Chapter XII: George Sand’s Childhood, 489 (3)

The other way in which this happy fusion of fancy with incomplete perception may be effected is through the working of the impulse to give outward embodiment to vivid and persistent images. All play, as we have seen, is an illustration of the impulse, and certain kinds of play show the working of the impulse in its purity. It extends, however, beyond the limits of what is commonly known as play. The instance quoted above, the peopling of a certain wood with wolves by the child C., was of course due in part to the fact that the small impressionable brain was at this time much occupied with the idea of the wolf. Dickens and others have told us how when children they were wont to project into the real world the lively images acquired from storyland. When suitable objects present themselves the images are naturally enough linked on to these. Thus Dickens writes: “Every burn in the neighbourhood, every stone of the church, every foot of the churchyard had some association of its own in my mind connected with these books (_Roderic Random_, _Tom Jones_, _Gil Blas_, etc.), and stood for some locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Piper go climbing up the church steeple; I have watched Strap with the knapsack on his back stopping to rest himself on the wicket-gate.”[36]

-----

Footnote 36:

Quoted by Forster, _Life of Charles Dickens_, chap. i.

-----

Along with this attachment of images to definite objects there goes a good deal of vague localisation in dim half-realised quarters of space. The supernatural beings, the fairies, the bogies, and the rest, are, as might be expected, relegated to these obscure and impenetrable regions. It would be worth while perhaps to collect a children’s comparative mythology, if only to see what different localities, geographic and cosmic, the childish mind is apt to assign to his fabulous beings. The poor fairies seem to have been forced to find an abode in most dissimilar regions. The boy C. selected the wall of his bedroom—hardly a dignified abode, though it had the merit of being within reach of his prayers. A child less bent on turning the superior personages to practical account will set them in some remoter quarter, in a vast forest, or deep cavern, on a distant hill, or higher up in the blue above the birds. But systems of child-mythology will occupy us again.

_Imagination and Storyland._

We may now pass to a freer region of imaginative activity where the child’s mind gives life and reality to its images without incorporating them into the outer sensible world, even to the extent of talking to invisible playmates. The world of story, as distinct from that of play, is the great illustration of this detached activity of fancy.

The entrance into storyland can only take place when the key of language is put into the child’s hand. A story is a verbal representation of a scene or action, and the process of imaginative realisation depends in this case on the stimulating effect of words in their association with ideas. Now a word has not for a child the peculiar force of an imitative sensuous impression, say that of a picture. The toy, the picture, being, however roughly, a likeness or show, brings the idea before the child’s eyes in a way in which the word-symbol cannot do. Yet we may easily underestimate the stimulating effect of words on children’s minds, which are much more tender and susceptible than we are wont to suppose. To call out to a child, ‘Bow, wow!’ or ‘Policeman!’ may be to excite in his mind a vivid image which is in itself an approach to a complete sensuous realisation of the thing. We cannot understand the fascination of a story for children save by remembering that for their young minds, quick to imagine and unversed in abstract reflexion, words are not dead thought-symbols, but truly alive and perhaps “winged” as the old Greeks called them.

It may not be easy to explain fully this stimulating power of words on the childish mind. There is some reason to say that in these early days spoken words as sounds for the ear have in themselves something of the immediate objective reality of all sense-impressions, so that to name a thing is in a sense to make it present. However this be, words as sense-presentations have a powerful suggestive effect on children’s imagination, calling up particularly vivid images of the objects named. The effect is probably aided by the child’s nascent feeling of reverence for another’s words as authoritative utterances.

This impulse to realise words makes the child a listener much more frequently than we suppose. How often is the mother surprised and amused at a question put by her child about something said in his presence to a servant, a visitor, or a workman; something which in her grown-up way she assumed would not be of the slightest interest to him. In this manner, words soon become a great power in the new wondering life of a child. They lodge like flying seedlings in the fertile brain, and shoot up into strange imaginative growths. But of this more by-and-by.

This profound and lasting effect of words is nowhere more clearly seen than in the spell of the story. We grown-up people are wont to flatter ourselves that we read stories: the child, if he could know what we call reading, would laugh at it. With what deftness does the little brain disentangle the language, often strange and puzzling enough, reducing it by a secret child-art to simplicity and to reality. A mother when reading a poem to her boy of six, ventured to remark, “I’m afraid you can’t understand it, dear,” for which she got duly snubbed by her little master in this fashion: “Oh, yes, I can very well, if only you would not explain”. The explaining is resented because it interrupts the child’s own spontaneous image-building, wherein lies the charm, because it rudely breaks the spell of the illusion, calling off the attention from the vision he sees in the word-crystal, which is all he cares about, to the cold lifeless crystal itself.

