Rêve el nom de mère en berçant sa poupée.[26]

-----

Footnote 26:

Goltz, _Buch der Kindheit_, pp. 4, 5.

-----

I read somewhere recently that the doll is a plaything for girls only:

but boys, though they often prefer india-rubber horses and other

animals, not infrequently go through a stage of doll-love also, and are

hardly less devoted than girls. Endless is the variety of _rôle_

assigned to the doll as to the tiny shell in our last picture of play.

The doll is the all-important comrade in that _solitude à deux_ of which

the child, like the adult, is so fond. Mrs. Burnett tells us that

sitting holding her doll in the armchair of the parlour she would sail

across enchanted seas to enchanted islands having all sorts of thrilling

adventures. At another time when she wanted to act an Indian chief the

doll just as obediently took up the part of squaw.

Very humanely, on the whole, is the little doll-lover wont to use her

pet, even though, as George Sand reminds us, there come moments of rage

and battering.[27] A little boy of two and a half years asked his mother

one day: “Will you give me all my picture-books to show dolly? I don’t

know which he will like best.” He then pointed to each and looked at the

doll’s face for the answer. He made believe that it selected one, and

then gravely showed it all the pictures, saying: “Look here, dolly!” and

carefully explaining them.

-----

Footnote 27:

See the study of George Sand’s childhood below, chap. xii.

-----

The doll illustrates the childish attitude towards all toys, the impulse

to take them into the innermost and warmest circle of personal intimacy,

to make them a living part of himself. A child’s language, as we shall

see later, points to an early identification of self with belongings.

The ‘me’ and the ‘my’ are the same, or nearly the same, to a mite of

three. This impulse to attach the doll to self, or to embrace it within

the self-consciousness or self-feeling, shows itself in odd ways. In the

grown-up child, Laura Bridgman, it took the form of putting a bandage

like her own over her doll’s eyes. This resembles a case of a girl of

six, who when recovering from measles was observed to be busily occupied

with her dolls, each of which she painted over with bright red spots.

The dolly must do all, and be all that I am: so the child in his warm

attachment seems to argue. This feeling of oneness is strengthened by

that of exclusive possession, the sense that the child himself is the

only one who really knows dolly, can hear her cry when she cries and so

forth.[28] It is another manifestation of the same feeling of intimacy

and solidarity when a child insists on dolly’s being treated by others

as courteously as himself. Children will often expect the mother or

nurse to kiss and say good-night to their pet or pets—for their hearts

are capacious—when she says good-night to themselves.

-----

Footnote 28:

_Cf._ Perez, _L’Art et la Poésie chez l’enfant_, p. 28.

-----

Here, nobody can surely doubt, we have clearest evidence of

play-illusion. The lively imagination endows the inert wooden thing with

the warmth of life and love. How large a part is played here by the

alchemist, fancy, is known to all observers of children’s playthings.

The faith and the devotion often seem to increase as the first

meretricious charms, the warm tints of the cheek and the lips, the

well-shaped nose, the dainty clothes, prematurely fade, and the lovely

toy which once kept groups of hungry-looking children gazing long at the

shop-window, is reduced to the naked essence of a doll. A child’s

constancy to his doll when thus stript of exterior charms and degraded

to the lowest social stratum of dolldom is one of the sweetest and most

humorous things in child-life.

And then what rude unpromising things are adopted as doll-pets. Mrs.

Burnett tells us she once saw a dirty mite sitting on a step in a

squalid London street, cuddling warmly a little bundle of hay tied round

the middle by a string. Here, surely, the _besoin d’aimer_ was little if

anything behind the _besoin de croire_.

Do any of us really understand this doll-superstition? Writers of a

clear long-reaching memory have tried to take us back to childhood, and

restore to us for a moment the whole undisturbed trust, the perfect

satisfaction of love, which the child brings to its doll. Yet even the

imaginative genius of a George Sand is hardly equal, perhaps, to the

feat of resuscitating the buried companion of our early days and making

it live once more before our eyes.[29] The truth is the doll-illusion is

one of the first to pass. There are, I believe, a few sentimental girls

who, when they attain the years of enlightenment, make a point of saving

their dolls from the general wreckage of toys. Yet I suspect the pets

when thus retained are valued more for the outside charm of pretty face

and hair, and still more for the lovely clothes, than for the inherent

worth of the doll itself, of what we may call the doll-soul which

informs it and gives it, for the child, its true beauty and its worth.

-----

Footnote 29:

For her remarkable analysis of the child’s feeling for his doll, see

below, chap. xii.

-----

Yet if we cannot get inside the old doll-superstition we may study it

from the outside, and draw a helpful comparison between it and other

known forms of naïve credulity. And here we have the curious fact that

the doll exists not only for the child but for the “nature man”.

Savages, Sir John Lubbock tells us,[30] like toys, such as dolls, Noah’s

Arks, etc. The same writer remarks that the doll is “a hybrid between

the baby and the fetish, and that it exhibits the contradictory

characters of its parents”. Perhaps the changes of mood towards the

doll, of which George Sand writes, illustrate the alternating

preponderance of the baby and the fetish half. But as Sir John also

remarks, this hybrid is singularly unintelligible to grown-up people,

and it seems the part of modesty here to bow to one of nature’s

mysteries.

-----

Footnote 30:

_Origin of Civilisation_, appendix, p. 521.

-----

It has been suggested to me by Mr. F. Galton that a useful inquiry might

be carried out into the relation between a child’s preference in the

matter of doll or other toy and the degree of his imaginativeness as

otherwise shown, _e.g._, in craving for story, and in romancing. So far

as I have inquired I am disposed to think that such a relation exists. A

lady who has had a large experience as a Kindergarten teacher tells me

that children who play with rough shapeless things, and readily endow

with life the ball, and so forth, in Kindergarten games are imaginative

in other ways. Here is an example:—

P. Mc. L., a girl, observed from three and a half to five years of

age, was a highly imaginative child as shown by the power of

make-believe in play. The ball of soft india-rubber was to her on the

teacher’s suggestion, say, a baby, and on it she would lavish all her

tenderness, kissing it, feeding it, washing its face, dressing it in

her pinafore, etc. So thorough was her delight in the play that the

less imaginative children around her would suspend their play at

‘babies’ and watch her with interest. Whilst a most indifferent

restless child at lessons, whenever a story was told she sat

motionless and wide-eyed till the close.

