FIRST THOUGHTS: (_a_) THE NATURAL WORLD.
We have seen in the last chapter that children have their characteristic
ways of looking at their new world. These ways often result in the
formation of definite ideas or "thoughts" which may last for years. We
will now try to follow the little thinker in his first attempt at
framing a theory of Nature and her doings.
Here, too, we shall find that the active little brain has its work cut
out for it. As already suggested, things are often so puzzling to the
child that it is only by dint of a good deal of questioning that he can
piece them together at all. And even after he has had his questions
answered he sometimes finds it well-nigh impossible to reconcile one
fact with another, and to reach a clear view of things as a whole.
_The Fashion of Things._
The first thoughts on Nature and her processes are moulded very largely
by the tendencies of the young mind touched on in the last chapter. Like
the savage the child is apt to think of the wind and the thunder as
somebody's doing, and as aimed specially at himself. Hence the strongly
marked mythological or supernatural element in children's theories.
Here, it is evident, thought is supported by a somewhat capricious
fancy. When, for example, a child accounts for the wind by saying that
somebody is waving a very big fan somewhere, or, more prettily, that it
is made by the fanning of the angels' wings, he comes very near that
romancing which we have regarded as the play of imagination. Yet though
fanciful it is still thought, just because it aims, however wildly, at
explaining something in the real world.
With this fanciful and mythological element there goes a more scientific
one. Even the fan myth recognises a mechanical process, _viz._, the
waving of something to and fro, which does undoubtedly produce a
movement of the air. Children's first theories of nature often show a
queer mingling of supernatural and natural conceptions.
I propose now to examine a few of the commoner ideas of children
respecting natural objects.
One characteristic of this first thought about things appears at an
early age. A child seems inclined to take all that he sees for real
tangible substance: it is some time before he learns that "things are
not what they seem". For example, an infant will try to touch shadows,
sunlight dancing on the wall and flat objects in pictures. This tendency
to make things out of all he sees shows itself in pretty forms, as when
a little girl one year eleven months old, "gathered sunlight in her
hands and put it on her face," and 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 tidying her mother's hair; 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; which reminds one of R. L.
Stevenson's lines to the wind:--
I felt you push, I heard you call,
I could not see yourself at all.
In making a reality out of the wind a child is led not by sight, but by
touch. He _feels_ the wind, and so the wind must be something
substantial.
The common childish thought about the wind shows that the young mind is
apt to be much impressed by the movements of things. Movement seems for
all of us the clearest and most impressive manifestation of life. When
the movement of an object is not seen to be caused by some other object,
but seems to be spontaneous, it is apt to be taken by children as by
uncivilised races to be the sign of life, and of something like human
impulse. A child of eighteen months used to throw kisses to the fire.
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 some internal contrivance
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.
Next to movement a sound which seems to be produced by the thing itself
leads children to endow it with life. Are not movement and vocal sound
the two great channels by which the child itself expresses its feelings
and impulses? The wind often owes something of its life to its sound.
The common tendency of children to think of the sea as alive, of which
M. Pierre Loti gives an excellent illustration in his _Roman d'un
enfant_, is no doubt based on the perception of its noise and movement.
A little boy assured his teacher that the wind was alive, for he heard
it whistling in the night. The impulse, too, to endow with life an
object which looks so very much of a machine as a railway engine, is
probably supported by the knowledge of its puffing and whistling.
Closely related to this impulse to ascribe life to what we call
inanimate objects is the tendency to conceive of them as growing. This
is illustrated in the remark of a little boy of three and a half years
who when criticised by his mother for trying to make a walking-stick out
of a very short stick, observed: "Me use it for walking-stick when stick
be bigger".
I have referred in the last chapter to children's way of thinking of
things as made by somebody. The idea of hand-work is extended in odd
ways. For example, quite young children are apt to extend the ideas
broken and mended to all kinds of objects. Anything which seems to have
become reduced by losing a portion of itself is said to be "broken".
Thus 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 not broken or intact was said to be "mended".
Do children when they talk in this fashion really think that things are
constantly undergoing repairs at the hand of some mysterious mechanic,
or are they using their familiar terms figuratively in default of
others? It is hard to say.
Curious thoughts about Nature's processes arise later when the inquirer
tries to make them intelligible to himself. Here the first mechanical
conceptions of the wind deserve attention. An American child, asked what
a tree was, answered oddly, "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 which stood in front of the house not
far from the windows of his bedroom. This putting of the cart before the
horse is funny enough, yet it is perfectly natural. All the wind-making
a child can observe, as in blowing with his mouth, waving a newspaper,
and so forth, is effected by the movement of a material object.
_The Bigger World._
With respect to distant objects, a child is of course freer to
speculate, and, as we know, his ideas of the heavenly bodies are wont to
be odd enough. His thoughts about these remote objects are rendered
quainter by his inability to conceive of great distances.