And what a bright vision it is that is there gained. How clearly scene after scene of the dissolving view unfolds itself. How thrilling the anticipation of the next unknown, undiscernible stage in the history. Perhaps no one has given us a better account of the state of absorption in storyland, the oneirotic or dream-like condition of complete withdrawal from the world of sense into an inner world of fancy, than Thackeray. In one of his delightful “Roundabout Papers,” he thus writes of the experiences of early boyhood. "Hush! I never read quite to the end of my first _Scottish Chiefs_. I couldn’t. I peeped in an alarmed furtive manner at some of the closing pages.... Oh, novels, sweet and delicious as the raspberry open tarts of budding boyhood! Do I forget one night after prayers (when we under-boys were sent to bed) lingering at my cupboard to read one little half-page more of my dear Walter Scott—and down came the monitor’s dictionary on my head!"

As one thinks of the deep delights of these first excursions into storyland one almost envies the lucky boys whom the young Charles Dickens held spellbound with his tales.

The intensity of the delight is seen in the greed it generates. Who can resist the child’s hungry demand for a story? Edgar Quinet in his _Histoire de mes Idées_ tells how when a child an old corporal came to drill him. He had been taken prisoner by the Spaniards and placed on an inaccessible island. Edgar loved to hear the thrilling story of the old soldier’s adventures, and scarcely was the narrative finished when the greedy boy would exclaim, “Encore une fois!” Heine’s delight when a boy at Düsseldorf in drinking in the stories of Napoleon’s exploits from his drummer is another well-known illustration.

Through the perfect gift of visual realisation which a child brings to it the verbal narrative becomes a record of fact, a true history. The intense enjoyment which is bound up with this process of imaginative realisation makes children jealously exact as to accuracy in repetition. The boy C. when a story was repeated to him used to resent even a small alteration of the text. Woe to the unfortunate mother who in telling one of the good stock nursery tales varies a detail. One such, a friend of mine, repeating ‘Puss in Boots’ inadvertently made the hero sit on a chair instead of on a box to pull on his boots. She was greeted by a sharp volley of ‘No’s!’ The same lady tells me that when narrating the story of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ for the second time only she forgot in describing the effect of the Beast’s sighing to add after the words ‘till the glasses on the table shake’ ‘and the candles are nearly blown out’; whereupon the severe little listener at once stopped the narrator and supplied the interesting detail. The exacting memory of childhood in the matter of stories is the product of a full detailed realisation. In the case just quoted the reality of the story was contradicted by substituting a stupid conventional chair for the box, and by omitting the striking incident of the candles.

Happy age of childhood, when a new and wondrous world, created wholly by the magic of a lively phantasy, rivals in brightness, in distinctness of detail, aye, and in steadfastness too, the nearest spaces of the world on which the bodily eye looks out, before reflexion has begun to draw a hard dividing line between the domains of historical truth and fiction.

As the demand for faithful repetition of story shows, the imaginative realisation continues when the story is no longer heard or read. It has added something to the child’s inner supplementary world, given him one more lovely region in which he may live blissful moments. The return of the young mind to the persons and scenes of story is forcibly illustrated in the impulse, already touched on, to act out in play the parts of this and that heroic figure. With many children any narrative which holds the imagination delightfully enthralled is likely to become more fully realised in a visible embodiment. For instance, a child of five years, when told a story of four men going along a railway to stop a train before it neared a bridge which was on fire, at once proceeded to play the incident with his toy train. Here we see how story by contributing lively images to the child’s brain becomes one main stimulative and guiding influence in the domain of play. In like manner the images born of story may, as in the case of Dickens, attach themselves permanently to particular localities and objects.

To this lively imaginative reception of what is told him the child is apt very soon to join his own free inventions of figures, human, superhuman, or subhuman. The higher qualities of this invention properly come under the head of child-art, and will have to be considered in another chapter. Here we may glance at these inventions as illustrating the realising power of the child’s imagination.

This invention appears in a sporadic manner in occasional ‘romancings’ which may set out from some observation of the senses. A little boy aged three and a half years seeing a tramp limping along with a bad leg exclaimed: “Look at that poor ole man, mamma, he has dot (got) a bad leg”. Then romancing, as he was now wont to do: “He dot on a very big ’orse, and he fell off on some great big stone, and he hurt his poor leg and he had to get a big stick. We must make it well.” Then after a thoughtful pause: “Mamma, go and kiss the place and put some powdey (powder) on it and make it well like you do to I”. The unmistakable childish seriousness here, the outflow of young compassion, and the charming enforcement of the nursery prescription, all point to a vivid realisation of this extemporised little romance. This child was moreover more than commonly tender-hearted, and perhaps the more exposed on that account to such amiable self-deception. Another small boy when a little over two years, happening to hear a buzzing on the window, said: “Mamma, bumble-bee in a window says it wants a yump (lump) of sugar”: then shaking his head sternly, added: “Soon make you heat-spots, bumble-bee”. Other examples of this romancing will be met with in the notes on the child C.

In such simple fashion does the child build up a tiny myth on the basis of some passing impression, supplying out of his quaintly stored fancy unlooked-for adornments to the homely occurrences of every-day life.