Children sometimes make babies of their younger brothers and sisters,

going through all the sweet solicitous offices which others are wont to

carry out on their dolls.[31] This suggests another and closely related

question: Do the more imaginative children prefer the inert, ugly doll

to the living child in these nursing pastimes? What is the real relation

in the child’s play between the toy-companion, the doll or india-rubber

dog, and the living companion? Again, a child will occasionally play

with an imaginary doll.[32] How is this impulse related to the other two

forms of doll-passion? These points would well repay a careful

investigation.

-----

Footnote 31:

Baldwin gives a pretty example of this, _op. cit._, p. 362.

Footnote 32:

An example is given by Paola Lombroso, _Psicologia del Bambino_, p.

126.

-----

The vivification of the doll or toy animal is the outcome of the

play-impulse, and this, as we have seen, is an impulse to act out, to

realise an idea in outward show. The absorption in the idea and its

outward expression serves, as in the case of the hypnotised subject, to

blot out the incongruities of scene and action which you or I, a cold

observer, would note. The play-idea works transformingly by a process

analogous to what is called auto-suggestion.

How complete this play-illusion may become here can be seen in more ways

than one. We see it in the jealous insistence already illustrated that

everything shall for the time pass over from the every-day world into

the new fancy-created one. “About the age of four,” writes M. Egger of

his boys, “Felix is playing at being coachman, Emile happens to return

home at the moment. In announcing his brother, Felix does not say,

‘Emile is come,’ he says ‘The brother of the coachman is come’.”[33]

-----

Footnote 33:

Quoted by Compayré, _op. cit_., p. 150.

-----

As we saw above, the child’s absorption in his new play-world is shown

by his imperious demand that others, as his mother, shall recognise his

new character. Pestalozzi’s little boy, aged three years and a half, was

one day playing at being butcher, when his mother called him by his

usual diminutive, ‘Jacobli’. He at once replied: “No, no; you should

call me butcher now”.[34] Here is a story to the same effect, sent me by

a mother. A little girl of four was playing ‘shops’ with her younger

sister. “The elder one was shopman at the time I came into her room and

kissed her. She broke out into piteous sobs, I could not understand why.

At last she sobbed out: ‘Mother, you never kiss the man in the shop’. I

had with my kiss quite spoilt her illusion.”

-----

Footnote 34:

De Guimp’s _Life of Pestalozzi_ (Engl. trans.), p. 41.

-----

The intensity of the realising power of imagination in play is seen too

in the stickling for fidelity to the original in all playful

reproduction, whether of scenes observed in everyday life or of what has

been narrated. The same little boy who showed his picture-books to dolly

was, we are told, when two years and eight months old, fond of imagining

that he was Priest, his grandmamma’s coachman. “He drives his toy horse

from the arm-chair as a carriage, getting down every minute to ‘let the

ladies out,’ or to ‘go shopping’. The make-believe extends to his

insisting on the reins being held while he gets down and so forth.” The

same thing shows itself in acting out stories. The full enjoyment of the

realisation depends on the faithful reproduction, on the suitable

outward embodiment of the distinct idea in the child’s mind.

The following anecdote bears another kind of testimony, a most winsome

kind, to the realising power of play. One day two sisters said to one

another: “Let us play being sisters”. This might well sound insane

enough to hasty ears; but is it not really eloquent? To me it suggests

that the girls felt they were not realising their sisterhood, enjoying

all the possible sweets of it, as they wanted to do—perhaps there had

been a quarrel and a supervening childish coldness. And they felt too

that the way to get this more vivid sense of what they were, or ought to

be, one to the other, was by playing the part, by acting a scene in

which they would come close to one another in warm sympathetic

fellowship.

But there is still another, and some will think a more conclusive way of

satisfying ourselves of the reality of the play-illusion. The child

finds himself confronted by the unbelieving adult who questions what he

says about the doll’s crying and so forth. One little girl, aged one

year and nine months, when asked by her mother how her doll, who had

lost his arms, ate his dinner without hands, quickly changed the

subject. She did not apparently like having difficulties brought into

her happy play-world. But the true tenacious faith shows itself later

when the child understands these sceptical questionings of others, and

sees that they are poking fun at his play and his day-dreamings. Such

cruel quizzings of his make-believe are apt to cut him to the quick. I

have heard of children who will cry if a stranger suddenly enters the

nursery when they are hard at play, and shows himself unsympathetic and

critical.

Play may produce not only this vivid imaginative realisation at the

time, but a sort of mild permanent illusion. Sometimes it is a

toy-horse, in one case communicated to me it was a funny-looking

toy-lion, more frequently it is the human effigy, the doll, which as the

result of successive acts of imaginative vivification gets taken up into

the relation of permanent companion and pet. Clusters of happy

associations gather about it, investing it with a lasting vitality and

character. A mother once asked her boy of two and a half years if his

doll was a boy or a girl. He said at first, “A boy,” but presently

correcting himself added, “I think it is a baby”. Here we have a

challenging of the inner conviction by a question, a moment of

reflexion, and as a result of this, an unambiguous confession of faith

that the doll had its place in the living human family.

Here is a more stubborn exhibition on the part of another boy of this

lasting faith in the plaything called out by others’ sceptical attitude.

