Chapter XII: George Sand’s Childhood, 489 (4)

I have lately come across a very early, and as I think, remarkable illustration of this form of childish thought. A little girl already quoted, whom we will call M., when one year eleven months old, happened to be walking with her mother on a windy day. At first she was delighted at the strong boisterous wind, but then got tired and said: ‘Wind make mamma’s hair untidy, Babba (her own name) make mamma’s hair tidy, _so wind not blow adain_ (again)’. About three weeks later this child was out in the rain, when she said to her mother: ‘Mamma, dy (dry) Babba’s hands, _so not rain any more_’. What does this curious inversion of the order of cause and effect mean? I am disposed to think that this little girl, who was unusually bright and intelligent, was transferring to nature’s phenomena the forms of her own experience. When she is disorderly, and her mother or nurse arranges her hair or washes her hands, it is in order that she may not continue to be disorderly. The child is envisaging the wind and the rain as a kind of naughty child who can be got to behave properly by effacing the effects of its naughtiness. In other words they are both to be deterred from repeating what is objectionable by a visible and striking manifestation of somebody’s objection or prohibition. Here, it seems unmistakable, we have a projection into nature of human purpose, of the idea of determination of action by end: we have a form of anthropomorphism which runs through the whole of primitive thought.

It seems to follow from this that there is a stage in the development of a child’s intelligence when questions such as, ‘Why do the leaves fall?’ ‘Why does the thunder make such a noise?’ are answered most satisfactorily by a poetic fiction, by saying, for example, that the leaves are old and tired of hanging on to the trees, and that the thunder giant is in a particularly bad temper and making a noise. It is perhaps permissible to make use of this fiction at times, more especially when trying to answer the untiring questioning about animals and their doings, a region of existence, by the way, of which even the wisest of us knows exceedingly little. Yet the device has its risks; and an ill-considered piece of myth-making passed off as an answer may find itself awkwardly confronted by that most merciless of things, a child’s logic.

We may notice something more in this early mode of interrogation. Children are apt to think not only that things behave in general after our manner, that their activity is determined by some end or purpose, or that they have their useful function, their _raison d’être_ as we say, but that this purpose concerns us human creatures. The wind and the rain came and went in our little girl’s nature-theory just to vex or out of consideration for ‘mamma’ and ‘Babba’. A little boy of two years two months sitting on the floor one day in a bad temper looked up and saw the sun shining and said captiously, ‘Sun not look at Hennie,’ and then more pleadingly, ‘Please, sun, not look at poor Hennie’.[40] The sea, when the child C. first saw it, was supposed to make its disturbing noise with special reference to his small ears. We may call this the anthropocentric idea, the essence of which is that man is the centre of reference, the aim or target, in all nature’s processes. This anthropocentric tendency again is shared by the child with the uncultured adult. Primitive man looks on wind, rain, thunder as sent by some angry spirit, and even a respectable English farmer tends to view these operations of nature in much the same way. In children this anthropocentric impulse is apt to get toned down by their temperament, which is on the whole optimistic and decidedly practical, into a looking out for the _uses_ of things. A boy, already quoted, once (towards the end of the fourth year) asked his mother what the bees do. This question he explained by adding: “What is the good of them?” When told that they made honey he observed pertinently enough from his teleological standpoint: “Then do they bring it for us to eat?” This shrewd little fellow might have made short work of some of the arguments by which the theological optimists of the last century were wont to ‘demonstrate’ the Creator’s admirable adaptation of nature to man’s wants.

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Footnote 40:

See note by E. M. Stevens, _Mind_, xi., p. 150.

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The frequency of this kind of ‘why?’ suggests that children’s thoughts about things are penetrated with the idea of purpose and use. This is shown too in other ways. M. A. Binet found by questioning children that their ideas of things are largely made up of uses. Thus, asked what a hat is, a child answered: “Pour mettre sur la tête”. Mr. H. E. Kratz of Sioux City sends me some answers to questions by children of five on entering a primary school, which illustrate the same point. Thus the question, ‘What is a tree?’ brings out the answers, ‘To make the wind blow,’ ‘To sit under,’ and so forth.

Little by little this idea of a definite purpose and use in this and that thing falls back and the child gets interested more in the production or origination of things. He wants to know who made the trees, the birds, the stars and so forth. Here, though what we call efficient, as distinguished from final, cause is recognised, anthropomorphism survives in the idea of a maker analogous to the carpenter. We shall see later that children habitually envisage the deity as a fabricator.

All this rage of questioning about the uses and the origin of things is the outcome, not merely of ignorance and curiosity, but of a deeper motive, a sense of perplexity, of mystery or contradiction. It is not always easy to distinguish the two types of question, yet in many cases at least its form and the manner of putting it will tell us that it issues from a puzzled and temporarily baffled brain. As long as the questioning goes on briskly we may infer that a child believes in the possibility of knowledge, and has not sounded the deepest depths of intellectual despair. More pathetic than the saddest of questions is the silencing of questions by the loss of faith.

