Child development; Infant psychology; Motor ability in children
Though she externalized sight and sound, it is not likely that the baby
at this stage distinguished external and internal in touch impressions,
unless about her face. She had not at all learned the bounds of her
own body yet. Below her arms, her control of it was almost nothing.
She could not turn herself over. She had never passed her hands over
her own surface, and knew it only by chance touches. She understood
so little her relation even to her hands, which were fairly under
control, that when they met by chance, each hand would seize the
other, and try to take it to her mouth. She was often aggrieved by the
unexpected result when she tried to flourish her arm and go on sucking
her thumb at the same time, and could not imagine what had suddenly
snatched the cherished thumb away. Her feeling of herself must have
been very different from ours: more like that of a conventional cherub,
all but her head dissolved away into oneness with the outside world.
Did she, then, seeing the vision of the world, see it as a world of
_things_--solid objects, visible and tangible? Probably not. Her whole
behavior showed that she had never blended the feel of a thing and
the look of a thing into the perception of the thing itself. If her
body was touched anywhere, she never looked toward the place to see
what touched her. When she groped on her tray, she seemed to be merely
repeating motions that had formerly brought sensations, not seeking
for things that she supposed were there; she never looked for them, nor
even looked at them as she held them; she seemed to have no suspicion
that the feeling in her hand was due to a visible object there.
Nor could she well have had any idea of an object, even as one may
get it from touch alone, without sight; for she did not feel over the
things she held--she was conscious only of the part that touched her.
If she laid hold of her rattle one day by one part, and another day by
another, she could not have known it was the same object, except as
she learned a little about it in fumbling for a better hold. In short,
the things she touched and held can hardly have been to her definite
objects, but only disjointed touch and weight sensations.
With no more material than this, children born blind do build up in
time the idea of a world of things; but seeing children have a much
quicker and completer way.
Just at the end of the third month the baby had once gazed at her
rattle as she held it in her hand; but it was not till the second week
of the fourth month that she seemed really to learn that when she felt
the familiar touch in her hand, she could see something by looking.
Then her eyes began to rest on things while she picked them up; but in
a blank and passive way--the eyes looking on like outsiders, while the
awkward little hands fumbled just as they would have done in the dark.
The baby seemed to have no idea that what she saw was the same thing as
what she felt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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