"When (writes a lady correspondent) he was just over two years old L.

began to speak of a favourite wooden horse (Dobbin) as if it were a real

living creature. ‘No tarpenter (carpenter) made Dobbin,’ he would say,

‘he is not wooden but kin (skin) and bones and Dod (God) made him.’ If

any one said ‘it’ in speaking of the horse his wrath was instantly

aroused, and he would shout indignantly: ‘It! You mutt’ent tay “it,” you

mut tay _he_’. He imagined the horse was possessed of every virtue and

it was strange to see what an influence this creature of his own

imagination exercised over him. If there was anything L. particularly

wished not to do his mother had only to say: ‘Dobbin would like you to

do this,’ and it was done without a murmur."

There is another domain of childish activity closely bordering on that

of play where a like suffusion of the world of sense by imagination

meets us. I refer to pictures and artistic representations generally. If

in the case of adults there is a half illusion, a kind of oneirotic or

trance condition induced by a picture or dramatic spectacle, in the case

of the less-instructed child the illusion is apt to become more

complete. A picture seems very much of a toy to a child. A baby of eight

or nine months will talk to a picture as to a living thing; and

something of this tendency to make a fetish of a drawing survives much

later. But it will be more convenient to deal with the attitude of the

child-mind towards pictorial representations in connexion with his

art-tendencies.

The imaginative transformation of things, more particularly the endowing

of lifeless things with life, enters, I believe, into all children’s

pastimes. Whence comes the perennial charm, the undying popularity, of

the hoop? Is not the interest here due to the circumstance that the

child controls a moving thing which in the capricious variations of its

course simulates a free will of its own? As I understand it, trundling

the hoop is imaginative play hardly less than riding the horse-stick and

slashing its flanks. Who again that can recall early experiences will

doubt that the delight of flying the kite, of watching it as it sways to

the right or to the left, threatening to fall head-foremost to earth,

and most of all perhaps of sending a paper ‘messenger’ along the string

to the wee thing poised like a bird so terribly far away in the blue

sky, is the delight of imaginative play? The same is true of sailing

boats, and other pastimes of early childhood.

I have here touched merely on the imaginative and half-illusory side of

children’s play. It is to be remembered, however, that play is much more

than this, and reflects much more of the childish mind. Play proper as

distinguished from mere day-dreaming is activity and imitative activity;

and children show marked differences in the energy of this activity, and

in the quickness and closeness of their responses to the model actions

of the real nurse, real coachman, and so forth. That is to say,

observation of others will count here. Again, while social surroundings,

opportunities for imitation, are important, they are by no means

all-decisive. Children show a curious selectiveness in their imitative

games, germs of differential interest, sexual and individual, revealing

themselves quite early. It may be added that a child with few

opportunities of observation may get quite enough play-material from

storyland. But play is never merely imitative, save indeed in the case

of unintelligent and ‘stoggy’ children. It is a bright invention into

which all the gifts of childish intelligence may pour themselves. The

relation of play to art will engage us later on.

_Free Projection of Fancies._

In play and the kindred forms of imaginative activity just dealt with,

we have been concerned with imaginative realisation in its connexion

with sense-perception. And here, it is to be noticed, there is a kind of

reciprocal action between sense and imagination. On the one hand, as we

have seen, imagination interposes a coloured medium, so to speak,

between the eye and the object, so that it becomes transformed and

beautified. On the other hand, in what is commonly called playing,

imaginative activity receives valuable aid from the senses. The stump of

a doll, woefully unlike as it is to what the child’s fancy makes it, is

yet a sensible fact, and as such gives support and substance to the

realising impulse.

Now this fact that imagination derives support from sense leads to a

habit of projecting fancies, and giving them an external and local

habitation. In this way the idea receives a certain solidity and fixity

through its embodiment in the real physical world.

This incorporation of images in the system of the real world may, like

play, start at one of two ends. On the one hand, the external world, so

far as it is only dimly perceived, excites wonder, curiosity, and the

desire to fill in the blank spaces with at least the semblance of

knowledge. Here distance exercises a strange fascination. The remote

chain of hills faintly visible from the child’s home, has been again and

again endowed by his enriching fancy with all manner of wondrous scenery

and peopled by all manner of strange creatures. The unapproachable

sky—which to the little one, so often on his back, is much more of a

visible object than to us—with its wonders of blue expanse and

cloudland, of stars and changeful moon, is wont to occupy his mind, his

bright fancy quite spontaneously filling out this big upper world with

appropriate forms.

This stimulating effect of the half-perceivable is seen in still greater

intensity in the case of what is hidden from sight. The spell cast on

the young mind by the mystery of holes, and especially of dark woods,

and the like, is known to all. C.’s peopling of a dark wood with his

_bêtes noires_ the wolves illustrates this tendency.

“What (writes a German author already quoted) all childish fancy has

almost without exception in common, is the idea of a wholly new and

unheard-of world behind the remote horizon, behind woods, lakes and

hills, and all objects reached by the eye. When I was a child and we

played hide and seek in the barn, I always felt that there must or might

be behind every bundle of straw, and especially in the corners,

something unheard of lying hidden. And yet I had no profane curiosity,

no desire to experiment by turning over the bundle of straw. It was just

a fancy, and though I half recognised it as such it was lively enough to

engage me as a reality.” The same writer goes on to describe how his

imagination ever occupied itself with what lay behind the long stretch

of wood which closed in a large part of his child’s horizon.[35]

-----

Footnote 35:

Goltz, _Das Buch der Kindheit_, p. 276.

-----

This imaginative filling up of the remote and the hidden recesses of the

outer world is subject to manifold stimulating influences from the

region of feeling. We know that all vivid imagination is charged with

emotion, and this is emphatically true of children’s phantasies. The

unseen, the hidden, contains unknown possibilities, something awful,

terrible, it may be, to make the timid wee thing shudder in anticipatory

vision, or wondrously and surprisingly beautiful. How far the childish

attitude is from intellectual curiosity is seen in the remark of Goltz,

that no impious attempt is made to probe the mystery.

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.

