FIRST THOUGHTS: (_b_) SELF AND OTHER MYSTERIES.
We may now pass to some of the characteristic modes of child-thought
about that standing mystery, the self. As our discussion of the child's
ideas of origin, growth and final shrinkage suggests, a good deal of his
most earnest thinking is devoted to problems relating to himself.
_The Visible Self._
The date of the first thought about self, of the first dim stage of
self-awareness, probably varies considerably in the case of different
children according to the rapidity of the mental development and to the
character of the surrounding circumstances. The little girl, who was
afterwards to be known as George Sand, may be supposed to have had an
exceptional development; and the blow which she received as a baby in
arms, and to which she ascribes the first dawn of self-consciousness,
was, of course, exceptional too. There are probably many robust and
unreflective children, knowing little of life's misery, who get on
extremely well without any consciousness of self.
The earliest idea of children about "myself" is a mental picture of the
body. They come to learn that their body is different from other objects
of sense by a number of experiences, such as grasping the foot,
striking the head, receiving soft caresses, kisses, and so forth. Such
experiences may suffice to develop even during the first year the idea
that their body is "me" in the sense that it is the living seat of pain
and pleasure.
The moving limbs are, of course, a specially interesting part of this
bodily self. Yet there is reason to think that children regard the trunk
as the most important and vital part of themselves. Thus one small boy
who, when put to bed, could not get into a comfortable posture, said
queerly: "I can't get my hands out of the way of myself". This may be
because they learn to connect the impressive experiences of aches and
pains with the trunk, and because they observe that the maimed can do
without arms and without legs. It is interesting to note that in the
development of the idea of the soul by the race its seat was placed in
the trunk, _viz._, the heart, long before it was localised in the head.
Children are probably confirmed in this view of the supreme importance
of the trunk by our way of specially referring to it when speaking of
the "body".
About this interesting trunk-body, what is inside it, and how it works,
the child speculates vastly. The experience of bleeding has suggested to
some children that it is filled with blood. When later on the young
thinker hears of the stomach, bones and so forth, he sets about
theorising on these mysterious matters. Odd twistings of thought occur
when the higher anatomy is talked of in his hearing. A six-year-old
girl, of whom Mr. Canton writes, thus delivered herself with respect to
the brain and its functions: "Brain is what you think with in your
head, and the more you think the more crinkles there are". The growth of
the folds was understood, with charming childish simplicity, as the
immediate effect of thought, like the crinkling of the skin of the
forehead.
At a later stage of the child's development, no doubt, when he begins to
grasp the idea of a conscious thinking "I," the head will become a
principal portion of the bodily self. Children are quite capable of
finding their way, in part at least, to the idea that the mind has its
lodgment in the head. But it is long before this thought grows clear.
This may be seen in children's talk, as when a girl of four spoke of her
dolly as having no sense in her _eyes_. Even after a child has learned
from others that we think with our brains he may go on supposing that
our thoughts travel down to the mouth when we speak.
Very interesting in connection with the first stages of development of
the idea of self is the experience of the mirror. It would be absurd to
expect a child when first placed before a glass to recognise his own
face. He will smile at the reflection as early as the tenth week, though
this is probably merely an expression of pleasure at the sight of a
bright object. If held when about six months old in somebody's arms
before a glass a baby will at once show that he recognises the image of
the familiar face of his carrier by turning round to the real face,
whereas he does not recognise his own. He appears at first and for some
months to take it for a real object, sometimes smiling to it as to a
stranger and even kissing it, or, as in the case of a little girl
(fifteen months old), offering it things.
An infant will, we know, take a shadow to be a real object and try to
touch it. Some children on noticing their own and other people's shadows
on the wall are afraid as at something uncanny. Here, too, in time, as
with young animals, _e.g._, kittens, the strange appearance is taken as
a matter of course.