It is easy to see that children must find themselves puzzled with much which they see and hear of. The apparent exceptions to rules don’t trouble the grown-up persons just because as _recurrent_ exceptions they seem to take on a rule of their own. Thus adults though quite unversed in hydrostatics would be incapable of being puzzled by C.’s problem: why my putting my hand in water does not make a hole in it. Similarly, though they know nothing of animal physiology they are never troubled by the mystery of fish breathing under water, which when first noted by a child may come as a sort of shock. The little boy just referred to, in his far-reaching zoological interrogatory asked his mother: “Can they (the fish) breathe with their moufs under water?”

In his own investigations, and in getting instruction from others, the child is frequently coming upon puzzles of this sort. The same boy was much exercised about the sea and where it went to. He expressed a wish to take off his shoes and to walk out into the sea so as to see where the ships go to, and was much troubled on learning that the sea got deeper and deeper, and that if he walked out into it he would be drowned. At first he denied the paradox (which he at once saw) of the incoming sea going uphill: “But, mamma, it doesn’t run up, it doesn’t run up, so it couldn’t come up over our heads?” He was told that this was so, and he wisely began to try to accommodate his mind to this startling revelation. C., it will be seen, was much exercised by this problem of the moving mass of waters, wanting to know whether it came half way up the world. Probably in both these cases the idea of water rising had its uncanny alarming aspect.

It is probable that the disappearance of a thing is at a very early stage a puzzle to the infant. Later on, too, the young mind continues to be exercised about this mystery. Our little friend’s inquiry about the whither of the big receding sea, “Where does the sea sim (swim) to?” illustrates this perplexity. A child seems able to understand the shifting of an object of moderate size from one part of space to another, but his conception of space is probably not large enough to permit him to realise how a big tract of water can pass out of the visible scene into the unseen. The child’s question, “Where does all the wind go to?” seems to have sprung from a like inability to picture a vast unseen realm of space.

In addition to this difficulty of the disappearance of big things, there seems to be something in the vastness, and the infinite number of existent things perceived and heard about, which puzzles and oppresses the young mind. The inability to take in all the new facts leads to a kind of resentment of their multitude. “Mother,” asked a boy of four years, “why _is_ there such a lot of things in the world if no one knows all these things?” One cannot be quite sure of the underlying thought here. The child may have meant merely to protest against the production of so confusing a number of objects in the world. This certainly seems to be the motive in some children’s inquiries, as when a little girl, aged three years seven months, said: ‘Mamma, why do there be any more days, why do there? and why don’t we leave off eating and drinking?’ Here the burdensomeness of mere multiplicity, of the unending procession of days and meals, seems to be the motive. Yet it is possible that the question about a lot of things not known to anybody was prompted by a deeper difficulty, a dim presentiment of Berkeley’s idealism, that things can exist only as objects of knowledge. This surmise may seem far-fetched to some, yet I have found what seem to me other traces of this tendency in children. A girl of six and a half years was talking to her father about the making of the world. He pointed out to her the difficulty of creating things out of nothing, showing her that when we made things we simply fashioned materials anew. She pondered and then said: “Perhaps the world’s a fancy”. Here again one cannot be quite sure of the child-thought behind the words. Yet it certainly looks like a falling back for a moment into the dreamy mood of the idealist, that mood in which we seem to see the solid fabric of things dissolve into a shadowy phantasmagoria.

The subject of origins is, as we know, beset with puzzles for the childish mind. The beginnings of living things are, of course, the great mystery. “There’s such a lot of things,” remarked the little zoologist I have recently been quoting, “I want to know, that you say nobody knows, mamma. I want to know who made God, and I want to know if Pussy has eggs to help her make ickle (little) kitties.” Finding that this was not so, he observed: “Oh, then, I s’pose she has to have God to help her if she doesn’t have kitties in eggs given her to sit on”. Another little boy, five years old, found his way to the puzzle of the reciprocal genetic relation of the hen and the egg, and asked his mother: “When there _is_ no egg where does the hen come from? When there _was_ no egg, I mean, where _did_ the hen come from?” In a similar way, as we shall see in C.’s journal, a child will puzzle his brains by asking how the first child was suckled, or, as a little girl of four and a half years put it, "When everybody was a baby—then who could be their nurse—if they were all babies?" The beginnings of human life are, as we know, a standing puzzle for the young investigator.

Much of this questioning is metaphysical in that it transcends the problems of every-day life and of science. The child is metaphysician in the sense in which the earliest human thinkers were metaphysicians, pushing his questioning into the inmost nature of things, and back to their absolute beginnings, as when he asks ‘Who made God?’ or ‘What was there before God?’[41] He has no idea yet of the confines of human knowledge. If his mother tells him she does not know he tenaciously clings to the idea that somebody knows, the doctor it may be, or the clergyman—or possibly the policeman, of whose superior knowledge one little girl was forcibly convinced by noting that her father once asked information of one of these stately officials.