I have lately come across a very early, and as I think, remarkable

illustration of this form of childish thought. A little girl already

quoted, whom we will call M., when one year eleven months old, happened

to be walking with her mother on a windy day. At first she was delighted

at the strong boisterous wind, but then got tired and said: ‘Wind make

mamma’s hair untidy, Babba (her own name) make mamma’s hair tidy, _so

wind not blow adain_ (again)’. About three weeks later this child was

out in the rain, when she said to her mother: ‘Mamma, dy (dry) Babba’s

hands, _so not rain any more_’. What does this curious inversion of the

order of cause and effect mean? I am disposed to think that this little

girl, who was unusually bright and intelligent, was transferring to

nature’s phenomena the forms of her own experience. When she is

disorderly, and her mother or nurse arranges her hair or washes her

hands, it is in order that she may not continue to be disorderly. The

child is envisaging the wind and the rain as a kind of naughty child who

can be got to behave properly by effacing the effects of its

naughtiness. In other words they are both to be deterred from repeating

what is objectionable by a visible and striking manifestation of

somebody’s objection or prohibition. Here, it seems unmistakable, we

have a projection into nature of human purpose, of the idea of

determination of action by end: we have a form of anthropomorphism which

runs through the whole of primitive thought.

It seems to follow from this that there is a stage in the development of

a child’s intelligence when questions such as, ‘Why do the leaves fall?’

‘Why does the thunder make such a noise?’ are answered most

satisfactorily by a poetic fiction, by saying, for example, that the

leaves are old and tired of hanging on to the trees, and that the

thunder giant is in a particularly bad temper and making a noise. It is

perhaps permissible to make use of this fiction at times, more

especially when trying to answer the untiring questioning about animals

and their doings, a region of existence, by the way, of which even the

wisest of us knows exceedingly little. Yet the device has its risks; and

an ill-considered piece of myth-making passed off as an answer may find

itself awkwardly confronted by that most merciless of things, a child’s

logic.

We may notice something more in this early mode of interrogation.

Children are apt to think not only that things behave in general after

our manner, that their activity is determined by some end or purpose, or

that they have their useful function, their _raison d’être_ as we say,

but that this purpose concerns us human creatures. The wind and the rain

came and went in our little girl’s nature-theory just to vex or out of

consideration for ‘mamma’ and ‘Babba’. A little boy of two years two

months sitting on the floor one day in a bad temper looked up and saw

the sun shining and said captiously, ‘Sun not look at Hennie,’ and then

more pleadingly, ‘Please, sun, not look at poor Hennie’.[40] The sea,

when the child C. first saw it, was supposed to make its disturbing

noise with special reference to his small ears. We may call this the

anthropocentric idea, the essence of which is that man is the centre of

reference, the aim or target, in all nature’s processes. This

anthropocentric tendency again is shared by the child with the

uncultured adult. Primitive man looks on wind, rain, thunder as sent by

some angry spirit, and even a respectable English farmer tends to view

these operations of nature in much the same way. In children this

anthropocentric impulse is apt to get toned down by their temperament,

which is on the whole optimistic and decidedly practical, into a looking

out for the _uses_ of things. A boy, already quoted, once (towards the

end of the fourth year) asked his mother what the bees do. This question

he explained by adding: “What is the good of them?” When told that they

made honey he observed pertinently enough from his teleological

standpoint: “Then do they bring it for us to eat?” This shrewd little

fellow might have made short work of some of the arguments by which the

theological optimists of the last century were wont to ‘demonstrate’ the

Creator’s admirable adaptation of nature to man’s wants.

-----

Footnote 40:

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

-----

The frequency of this kind of ‘why?’ suggests that children’s thoughts

about things are penetrated with the idea of purpose and use. This is

shown too in other ways. M. A. Binet found by questioning children that

their ideas of things are largely made up of uses. Thus, asked what a

hat is, a child answered: “Pour mettre sur la tête”. Mr. H. E. Kratz of

Sioux City sends me some answers to questions by children of five on

entering a primary school, which illustrate the same point. Thus the

question, ‘What is a tree?’ brings out the answers, ‘To make the wind

blow,’ ‘To sit under,’ and so forth.

Little by little this idea of a definite purpose and use in this and

that thing falls back and the child gets interested more in the

production or origination of things. He wants to know who made the

trees, the birds, the stars and so forth. Here, though what we call

efficient, as distinguished from final, cause is recognised,

anthropomorphism survives in the idea of a maker analogous to the

carpenter. We shall see later that children habitually envisage the

deity as a fabricator.

All this rage of questioning about the uses and the origin of things is

the outcome, not merely of ignorance and curiosity, but of a deeper

motive, a sense of perplexity, of mystery or contradiction. It is not

always easy to distinguish the two types of question, yet in many cases

at least its form and the manner of putting it will tell us that it

issues from a puzzled and temporarily baffled brain. As long as the

questioning goes on briskly we may infer that a child believes in the

possibility of knowledge, and has not sounded the deepest depths of

intellectual despair. More pathetic than the saddest of questions is the

silencing of questions by the loss of faith.

It is easy to see that children must find themselves puzzled with much

which they see and hear of. The apparent exceptions to rules don’t

trouble the grown-up persons just because as _recurrent_ exceptions they

seem to take on a rule of their own. Thus adults though quite unversed

in hydrostatics would be incapable of being puzzled by C.’s problem: why

my putting my hand in water does not make a hole in it. Similarly,

though they know nothing of animal physiology they are never troubled by

the mystery of fish breathing under water, which when first noted by a

child may come as a sort of shock. The little boy just referred to, in

his far-reaching zoological interrogatory asked his mother: “Can they

(the fish) breathe with their moufs under water?”