Some children seem to follow out in part the line of thought of
uncivilised races, and take reflections and shadows for a kind of
"double" of the self. One of Dr. Stanley Hall's correspondents writes to
him that he used to have small panics at his own shadow, trying to run
away from it, and to stamp on it, thinking it might be his soul. We find
another illustration of this doubling of the self in the autobiography
of George Sand, which relates that when a child, reflecting on the
impressive experience of the echo, she invented a theory of her double
existence. We know, too, that the boy Hartley Coleridge distinguished
among the "Hartleys" a picture Hartley and a shadow Hartley. To one
little boy the idea of being photographed seemed uncanny, as if it were
a robbing himself of something and the making of another self. But much
more needs to be known about these matters.
The prominence of the bodily element in a child's first idea of himself
is seen in the tendency to regard his sameness as limited by unaltered
bodily appearance. A child of six, with his shock of curls, will,
naturally enough, refuse to believe that he is the same as the hairless
baby whose photograph the mother shows him. One boy who had attained to
the dignity of knickerbockers used to speak of his petticoated
predecessor as a little girl.
_The Hidden Self._
In process of time, however, what we call the conscious self, that which
thinks and suffers and wills, comes to be dimly discerned. It is
probable that a real advance towards this true self-consciousness takes
place towards the end of the third year, when the difficult forms of
language, "I," "me," "mine," commonly come to be used with intelligence.
This is borne out by the following story: A little girl of three lying
in bed shut her eyes and said: "Mother, you can't see me now". The
mother replied: "Oh, you little goose, I can see you but you can't see
me". To which she rejoined: "Oh, yes, I know you can see _my body_,
mother, but you can't see _me_". The "me" here was, I suppose, the
expression of the inner self through the eyes. The same child at about
the same age was concerned as to the reality of her own existence. One
day playing with her dolls she asked her mother: "Mother, am _I_ real,
or only a pretend like my dolls?"
The first thought about self as something existing apart from all that
is seen is apt to be very perplexing to the thoughtful child. As one
lady puts it, writing to me of her childish experience: "The power of
feeling and acting and moving about myself, under the guidance of some
internal self, amazed me continually".
As may be seen by this quotation, the first thought about self is
greatly occupied with its action on the body. Among the many things
that puzzled one much-questioning little lad already quoted was this:
"How do my thoughts come down from my brain to my mouth: and how does my
spirit make my legs walk?" A girl in her fifth year wanted to know how
it is we can move our arm and keep it still when we want to, while the
curtain can't move except somebody moves it.
_The Unreachable Past._
Very curious are the directions of the first thought about the past
self. The idea of what we call personal identity does not appear to be
fully reached at first; the little boy already quoted who referred to
his past self by saying, "when I was a little girl," must have had a
very hazy idea of his sameness with that small petticoated person. It
would seem, indeed, as if a child found it easy to dissociate his
present self from his past, to deny all kinship with it.
The difficulty to the child of conceiving of his remote past, is
surpassed by that of trying to understand the state of things before he
was born. The true mystery of birth for the child, the mystery which
fascinates and holds his mind, is that of his beginning to be. This is
illustrated in the question of a little boy: "Where was I a hundred
years ago? Where was I before I was born?" It remains a mystery for all
of us, only that after a time we are wont to put it aside.
Even when a child begins to take in the fact that there was a time when
he was not, he is unable to think of absolute non-existence. A little
girl of three being shown a photograph of her family and not seeing her
own face in the group asked: "Where is me?" Being duly instructed that
she was not here, or indeed anywhere, she asked: "Was I killed?"
It is curious to note the differences in the attitude of children's
minds towards this mystery, "before you were born". A child accustomed
to be made the centre of others' interest may be struck with the blank
in the common home life before his arrival. A little girl of three, on
being told by her mother of something which happened long before she was
born, asked in amazement: "And what did you do without H.? Did you cry
all day for her?"
Sometimes again, in the more metaphysical sort of child, the puzzle
relates to the past existence of the outer world. We have all been
perplexed by the thought of the earth and sky, and other folk existing
before we were, and going on to exist after we cease to be; though here
again we are apt to "get used" to the puzzle. Children may be deeply
impressed with this apparent contradiction. Jean Ingelow in the
interesting reminiscences of her childhood writes: "I went through a
world of cogitation as to whether it was really true that anything had
been and lived before I was there to see it". A little boy of five who
was rather given to saying "clever" things, was one day asked by a
visitor, who thought to rebuke what she took to be his conceit: "Why,
M., however did the world go round before you came into it?" M. at once
replied: "Why, it _didn't_ go round. It only began five years ago." This
child, too, had probably felt little Jean Ingelow's difficulty.