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Footnote 41:

Illustrations are given by Compayré, _op. cit._, and by P. Lombroso,
_Psicologia del Bambino_, p. 47 ff.

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Strange, bizarre, altogether puzzling to the listener, are some of these childish questions. A little American girl of nine years after a pause in talk re-commenced the conversation by asking: “Why don’t I think of something to say?” A play recently performed in a London theatre made precisely this appeal to others by way of getting at one’s own motives a chief amusing feature in one of its comical characters. Another little American girl aged three one day left her play and her baby sister named Edna Belle to find her mother and ask: “Mamma, why isn’t Edna Belle me, and why ain’t I Edna Belle?”[42] The narrator of this story adds that the child was not a daughter of a professor of metaphysics but of practical farmer folk. One cannot be quite sure of the precise drift of this question. It may well have been the outcome of a new development of self-consciousness, of a clearer awareness of the self in its distinctness from others. A question with a much clearer metaphysical ring about it, showing thought about the subtlest problems, was that put by a boy of the same age: “If I’d gone upstairs, could God make it that I hadn’t?” This is a good example of the type of question: ‘Can he make a thing done not to have been done?’ which according to Erasmus was much debated by theologians.[43]

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Footnote 42:

Quoted from an article, “Some Comments on Babies,” by Miss Shinn in
the _Overland Monthly_, Jan., 1894.

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Footnote 43:

Froude, _Letters of Erasmus_, Lect. vii.

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With many children confronted with the mysteries of God and the devil this questioning often reproduces the directions of theological speculation. Thus the problem of the necessity of evil is clearly recognisable in the question once put by an American boy under eight years of age to a priest who visited his home: “Father, why don’t God kill the devil and then there would be no more wickedness in the world?”

All children’s questioning does not of course take this sublime direction. Along with the tendency to push back inquiry to the unreachable beginning of things we mark a more modest and scientific line of investigation into the observable and explainable processes of nature. Some questions which a busy listener would pooh-pooh as dreamy have a genuinely scientific value, showing that the little inquirer is trying to work out some problem of fact. This is illustrated by a question put by a little boy aged three years nine months: “Why don’t we see two things with our two eyes?” a problem which, as we know, has exercised older psychologists.

When this more definitely scientific direction is taken by a child’s questioning we may observe that the ambitious ‘why?’ begins to play a second _rôle_, the first being now taken by the more modest ‘how?’ The germ of this kind of inquiry may be present in some of the early questioning about growth. “How,” asked our little zoologist, “does plants grow when we plant them, and how does boys grow from babies to big boys like me? Has I grown now whilst I was eating my supper? See!” and he stood up to make the most of his stature. Clearer evidence of a directing of inquiry into the processes of things appears in the fifth and sixth years. A little girl of four years seven months among other questionings wanted to know what makes the trains move, and how we move our eyes. The incessant inquiries of the boy Clark Maxwell into the ‘go’ of this thing or the ‘particular go’ of that illustrate in a clearer manner the early tendency to direct questioning to the more manageable problems to which science confines itself.

These different lines of questioning are apt to run on concurrently from the end of the third year, a fit of eager curiosity about animals or other natural objects giving place to a fit of theological inquiry, this again being dropped for an equally eager inquiry into the making of clocks, railway engines, and so on. Yet through these alternating bouts of questioning we can distinguish something like a law of intellectual progress. Questioning as the most direct expression of a child’s curiosity follows the development of his groups of ideas and of the interests which help to construct these. Thus I think it a general rule that questioning about the make or mechanism of things follows questioning about animal ways just because the zoological interest (in a very crude form of course) precedes the mechanical. The scope of this early questioning will, moreover, expand with intellectual capacity, and more particularly the capability of forming the more abstruse kind of childish idea. Thus inquiries into absolute beginnings, into the origin of the world and of God himself, indicate the presence of a larger intellectual grasp of time-relations and of the processes of becoming.

Our survey of the field of childish questioning suggests that it is by no means an easy matter to deal with. It must be admitted, I think, by the most enthusiastic partisan of children that their questioning is of very unequal value. It may often be noticed that a child’s ‘why?’ is used in a sleepy mechanical way with no real desire for knowledge, any semblance of answer being accepted without an attempt to put a meaning into it. A good deal of the more importunate kind of children’s questioning, when they follow up question by question recklessly, as it seems, and without definite aim, appears to be of this formal and lifeless character, an expression not of a healthy intellectual activity, but merely of a mood of general mental discontent and peevishness. In a certain amount of childish questioning, indeed, we have, I suspect, to do with a distinctly abnormal mental state, with an analogue of that mania of questions, or passion for mental rummaging or prying into everything, “Grubelsucht” as the Germans call it, which is a well-known phase of mental disease, and prompts the patient to put such questions as this: “Why do I stand here where I stand?” “Why is a glass a glass, a chair a chair?” Such questioning ought, it is evident, not to be treated too seriously. We may attach too much significance to a child’s question, labouring hard to grasp its meaning, with a view to answering it, when we should be wiser if we viewed it as a symptom of mental irritability and peevishness, to be got rid of as quickly as possible by a good romp or other healthy distraction.[44]

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Footnote 44:

_Cf._ Perez, _L’Education dès le berceau_, p. 45 ff.