Partly by taking in and fully realising the wonders of story, partly by the independent play of an inventive imagination, children’s minds pass under the dominion of more or less enduring myths. The princes and princesses and dwarfs and gnomes of fairy-tale, the workers of Christmas miracles, Santa Claus and Father Christmas, as well as the beings fashioned by the child’s imagination on the model of those he knows from story, these live on like the people of the every-day world, are apt to appear in dreams, in the dark, at odd dreamy moments when the things of sense lose their hold, bringing into the child’s life golden sunlight or black awful shadows, the most real of all realities.

This childish belief in myth is often curiously tenacious. A father was once surprised to find that his boy aged five years and ten months continued naïvely to believe in the real personality of Santa Claus. It was Christmastide and the father, in order to test the child’s credulity, put his own pocket-knife into the stocking which Santa Claus was supposed to fill. The child, though he knew his father’s knife very well, did not in the least suspect that the knife he found in the stocking had been placed there by human hands, but expressed himself as pleased that Santa Claus had sent him one like his father’s. When his father followed this up by telling him that he had lost his knife, and by searching for it in the boy’s presence, the latter asked whether Santa Claus had stolen the knife—thus showing how its close similarity to the knife he had received had impressed him, though he would not for a moment doubt the fact of its coming from the mysterious personage. It might be thought that this child was particularly stupid. On the contrary he was well above the average in intelligence. In proof of this I may relate that the Christmas before this, that is to say when he was under five years, he was the only one among thirty children who recognised his uncle when extremely well disguised as Father Christmas. When asked by his father why he thought it was his uncle, he said at first he didn’t know, but thinking a moment he added, “I don’t see who else there is,” showing that he had reasoned out his belief by a method of exclusion.

Of course it will be said that I am here selecting exceptional cases of childish imagination. I am quite ready to admit the probability of this. The best examples of any trait of the young mind will obviously be supplied by those who have most of this trait. Yet I very much suspect that ordinary and even dull children are wont to hide away a good deal of such superstitious belief. “One of the greatest pleasures of childhood,” says Oliver Wendell Holmes in _The Poet of the Breakfast Table_, “is found in the mysteries which it hides from the scepticism of the elders and works up into small mythologies of its own.”

I have treated the myths of children as a product of pure imagination, of the impulse to realise in vivid images what lies away from and above the world of sense. Yet, as we shall see later, they are really more than this. They contain, like the myths of primitive man, a true germ of thought.

In George Sand’s recollections we shall meet with a striking illustration of how the vivid imagination of supernatural beings is followed up by a reflective and half-scientific effort to connect the myth with the facts and laws of the known world. This infusion of childish reason into wonderland, the first crude attempt to adjust belief to belief, and to find points of attachment for the much-loved myth in the matter-of-fact world, is apt to lead, as we shall see, to a good deal that is very quaint and characteristic in the child’s mythology.

The conclusion which observation of children leads us to is that, as compared with adults, they are endowed with strong imaginative power, the activity of which leads to a surprisingly intense inner realisation of what lies above sense. For the child, as for primitive man, reality is a projection of fancy as well as an assurance of sense.

Now this conclusion is, I think, greatly strengthened by all that we know of the conditions of the brain-life in children, and of the many perturbations to which it is liable. With respect to this brain-life we have to remember that in the first years the higher cortical centres which take part in the co-ordinative and regulative processes of thought and volition are but very imperfectly developed. Hence the centres concerned in imagination—which, if not identical with what used to be called the sensorium or seat of sensation, are in closest connexion with it—are not checked and inhibited by the action of the higher centres as is the case with us. By exercising a volitional control over the flow of our ideas, we are able to reason away a fancy, and generally to guard ourselves against error. In young children all ideas that grow clear and full under the stimulus of a strong interest are apt to persist and to become preternaturally vivid. As has been suggested by more than one recent writer on childhood and education, the brain of a child has a slight measure of that susceptibility to powerful illusory suggestion which characterises the brain of a hypnotised subject. Savages, who show so striking a resemblance to children in the vivacity and the dominance of their fancy, are probably much nearer to the child than to the civilised adult in the condition of their brain.

This preternatural liveliness of the images of the imperfectly developed brain exposes children, as we know, to disturbing illusion. The effect of bad dreams, of intense feeling, particularly of fear, in developing illusory belief in sensitive and delicate children is familiar enough, and will be dealt with again later on. Some parents feel the dangers of such disturbance so keenly that they think it best to cut their children off from the world of fiction altogether. But this is surely an error. For one thing children who are strongly imaginative will be certain to indulge their fancies, as the Brontë girls did, even when no fiction is supplied and their eager little minds are thrown on the matter-of-fact newspaper. A child needs not to be deprived of story altogether, but to be supplied with bright and happy stories, in which the gruesome element is subordinate. Specially sensitive children should, I think, be guarded against much that from an older point of view is classic, as some of the ‘creepy’ stories in Grimm, though there are no doubt hardy young nerves which can thrill enjoyably under these horrors. As to confusing a child’s sense of truth by indulging him in story, the evil seems to me problematic, and, if it exists at all, only slight and temporary. But I hope to touch on this aspect of the subject in the next chapter.

