ABSTRACT
Meaning and imagery. We may regard the first step towards the development of thinking as made when an object has acquired some meaning for the child additional to what is immediately perceived.
A suit of armour, writes G. F. Stout, ‘ looks hard, smooth and cold ’ : but the idea of hardness is ‘ not separately discernible as an explicit idea’. This is what Stout calls ‘complication’,1 and it is perception rather than thinking. A further stage is reached when some perception, e.g. the sound of the mother’s voice, calls up an image of something not present, in this case a visual image of the mother. If this image only occurs when the mother’s voice is heard, the image is ‘ tied ’ to the perception of the voice : it does not exist independently. It is in this form, says Stout, ‘that ideas first become implicit-as extensions of present perception’.2 In a similar manner, we may imagine, various activities or qualities of the mother become associated with her appearance, and at first are ‘ tied ’, in the sense that they are not thought of separately : they may exist for the child as anticipations of, say, warmth and softness on contact, these anticipations being bound up with the sight of the mother or the sound of her voice. It seems quite likely that images do appear in this way as Stout indicates ; though I think it impossible to prove that, when once they occur like this, they do not also occur independently. Still, when the first images or, to be cautious, shall we say the first thoughts of objects not present to the senses do first seem to occur, they occur immediately after the object is seen or heard; for example, when B at o ; while nursing, kept looking round for me after I had once spoken. At o ; 6 B frequently looked for his toys when he had dropped them. At first this was only for a moment or two. Then at o ; 7 the searching was repeated at intervals (of about half a minute) while playing with another toy, i.e. there was a recurrence of the idea of the dropped toy. (Details have been given in the chapter on Learning and Remembering, p. 355.)
Finally, the interval between seeing a thing and then looking for it becomes so long that clearly the image (or other element of ideational activity) is not ‘ tied ’ : thus
B, o ; ii. When put on my knee, B began to search for my yellow pencil in my waistcoat pocket, where he had found it lately. N.B .— He had not seen it for 24 hours. (The same thing happened the next day.)
(Charlotte Biihler places at o ; 10-1 ; o a test of remembering the contents of a box, one minute after the box had been removed. The child looks in the box for the missing toy.)1 This period (about o ; 7-0 ; 9 in B), at which a missing thing is looked for, coincides with that in which words first begin to mean something to the child (e.g. when B had begun (at o ; 8) to use ‘ Dadda ’ as an expression of delight), but words are not yet used to indicate absent things.
