The biography of a baby

I have said that the baby began the world as an automaton, but a conscious, feeling automaton. And what, then, were these feelings and this consciousness? What was the outfit for beginning the world that the little mind brought with it? When I asked such questions I was skirting the edge of one of the great battle-grounds of philosophy. Whether all human ideas are made up solely from one’s own experience of the outer world as given him by his senses, or whether there are, on the contrary, inborn ideas, implanted directly by nature or God,—this is a question on which volumes have been written.

Did the baby start out ready equipped with ideas of space, personal identity, time, causation, such as we find so ineradicable in our own minds? That is, did she see objects about her, located in space, nearer and farther, right and left, and all outside and separate from herself, as we do? hear sounds coming from without, as we do? Did she feel herself a separate thing from the outer world? Did she perceive events as happening in time succession, one after another? And did she think of one thing as happening because of another, so that, for instance, she was capable of crying in order to cause her dinner to be brought?

The hope of answering such questions was the first stimulus to the study of infants, and the earlier records are much occupied with them. Philosophers nowadays are less disposed to think that we can prove anything about the doctrine of innate ideas by finding whether babies have such ideas to begin with; for we might indeed have ideas that came direct from God, or from the nature of the mind, and yet might not enter into our inheritance of these at once.

To me, however, not seeking to solve philosophical problems, but only to watch and comprehend what was going on in the baby’s mind, it was none the less interesting to try to make out the condition of her senses and consciousness—though without the careful special investigations certain physiologists had made before, I should have found it blind guessing as to how much she really did see, hear, and feel; for these processes, of course, went on inside her little mind, and could only be inferred from her behavior.

She evidently felt a difference between light and darkness from the first hour, for she stopped crying when her face was exposed to gentle light; and other observers confirm this. Two or three report also a turning of the head toward the light within the first week. The nurse, who was intelligent and exact, thought she saw this in the case of my niece. I did not, but I saw instead a constant turning of the eyes toward a person coming near her—that is, toward a large dark mass that interrupted the light. Either movement must be regarded as entirely instinctive or reflex. Even plants will turn toward the light, and among animal movements this is one of the most primitive; while the habit of looking toward any dark moving mass runs far back in animal history, and may well have become fixed in the bodily mechanism. With the beginning of voluntary looking these instinctive movements fade.

No other sign of vision appeared in the little one during the first fortnight. The eyes were directed to nothing, fixed on nothing. They did not wink if one made a pass at them. There was no change of focus for near or distant seeing; the two eyes did not even move always in unison,—and as the lids also had by no means learned yet to move symmetrically with the balls and with each other, some extraordinary and alarming contortions resulted.

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 showed no sign of hearing anything until the third day, when she started violently at the sound of tearing paper, some eight feet from her. After that, occasional harsh or sudden sounds—oftener the rustling of paper than anything else—could make her start or cry.

It is well established by the careful tests of several physiologists that babies are deaf for a period lasting from several hours to several days after birth. The outer tube of the ear is often closed by its own walls, and the middle ear is always stopped up with fluid. Even after the ear itself is clear and ready for hearing, few sounds are noticed; perhaps because the outer passage is still so narrow, perhaps because of imperfect nerve connections with the brain, perhaps because sounds are not distinguished, but go all together into a sort of blur, just as the sights do. As the usual effect of sounds on wee babies is to startle them, and to set off convulsive reflex movements, it is well for them that hearing is so tardy in development.

There is noticeable variation in sensitiveness to hearing, not only among different babies, but in the same baby at different times. A sound that startles on one day seems to pass absolutely unheard on the next.

In observing the sensibility to sound, one may easily be misled. If a baby starts when a door slams or a heavy object falls, it is more likely to be the jar than the sound that affects him; if he becomes restless when one claps the hands or speaks, it may be because he felt a puff of air on his head. The tap of an ordinary call bell is a good sound to test with, causing neither jar nor air current.

Taste and smell were senses that the baby gave no sign of owning till much later. The satisfaction of hunger was quite enough to account for the contentment she showed in nursing; and when she was not hungry she would suck the most tasteless object as cheerfully as any other. Physiologists, however, have had the daring to make careful test of smell and taste in the new-born, putting a wee drop of quinine, sugar, salt, or acid solution on the babies’ tongues, and strong odors to their noses, and have been made certain by the resulting behavior that these senses do exist from the first. But it requires rather strong tests to call them into action. Many babies, for instance, suck at a two per cent. solution of quinine as if it were sugar; so it seems unlikely that the mild and monotonous taste of milk, and the neutral smells by which any well-kept baby is surrounded, are really perceived at all. There are instances related of very positive discrimination between one milk and another, either by taste or smell, shown by very young babies; yet the weight of evidence points to an almost dormant condition of these two senses.