III.
THE DAWN OF REASON.

_The Process of Thought._

To treat the child’s mind as merely a harbourer of fancies, as completely subject to the illusive spell of its bright imagery, would be the grossest injustice. It is one of the reputable characteristics of childhood that it manages to combine with so much vivacity and force of imagination a perfectly grave matter-of-fact look-out on the actual world.

And here I should like to correct the common supposition that children are imaginative _or_ observant of their surroundings, but not both. I have no doubt that there are many children who show a marked preponderance of the one or of the other tendency: there is the fanciful and dreamy child, and the matter-of-fact child with a tenacious grasp on the realities of things. I have but little doubt, too, that in the case of children who show the two tendencies, the one or the other is apt to preponderate at a certain stage of development: many boys, for example, have their dreamy period, and then become almost stolidly practical. All that I am concerned to make out here is that the two tendencies do co-exist, and as a number of parents have assured me may co-exist each in a high degree of intensity in the same child; the really intelligent children, boys as well as girls, being dispassionate and shrewd inquirers into the make of the actual world while ardently engaged in fashioning a brighter one.

The two tendencies belong to two moods, one of which may be regent for days together, though they often alternate with astonishing rapidity. More particularly the serious matter-of-fact mood readily passes, as if in relief from mental tension, into the playful fanciful one, as when the tiny student, deep in the stupendous lore of the spelling-book, suddenly dashes off to some fanciful conceit suggested by the ‘funny’ look of a particular word or letter.

The child not only observes but begins to reflect on what he observes, and does his best to understand the puzzling scene which meets his eye. And all this gives seriousness, a deep and admirable seriousness, to his attitude. So much is this the case that if we were called on to portray the typical mental posture of the child we might probably do so by drawing the erect little figure of a boy, as with widely open eye he gazes at some new wonder, or listens to some new report of his surroundings from a mother’s lips. Hence, one may forgive the touch of exaggeration when Mr. Bret Harte writes: “All those who have made a loving study of the young human animal will, I think, admit that its dominant expression is _gravity_ and not playfulness”.[37] We may now turn to this graver side of the young intelligence.

-----

Footnote 37:

Works, vol. iii., p. 396.

-----

Here, again, I may as well say that I prefer to observe the phenomenon in its clearer and fuller manifestations, that is to say, to study the serious intelligence of the child in the most intelligent children, or at least in children whose minds are most active. This does not mean that we shall be on the look-out for precocious wisdom or priggish smartness. On the contrary, since it is childish intelligence as such that we are in search of, we shall take pains to avoid as far as possible any encounter with prodigies. By these I mean the unfortunate little people whose mental limbs have been twisted out of beautiful child-shape by the hands of those in whom the better instincts of the parent have been outweighed by the ambition of the showman. We shall seek more particularly for spontaneous openings of the mental flower under the warming rays of a true mother’s love, for confidential whisperings of child-thought to her ever-attentive and ever-tolerant ear.

In order fully to understand the serious work of childish intelligence, we ought to begin with a study of early observation. But I must pass by this interesting subject with only a remark or two.

Much has been written on the deeply concentrated all-absorbing scrutiny of things by the young eye. But to say how much an infant of nine months really sees when he fixes his wide eyes on some new object, is a matter of great uncertainty. What seems certain, is that the infant has to learn to see things, and very probably takes what seems to us an unnecessarily long time to see them at all completely.

We find when the child grows and can give an account of what he notes that his observation, while often surprisingly minute in particular directions, is highly restricted as to its directions, being narrowly confined within the limits of a few dominant attractions. Thus a child will sometimes be so impressed with the colour of an object as almost to ignore its form. A little girl of eighteen months, who knew lambs and called them ‘lammies,’ on seeing two black ones in a field among some white ones called out, “Eh! doggie, doggie!” The likeness of colour to the black dog overpowered the likeness in form to the other lambs close by. Within the limits of form-perception again, we may remark the tendency to a one-sided mode of observing things which has in it something of an abstract quality. For the child C. the pointed head was the main essential feature of the dog, and he recognised this in a bit of biscuit. We shall find further examples of this abstract observation when we come to consider children’s drawings.

This same partiality of observation comes out very clearly in a good deal of the early assimilation or apperception already referred to. The reason why it is so easy for a child to superimpose a fanciful analogy on an object of sense, is that his mind is untroubled by all the complexity of this object. It fastens on some salient feature of supreme attractiveness or interest, and flies away on the wings of this, to what seems to us a far-off resemblance.

This detaching or selective activity in children’s observation, which in a manner is a defect, is also a point of superiority. It has this in common with the observation of the poet, that it is wholly engrossed with what is valuable. Thus one main feature of the eye-lid is certainly that it opens and closes like a curtain; and it is its resemblance to the mysterious curtain shutting out the daylight, which makes it a matter of absorbing interest. Here, then, we have, as we shall see more fully presently, a true germ of thought-activity embedded in the very process of childish observation and recognition. For thought is precisely a more methodical process of bringing the concrete object into its relations to other things.