Children naturally enough take this world to be what it looks to their
uninstructed eyes. Thus the earth becomes a circular plain, and the sky
a sort of inverted bowl placed upon it. Many children appear like the
ancients to suppose that the sky and the heavenly bodies touch the earth
somewhere, and could be reached by taking a long, long journey. Other
and similar ideas are formed by some. Thus one little girl used on
looking at the sky to fancy she was inside a blue balloon. The heavenly
bodies are apt to be taken for flat discs. The brother of the little
girl just referred to took the sun to be a big kind of cask cover, which
could be put on the round globe to make a "see-saw".
When this first simple creed gets corrected, children go to work to put
a meaning into what is told them by their instructors. 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 wont to localise it just above the sky, which to their thought
forms its floor. Some hard thinking is carried out by the young heads in
the effort to reconcile the various things they learn about the
celestial region. Thus the sky is apt to be thought of as _thin_,
probably by way of explaining the light of the stars and moon, which is
supposed to shine through the sky-roof. One American child ingeniously
applied the idea of the thinness of the sky to explain the appearance of
the moon when one part is bright and the other faintly illumined,
supposing it to be half-way through a sort of semi-transparent curtain.
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.
Characteristic movements of childish thought show themselves in framing
ideas of the making of the world. The boy of four described by Mrs.
Jardine thought that the stars were "cut out" first, and that then the
little bits left over were all rolled into the moon. Such an idea of
cosmogony seems nonsense till one remembers the work of cutting out the
finer figures in paper.
In much the same way children try to understand the movements of the sun
and other heavenly bodies by help of the familiar movements of
terrestrial objects. Thus the sun was thought by American children to
fly, to be blown, perhaps like a soap-bubble or air-ball, and, by a
child with a more mechanical turn, to roll, presumably as a hoop rolls,
and so forth. Theological ideas, too, are pressed into the service of
childish explanation, as when the disappearance of the sun is ascribed
to God's pulling it up higher out of sight, to his taking it into heaven
and putting it to bed, and the like.
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 describing the supernatural operation here, thunder
being thought of as the noise made by God when groaning, when walking
heavily on the floor of heaven, when he has coals "run in"--ideas which
show how naively 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 lighting the gas, or striking many
matches at once. By a similar use of familiar household operations God
is supposed to cause rain by turning on a tap, or by letting it down
from a cistern by a hose, or, better, by passing it through a sieve or a
dipper with holes.[7]
[7] I am indebted for these illustrations to an article by Dr.
Stanley Hall on "The Contents of Children's Minds".
Throughout the whole region of these mysterious phenomena we have
illustrations of the tendency to regard what takes place as designed
for us poor mortals. Thus one of the American children referred to said
charmingly that the moon comes round when people forget to light the
lamps. 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". When frightened by the crash of
the thunder a child instinctively thinks that it is all done to vex his
little soul. An earthquake may be thought of as a kind of wonder show,
specially got up for the admiration of a sufficient body of spectators.
Two children, D. and K., aged ten and five respectively, lived in a
small American town. D., who was reading about an earthquake, addressed
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, answered: "Why, no, D., they
don't have earthquakes in little towns like this". Later on Nature's
arrangements are criticised from the same point of view. A girl of
seven, going back to the interesting question of babies, remarked to her
mother: "Wouldn't it be convenient if you laid an egg, and then if you
changed your mind you needn't hatch it?"
_Dreams._
Children are apt to have their own thoughts about the strange semblances
of objects which sometimes present themselves to their eyes, more
particularly the "spectra" which we see after looking at the sun or when
the circulation of the retina is disturbed. One little fellow spun
quite a romance about the spectra he used to see when poorly, saying
that they were angels, and that they went into his toy-basket and played
with his toys.
The most common form of such illusory appearance is, of course, the
dream, and I believe that children dwell much on the mystery of
dreaming. The simpler kind of child, like the savage, is disposed to
take his dreams for sensible realities. 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".
Yet children who reflect soon find out that dream-objects do not belong
to the common world, in the sights of which we all partake. Another
theory has then to be found. I believe that many children, especially
those who, being imaginative when awake, make their fairy-stories and
their own romancings very real to themselves, and who, as a result of
this, are wont to return to them in their dreams, are inclined to
identify dreamland and fairyland. If they want to see their "fairies" by
day they will shut their eyes; and so the idea may naturally enough
occur to them that when closing their eyes for sleep they are going to
see the beloved fairies again, and for a longer time. Other ideas about
dreams also occur among children. A gentleman tells me that when a child
he used to think that dreaming, though different from actual seeing,
was yet more than having one's own individual fancies; on dreaming, for
example, that he had met certain people he supposed that each of these
must have had a dream in which he had met him. This, it may be
remembered, is very much the fanciful idea of dreaming which Mr. Du
Maurier works out in his pretty story _Peter Ibbetson_.
