The noise that comes from the
tearing and crumpling of paper is as yet unknown to the child. He
discovers (in the fifth month) the fact that he himself in tearing
paper into smaller and smaller pieces has again and again the new
sound-sensation, and he repeats the experiment day by day and with a
strain of exertion until this connection has lost the charm of
novelty. At present there is not, indeed, as yet any clear insight
into the nexus of cause; but the child has now had the experience
that he can himself be the cause of a combined perception of sight
and sound regularly, to the extent that when he tears paper there
appears, on the one hand, the lessening in size; on the other hand,
the noise. The patience with which this occupation--from the
forty-fifth to the fifty-fifth week especially--is continued with
pleasure is explained by the gratification at being a cause, at the
perception that so striking a transformation as that of the
newspaper into fragments has been effected by means of his own
activity. Other occupations of this sort, which are taken up again
and again with a persistency incomprehensible to an adult, are the
shaking of a bunch of keys, the opening and closing of a box or
purse (thirteenth month); the pulling out and emptying, and then the
filling and pushing in, of a table-drawer; the heaping up and the
strewing about of garden-mold or gravel; the turning of the leaves
of a book (thirteenth to nineteenth month); digging and scraping in
the sand; the carrying of footstools hither and thither; the placing
of shells, stones, or buttons in rows (twenty-first month); pouring
water into and out of bottles, cups, watering-pots (thirty-first to
thirty-third months); and, in the case of my boy, the throwing of
stones into the water.
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