Yet children’s observation does not remain at this height of grand selectiveness. The pressure of practical needs tends to bring it down to our familiar level. A child finds himself compelled to distinguish things and name them as others do. The lamb and the dog, for example, have to be distinguished by a _complex_ of marks in which the supremely interesting detail of colour holds a quite subordinate place. Individual things, too, have to be distinguished, if only for the purpose of drawing the line between what is ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’. The boy’s mother, his cup, his hat, must be readily recognised, and this necessity forces the attention to grasp a plurality of marks. Thus the mother cannot always be recognised by her height alone, as when she happens to be sitting, nor by her hair alone, as when she happens to have her hat on, so that the weighty problem of recognising her always compels the child to note a number of distinctive marks, some of which will in every case be available.

When once the eye has begun to note differences it makes rapid progress. This is particularly true where the development of a special interest in a group of things leads to a habit of concentration. Thus little boys when the ‘railway interest’ seizes them are apt to be finely observant of the differences between this and that engine and so forth. A boy aged two years and eleven months, after travelling from Dublin to Cork, and thence by another railway, asked his mother if she had noticed the difference in the make of the rails on the two lines. Of course she had not, though she afterwards ascertained that there was a slight difference which the boy’s keener eye had detected.

The fineness of a child’s distinguishing observation is well illustrated in his recognition of small drawings and photographs, as when a child of two will pick out the likeness of his father from a small _carte de visite_ group. But this side of children’s recognition will occupy us later on.

Such fine and ready recognition as that just illustrated shows not merely a penetrating observation of what is distinctive and characteristic, but also a measure of a higher power, that of seizing in one act of attention a complex or group of such marks. In truth, children’s observation, when close and methodical, as it is apt to be under the stimulus of a powerful interest, is often surprisingly full as well as exact. The boy, John Ruskin, was not the only one who could look for hours together at such an object as flowing water, noting all its changing features. A mother writes to me that her boy, when three and a half years old, received a picture-book, ‘The Railway Train,’ and looked at it almost uninterruptedly for a week, retaining it even at meals. “At the end of this time he had grasped the smallest detail in every picture.” By such occasional fits of fine exhaustive inspection, a child of the more intelligent sort will now and again come surprisingly near that higher type of observation, at once minute and comprehensive, which subserves, in somewhat different ways, scientific discovery and artistic representation. Many parents when watching these exceptional heights of childish scrutiny have indulged in fond dreams of future greatness. Yet these achievements are, alas, often limited to a certain stage of intellectual progress, and are apt to disappear when the bookish days come on, and the child loses himself hours together over his favourite stories. And in any case the germ of promise must possess a wondrous vitality if it resists all the efforts of our school-system to weed out from the garden of the mind anything so profitless as an observing faculty.

Next to this work of observation we must include in the pre-conditions of childish thought at its best a lively retention of what is observed. Everybody who has talked much with little children must have been struck by the tenacity of their memories, their power of recalling after considerable intervals small features of an object or small incidents which others hardly noted, or, if they noted them at the time, have since forgotten. Stories of this surprising recollection may be obtained in abundance. A little girl when only nine months old was on a walk shown some lambs at the gate of a field. On being taken the same road three weeks later she surprised her mother by calling out just before arriving at the gate ‘Baa, baa!’ Later on children will remember through much longer intervals. A little boy aged two years and ten months when taken to Italy a second time after four or five months’ absence, remembered the smallest details, _e.g._, how the grapes were cut, how the wine was made and so forth.

The gradual gathering of a store of such clear memory-images is a necessary preliminary to reflexion and thought. It is because the child remembers as well as sees, remembering even while he sees, that he grows thoughtful, inquiring about the meaning and reason of this and that, or boldly venturing on some explanation of his own. And just as the child’s mind must take on many pictures of things before it reflects upon and tries to understand the world, so it must collect and arrange pictures of the successive scenes and events of its life, before it will grow self conscious and reflect upon its own strange existence.

The only other pre-condition of this primitive thoughtfulness is that imaginative activity which we have already considered on its playful and pleasurable side. We are learning at last that the inventive phantasy of a child, prodigal as it is of delightful illusions, is also a valuable contributor to this sober work of thought. It is just because the young mind is so mobile and agile, passing far beyond the narrow confines of the actual in imaginative conjecture of what lies hidden in the remote, that it begins to _think_, that is, to reason about the causes of things. In the history of the individual as of the race, thought, even the abstract thought of science, grows out of the free play of imagination. The myth is at once a picturesque fancy, and a crude attempt at an explanation. This primitive thought is indeed so compact of bright picturesque imagery that we with our scientifically trained minds might easily overlook its inherent thoughtfulness. Yet a close inspection shows us that it contains the essential characteristics of thought, an impulse to comprehend things, to reduce the confusing multiplicity to order and system.