A child will sometimes try to escape from this puzzle by way of the
supernatural ideas already referred to. If of quick intelligence he will
see in the legend of babies brought from heaven to earth a way of
prolonging his existence backwards. The same little boy that was so
concerned to know what his mother had done without him, happened one day
to be passing a street pump with his mother, when he stopped and
observed with perfect gravity: "There are no pumps in heaven where I
came from". He had evidently worked out the idea of heaven-sent babies
into a theory of pre-natal existence.
In thinking of their past, children have to encounter that terrible
mystery, time. They seem at first quite unable to think of time as we
think of it, in an abstract way. "To-day," "to-morrow" and "yesterday"
are spoken of as things which move. A girl of four asked: "Where is
yesterday gone to?" and "Where will to-morrow come from?"
Another difficulty is the grasping of great lengths of time. A child is
apt to exaggerate greatly a short period. The first morning at school
has seemed an eternity to some who have carried the recollection of it
into middle life. Even the minutes when, as Mrs. Maynell writes, "your
mother's visitor held you so long at his knee, while he talked to her
the excited gabble of the grown-up," may have seemed very, very big.
Possibly this sense of the immeasurable length of certain experiences of
childhood gives to the child's sense of past time something of an aching
vastness which older people can hardly understand. Do not the words
"long, long ago," when we use them in telling a child a story, still
carry with them for our ears a strangely far-off sound?
Again, children find it hard to map out the divisions of time, and to
see the relations of one period to another. One little boy about five
and a half finding that something had happened before his father was
born, asked whether it was in the time of the Romans. His historical
perspective had, not unnaturally perhaps, set the "time of the Romans"
just before the life of the oldest of his household.
_The Supernatural World._
A child's first acquaintance with the supernatural is frequently made
through the medium of fairy-story or other fiction. And, as has been
suggested in an earlier chapter, he can put a germ of thought into the
tradition of a fairy-world. It is, however, when something in the shape
of theological instruction supervenes that the supernatural becomes a
problem for the young intellect. He is told of these mysterious things
as of certainties, and in the measure in which he is a thinker, he will
try to get a clear intelligent view of things.
Like the beginning of life, its ending is one of the recurring puzzles
of early days. A child appears better able to imagine others dying than
himself; this seems to be suggested by a story published by Stanley Hall
of a little girl who from six to nine feared that all other people would
die one by one, and that she would be left alone on the earth.
The first recoil from an inscrutable mystery soon begins to give place
to a feeling of dread. A little girl of three and a half years asked
her mother to put a great stone on her head, because she did not want to
die. She was asked how a stone would prevent it, and answered with
perfect childish logic: "Because I shall not grow tall if you put a
great stone on my head; and people who grow tall get old and then die".
The first way of regarding death seems to be as a temporary state like
sleep, which it so closely resembles. A little boy of two and a half
years, on hearing from his mother of the death of a lady friend, at once
asked: "Will Mrs. P. still be dead when we go back to London?"
The knowledge of burial gives a new and alarming turn to the child's
thought. He now begins to speculate much about the grave. The
instinctive tendency to carry over the idea of life and feeling to the
buried body is illustrated in the request made by a little boy to his
mother: "Don't put earth on my face when I am buried".
In the case of children who pick up something of the orthodox creed the
idea of going to heaven has somehow to be grasped and put side by side
with that of burial. Here comes one of the hardest puzzles for the
logical child. One boy tried to reconcile the story of heaven with the
fact of burial, at first by assuming that the good people who went to
heaven were not buried at all; and later by supposing that the journey
to heaven was somehow to be effected after burial and by way of the
grave. Other devices for getting a consistent view of things are also
hit upon. Some children have supposed that the _head_ only passes into
heaven, partly from taking the "body" to be the trunk only, and partly
from a feeling that the head is the seat of the thinking mind.