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To admit, however, that children’s questions may now and again need this sort of wholesome snubbing is far from saying that we ought to treat all their questioning with a mild contempt. The little questioners flatter us by attributing superior knowledge to us, and good manners should compel us to treat their questions with some attention. And if now and then they torment us with a string of random reckless questioning, in how many cases, one wonders, are they not made to suffer, and that wrongfully, by having perfectly serious questions rudely cast back on their hands? The truth is that to understand and to answer children’s questions is a considerable art, including both a large and deep knowledge of things, and a quick sympathetic insight into the little questioners’ minds, and few of us have at once the intellectual and the moral excellences needed for an adequate treatment of them. It is one of the tragi-comic features of human life that the ardent little explorer looking out with wide-eyed wonder upon his new world should now and again find as his first guide a nurse or even a mother who will resent the majority of his questions as disturbing the luxurious mood of indolence in which she chooses to pass her days. We can never know how much valuable mental activity has been checked, how much hope and courage cast down by this kind of treatment. Yet happily the questioning impulse is not easily eradicated, and a child who has suffered at the outset from this wholesale contempt may be fortunate enough to meet, while the spirit of investigation is still upon him, one who knows and who has the good nature and the patience to impart what he knows in response to a child’s appeal.

IV.
PRODUCTS OF CHILD-THOUGHT.

_The Child’s Thoughts about Nature._

We have seen in the previous article how a child’s mind behaves when brought face to face with the unknown. We will now examine some of the more interesting results of this early thought-activity, what are known as the characteristic ideas of children. There is no doubt, I think, that children, by reflecting on what they see or otherwise experience and what they are told by others, fashion their own ideas about nature, death and the rest. This tendency, as pointed out above, discloses itself to some extent in their questions about things. It has now to be more fully studied in their sayings as a whole. The ideas thus formed will probably prove to vary considerably in the case of different children, yet to preserve throughout these variations a certain general character.

These ideas, moreover, like those of primitive races, will be found to be a crude attempt at a connected system. We must not, of course, expect too much here. The earliest thought of mankind about nature and the supernatural was very far from being elaborated into a consistent logical whole; yet we can see general forms of conception or tendencies of thought running through the whole. So in the case of this largely spontaneous child-thought. It will disclose to an unsparing critical inspection vast gaps, and many unsurmounted contradictions. Thus in the case of children, as in that of uncultured races, the supernatural realm is at first brought at most into only a very loose connexion with the visible world. All the same there is seen, in the measure of the individual child’s intelligence, the endeavour to co-ordinate, and the poor little hard-pressed brain of a child will often pluckily do its best in trying to bring some connexion into that congeries of disconnected worlds into which he finds himself so confusingly introduced, partly by the motley character of his own experiences, as the alternations of waking and sleeping, partly by the haphazard miscellaneous instruction, mythological, historical, theological, and the rest, with which we inconsiderately burden his mind.

As was observed in dealing with children’s imaginative activity, this primitive child-lore, like its prototype in folk-lore, is largely a product of a naïve vivid fancy. In assigning the relations of things and their reasons, a child’s mind does not make use of abstract conceptions. It does not talk about “relation,” but pictures out the particular relation it wants to express by a figurative expression, as in apperceiving the juxtaposition of moon and star as mamma and baby. So it does not talk of abstract force, but figures some concrete form of agency, as in explaining the wind by the idea of somebody’s waving a big fan somewhere. This first crude attempt of the child to envisage the world is, indeed, largely mythological, proceeding by the invention of concrete and highly pictorial ideas of fairies, giants and their doings.

The element of thought comes in with the recognition of the real as such, and with the application of the products of young phantasy to comprehending and explaining this reality. And here we see how this primitive child-thought, though it remains instinct with glowing imagery, differentiates itself from pure fancy. This last knows no restraint, and aims only at the delight of its spontaneous play-like movements, whereas thought is essentially the serious work of realising and understanding what exists. The contrast is seen plainly enough if we compare the mental attitude of the child when he is frankly romancing, giving out now and again a laugh, which shows that he himself fully recognises the absurdity of his talk, with his attitude when in gravest of moods he is calling upon his fancy to aid reason in explaining some puzzling fact.

How early this splitting of the child’s imaginative activity into these two forms, the playful and the thoughtful, takes place is not, I think, very easy to determine. Many children at least are apt at first to take all that is told them as gospel. To most of them about the age of three and four, I suspect, fairyland, if imagined at all, is as much a reality as the visible world. The disparity of its contents, the fairies, dragons and the rest, with those of the world of sense does not trouble their mind, the two worlds not being as yet mentally juxtaposed and dove-tailed one into the other. It is only later when the desire to understand overtakes and even passes the impulse to frame bright and striking images, and, as a result of this, critical reflexion applies itself to the nursery legends and detects their incongruity with the world of every-day perception, that a clear distinction comes to be drawn between reality and fiction, what exists and can (or might) be verified by sense, and what is only pictured by the mind.