We must not hope to trace clearly the lines of this first child-thought. The earliest attitude of the wakening intelligence towards the confusion of novelties, which for us has become a world, is presumably indescribable, and further, by the time that a child comes to the use of words and can communicate his thoughts, in a broken way at least, the scene is already losing something of its first strangeness, the organising work of experience has begun. Yet though we cannot expect to get back to the primal wonderment we can catch glimpses of that later wonderment which arises when instruction supplements the senses, and ideas begin to form themselves of a vast unknown in space and time, of the changefulness of things, and of that mystery of mysteries the beginning of things. The study of this child-thought as it tries to utter itself in our clumsy speech will well repay us. Only we must be ever on the alert lest we read too much into these early utterances, forgetting that the child’s first tentative use of words is very apt to mislead.

The child first dimly reveals himself as thinker in the practical domain. In the evolution of the race the reasoning faculty has been first quickened into action by the ferment of instinctive craving and striving. Man began to reflect on the connexions of things in order to supply himself with food, to ward off cold and other evils. So with the child. Before the age of speech we may observe him thinking out rapidly as occasion arises some new practical expedient, as, for example, seizing a clothes-pin or other available aid in order to reach a toy that has slipped out of his reach; or clutching at our dress and pulling the chair by way of signifying to us that we are to remain and continue to amuse him. The observations of the first months of child-life abound with such illustrations of an initiating practical intelligence.

Yet these exploits, impressive as they often are, hardly disclose the distinctive attributes of the human thinker. The cat, without any example to imitate, will find its way to a quite charming begging gesture by reaching up and tapping your arm.

Probably the earliest unambiguous indication of a human faculty of thought is to be found in infantile comparison. When a baby turns its head deliberately and sagely from a mirror-reflexion or portrait of its mother to the original, we appear to see the first crude beginnings of a process which, when more elaborated, becomes human understanding.

A good deal of comparison of this kind seems to enter into the mental activity of young children. Thus the deep absorbing attention to pictures spoken of above commonly means a careful comparison of this and that form one with another, and in certain cases, at least, a comparison of what is now seen with the mental image of the original. In some children, moreover, comparison under the form of measurement grows into a sort of craze. They want to measure the height of things one with another and so forth. An intelligent child will even find his way to a _mediate_ form of comparison, that is, to measuring things through the medium of a third thing. Thus a boy of five, who had conceived a strong liking for dogs, was in the habit when walking out of measuring on his body how high a dog reached. On returning home he would compare this height with that of the seat or back of a chair, and would finally ask for a yard measure and find out the number of inches.

This comparison of things is of the very essence of understanding, of comprehending things as distinguished from merely apprehending them as concrete isolated objects. The child in his desire to assimilate, to find something in the region of the known with which the new and strange thing may be brought into kinship, is ever on the look-out for likeness. Hence the analogical and half-poetical apperception of things, the metaphorical reduction of a thing to a prototype, as in calling a star an eye, or an eyelid a curtain, may be said to contain the germ at once of poetry and of science.

This comparison for purposes of understanding leads on to what psychologists call classification, or generalisation; the bringing together and keeping before the mind of a number of like things by help of a general name. The child may be said to become a true thinker as soon as he uses names intelligently, calling each thing by an appropriate name, and so classing it with its kind.

This power of infantile generalisation is one full of interest and has been carefully observed. It will, however, be more conveniently dealt with in another chapter where we shall be specially concerned with the child’s use of language.

While thus beginning to arrange things according to such points of likeness as he can discover, the child is noting the connexions of things. He finds out what belongs to a horse, to a locomotive engine, he notes when father leaves home and returns, when the sun declines, what accompanies and follows rain, and so forth. That is to say, he is feeling his way to the idea of connectedness, of regularity, of what we call uniformity or law. We now say that the child reasons, no longer blindly or automatically like the dog, but with a consciousness of what he is doing. We little think how much hard work has to be got through by the little brain before even this dim perception of regularity is attained. In some things, no doubt, the regularity is patent enough, and can hardly be overlooked by the dullest of children. The connexion between the laying of the cloth and the meal—at least in an orderly home—is a matter which even the canine and the feline intelligence is quite able to grasp. But when it comes to finding out the law according to which, say, his face gets dirty, his head aches, or people send out their invitations to children’s parties, the matter is not so simple.

The fact is that there is so large a proportion of apparent disconnectedness and capricious irregularity in the child’s world that it is hard to see how he would ever learn to understand and to reason, were he not endowed with a lively and inextinguishable impulse to connect and simplify. Herein lies a part of the pathos of childhood. It brings its naïve prepossession of a regular well-ordered world, and alas, finds itself confronted with an impenetrable tangle of disorder. How quaint it is to listen to the little thinker, as, with untroubled brow, he begins to propound his beautifully simple theory of the cosmic order. An American boy of ten who had had one cross small teacher, and whose best teacher had been tall, accosted a new teacher thus: “I’m afraid you’ll make a cross teacher”. His teacher replied: “Why, am I cross?” To which he rejoined: “No; but you are so small”. We call this hasty generalisation. We might with equal propriety term it the child’s innate _a priori_ view of things.