In his own investigations, and in getting instruction from others, the

child is frequently coming upon puzzles of this sort. The same boy was

much exercised about the sea and where it went to. He expressed a wish

to take off his shoes and to walk out into the sea so as to see where

the ships go to, and was much troubled on learning that the sea got

deeper and deeper, and that if he walked out into it he would be

drowned. At first he denied the paradox (which he at once saw) of the

incoming sea going uphill: “But, mamma, it doesn’t run up, it doesn’t

run up, so it couldn’t come up over our heads?” He was told that this

was so, and he wisely began to try to accommodate his mind to this

startling revelation. C., it will be seen, was much exercised by this

problem of the moving mass of waters, wanting to know whether it came

half way up the world. Probably in both these cases the idea of water

rising had its uncanny alarming aspect.

It is probable that the disappearance of a thing is at a very early

stage a puzzle to the infant. Later on, too, the young mind continues to

be exercised about this mystery. Our little friend’s inquiry about the

whither of the big receding sea, “Where does the sea sim (swim) to?”

illustrates this perplexity. A child seems able to understand the

shifting of an object of moderate size from one part of space to

another, but his conception of space is probably not large enough to

permit him to realise how a big tract of water can pass out of the

visible scene into the unseen. The child’s question, “Where does all the

wind go to?” seems to have sprung from a like inability to picture a

vast unseen realm of space.

In addition to this difficulty of the disappearance of big things, there

seems to be something in the vastness, and the infinite number of

existent things perceived and heard about, which puzzles and oppresses

the young mind. The inability to take in all the new facts leads to a

kind of resentment of their multitude. “Mother,” asked a boy of four

years, “why _is_ there such a lot of things in the world if no one knows

all these things?” One cannot be quite sure of the underlying thought

here. The child may have meant merely to protest against the production

of so confusing a number of objects in the world. This certainly seems

to be the motive in some children’s inquiries, as when a little girl,

aged three years seven months, said: ‘Mamma, why do there be any more

days, why do there? and why don’t we leave off eating and drinking?’

Here the burdensomeness of mere multiplicity, of the unending procession

of days and meals, seems to be the motive. Yet it is possible that the

question about a lot of things not known to anybody was prompted by a

deeper difficulty, a dim presentiment of Berkeley’s idealism, that

things can exist only as objects of knowledge. This surmise may seem

far-fetched to some, yet I have found what seem to me other traces of

this tendency in children. A girl of six and a half years was talking to

her father about the making of the world. He pointed out to her the

difficulty of creating things out of nothing, showing her that when we

made things we simply fashioned materials anew. She pondered and then

said: “Perhaps the world’s a fancy”. Here again one cannot be quite sure

of the child-thought behind the words. Yet it certainly looks like a

falling back for a moment into the dreamy mood of the idealist, that

mood in which we seem to see the solid fabric of things dissolve into a

shadowy phantasmagoria.

The subject of origins is, as we know, beset with puzzles for the

childish mind. The beginnings of living things are, of course, the great

mystery. “There’s such a lot of things,” remarked the little zoologist I

have recently been quoting, “I want to know, that you say nobody knows,

mamma. I want to know who made God, and I want to know if Pussy has eggs

to help her make ickle (little) kitties.” Finding that this was not so,

he observed: “Oh, then, I s’pose she has to have God to help her if she

doesn’t have kitties in eggs given her to sit on”. Another little boy,

five years old, found his way to the puzzle of the reciprocal genetic

relation of the hen and the egg, and asked his mother: “When there _is_

no egg where does the hen come from? When there _was_ no egg, I mean,

where _did_ the hen come from?” In a similar way, as we shall see in

C.’s journal, a child will puzzle his brains by asking how the first

child was suckled, or, as a little girl of four and a half years put it,

"When everybody was a baby—then who could be their nurse—if they were

all babies?" The beginnings of human life are, as we know, a standing

puzzle for the young investigator.

Much of this questioning is metaphysical in that it transcends the

problems of every-day life and of science. The child is metaphysician in

the sense in which the earliest human thinkers were metaphysicians,

pushing his questioning into the inmost nature of things, and back to

their absolute beginnings, as when he asks ‘Who made God?’ or ‘What was

there before God?’[41] He has no idea yet of the confines of human

knowledge. If his mother tells him she does not know he tenaciously

clings to the idea that somebody knows, the doctor it may be, or the

clergyman—or possibly the policeman, of whose superior knowledge one

little girl was forcibly convinced by noting that her father once asked

information of one of these stately officials.

-----

Footnote 41:

Illustrations are given by Compayré, _op. cit._, and by P. Lombroso,

_Psicologia del Bambino_, p. 47 ff.

-----

Strange, bizarre, altogether puzzling to the listener, are some of these

childish questions. A little American girl of nine years after a pause

in talk re-commenced the conversation by asking: “Why don’t I think of

something to say?” A play recently performed in a London theatre made

precisely this appeal to others by way of getting at one’s own motives a

chief amusing feature in one of its comical characters. Another little

American girl aged three one day left her play and her baby sister named

Edna Belle to find her mother and ask: “Mamma, why isn’t Edna Belle me,

and why ain’t I Edna Belle?”[42] The narrator of this story adds that

the child was not a daughter of a professor of metaphysics but of

practical farmer folk. One cannot be quite sure of the precise drift of

this question. It may well have been the outcome of a new development of

self-consciousness, of a clearer awareness of the self in its

distinctness from others. A question with a much clearer metaphysical

ring about it, showing thought about the subtlest problems, was that put

by a boy of the same age: “If I’d gone upstairs, could God make it that

I hadn’t?” This is a good example of the type of question: ‘Can he make

a thing done not to have been done?’ which according to Erasmus was much

debated by theologians.[43]

-----

Footnote 42:

Quoted from an article, “Some Comments on Babies,” by Miss Shinn in

the _Overland Monthly_, Jan., 1894.

-----

Footnote 43:

Froude, _Letters of Erasmus_, Lect. vii.

-----

With many children confronted with the mysteries of God and the devil

this questioning often reproduces the directions of theological

speculation. Thus the problem of the necessity of evil is clearly

recognisable in the question once put by an American boy under eight

years of age to a priest who visited his home: “Father, why don’t God

kill the devil and then there would be no more wickedness in the world?”