With this preliminary peep into the _modus operandi_ of children’s thought, let us see what sort of ideas of things they fashion.

Beginning with their ideas of natural objects we find, as has been hinted, the influence of certain predominant tendencies. Of these the most important is the impulse to think of what is far off, whether in space or time, and so unobservable, as like what is near and observed. Along with this tendency, or rather as one particular development of it, there goes the disposition already illustrated, to vivify nature, to personify things and so to assimilate their behaviour to the child’s own, and to explain the origin of things by ideas of making and aiming at some purpose. Since, at the same time that these tendencies are still dominant, the child by his own observation and by such instruction as he gets, is gaining insight into the ‘how,’ the mechanism of things, we find that his cosmology is apt to be a quaint jumble of the scientific and the mythological. Thus the boy C. tried to conceive of the divine creation of men as a mechanical process with well-marked stages—the fashioning of stone men, iron men, and then real men. In many cases we can see that a nature-myth comes in to eke out the deficiencies of mechanical insight. Thus, the production of thunder and other strange and inexplicable phenomena is referred, as by the savage, and even by many so-called civilised men and women, to the direct interposition of a supernatural agency. The theological idea with which children are supplied is apt to shape itself into that of a capricious and awfully clever demiurgos, who not only made the world-machine but alters its working as often as he is disposed. With this idea of a supernatural agent there is commonly combined that of a natural process as means employed, as when thunder is supposed to be caused by God’s treading heavily on the floor of the sky. Contradictions are not infrequent, the mythological impulse sometimes alternating with a more distinctly scientific impulse to grasp the mechanical process, as when wind is sometimes thought of, as caused by a big fan, and sometimes, _e.g._, when heard moaning in the night, endowed with life and feeling.

I shall make no attempt to give a methodical account of children’s thoughts about nature. I suspect that a good deal more material will have to be collected before a complete description of these thoughts is possible. I shall content myself with giving a few samples of their ideas so far as my own studies have thrown light on them.

With respect to the make or substance of things children are, I believe, disposed to regard all that they see as having the resistant quality of solid material substance.

At first, that is to say after the child has had experience enough of seeing and touching things at the same time to know that the two commonly go together, he believes that all which he sees is tangible or substantial. Thus he will try to touch shadows, sunlight dancing on the wall, and picture forms. This tendency to “reify,” or make things of, his visual impressions shows itself in pretty forms, as when the little girl M., one year eleven months old, “gathered sunlight in her hands and put it on her face”. The same child about a month earlier expressed a wish to wash some black smoke. This was the same child that tried to make the wind behave by making her mother’s hair tidy; and her belief in the material reality of the wind was shown by her asking her mother to lift her up high so that she might see the wind. This last, it is to be noted, was an inference from touching and resisting to seeing.[45] Wind, it has been well remarked, keeps something of its substantiality for all of us long after shadows have become the type of unreality, proving that the experience of resisting something lies at the root of our sense of material substance. That older children believe in the wind as a living thing seems suggested by the readiness with which they get up a kind of play-tussle with it. That wind even in less fanciful moments is reified is suggested by the following story from the Worcester collection. A girl aged nine was looking out and seeing the wind driving the snow in the direction of a particular town, Milbury: whereupon she remarked, “I’d like to live down in Milbury”. Asked why, she replied, “There must be a lot of wind down there, it’s all blowing that way”.

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Footnote 45:

Compare R. L. Stevenson’s lines to the wind:

“I felt you push, I heard you call,
I could not see yourself at all”.
_A Child’s Garden of Verse_, xxv.

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Children, as may be seen in this story, are particularly interested in the movements of things. Movement is the clearest and most impressive manifestation of life. All apparently spontaneous or self-caused movements are accordingly taken by children, as by primitive man, to be the sign of life, the outcome of something analogous to their own impulses. Hence the movements of falling leaves, of running water, of feathers and the like are specially suggestive of life. Wind owes much of its vitality, as seen in the facile personification of it by the poet, to its apparently uncaused movements. Some children in the Infant Department of a London Board School were asked what things in the room were alive, and they promptly replied the smoke and the fire. Big things moving by an internal mechanism of which the child knows nothing, more especially engines, are of course endowed with life. A little girl of thirteen months offered a biscuit to a steam-tram, and the author of _The Invisible Playmate_ tells us that his little girl wanted to stroke the “dear head” of a locomotive. A child has been known to ask whether a steam-engine was alive. In like manner, savages on first seeing the self-moving steamer take it for a big animal. The fear of a dog at the sight of an unfamiliar object appearing to move of itself, as a parasol blown along the ground by the wind, seems to imply a rudiment of the same impulse to interpret self-movement as a sign of life.[46]

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Footnote 46:

See P. Lombroso, _op. cit._, p. 26 ff.