There is some evidence to show that a thoughtful child, when he begins
to grasp the truth that dreams are only unreal phantasms, becomes
confused, and wonders whether the things too which we see when waking
are not unreal. Here is a quaint example of this transference of
childish doubt from dreamland to the every-day world. A little boy five
years old asked his teacher: "Wouldn't it be funny if we were dreaming?"
and being satisfied by the reply elicited that it would be funny, he
continued more explicitly: "Supposing every one in the whole world were
dreaming, wouldn't _that_ be funny? They might be, mightn't they?"
Receiving a slightly encouraging, "Perhaps they might," he wound up his
argument in this fashion: "Yes, but I don't think we are--I'm sure we
are not. Perhaps we should wake up and find _every one_ gone away." This
is dark enough, but suggests, I think, that doubt as to the bright
beautiful forms seen in sleep is casting its shadow on the real world,
on the precious certainty of the presence of those we love. A little
girl about six and a half years old being instructed by her father as to
the making of the world remarked: "Perhaps the world's a fancy". The
doubt in this case too was, one may conjecture, led up to by the loss of
faith in dreamland.
_Birth and Growth._
We may now pass to some of children's characteristic thoughts 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, the growth of things is one of the most
stimulating of childish puzzles. Led no doubt by what others tell him, a
child 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.
A number of children, I have found, have the queer notion that towards
the end of life there is a process of shrinkage. Old people are supposed
to become little again. One of the American children referred to, 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 Versa_. Yet I have collected a number
of similar observations. For example, 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". And one
little girl asked about some old person of her acquaintance: "When will
she begin to get small?" Another little girl asked her grown-up cousin
who was reading to her something about an old woman: "Do people turn
back into babies when they get quite old?"
Another interesting fact to be noted here is that some children firmly
believe that persons after dying and going to heaven will return to
earth as little children. An American lady writes to me that two of her
boys found their way independently of each other to this idea. Thus one
of them speaking of a playmate who had been drowned, and who was now, he
was told, in heaven, remarked: "Then God will let him come back and be a
baby again".
What, it may be asked, is the explanation of this quaint childish
thought? I think it probable that it is suggested in different ways. One
must remember that as a child grows taller grown-ups may seem _by
comparison_ to get shorter. Again old people are wont to stoop and so to
look shorter; and then children often hear in their stories of "little
old" people. I suspect, however, that in some cases there is a more
subtle train of thought. As the belief of the two brothers in people's
coming back from heaven suggests, the idea of shrinkage is connected
with those of birth and death. May it not be that the more thoughtful
sort of child reasons in this way? Babies which are sent from heaven
must have been something there; and people when they die must continue
to be something in heaven. Why, then, the "dead" people that go to this
place are the very same as the babies that come from it. To make this
theory "square" with other knowledge, the idea of shrinkage, either
before or after death, has to be called in. That it takes place before
death is supported by what was said above, and probably also by the
information often given to children that people when they die are
carried by angels to heaven just as the babies are said to be brought
down to earth by the angels.
The origin of babies and young animals furnishes the small brain, as we
have seen, with much food for speculation. Here the little thinker is
not often left to excogitate a theory for himself. His inconvenient
questionings in this direction have to be firmly checked, and thus arise
the well-known legends about the doctor, the angel and so forth. With
the various lore thus collected, supplemented by the pretty conceits of
Hans Andersen and other writers of fairy stories, the young inquirer has
to do his best.
How the child-thinker is apt to go to work here is illustrated in a
collection of the thoughts of American school-children. Some of these
said that God drops babies for the women and doctors to catch them,
others that he brings them down to earth by means of a wooden ladder,
others again, that mamma, nurse, or doctor goes up and fetches them in a
balloon. They are said by other children to grow in cabbages, or to be
placed by God in water, perhaps in the sewer, where they are found by
the doctor, who takes them to sick folks that want them. Here we have
delicious touches of childish fancy, quaint adaptations of fairy and
Bible lore, as in the use of Jacob's ladder and the legend of Moses
placed among the bulrushes, this last being enriched by the thorough
master-stroke of child-genius, the idea of the dark, mysterious,
wonder-producing sewer.
Not all children, by any means, elaborate even this crude sort of
theory. The less speculative and more practical kind of child accepts
what he is told and proceeds to apply it, sometimes oddly enough. Thus
the _Lancet_ recently contained an amusing letter from some children,
the eldest of whom was seven, addressed to a doctor asking for a baby
for their mother's next birthday. It was to be "fat and bonny, with blue
eyes and fair hair"--a perfect doll in fact; and a characteristic
postscript asked: "Which would be the cheaper--a boy or a girl?"
These ideas of children about babies partly communicated by others,
partly thought out for themselves, are naturally enough made to account
for the beginnings of animal life. This is illustrated in the
supposition of the little boy, already quoted, who thought that God
helps pussy to have "'ickle kitties," seeing that she hasn't any kitties
in eggs given her to sit upon.