The idea of dead people going to heaven is, as we know, pushed by the
little brain to its logical consequences. Animals when they die are,
naturally enough, supposed to go to heaven also.
_The Great Maker._
Children seem disposed, apart from religious instruction, to form ideas
of supernatural beings. Sometimes it is a dreadful person who exerts a
malign influence on the child, sending him, for example, his pains in
the stomach. In other cases it is a fairy-like being who is created into
a mighty benefactor, and half-worshipped and prayed to in childish
fashion.
Even when religious instruction supplies the form of the supernatural
being the young thinker deals with this in his own original way. He has
to understand the mysteries of God, Satan and the rest, and he can only
understand them by shedding on them the light of homely terrestrial
facts. Hence the undisguised materialism of the child's theology.
According to Dr. Stanley Hall's inquiries into the thoughts of American
children, God is apt to be imaged as a big, very strong man or giant.
One child thought of him as a huge being with limbs spread all over the
sky; another, as so tall that he could stand with one foot on the
ground, and touch the clouds. He is commonly supposed, in conformity
with what is told him, to dwell just above the sky, which last, as we
have seen, is thought of as a dividing floor, through the chinks of
which we get glimmerings of the glory of the heaven above. But some
children show more of their own thought in localising the Deity, placing
him, for example, in one of the stars, or the moon, or lower down "upon
the hill".
Differences in childish feeling, as well as in intelligence, reflect
themselves in the first ideas about the divine dwelling-place. It seems
commonly to be conceived of as a grand house or mansion. While, however,
some children deck it out with all manner of lovely things, including a
park, flowers, and birds, others give it a homelier character, thinking,
for example, of doors and possible draughts, like a little girl who
asked God "to mind and shut the door, because he (_i.e._, grandpapa who
had just died) can't stand the draughts". Some children, too, of a less
exuberant fancy are disposed to think of heaven as by no means so
satisfyingly lovely, and rather to shrink from a long wearisome stay in
it.
While thus relegated to the sublime regions of the sky God is supposed
to be doing things, and of course doing them for us, sending down rain
and so forth. What seems to impress children most, especially boys, in
the traditional account of God is his power of making things. He is
emphatically the artificer, the "demiurgos," who not only has made the
world, the stars, etc., but is still kept actively employed by human
needs. According to some of the American school-children he fabricates
all sorts of things from babies to money, and the angels work for him.
The boy has a great admiration for the maker, and one small English boy
once expressed this oddly by asking his mother whether a group of
working men returning from their work were "gods".
This admiration for superior power and skill favours the idea of God's
omnipotence. This is amply illustrated in children's spontaneous
prayers, which ask for things, from fine weather on a coming holiday to
a baby with curly hair and other lovely attributes, with all a child's
naive faith. Yet a critical attitude will sometimes be taken up towards
this mystery of unlimited power. The more logical and speculative sort
of child will now and then put a sceptical question to his elders on
this subject. A boy of eight turned over the problem whether God could
beat him in a foot-race if he were starter and judge and refused to let
God start till he had reached the goal; and he actually measured out the
racecourse on a garden path and went through the part of running,
afterwards sitting down and giving God time to run, and then pondering
the possibility of his beating him.
The idea of God's omniscience, too, may come readily enough to a child
accustomed to look up admiringly to the boundless knowledge of some
human authority, say a clergyman. Yet I know of cases where the dogma of
God's infinite knowledge provoked in the child's mind a sceptical
attitude. One little fellow remarked on this subject rather profanely:
"I know a 'ickle more than Kitty, and you know a 'ickle more than me;
and God knows a 'ickle more than you, I s'pose; then he can't know so
very much after all".
Another of the divine attributes does undoubtedly shock the child's
intelligence. While he is told that God has a special abode in heaven,
he is told also that he is here, there and everywhere, and can see
everything. More particularly the idea of being always watched is, I
think, repugnant to sensitive and high-spirited children. An American
lady, Miss Shinn, speaks of a little girl, who, on learning that she was
under this constant surveillance, declared that she "would _not_ be so
tagged". An English boy of three, on being informed by his older sister
that God can see and watch us while we cannot see him, thought awhile,
and then in an apologetic tone said: "I'm very sorry, dear, I can't
(b)elieve you".
