Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/457

Rh want (or, possibly, don't want) the dog." These words are "sentence-words"—that is, they are meant to convey a whole process of thought. Only the thought is as yet only half formed or germinal in the degree of its differentiation. Thus it is fairly certain that when the child wants you to sit down and says "dow," it does not clearly realize the relation which you and I understand under that word, but merely has a mental picture of you in the position of sitter.

In these first attempts to use our speech the child's mind is innocent of grammatical distinctions. These arise out of the particular uses of words in sentence structure, and of this structure the child has as yet no inkling. If, then, following a common practice, I speak of a child of twelve or fifteen months as naming an object, the reader must not suppose that I am ascribing to the baby mind a clear grasp of the function of what grammarians call nouns (substantives). All that is implied in this way of speaking is that the infant's first words are used mainly as recognition signs. There is from the first, I conceive, even in the gesture of pointing and saying "da!" a germ of this naming process.

The progress of this first rude naming or articulate recognition is very interesting. The names first learned are either those of individuals, what we call proper names, as mamma, nurse, or those which, like "bath," "wow-wow," are at first applied to one particular object. It is often supposed that a child uses these as true singular names, recognizing individual objects as such; but this is pretty certainly an error. He has no clear idea of an individual thing as yet; and he will, as occasion arises, quite spontaneously extend his names to other individuals, as we see in his lumping together other men with his sire under the name "papa."

This extension of names or generalizing process proceeds primarily and mainly by the discovery of the likenesses among things, though, as we shall see presently, their connections of time and place afford a second and subordinate means of expansion. The transference of a name from object to object through the discovery of a likeness or analogy has been touched on in another chapter. It moves along thoroughly childish lines, and constitutes one of the most striking and interesting of the manifestations of precocious originality. Yet, if unconventional in its mode of operation, it is essentially thought activity, a connecting of like with like, and a rudimentary grouping of things in classes.

This tendency to comprehend like things or situations under a single articulate sign is seen already in the use of the early indicative sign "atta" (all gone). It was used by Preyer's child to mark not only the departure of a thing, but the putting out of a