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The child’s impulse to give life to moving things may lead him to overlook the fact that the movement is caused by an external force, and this even when the force is exerted by himself. The boy C. on finding the cushion he was sitting upon slipping from under him in consequence of his own wriggling movements pronounced it alive. In like manner children, as suggested above, ascribe life to their moving playthings. Thus, C.’s sister when five years old stopped one day trundling her hoop, and turning to her mother, exclaimed: “Ma, I do think this hoop must be alive, it is so sensible: it goes where I want it to”. Another little girl two and a quarter years old on having a string attached to a ball put into her hand, and after swinging it round mechanically, began to notice the movement of the ball, and said to herself, “Funny ball!” In both these cases, although the movement was directly caused by the child, it was certainly in the first case, and apparently in the second, attributed to the object.

Next to movement apparently spontaneous sound appears to be a common reason for attributing life to inanimate objects. Are not movement and vocal sound the two great channels of utterance of the child’s own impulses? The little girl M., when just two years old, being asked by her mother for a kiss, answered prettily, ‘Tiss (kiss) gone away’. This may, of course, have been merely a child’s way of using language, but the fact that the same little girl asked to see a ‘knock’ suggests that she was disposed to give reality and life to sounds. Its sound greatly helps the persuasion that the wind is alive. A little boy assured his teacher that the wind was alive, for he heard it whistling in the night. The ascription of life to fire is probably aided by its sputtering crackling noises. The impulse, too, to endow so little organic-looking an object as a railway engine with conscious life is probably supported by the knowledge of its puffing and whistling. Pierre Loti, when as a child he first saw the sea, regarded it as a living monster, no doubt on the ground of its movement and its noise. The personification of the echo by the child, of which George Sand’s reminiscences give an excellent example, as also by uncultured man, is a signal illustration of the suggestive force of a voice-like sound.

Closely connected with this impulse to ascribe life to what older folk regard as inanimate objects is the tendency to conceive them as growing. This is illustrated in the remark of the boy C., that his stick would in time grow bigger. On the other hand, there is in the Worcester Collection a curious story of a little American boy of three who, having climbed up into a large waggon, and being asked, “How are you going to get out?” replied, “I can stay here till it gets little and then I can get out my own self”. We shall see presently that shrinkage or diminution of size is sometimes attributed by the child-mind to people when getting old. So that we seem to have in each of these cases the extension to things generally of an idea first formed in connexion with the observation of human life.

Children’s ideas of natural objects are anthropomorphic, not merely as reflecting their own life, but as modelled after the analogy of the effects of their action. Quite young children are apt to extend the ideas broken and mended to objects generally. Anything which seems to have become reduced by losing a portion of itself is said to be ‘broken’. A little boy of three, on seeing the moon partly covered by a cloud, remarked, “The moon is broken”. On the other hand, in the case of one little boy, everything intact was said to be mended. It may be said, however, that we cannot safely infer from such analogical use of common language that children distinctly think of all objects as undergoing breakage and repair: for these expressions in the child’s vocabulary may refer rather to the resulting appearances, than to the processes by which they are brought about.

Clearer evidences of this reflexion on to nature of the characteristics of his own life appear when a child begins to speculate about mechanical processes, which he invariably conceives of after the analogy of his own actions. This was illustrated in dealing with children’s questions. We see it still more clearly manifested in some of their ideas. One of the most curious instances of this that I have met with is seen in early theorisings about the cause of wind. One of the children examined by Mr. Kratz said the tree was to make the wind blow. A pupil of mine distinctly recalls that when a child he accounted for the wind at night by the swaying of two large elms in front of the house and not far from the windows of his bedroom. This reversing of the real order of cause and effect looks silly, until we remember that the child necessarily looks at movement in the light of his own actions. He moves things, _e.g._, the water, by his moving limbs; we set the air in motion by a moving fan; it seems, therefore, natural to him that the wind-movements should be caused by the pressure of some moving thing; and there is the tree actually seen to be moving.

So far I have spoken for the most part of children’s ideas about near and accessible objects. Their notions of what is distant and inaccessible are, as remarked, wont to be formed on the model of the first. Here, however, their knowledge of things will be largely dependent on others’ information, so that the naïve impulse of childish intelligence has, as best it may, to work under the limitations of an imperfectly understood language.