With this eagerness to get at and formulate the law of things is inseparably bound up the impulse to bring every new occurrence under some general rule. Here, too, the small thinker may only too easily slip by failing to see the exact import and scope of the rule. We see this in the extension of laws of human experience to the animal world. Rules supplied by others and only vaguely understood, more particularly moral and religious truths, lend themselves to this kind of misapplication. The Worcester collection of _Thoughts and Reasonings of Children_ gives some odd examples of such application. American children, to judge from these examples, appear to be particularly smart at quoting Scripture; not altogether, one suspects, without a desire to show off, and possibly to raise a laugh. But discounting the influence of such motives it seems pretty clear that a child has a marvellous power of reading his own ideas into others’ words, and so of giving them a turn which is apt to stagger their less-gifted authors. Here is a case. R.’s aunt said: “You are so restless, R., I can’t hold you any longer”. R.: “Cast your burden on the Lord, Aunty K., and He will sustain you”. The child, we are told, was only four. He probably understood the Scripture injunction as a useful prescription for getting rid of a nuisance, and with the admirable impartiality of childish logic at once applied it to himself. Other illustrations of such misapplication will meet us when we take up the relation of the child’s thought to language.

_The Questioning Age._

The child’s first vigorous effort to understand the things about him may be roughly dated at the end of the third year, and it is noteworthy that this synchronises with the advent of the questioning age. The first putting of a question occurred in the case of Preyer’s boy in the twenty-eighth month, in that of Pollock’s girl in the twenty-third month. But the true age of inquisitiveness when question after question is fired off with wondrous rapidity and pertinacity seems to be ushered in with the fourth year.

A common theory peculiarly favoured by ignorant nurses and mothers is that children’s questioning is a studied annoyance. The child has come to the use of words, and with all a child’s ‘cussedness’ proceeds to torment the ears of those about him. There are signs, however, of a change of view on this point. The fact that the questioning follows on the heels of the reasoning impulse might tell us that it is connected with the throes which the young understanding has to endure in its first collision with a tough and baffling world. The question is the outcome of ignorance coupled with a belief in the boundless knowledge of grown-up people. It is an attempt to add to the scrappy, unsatisfying information about things which the little questioner’s own observation has managed to gather, or others’ half-understood words have succeeded in communicating. It is the outcome of intellectual craving, of a demand for mental food. But it is much more than an expression of need. Just as the child’s articulate demand for food implies that he knows what food is, and that it is obtainable, so the question implies that the little questioner knows what he needs, and in what direction to look for it. The simplest form of question, _e.g._, “What is this flower?” “this insect?” shows that the child by a half-conscious process of reflexion and reasoning has found his way to the truth that things have their qualities, their belongings, their names. Many questions, indeed, _e.g._, ‘Has the moon wings?’ ‘Where do all the days go to?’ reveal a true process of childish thought and have a high value as expressions of this thought.

Questioning may take various directions. A good deal of the child’s catechising of his long-suffering mother is prompted by thirst for fact.[38] The typical form of this line of questioning is ‘What?’ The motive here is to gain possession of some fact which will connect itself with and supplement a fact already known. ‘How old is Rover?’ ‘Where was Rover born?’ ‘Who was his father?’ ‘What is that dog’s name?’ ‘What sort of hair had you when you were a little girl?’ These are samples of the questioning activity by help of which the little inquirer tries to make up his connected wholes, to see things with his imagination in their proper attachment and order. And how greedily and pertinaciously the small folk will follow up their questioning, flying as it often looks wildly enough from point to point, yet gathering from every answer some new contribution to their ideas of things. A boy of three years and nine months would thus attack his mother: ‘What does frogs eat, and mice and birds and butterflies? and what does they do? and what is their names? What is all their houses’ names? What does they call their streets and places?’ etc., etc.

-----

Footnote 38:

The first question put by Preyer’s boy was, ‘Where is mamma?’ _Die
Seele des Kindes_, p. 412. (The references are to the third edition,
1890.)

-----

Such questions easily appear foolish because, as in the case just quoted, they are directed by quaint childish fancies. The child’s anthropomorphic way of looking out on the world leads him to assimilate animal to human ways.

One feature in this fact-gleaning kind of question is the great store which the child sets by the name of a thing. M. Compayré has pointed out that the form of question: ‘What is this?’ often means, “What is it called?” The child’s unformulated theory seems to be that everything has its own individual name. The little boy just spoken of explained to his mother that he thought all the frogs, the mice, the birds, and the butterflies had names given to them by their mothers as he himself had. Perhaps this was only a way of expressing the childish idea that everything has its name, primordial and unchangeable.