When the idea is accepted odd devices are excogitated by the active
little brain for making it intelligible. Thus one child thought of God
as a very small person who could easily pass through the keyhole. The
opposite idea of God's huge framework, illustrated above, is probably
but another attempt to figure the conception of omnipresence. Curious
conclusions too are sometimes drawn from the supposition. Thus a little
girl of three years and nine months one day said to her mother in the
abrupt childish manner: "Mr. C. (a gentleman she had known who had just
died) is in this room". Her mother, naturally a good deal startled,
answered: "Oh, no!" Whereupon the child resumed: "Yes, he is. You told
me he is with God, and you told me God was everywhere; so as Mr. C. is
with God, he must be in this room."
It might easily be supposed that the child's readiness to pray to God is
inconsistent with what has just been said. Yet I think there is no real
inconsistency. Children's idea of prayer appears commonly to be that of
sending a message to some one at a distance. The epistolary manner
noticeable in many prayers, especially at the beginning and the ending,
seems to illustrate this. The mysterious whispering in which a prayer is
often conveyed is, I suspect, supposed in some inscrutable fashion known
only to the child to transmit itself to the divine ear.
Of the child's belief in God's goodness it is needless to say much. For
these little worshippers he is emphatically the friend in need who is
just as ready as he is able to help them out of every manner of
difficulty, and who, if they only ask prettily, will send them all the
nice things they long for. Yet, happy little optimists as they are
inclined to be, they will now and again be saddened by doubt, and wonder
why the nice things asked for don't come, and why the dear kind God
allows them to suffer so much.
While a child is thus apt to think of God as nicer than the nicest
gentleman visitor who is wont to bring toys and do wondrous things for
his delectation, he commonly imports into his conception a touch of
human caprice. Fear may readily suggest to a child who has had some
orthodox instruction that the wind howling at night is the noise of
God's anger, or that the thunder is due to a sudden determination of the
Creator to shoot him dead. The sceptical child, again, who is by no
means so rare, may early begin to wonder how God can be so good and yet
allow men to kill animals, and allow Satan to do such a lot of wicked
things.
One of the hardest puzzles set to a child by the common religious
instruction is the doctrine of God's eternity. The idea of a vast,
endless "for ever," whether past or future, seems to be positively
overwhelming to many young minds. The continual frustration of the
attempt to reach a resting-place in a beginning or an end may bring on
something of mental giddiness. Hence the wearisome perplexities of the
first thoughts about God's past. The question, "Who made God?" seems to
be one to which all inquiring young minds are led at a certain stage of
child-thought. When told that God has always been, unchanging, and
knowing no youth, he wants to get behind this "always was," just as at
an earlier stage of his development he wanted to get behind the barrier
of the blue hills.
Other mysteries of the orthodox faith may undergo a characteristic
solution in the hard-working mind of a child. A friend tells me that
when a child he was much puzzled by the doctrine of the Trinity. He
happened to be an only child, and so he was led to put a meaning into it
by likening it to his own family group, in which the Holy Ghost had,
rather oddly, to take the place of the mother.
Thoughtful children by odd processes of early logic are apt when
interpreting the words and actions of their teachers to endow God with
surprising attributes. For example, a boy of four asked his aunt one
Sunday to tell him why God was so fond of three-penny bits. Asked why he
thought God had this particular liking, he explained by saying that he
noticed that on Sunday morning people ask for a three-penny bit "instead
of" three pennies, and that as they take it to church he supposed that
they gave it to God.
I have tried to show that the more thoughtful children seek to put
meaning into the communications about the unseen world which they are
wont to receive from their elders. Perhaps these elders if they knew
what is apt to go on in a child's mind would reconsider some of the
answers which they give to the little questioner, and select with more
care the truths which, as they flatter themselves, they are making so
plain to their little ones.