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”.

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]

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.

So far I have spoken for the most part of children’s ideas about near and accessible objects. Their notions of what is distant and inaccessible are, as remarked, wont to be formed on the model of the first. Here, however, their knowledge of things will be largely dependent on others’ information, so that the naÏve impulse of childish intelligence has, as best it may, to work under the limitations of an imperfectly understood language.

It is perhaps hardly necessary to remind the reader that children’s ideas of distance before they begin to travel far are necessarily very inadequate. They are disposed to localise the distant objects they see, as the sun, moon and stars, and the places they hear about on the earth’s surface as near as possible. The tendency to approximate things as seen in the infant’s stretching out of the hand to touch the moon lives on in the later impulse to localise the sky and heavenly bodies just beyond the farthest terrestrial object seen, as when a child thought they were just above the church spire, another that they could be reached by tying a number of ladders together, another that the setting sun went close behind the ridge of hills, and so forth. The stars, being so much smaller looking, seem to be located farther off than the sun and moon. Similarly when they hear of a distant place, as India, they tend to project it just beyond the farthest point known to them, say Hampstead, to which they were once taken on a long, long journey from their East End home. A child’s standard of size and distance is, as all know who have revisited the home of their childhood after many years, very different from the adult’s. To the little legs unused as yet to more than short spells of locomotion a mile seems stupendous: and then the half-formed brain cannot yet pile up the units of measurement well enough to conceive of hundreds and thousands of miles.

The child appears to think of the world as a circular plain, and of the sky as a sort of inverted bowl upon it. C.’s sister used on looking at the sky to fancy she was inside a blue balloon. That is to say he takes them to be what they look. In a similar manner C. took the sun to be a great disc which could be put on the round globe to make a ‘see-saw’. When this ‘natural realism’ gets corrected, children go to work to convert what is told them into an intelligible form. Thus they begin to speculate about the other side of the globe, and, as Mr. Barrie reminds us, are apt to fancy they can know about it by peeping down a well. When religious instruction introduces the new region of heaven they are apt to localise it just above the sky, which to their thought forms its floor. Some genuine thought-work is seen in the effort to harmonise the various things they learn by observation and instruction about the celestial region into a connected whole. Thus the sky is apt to be thought of as thin, this idea being probably formed for the purpose of explaining the shining through of moon and stars. Stars are, as we know, commonly thought of by the child as holes in the sky letting through the light beyond. One Boston child ingeniously applied the idea of the thinness of the sky to explain the appearance of the moon when one half is bright and the other faintly illumined, supposing it to be half-way through the partially diaphanous floor. Others again prettily accounted for the waning of the moon to a crescent by saying it was half stuck or half buttoned into the sky.

The movements of the sun and other heavenly bodies are similarly apperceived by help of ideas of movements of familiar terrestrial objects. Thus the sun was thought by the Boston children half-mythologically, half-mechanically, to roll, to fly, to be blown (like a soap bubble or balloon?) and so forth. The anthropocentric form of teleological explanation is apt to creep in, as when a Boston child said charmingly that the moon comes round when people forget to light some lamps. Theological ideas, too, are pressed into this sphere of explanation, as in the attribution of the disappearance of the sun to God’s pulling it up higher out of sight, to his taking it into heaven and putting it to bed, and so forth. These ideas are pretty obviously not those of a country child with a horizon. There is rather more of nature-observation in the idea of another child that the sun after setting lies under the trees where angels mind it.

The impressive phenomena of thunder and lightning give rise in the case of the child as in that of the Nature-man to some fine myth-making. The American children, as already observed, have different mechanical illustrations for setting forth the modus of the supernatural operation here, thunder being thought of now as God groaning, now as his walking heavily on the floor of heaven (cf. the old Norse idea that thunder is caused by the rolling of Thor’s chariot), now as his hammering, now as his having coals run in—ideas which show how naÏvely the child-mind humanises the Deity, making him a respectable citizen with a house and a coal-cellar. In like manner the lightning is attributed to God’s burning the gas quick, striking many matches at once, or other familiar human device for getting a brilliant light suddenly. So God turns on rain by a tap, or lets it down from a cistern by a hose, or, better, passes it through a sieve or a dipper with holes.^[47] In like manner a high wind was explained by a girl of five and a half by saying that it was God’s birthday, and he had received a trumpet as a present.