We were told in school that the fifth sense was “feeling,” but psychologists now regard this not as a single sense, but as a group, called the “dermal” or skin senses. The sense of touch and pressure, the senses of heat and cold, and the sense of pain are the principal ones of the group.

Our baby showed from the first that she was aware when she was touched. She stopped crying when she was cuddled or patted. She showed comfort in the bath, which may have been in part due to freedom from the contact of clothes, and to liking for the soft touches of the water. She responded with sucking motions to the first touch of the nipple on her lips. Preyer found the lips of new-born babies quite delicately sensitive, responding even to the lightest touch; and there are other sensitive spots, such as the nostrils and the soles of the feet.

On the whole, however, the rose-leaf baby skin proves to be much less sensitive than ours, not only to contact, but also to pain, and perhaps to heat and cold, though this has not been so thoroughly tested. This is not saying, of course, that the physiological effects of heat and cold upon the baby are unimportant.

Our baby had no experience of skin pain in her early days, and being kept at an equable temperature, probably received no definite sensations either of heat or of cold.

The foregoing are the “special senses,” that is, those that give impressions of external things, and have end organs to receive and make definite these impressions,—the eye at the end of the optic nerve, the different kinds of nerve tips in the skin, and so forth. Another sense now claims almost to rank with them,—the recently studied sense of equilibrium and motion, by which we feel loss of balance in our bodies and changes in their motion (changes only, for no one can feel perfectly smooth motion). This sense has been traced to the semicircular canals of the ear; and as this part of the ear is the oldest in evolution, and the rudimentary ears of the lower orders of animals are quite analogous to it in structure, biologists now suspect that hearing may be a more recent sense than we have thought, and that much which has been taken for sense of sound in the lower animals—even as high as fishes—may perhaps be only a delicate sense of motion.

I failed to watch for this motion sense in the baby. It would have been shown by signs that she felt change of motion when she was lifted and moved. Equilibrium sense she must have used as soon as she began to balance her little head, but in the first limp and passive days there was no sign of it. Still, there are tales of very young babies who showed disturbance, as if from a feeling of lost equilibrium, when they were lowered swiftly in the arms.

There is besides a sort of sensibility to vibration that affects the whole body. We know how much of the rhythm of music may be caught quite soundlessly through, the vibrations of the floor; and it is said (perhaps not altogether credibly) that it was thus that Jessie Brown recognized even the instruments and the tune at the relief of Lucknow by the tremor along the ground before a sound was audible. A jar, affecting the whole body, seems to be felt by creatures of very low organization. Babies are undoubtedly quite susceptible to jarring from the earliest days. Champney’s baby started when the scale of the balance in which he was lying immediately after birth sprang up.

Then there is the “muscle sense”—the feeling of the action of our own muscles; and a most delicate and important sense this is. It is safe to say that the baby had it from the first, and felt the involuntary movements her own little body was making, for it is hardly conceivable how else she could have learned to make voluntary ones. But that is another story, and comes later.

Even this does not exhaust the list of sensations the baby could feel. There was the whole group of “organic sensations,” coming from the inner organs,—hunger, thirst, organic pain. With older people, nausea, suffocation, choking, and perhaps some others might be added; but little babies certainly do not feel nausea,—their food regurgitates without a qualm. Nor do they seem to feel disagreeable sensations when they choke in nursing.

Organic pain our baby had her touch of in the usual form of colic; and hunger was obviously present very early, though perhaps not in the first two or three days. Thirst appeared from the first, and was always imperative. Of course, the milk diet largely satisfied it, but not entirely. Luckily our baby did not suffer from thirst, for grandma, nurse, and the good doctor had all entered early warning that “babies needed water,” and that many a baby was treated for colic, insomnia, nervousness, and natural depravity, when all the poor little fellow wanted was a spoonful of cool water. The baby’s body, as I said in my last chapter, is largely composed of water, and the evaporation from the loose texture of the skin is very great. After children can talk, they wear out the most robust patience with incessant appeals, night and day, for a “d’ink,” and consume water in quantities quite beyond what seems rational. But their craving is doubtless a true indication of what they need.