It is perhaps hardly necessary to remind the reader that children’s ideas of distance before they begin to travel far are necessarily very inadequate. They are disposed to localise the distant objects they see, as the sun, moon and stars, and the places they hear about on the earth’s surface as near as possible. The tendency to approximate things as seen in the infant’s stretching out of the hand to touch the moon lives on in the later impulse to localise the sky and heavenly bodies just beyond the farthest terrestrial object seen, as when a child thought they were just above the church spire, another that they could be reached by tying a number of ladders together, another that the setting sun went close behind the ridge of hills, and so forth. The stars, being so much smaller looking, seem to be located farther off than the sun and moon. Similarly when they hear of a distant place, as India, they tend to project it just beyond the farthest point known to them, say Hampstead, to which they were once taken on a long, long journey from their East End home. A child’s standard of size and distance is, as all know who have revisited the home of their childhood after many years, very different from the adult’s. To the little legs unused as yet to more than short spells of locomotion a mile seems stupendous: and then the half-formed brain cannot yet pile up the units of measurement well enough to conceive of hundreds and thousands of miles.

The child appears to think of the world as a circular plain, and of the sky as a sort of inverted bowl upon it. C.’s sister used on looking at the sky to fancy she was inside a blue balloon. That is to say he takes them to be what they look. In a similar manner C. took the sun to be a great disc which could be put on the round globe to make a ‘see-saw’. When this ‘natural realism’ gets corrected, children go to work to convert what is told them into an intelligible form. Thus they begin to speculate about the other side of the globe, and, as Mr. Barrie reminds us, are apt to fancy they can know about it by peeping down a well. When religious instruction introduces the new region of heaven they are apt to localise it just above the sky, which to their thought forms its floor. Some genuine thought-work is seen in the effort to harmonise the various things they learn by observation and instruction about the celestial region into a connected whole. Thus the sky is apt to be thought of as _thin_, this idea being probably formed for the purpose of explaining the shining through of moon and stars. Stars are, as we know, commonly thought of by the child as holes in the sky letting through the light beyond. One Boston child ingeniously applied the idea of the thinness of the sky to explain the appearance of the moon when one half is bright and the other faintly illumined, supposing it to be half-way through the partially diaphanous floor. Others again prettily accounted for the waning of the moon to a crescent by saying it was half stuck or half buttoned into the sky.

The movements of the sun and other heavenly bodies are similarly apperceived by help of ideas of movements of familiar terrestrial objects. Thus the sun was thought by the Boston children half-mythologically, half-mechanically, to roll, to fly, to be blown (like a soap bubble or balloon?) and so forth. The anthropocentric form of teleological explanation is apt to creep in, as when a Boston child said charmingly that the moon comes round when people forget to light some lamps. Theological ideas, too, are pressed into this sphere of explanation, as in the attribution of the disappearance of the sun to God’s pulling it up higher out of sight, to his taking it into heaven and putting it to bed, and so forth. These ideas are pretty obviously not those of a country child with a horizon. There is rather more of nature-observation in the idea of another child that the sun after setting lies under the trees where angels mind it.

The impressive phenomena of thunder and lightning give rise in the case of the child as in that of the Nature-man to some fine myth-making. The American children, as already observed, have different mechanical illustrations for setting forth the _modus_ of the supernatural operation here, thunder being thought of now as God groaning, now as his walking heavily on the floor of heaven (_cf._ the old Norse idea that thunder is caused by the rolling of Thor’s chariot), now as his hammering, now as his having coals run in—ideas which show how naïvely the child-mind humanises the Deity, making him a respectable citizen with a house and a coal-cellar. In like manner the lightning is attributed to God’s burning the gas quick, striking many matches at once, or other familiar human device for getting a brilliant light suddenly. So God turns on rain by a tap, or lets it down from a cistern by a hose, or, better, passes it through a sieve or a dipper with holes.[47] In like manner a high wind was explained by a girl of five and a half by saying that it was God’s birthday, and he had received a trumpet as a present.

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Footnote 47:

See the article on “The Contents of Children’s Minds” already referred
to.

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Throughout the whole region of these mysterious phenomena we have illustrations of the anthropocentric tendency to regard what takes place as designed for us poor mortals. The little girl of whom Mr. Canton writes thought “the wind, and the rain and the moon ‘walking’ came out to see _her_, and the flowers woke up with the same laudable object”.[48] When frightened by the crash of the thunder a child instinctively thinks that it is all done to vex his little soul. One of the funniest examples of the application of this idea I have met with is in the Worcester Collection. Two children, D. and K., aged ten and five respectively, live in a small American town. D., who is reading about an earthquake, addresses his mother thus: “Oh, isn’t it dreadful, mamma? Do you suppose we will ever have one here?” K., intervening with the characteristic impulse of the young child to correct his elders: “Why, no, D., they don’t have earthquakes in little towns like this”. There is much to unravel in this delightful childish observation. It looks to my mind as if the earthquake were envisaged by the little five-year-old as a show, God being presumably the travelling showman, who takes care to display his fearful wonders only where there is an adequate body of spectators.

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Footnote 48:

_The Invisible Playmate_, pp. 27, 28.