All children’s questioning does not of course take this sublime

direction. Along with the tendency to push back inquiry to the

unreachable beginning of things we mark a more modest and scientific

line of investigation into the observable and explainable processes of

nature. Some questions which a busy listener would pooh-pooh as dreamy

have a genuinely scientific value, showing that the little inquirer is

trying to work out some problem of fact. This is illustrated by a

question put by a little boy aged three years nine months: “Why don’t we

see two things with our two eyes?” a problem which, as we know, has

exercised older psychologists.

When this more definitely scientific direction is taken by a child’s

questioning we may observe that the ambitious ‘why?’ begins to play a

second _rôle_, the first being now taken by the more modest ‘how?’ The

germ of this kind of inquiry may be present in some of the early

questioning about growth. “How,” asked our little zoologist, “does

plants grow when we plant them, and how does boys grow from babies to

big boys like me? Has I grown now whilst I was eating my supper? See!”

and he stood up to make the most of his stature. Clearer evidence of a

directing of inquiry into the processes of things appears in the fifth

and sixth years. A little girl of four years seven months among other

questionings wanted to know what makes the trains move, and how we move

our eyes. The incessant inquiries of the boy Clark Maxwell into the ‘go’

of this thing or the ‘particular go’ of that illustrate in a clearer

manner the early tendency to direct questioning to the more manageable

problems to which science confines itself.

These different lines of questioning are apt to run on concurrently from

the end of the third year, a fit of eager curiosity about animals or

other natural objects giving place to a fit of theological inquiry, this

again being dropped for an equally eager inquiry into the making of

clocks, railway engines, and so on. Yet through these alternating bouts

of questioning we can distinguish something like a law of intellectual

progress. Questioning as the most direct expression of a child’s

curiosity follows the development of his groups of ideas and of the

interests which help to construct these. Thus I think it a general rule

that questioning about the make or mechanism of things follows

questioning about animal ways just because the zoological interest (in a

very crude form of course) precedes the mechanical. The scope of this

early questioning will, moreover, expand with intellectual capacity, and

more particularly the capability of forming the more abstruse kind of

childish idea. Thus inquiries into absolute beginnings, into the origin

of the world and of God himself, indicate the presence of a larger

intellectual grasp of time-relations and of the processes of becoming.

Our survey of the field of childish questioning suggests that it is by

no means an easy matter to deal with. It must be admitted, I think, by

the most enthusiastic partisan of children that their questioning is of

very unequal value. It may often be noticed that a child’s ‘why?’ is

used in a sleepy mechanical way with no real desire for knowledge, any

semblance of answer being accepted without an attempt to put a meaning

into it. A good deal of the more importunate kind of children’s

questioning, when they follow up question by question recklessly, as it

seems, and without definite aim, appears to be of this formal and

lifeless character, an expression not of a healthy intellectual

activity, but merely of a mood of general mental discontent and

peevishness. In a certain amount of childish questioning, indeed, we

have, I suspect, to do with a distinctly abnormal mental state, with an

analogue of that mania of questions, or passion for mental rummaging or

prying into everything, “Grubelsucht” as the Germans call it, which is a

well-known phase of mental disease, and prompts the patient to put such

questions as this: “Why do I stand here where I stand?” “Why is a glass

a glass, a chair a chair?” Such questioning ought, it is evident, not to

be treated too seriously. We may attach too much significance to a

child’s question, labouring hard to grasp its meaning, with a view to

answering it, when we should be wiser if we viewed it as a symptom of

mental irritability and peevishness, to be got rid of as quickly as

possible by a good romp or other healthy distraction.[44]

-----

Footnote 44:

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

-----

To admit, however, that children’s questions may now and again need this

sort of wholesome snubbing is far from saying that we ought to treat all

their questioning with a mild contempt. The little questioners flatter

us by attributing superior knowledge to us, and good manners should

compel us to treat their questions with some attention. And if now and

then they torment us with a string of random reckless questioning, in

how many cases, one wonders, are they not made to suffer, and that

wrongfully, by having perfectly serious questions rudely cast back on

their hands? The truth is that to understand and to answer children’s

questions is a considerable art, including both a large and deep

knowledge of things, and a quick sympathetic insight into the little

questioners’ minds, and few of us have at once the intellectual and the

moral excellences needed for an adequate treatment of them. It is one of

the tragi-comic features of human life that the ardent little explorer

looking out with wide-eyed wonder upon his new world should now and

again find as his first guide a nurse or even a mother who will resent

the majority of his questions as disturbing the luxurious mood of

indolence in which she chooses to pass her days. We can never know how

much valuable mental activity has been checked, how much hope and

courage cast down by this kind of treatment. Yet happily the questioning

impulse is not easily eradicated, and a child who has suffered at the

outset from this wholesale contempt may be fortunate enough to meet,

while the spirit of investigation is still upon him, one who knows and

who has the good nature and the patience to impart what he knows in

response to a child’s appeal.

IV.

PRODUCTS OF CHILD-THOUGHT.

_The Child’s Thoughts about Nature._

We have seen in the previous article how a child’s mind behaves when

brought face to face with the unknown. We will now examine some of the

more interesting results of this early thought-activity, what are known

as the characteristic ideas of children. There is no doubt, I think,

that children, by reflecting on what they see or otherwise experience

and what they are told by others, fashion their own ideas about nature,

death and the rest. This tendency, as pointed out above, discloses

itself to some extent in their questions about things. It has now to be

more fully studied in their sayings as a whole. The ideas thus formed

will probably prove to vary considerably in the case of different

children, yet to preserve throughout these variations a certain general

character.