There are composites of sensation which the baby experiences very early. There is the feeling of clothes, for instance, made up of warmth, of touch and pressure sensations all over his skin, and of changes in the muscular feelings from constraint, and in the internal feelings from the effect on circulation. There are feelings of fatigue in one position, made up of sensations of touch, of the pressure of the body’s weight on the under surfaces of skin, of some muscular tensions, and perhaps of several other elements. Our baby’s nurse saved her much fretting by simply changing the position of the little body from time to time. We ourselves are constantly moving and shifting our positions, to relieve a pressure on the skin here, or a muscular tension there, but the wee baby cannot so much as turn his head or move a limb at will.

Vaguest and most composite of all is what is called “common sensation,” or “general sensation”—that feeling of comfort or discomfort, vigor or languor, diffused through the whole body, with which we are all familiar. It seems to be very primitive in origin—indeed, the speculation is that this dim, pervasive feeling is the original one, the primitive way in which animal tissue responded to light and heat and everything, before the special senses developed, gathering the light sensations to one focus, the sound sensations to another, and so on. But in its present development it is also largely made up of the sum of all the organic sensations, and even of dim overflows of feeling from the special senses.

It is with older people notably connected with emotional states. It varies, of course, with health and external conditions; yet each person seems from birth to be held to a certain fixed habit in this complex underlying condition of feeling—pleasant with one, unpleasant with another. This fixed habit of general sensation is perhaps the secret of what we call temperament; while its surface variations seem to be mainly responsible for moods.

Our baby showed temperament—luckily of the easy-going and cheerful kind—from her first day (though we could hardly see this except by looking back afterward); and there is no reason to doubt that she experienced some general sensation from the first. It was evidently of a pretty neutral sort, however: the definite appearance of high comfort and well-being did not come till later; nor were moods apparent at first.

Now in all this one significant thing appears. Sensations had from the first the quality of being agreeable or disagreeable. The baby could not wish, prefer, and choose, for she had not learned to remember and compare; but she could like and dislike. And this was shown plainly from the first hour by expressions of face—reflex facial movements, so firmly associated in the human race with liking and disliking that the most inexperienced observer recognizes their meaning at once. It is said that facial expression comes by imitation, and that the blind are therefore deficient in it; but this is not true of these simplest expressions: they come by inheritance, and are present in the first hour of life. A look of content or discontent, the monotonous cry, and vague movements of limbs, head, and features,—these are the limits of expression of feeling in the earliest days.

It would seem that in this sense condition there was nothing that could give the baby any feeling of inner or outer, of space or locality. We have some glimpse of the like condition ourselves,—when people say after an explosion, for instance, that it “seemed to be inside their own heads,” or when we try to locate a cicada’s note, or when we feel diffused warmth.

Here is the conception I gathered of the dim life on which the little creature entered at birth. She took in with a dull comfort the gentle light that fell on her eyes, seeing without any sort of attention or comprehension the moving blurs of darkness that varied it. She felt motions and changes; she felt the action of her own muscles; and, after the first three or four days, disagreeable shocks of sound now and then broke through the silence, or perhaps through an unnoticed jumble of faint noises. She felt touches on her body from time to time, but without the least sense of the place of the touch (this became evident enough later, as I shall relate in its order); and steady slight sensations of touch from her clothes, from arms that held her, from cushions on which she lay, poured in on her.

From time to time sensations of hunger, thirst, and once or twice of pain, made themselves felt through all the others, and mounted till they became distressing; from time to time a feeling of heightened comfort flowed over her, as hunger and thirst were satisfied, or release from clothes, and the effect of the bath and rubbing on her circulation, increased the net sense of well-being. She felt slight and unlocated discomforts from fatigue in one position, quickly relieved by the watchful nurse. For the rest, she lay empty-minded, neither consciously comfortable nor uncomfortable, yet on the whole pervaded with a dull sense of well-being. Of the people about her, of her mother’s face, of her own existence, of desire or fear, she knew nothing.

Yet this dim dream was flecked all through with the beginnings of later comparison and choice. The light was varied with dark; the feelings of passive motion, of muscular action, of touch, of sound, were all unlike each other; the discomforts of hunger, of pain, of fatigue, were different discomforts. The baby began from the first moment to accumulate varied experience, which before long would waken attention, interest, discrimination, and vivid life.