A second direction of this early questioning is towards the reason and the cause of things. The typical form is here ‘why?’ This form of inquiry occurred in the case of Preyer’s boy at the age of two years forty-three weeks. But it becomes the all-predominant form of question somewhat later. Who that has tried to instruct the small child of three or four does not know the long shrill whinelike sound of this question? This form of question develops naturally out of the earlier, for to give the ‘what?’ of a thing, that is its connexions, is to give its ‘why?’ that is its mode of production, its use and purpose.

Nothing perhaps in child utterance is better worth interpreting, hardly anything more difficult to interpret, than this simple-looking little ‘why?’

We ourselves perhaps do not use the word ‘why’ and its correlative ‘because’ with one clear meaning; and the child’s first use of the words is largely imitative. What may be pretty safely asserted is that even in the most parrot-like and wearisome iteration of ‘why?’ and its equivalents ‘what for?’ etc., the child shows a dim recognition of the truth that a thing is understandable, that it has its reasons if only they can be found.

Let us in judging of this pitiless ‘why?’ try to understand the situation of the young mind confronted by so much that is strange and unassimilated, meeting by observation and hearsay with new and odd occurrences every day. The strange things standing apart from his tiny familiar world, the wide region of the quaint and puzzling in animal ways, for example, stimulate the instinct to appropriate, to master. The little thinker must try at least to bring the new odd thing into some recognisable relation to his familiar world. And what is more natural than to go to the wise lips of the grown-up person for a solution of the difficulty? The fundamental significance of the ‘why?’ in the child’s vocabulary, then, is the necessity of connecting new with old, of illuminating what is strange and dark by light reflected from what is already matter of knowledge. And a child’s ‘why?’ is often temporarily satisfied by supplying from the region of the familiar an analogue to the new and unclassed fact. Thus his impulse to understand why pussy has fur, is met by telling him that it is pussy’s hair.

It is only a step further in the same direction when the ‘why?’ has to be met by supplying a general statement; for to refer the particular to a general rule is a more perfect and systematic kind of assimilation. Now we know that children are very susceptible to the authority of precedent, custom, general rule. Just as in children’s ethics customary permission makes a thing right, so in their logic the truth that a thing generally happens may be said to supply a reason for its happening in a particular case. Hence, when the much-abused nurse answers the child’s question, ‘Why is the pavement hard?’ by saying, ‘Because pavement is always hard,’ she is perhaps less open to the charge of giving a woman’s reason than is sometimes said.[39] In sooth the child’s queries, his searchings for explanation, are, as already suggested, prompted by the desire for order and connectedness. And this means that he wants the general rule to which he can assimilate the particular and as yet isolated fact.

-----

Footnote 39:

_Cf._ some shrewd remarks by Dr. Venn, _Empirical Logic_, p. 494.

-----

From the first, however, the ‘why?’ and its congeners have reference to the causal idea, to something which has brought the new and strange thing into existence and made it what it is. In truth this reference to origin, to bringing about or making, is exceedingly prominent in children’s questionings. Nothing is more interesting to a child than the production of things. What hours and hours does he not spend in wondering how the pebbles, the stars, the birds, the babies are made. This vivid interest in production is to a considerable extent practical. It is one of the great joys of children to be able themselves to make things, and this desire to fashion, which is probably at first quite immense, and befitting rather a god than a feeble mannikin of three years, naturally leads on to inquiry into the mode of producing. Yet from the earliest a true speculative interest blends with this practical instinct. Children are in the complete sense little philosophers, if philosophy, as the ancients said, consists in knowing the causes of things. This discovery of the cause is the completed process of assimilation, of the reference of the particular to a general rule or law.

This inquiry into origin and mode of production starts with the amiable presupposition that all things have been hand-produced after the manner of household possessions. The world is a sort of big house where everything has been made by somebody, or at least fetched from somewhere. This application of the anthropomorphic idea of fashioning follows the law of all childish thought, that the unknown is assimilated to the known. The one mode of origin which the embryo thinker is really and directly familiar with is the making of things. He himself makes a respectable number of things, including these rents in his clothes, messes on the tablecloth, and the like, which he gets firmly imprinted on his memory by the authorities. And, then, he takes a keen interest in watching the making of things by others, such as puddings, clothes, houses, hayricks. To ask, then, who made the animals, the babies, the wind, the clouds, and so forth, is for him merely to apply the more familiar type of causation as norm or rule. Similarly in all questions as to the ‘whence?’ of things, as in asking whether babies were bought in a shop.

The ‘why?’ takes on a more special meaning when the idea of purpose becomes clear. The search now is for the end, what philosophers call the teleological cause or reason. When, for example, a child asks ‘Why does the wind blow?’ he means, ‘What is its object in blowing?’ or ‘Of what use is the blowing of the wind?’

The idea underlying the common form of the ‘why?’ interrogative deserves a moment’s inspection. A child’s view of causation starts like other ideas from his most familiar experiences. He soon finds out that his own actions are controlled by the desire to get or to avoid something, that, to speak in rather technical language, the idea of the result of the action precedes and determines this action.