These ideas, moreover, like those of primitive races, will be found to

be a crude attempt at a connected system. We must not, of course, expect

too much here. The earliest thought of mankind about nature and the

supernatural was very far from being elaborated into a consistent

logical whole; yet we can see general forms of conception or tendencies

of thought running through the whole. So in the case of this largely

spontaneous child-thought. It will disclose to an unsparing critical

inspection vast gaps, and many unsurmounted contradictions. Thus in the

case of children, as in that of uncultured races, the supernatural realm

is at first brought at most into only a very loose connexion with the

visible world. All the same there is seen, in the measure of the

individual child’s intelligence, the endeavour to co-ordinate, and the

poor little hard-pressed brain of a child will often pluckily do its

best in trying to bring some connexion into that congeries of

disconnected worlds into which he finds himself so confusingly

introduced, partly by the motley character of his own experiences, as

the alternations of waking and sleeping, partly by the haphazard

miscellaneous instruction, mythological, historical, theological, and

the rest, with which we inconsiderately burden his mind.

As was observed in dealing with children’s imaginative activity, this

primitive child-lore, like its prototype in folk-lore, is largely a

product of a naïve vivid fancy. In assigning the relations of things and

their reasons, a child’s mind does not make use of abstract conceptions.

It does not talk about “relation,” but pictures out the particular

relation it wants to express by a figurative expression, as in

apperceiving the juxtaposition of moon and star as mamma and baby. So it

does not talk of abstract force, but figures some concrete form of

agency, as in explaining the wind by the idea of somebody’s waving a big

fan somewhere. This first crude attempt of the child to envisage the

world is, indeed, largely mythological, proceeding by the invention of

concrete and highly pictorial ideas of fairies, giants and their doings.

The element of thought comes in with the recognition of the real as

such, and with the application of the products of young phantasy to

comprehending and explaining this reality. And here we see how this

primitive child-thought, though it remains instinct with glowing

imagery, differentiates itself from pure fancy. This last knows no

restraint, and aims only at the delight of its spontaneous play-like

movements, whereas thought is essentially the serious work of realising

and understanding what exists. The contrast is seen plainly enough if we

compare the mental attitude of the child when he is frankly romancing,

giving out now and again a laugh, which shows that he himself fully

recognises the absurdity of his talk, with his attitude when in gravest

of moods he is calling upon his fancy to aid reason in explaining some

puzzling fact.

How early this splitting of the child’s imaginative activity into these

two forms, the playful and the thoughtful, takes place is not, I think,

very easy to determine. Many children at least are apt at first to take

all that is told them as gospel. To most of them about the age of three

and four, I suspect, fairyland, if imagined at all, is as much a reality

as the visible world. The disparity of its contents, the fairies,

dragons and the rest, with those of the world of sense does not trouble

their mind, the two worlds not being as yet mentally juxtaposed and

dove-tailed one into the other. It is only later when the desire to

understand overtakes and even passes the impulse to frame bright and

striking images, and, as a result of this, critical reflexion applies

itself to the nursery legends and detects their incongruity with the

world of every-day perception, that a clear distinction comes to be

drawn between reality and fiction, what exists and can (or might) be

verified by sense, and what is only pictured by the mind.

With this preliminary peep into the _modus operandi_ of children’s

thought, let us see what sort of ideas of things they fashion.

Beginning with their ideas of natural objects we find, as has been

hinted, the influence of certain predominant tendencies. Of these the

most important is the impulse to think of what is far off, whether in

space or time, and so unobservable, as like what is near and observed.

Along with this tendency, or rather as one particular development of it,

there goes the disposition already illustrated, to vivify nature, to

personify things and so to assimilate their behaviour to the child’s

own, and to explain the origin of things by ideas of making and aiming

at some purpose. Since, at the same time that these tendencies are still

dominant, the child by his own observation and by such instruction as he

gets, is gaining insight into the ‘how,’ the mechanism of things, we

find that his cosmology is apt to be a quaint jumble of the scientific

and the mythological. Thus the boy C. tried to conceive of the divine

creation of men as a mechanical process with well-marked stages—the

fashioning of stone men, iron men, and then real men. In many cases we

can see that a nature-myth comes in to eke out the deficiencies of

mechanical insight. Thus, the production of thunder and other strange

and inexplicable phenomena is referred, as by the savage, and even by

many so-called civilised men and women, to the direct interposition of a

supernatural agency. The theological idea with which children are

supplied is apt to shape itself into that of a capricious and awfully

clever demiurgos, who not only made the world-machine but alters its

working as often as he is disposed. With this idea of a supernatural

agent there is commonly combined that of a natural process as means

employed, as when thunder is supposed to be caused by God’s treading

heavily on the floor of the sky. Contradictions are not infrequent, the

mythological impulse sometimes alternating with a more distinctly

scientific impulse to grasp the mechanical process, as when wind is

sometimes thought of, as caused by a big fan, and sometimes, _e.g._,

when heard moaning in the night, endowed with life and feeling.

I shall make no attempt to give a methodical account of children’s

thoughts about nature. I suspect that a good deal more material will

have to be collected before a complete description of these thoughts is

possible. I shall content myself with giving a few samples of their

ideas so far as my own studies have thrown light on them.

With respect to the make or substance of things children are, I believe,

disposed to regard all that they see as having the resistant quality of

solid material substance.

At first, that is to say after the child has had experience enough of

seeing and touching things at the same time to know that the two

commonly go together, he believes that all which he sees is tangible or

substantial. Thus he will try to touch shadows, sunlight dancing on the

wall, and picture forms. This tendency to “reify,” or make things of,

his visual impressions shows itself in pretty forms, as when the little

girl M., one year eleven months old, “gathered sunlight in her hands and

put it on her face”. The same child about a month earlier expressed a

wish to wash some black smoke. This was the same child that tried to

make the wind behave by making her mother’s hair tidy; and her belief in

the material reality of the wind was shown by her asking her mother to

lift her up high so that she might see the wind. This last, it is to be

noted, was an inference from touching and resisting to seeing.[45] Wind,

it has been well remarked, keeps something of its substantiality for all

of us long after shadows have become the type of unreality, proving that

the experience of resisting something lies at the root of our sense of

material substance. That older children believe in the wind as a living

thing seems suggested by the readiness with which they get up a kind of

play-tussle with it. That wind even in less fanciful moments is reified

is suggested by the following story from the Worcester collection. A

girl aged nine was looking out and seeing the wind driving the snow in

the direction of a particular town, Milbury: whereupon she remarked,

“I’d like to live down in Milbury”. Asked why, she replied, “There must

be a lot of wind down there, it’s all blowing that way”.