Throughout the whole region of these mysterious phenomena we have illustrations of the anthropocentric tendency to regard what takes place as designed for us poor mortals. The little girl of whom Mr. Canton writes thought “the wind, and the rain and the moon ‘walking’ came out to see her, and the flowers woke up with the same laudable object”.^[48] When frightened by the crash of the thunder a child instinctively thinks that it is all done to vex his little soul. One of the funniest examples of the application of this idea I have met with is in the Worcester Collection. Two children, D. and K., aged ten and five respectively, live in a small American town. D., who is reading about an earthquake, addresses his mother thus: “Oh, isn’t it dreadful, mamma? Do you suppose we will ever have one here?” K., intervening with the characteristic impulse of the young child to correct his elders: “Why, no, D., they don’t have earthquakes in little towns like this”. There is much to unravel in this delightful childish observation. It looks to my mind as if the earthquake were envisaged by the little five-year-old as a show, God being presumably the travelling showman, who takes care to display his fearful wonders only where there is an adequate body of spectators.

Finally, the same impulse to understand the new and strange by assimilating it to the familiar is, so far as I can gather, seen in children’s first ideas about those puzzling semblances of visible objects which are due to subjective sensations. As we shall see in C.’s case the bright spectra or after-images caused by looking at the sun are instinctively objectived by the child, that is regarded as things external to his body. Here is a pretty full account of a child’s thought about these subjective optical phenomena. A little boy of five, our little zoologist, in poor health at the time, “constantly imagined he saw angels, and said they were not white, that was a mistake, they were little coloured things, light and beautiful, and they went into the toy-basket and played with his toys”. Here we have not only objectifying but myth-building. A year later he returned to the subject. “He stood at the window at B. looking out at a sea-mist thoughtfully and said suddenly, ‘Mamma, do you remember I told you that I had seen angels? Well, I want now to say they were not angels, though I thought they were. I have seen it often lately, I see it now: it is bright stars, small bright stars moving by. I see it in the mist before that tree. I see it oftenest in the misty days.... Perhaps by-and-by I shall think it is something in my own eyes.’” Here we see a long and painstaking attempt of a child’s brain to read a meaning into the ‘flying spots,’ which many of us know though we hardly give them a moment’s attention.

What are children’s first thoughts about their dreams like? I have not been able to collect much evidence on this head. What seems certain is that to the simple intelligence of the child these counterfeits of ordinary sense-presentations are real external things. The crudest manifestation of this thought-tendency is seen in taking the dream-apparition to be actually present in the bedroom. A boy in an elementary school in London, aged five years, said one day: “Teacher, I saw an old woman one night against my bed”. Another child, a little girl, in the same school told her mother that she had seen a funeral last night, and on being asked, “Where?” answered quaintly, “I saw it in my pillow”. A little boy whom I know once asked his mother not to put him to bed in a certain room, “because there were so many dreams in the room”. In thus materialising the dream and localising it in the actual surroundings, the child but reflects the early thought of the race which starts from the supposition that the man or animal which appears in a dream is a material reality which actually approaches the sleeper.

The Nature-man, as we know from Professor Tylor’s researches, goes on to explain dreams by his theory of souls or ‘doubles’ (animism). Children do not often find their way to so subtle a line of thought. Much more commonly they pass from the first stage of acceptance of objects present to their senses to the identification of dreamland with the other and invisible world of fairyland. There is little doubt that the imaginative child firmly believes in the existence of this invisible world, keeps it apart from the visible one, even though at times he may give it a definite locality in this (e.g., in C.’s case, the wall of the bedroom). He gets access to it by shutting out the real world, as when he closes his eyes tightly and ‘thinks’. With such a child, dreams get taken up into the invisible world. Going to sleep is now recognised as the surest way of passing into this region. The varying colour of his dreams, now bright and dazzling in their beauty, now black and terrifying, may be explained by a reference to the division of that fairy world into princes, good fairies, on the one hand, and cruel giants, witches, and the like, on the other.

We may now pass to some of children’s characteristic ideas about living things, more particularly human beings, and the familiar domestic animals. The most interesting of these I think are those respecting growth and birth.

