. The coöperation of different parts of the body that it teaches is remarkable; and it must have great influence in extending the sense of self to the legs and feet, where it has hitherto seemed but weakly developed. ”

“ We call a baby a little copy of the man, but really if he were magnified to man’s size and strength, we should regard him at first glance as an idiot and monster, with enormous head and abdomen, short legs, and no neck, not to speak of the flat-nosed, prognathous face; and on the other hand, a baby that was really a small copy of man’s body would seem positively uncanny. ”

“ The thing once corralled, she would pull it around, perhaps a minute, then put it to her mouth.
It is an epoch of tremendous importance when the baby first, with real attention, brings sight and touch and muscle feeling to bear together on an object. “In a very [144] deep sense,” says John Fiske, “all human science is but the increment of the power of the eye, and all human art is the increment of the power of the hand. Vision and manipulation—these in their countless indirect and transfigured forms are the two coöperating factors in all intellectual progress.” ”

“ The one instinct the human baby always brings into the world already developed is half a mere reflex act—that of sucking. It is started as a reflex would be, by the touch of some object, pencil, finger, or nipple, it [34] may be, between the lips; but it does not act like a reflex after that. It continues and ceases without reference to this external stimulus, and a little later often begins without it, or fails to begin when the stimulus is given. If it has originally a reflex character, that character fades out, and leaves it a pure instinct. ”

“ The grimaces of vague discomfort were disappearing, and the baby began to wear a look of satisfaction as she lay, warm and fed and dry, gazing at some light surface. In the bath, where the release from clothes and the stimulus to circulation from the warm water [62] heightened the pleasant condition of general sensation, her expression approached real delight; the movements of her limbs were freer, and all her muscles tenser.
The neck muscles, especially, were so far “innervated”—that is, supplied with nervous energy—as fairly to lift her head from the supporting hand. ”

“ Meanwhile the reflex clasping, which had always taken place when an object was laid in the baby’s palm, was growing firmer and longer, and more like conscious holding; and I noticed that the thumb was now “opposed” in clasping—that is, shut down opposite the fingers, an important element in the skill of human grasping. And now, when the fingers came in contact with convenient things—folds of the towel, for instance—the hands would clasp them mechanically, just as the lips, since the first month, had laid hold on a breast or cheek that touched them. ”

“ Now, in proportion as one believes that the faculties of the human mind unfold by evolutionary law, like a plant from the germ, he will feel the need of studying these also genetically. As we find them in our grown selves, they are often perplexing. What seems a single complete, inborn faculty may really be made up of simpler ones, so fused together by long practice that they cannot be discerned. We know that this is the case with seeing. For instance, we give a glance at a ball, and see its form with a single act of mind. ”

“ There were no movements beyond these three types, and therefore none that showed the least volition. Mothers often think the crying shows wish, will, or understanding of some sort. But Preyer tells us that babies born without a brain cry in just the same manner.
Mothers do not like to think that the baby is at first an automaton; and they would be quite right in objecting if that meant that he was a mere machine. He is an automaton in the sense that he has practically neither thought, wish, nor will; but he is a living, conscious automaton, and that makes all the difference in the world. ”

“ For a time she made little advance towards walking, though she began now to show some pleasure and pride in being led about by the hand. But about the middle of the month the walking instinct seemed at last to stir. The little one had often stepped from chair to chair, keeping a hand on one till she had fairly hold of the other. If the gap was an inch wider than she could cross thus, she dropped down and crept. Now one day she looked at the tiny gap, let go her chair, stood longingly, made a movement as if to take the single step, and dropped ignominiously and crept ”

“ It is a maxim of biology (as well as the frequent lesson of common observation) that while an organism is thus immature and plastic, it may learn, it may change, it may rise to higher development; and thus to infancy we owe the rank of the human race. ”

“ I was pretty sure, from our baby’s behavior I in the next two years, that she struggled back to the firm shores of waking consciousness through dark waters of confusion, and needed a friendly hand to cling to. This, I suspect, is the secret of the wild crying in the night, which doctors call “night terror”: it is not terror, I think, but vague distress, increased by the darkness—loss of self, of direction, of all one’s usual bodily feeling. ”

“ I have said that this is not memory, yet there is in it a germ of memory. A past [65] experience is brought back to consciousness; and if it were brought back as a definite idea, instead of a vague feeling, it would be memory.
Close on this came another great advance in vision. This was on the twenty-fifth day, toward evening, when the baby was lying on her grandmother’s knee by the fire, in a condition of high well-being and content, gazing at her grandmother’s face with an expression of attention. ”

“ Some of these channels—even whole connected systems of them—are already well prepared by inheritance, and hence come instinctive and reflex actions; many are still to be deepened by the baby’s own experience.
Now suppose the aimless impulse straying to the baby’s eye muscles, making the eyes roam hither and yon; but as they reach a certain position, they fall upon a lighted surface, and a pleasant brightness flows back into the consciousness; and something stirs within that has power to send an intenser current through those same fibres. ”

“ This impulse is usually imperfect, and the child has to work his own way to the mastery of the movements. Yet though certain reflex activities are inherited in a more highly developed condition than any human instincts, the instincts are at bottom always hereditary, which is not the case with the reflexes—any one may teach his muscles new reflex movements, unknown to his ancestors. A musician does it every time that he practices new music till his hands will run it off of their own accord, while he is thinking of something else. But instinct cannot be thus acquired. ”

“ This probably gives a true hint of the history of emotional development in the race: for in the animal world, too, fear appears [83] earliest of all the emotions, and in the simplest forms of fright is hardly to be distinguished from mere reflex action; and it is caused oftener by sound than by anything else. When we remember the theory that hearing is developed from the more ancient motion sense, we are tempted to trace the origin of fright still farther back, to the very primitive reflex sensibility to jarring movement, of which I have spoken before. ”

“ Even during the period of mere staring, faces had oftenest held her eyes, probably because they were oftener brought within the range of her clearest seeing than other light surfaces. The large, light, moving patch of the human [71] face (as Preyer has pointed out) coming and going in the field of vision, and oftener chancing to hover at the point of clearest seeing than any other object, embellished with a play of high lights on cheeks, teeth, and eyes, is calculated to excite the highest degree of attention a baby is capable of at a month old. ”

“ The little chicken runs about as soon as it is out of its shell, and even the monkey baby is able to take care of itself in a few months. Nothing is so helpless as the human baby, and in that helplessness is our glory, for it means that the activities of the race (as John Fiske has so clearly shown) have become too many, too complex, too infrequently repeated, to become fixed in the nervous structure before birth; hence the long period after birth before the child comes to full human powers. ”