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Footnote 45:

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

“I felt you push, I heard you call,

I could not see yourself at all”.

_A Child’s Garden of Verse_, xxv.

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Children, as may be seen in this story, are particularly interested in

the movements of things. Movement is the clearest and most impressive

manifestation of life. All apparently spontaneous or self-caused

movements are accordingly taken by children, as by primitive man, to be

the sign of life, the outcome of something analogous to their own

impulses. Hence the movements of falling leaves, of running water, of

feathers and the like are specially suggestive of life. Wind owes much

of its vitality, as seen in the facile personification of it by the

poet, to its apparently uncaused movements. Some children in the Infant

Department of a London Board School were asked what things in the room

were alive, and they promptly replied the smoke and the fire. Big things

moving by an internal mechanism of which the child knows nothing, more

especially engines, are of course endowed with life. A little girl of

thirteen months offered a biscuit to a steam-tram, and the author of

_The Invisible Playmate_ tells us that his little girl wanted to stroke

the “dear head” of a locomotive. A child has been known to ask whether a

steam-engine was alive. In like manner, savages on first seeing the

self-moving steamer take it for a big animal. The fear of a dog at the

sight of an unfamiliar object appearing to move of itself, as a parasol

blown along the ground by the wind, seems to imply a rudiment of the

same impulse to interpret self-movement as a sign of life.[46]

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Footnote 46:

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

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The child’s impulse to give life to moving things may lead him to

overlook the fact that the movement is caused by an external force, and

this even when the force is exerted by himself. The boy C. on finding

the cushion he was sitting upon slipping from under him in consequence

of his own wriggling movements pronounced it alive. In like manner

children, as suggested above, ascribe life to their moving playthings.

Thus, C.’s sister when five years old stopped one day trundling her

hoop, and turning to her mother, exclaimed: “Ma, I do think this hoop

must be alive, it is so sensible: it goes where I want it to”. Another

little girl two and a quarter years old on having a string attached to a

ball put into her hand, and after swinging it round mechanically, began

to notice the movement of the ball, and said to herself, “Funny ball!”

In both these cases, although the movement was directly caused by the

child, it was certainly in the first case, and apparently in the second,

attributed to the object.

Next to movement apparently spontaneous sound appears to be a common

reason for attributing life to inanimate objects. Are not movement and

vocal sound the two great channels of utterance of the child’s own

impulses? The little girl M., when just two years old, being asked by

her mother for a kiss, answered prettily, ‘Tiss (kiss) gone away’. This

may, of course, have been merely a child’s way of using language, but

the fact that the same little girl asked to see a ‘knock’ suggests that

she was disposed to give reality and life to sounds. Its sound greatly

helps the persuasion that the wind is alive. A little boy assured his

teacher that the wind was alive, for he heard it whistling in the night.

The ascription of life to fire is probably aided by its sputtering

crackling noises. The impulse, too, to endow so little organic-looking

an object as a railway engine with conscious life is probably supported

by the knowledge of its puffing and whistling. Pierre Loti, when as a

child he first saw the sea, regarded it as a living monster, no doubt on

the ground of its movement and its noise. The personification of the

echo by the child, of which George Sand’s reminiscences give an

excellent example, as also by uncultured man, is a signal illustration

of the suggestive force of a voice-like sound.

Closely connected with this impulse to ascribe life to what older folk

regard as inanimate objects is the tendency to conceive them as growing.

This is illustrated in the remark of the boy C., that his stick would in

time grow bigger. On the other hand, there is in the Worcester

Collection a curious story of a little American boy of three who, having

climbed up into a large waggon, and being asked, “How are you going to

get out?” replied, “I can stay here till it gets little and then I can

get out my own self”. We shall see presently that shrinkage or

diminution of size is sometimes attributed by the child-mind to people

when getting old. So that we seem to have in each of these cases the

extension to things generally of an idea first formed in connexion with

the observation of human life.

Children’s ideas of natural objects are anthropomorphic, not merely as

reflecting their own life, but as modelled after the analogy of the

effects of their action. Quite young children are apt to extend the

ideas broken and mended to objects generally. Anything which seems to

have become reduced by losing a portion of itself is said to be

‘broken’. A little boy of three, on seeing the moon partly covered by a

cloud, remarked, “The moon is broken”. On the other hand, in the case of

one little boy, everything intact was said to be mended. It may be said,

however, that we cannot safely infer from such analogical use of common

language that children distinctly think of all objects as undergoing

breakage and repair: for these expressions in the child’s vocabulary may

refer rather to the resulting appearances, than to the processes by

which they are brought about.

Clearer evidences of this reflexion on to nature of the characteristics

of his own life appear when a child begins to speculate about mechanical

processes, which he invariably conceives of after the analogy of his own

actions. This was illustrated in dealing with children’s questions. We

see it still more clearly manifested in some of their ideas. One of the

most curious instances of this that I have met with is seen in early

theorisings about the cause of wind. One of the children examined by Mr.

Kratz said the tree was to make the wind blow. A pupil of mine

distinctly recalls that when a child he accounted for the wind at night

by the swaying of two large elms in front of the house and not far from

the windows of his bedroom. This reversing of the real order of cause

and effect looks silly, until we remember that the child necessarily

looks at movement in the light of his own actions. He moves things,

_e.g._, the water, by his moving limbs; we set the air in motion by a

moving fan; it seems, therefore, natural to him that the wind-movements

should be caused by the pressure of some moving thing; and there is the

tree actually seen to be moving.