Man early acquires automatic tendencies and abilities quite
beyond the compass of his natural equipment. Man is gifted
natively with a brief and fleeting form of attention, but by
exercise and wise guidance its effectiveness may be greatly
increased both as to direction and span. Imagination and memory
may be natively vigorous in a desultory and disorganized sort
of a way and yet be comparatively helpless when confronted with
a situation requiring the organization of details into a system
or unit. For example, children may get a great deal of pleasure
out of fairy stories long before they understand much from the
various disconnected and often incorrect interpretations they
make of the words they have heard. This tendency is shown also
in childish explanations of things. One young man notices that
leaves, sticks, and stones left standing some time on the pond
where he skated gradually sink into the ice. He notices, also,
that slight scratches and flakes of snow gradually disappear.
Such data led him to explain to himself the phenomenon as
due to the fact that the water worked through the pores of
the ice and froze on the top. It is evident that he had not
heard of radiation from dark as compared with light surfaces,
but it illustrated an automatic tendency to explain things
fairly well developed which was quite beyond the power of
man naturally.--STUART H. ROWE, “Proceedings of the
Religious Education Association,” 1907.
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