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Finally, the same impulse to understand the new and strange by assimilating it to the familiar is, so far as I can gather, seen in children’s first ideas about those puzzling semblances of visible objects which are due to subjective sensations. As we shall see in C.’s case the bright spectra or after-images caused by looking at the sun are instinctively objectived by the child, that is regarded as things external to his body. Here is a pretty full account of a child’s thought about these subjective optical phenomena. A little boy of five, our little zoologist, in poor health at the time, “constantly imagined he saw angels, and said they were not white, that was a mistake, they were little coloured things, light and beautiful, and they went into the toy-basket and played with his toys”. Here we have not only objectifying but myth-building. A year later he returned to the subject. “He stood at the window at B. looking out at a sea-mist thoughtfully and said suddenly, ‘Mamma, do you remember I told you that I had seen angels? Well, I want now to say they were not angels, though I thought they were. I have seen it often lately, I see it now: it is bright stars, small bright stars moving by. I see it in the mist before that tree. I see it oftenest in the misty days.... Perhaps by-and-by I shall think it is something in my own eyes.’” Here we see a long and painstaking attempt of a child’s brain to read a meaning into the ‘flying spots,’ which many of us know though we hardly give them a moment’s attention.

What are children’s first thoughts about their dreams like? I have not been able to collect much evidence on this head. What seems certain is that to the simple intelligence of the child these counterfeits of ordinary sense-presentations are real external things. The crudest manifestation of this thought-tendency is seen in taking the dream-apparition to be actually present in the bedroom. A boy in an elementary school in London, aged five years, said one day: “Teacher, I saw an old woman one night against my bed”. Another child, a little girl, in the same school told her mother that she had seen a funeral last night, and on being asked, “Where?” answered quaintly, “I saw it in my pillow”. A little boy whom I know once asked his mother not to put him to bed in a certain room, “because there were so many dreams in the room”. In thus materialising the dream and localising it in the actual surroundings, the child but reflects the early thought of the race which starts from the supposition that the man or animal which appears in a dream is a material reality which actually approaches the sleeper.

The Nature-man, as we know from Professor Tylor’s researches, goes on to explain dreams by his theory of souls or ‘doubles’ (animism). Children do not often find their way to so subtle a line of thought. Much more commonly they pass from the first stage of acceptance of objects present to their senses to the identification of dreamland with the other and invisible world of fairyland. There is little doubt that the imaginative child firmly believes in the existence of this invisible world, keeps it apart from the visible one, even though at times he may give it a definite locality in this (_e.g._, in C.’s case, the wall of the bedroom). He gets access to it by shutting out the real world, as when he closes his eyes tightly and ‘thinks’. With such a child, dreams get taken up into the invisible world. Going to sleep is now recognised as the surest way of passing into this region. The varying colour of his dreams, now bright and dazzling in their beauty, now black and terrifying, may be explained by a reference to the division of that fairy world into princes, good fairies, on the one hand, and cruel giants, witches, and the like, on the other.

We may now pass to some of children’s characteristic ideas about living things, more particularly human beings, and the familiar domestic animals. The most interesting of these I think are those respecting growth and birth.

As already mentioned, growth is one of the most stimulating of childish puzzles. A child, led no doubt by what others tell him, finds that things are in general made bigger by additions from without, and his earliest conception of growth is, I think, that of such addition. Thus, plants are made to grow, that is, swell out, by the rain. The idea that the growth or expansion of animals comes from eating is easily reached by the childish intelligence, and, as we know, nurses and parents have a way of recommending the less attractive sorts of diet by telling children that they will make them grow. The idea that the sun makes us grow, often suggested by parents (who may be ignorant of the fact that growth is more rapid in the summer than in the winter), is probably interpreted by the analogy of an infusion of something into the body.

In carrying out my inquiries into this region of childish ideas, I lighted quite unexpectedly on the queer notion that towards the end of life there is a reverse process of shrinkage. Old people are supposed to become little again. The first instance of this was supplied me by the Worcester Collection of Thoughts. A little girl of three once said to her mother: “When I am a big girl and you are a little girl I shall whip you just as you whipped me now”. At first one is almost disposed to think that this child must have heard of Mr. Anstey’s amusing story _Vice Versâ_. Yet this idea seems too improbable: and I have since found that she is not by any means the only one who has entertained this idea. A little boy that I know, when about three and a half years old, used often to say to his mother with perfect seriousness of manner: “When I am big then you will be little, then I will carry you about and dress you and put you to sleep”.

I happened to mention this fact at a meeting of mothers and teachers, when I received further evidence of this tendency of child-thought. One lady whom I know could recollect quite clearly that when a little girl she was promised by her aunt some treasures, trinkets I fancy, when she grew up; and that she at once turned to her aunt and promised her that she would then give her in exchange all her dolls, as by that time she (the aunt) would be a little girl. Another case narrated was that of a little girl of three and a half years, who when her elder brother and sister spoke to her about her getting big rejoined: “What will you do when you are little?” A third case mentioned was that of a child asking about some old person of her acquaintance: “When will she begin to get small?” I have since obtained corroboratory instances from parents and teachers of infant classes. Thus a lady writes that a little girl, a cousin of hers aged four, to whom she was reading something about an old woman, asked: “Do people turn back into babies when they get quite old?”