As already mentioned, growth is one of the most stimulating of childish puzzles. A child, led no doubt by what others tell him, finds that things are in general made bigger by additions from without, and his earliest conception of growth is, I think, that of such addition. Thus, plants are made to grow, that is, swell out, by the rain. The idea that the growth or expansion of animals comes from eating is easily reached by the childish intelligence, and, as we know, nurses and parents have a way of recommending the less attractive sorts of diet by telling children that they will make them grow. The idea that the sun makes us grow, often suggested by parents (who may be ignorant of the fact that growth is more rapid in the summer than in the winter), is probably interpreted by the analogy of an infusion of something into the body.

In carrying out my inquiries into this region of childish ideas, I lighted quite unexpectedly on the queer notion that towards the end of life there is a reverse process of shrinkage. Old people are supposed to become little again. The first instance of this was supplied me by the Worcester Collection of Thoughts. A little girl of three once said to her mother: “When I am a big girl and you are a little girl I shall whip you just as you whipped me now”. At first one is almost disposed to think that this child must have heard of Mr. Anstey’s amusing story Vice VersÂ. Yet this idea seems too improbable: and I have since found that she is not by any means the only one who has entertained this idea. A little boy that I know, when about three and a half years old, used often to say to his mother with perfect seriousness of manner: “When I am big then you will be little, then I will carry you about and dress you and put you to sleep”.

I happened to mention this fact at a meeting of mothers and teachers, when I received further evidence of this tendency of child-thought. One lady whom I know could recollect quite clearly that when a little girl she was promised by her aunt some treasures, trinkets I fancy, when she grew up; and that she at once turned to her aunt and promised her that she would then give her in exchange all her dolls, as by that time she (the aunt) would be a little girl. Another case narrated was that of a little girl of three and a half years, who when her elder brother and sister spoke to her about her getting big rejoined: “What will you do when you are little?” A third case mentioned was that of a child asking about some old person of her acquaintance: “When will she begin to get small?” I have since obtained corroboratory instances from parents and teachers of infant classes. Thus a lady writes that a little girl, a cousin of hers aged four, to whom she was reading something about an old woman, asked: “Do people turn back into babies when they get quite old?”

What, it may be asked, does this queer idea of shrinkage in old age mean? By what quaint zig-zag movement of childish thought was the notion reached? I cannot learn that there is any such idea in primitive folk-lore, and this suggests that children find their way to it, in part at least, by the suggestions of older people’s words. A child may, no doubt, notice that old people stoop, and look small, and the fairy book with little old women may strengthen the tendency to think of shrinkage. But I cannot bring myself to believe that this would suffice to produce the idea in so many cases.

That there is much in what the little folk hear us say fitted to raise in their minds an idea of shrinking back into child-form is certain. Many children must, at some time or another, have overheard their elders speaking of old feeble people getting childish; and we must remember that even the attributive ‘silly’ applied to old people might lead a child to infer a return to childhood; for if there is one thing that children—true unsophisticated children—believe in it is the all-knowingness of grown-ups as contrasted with the know-nothingness of themselves. C.’s belief in the preternatural calculating powers of Goliath is an example of this correlation in the child’s consciousness between size and intelligence.^[49]

But I suspect that there is a further source of this characteristic product of early thought, involving still more of the child’s philosophizing. As we have seen, a child cannot accept an absolute beginning of things, and we shall presently find that he is equally incapable of believing in an absolute ending. He knows that we begin our earthly life as babies. Well, the babies must come from something, and when we die we must pass into something. What more natural, then, than the idea of a rhythmical alternation of cycles of existence, babies passing into grown-ups, and these again into babies, and so the race kept going? Does this seem too far-fetched an explanation? I think it will be found less so if it is remembered that according to our way of instructing these active little brains, people are brought to earth as babies in angels’ arms, and that when they die they are taken back also in angels’ arms. Now as the angel remains of constant size,—for this their pictures vouch—it follows that old people, when they are dead at least, must have shrivelled up to nursable dimensions; and as the child, when he philosophizes, knows nothing of miraculous or cataclasmic changes, he naturally supposes that this shrivelling up is gradual like that of flowers and other things when they fade.^[50]

I am disposed to think, then, that in this idea of senile shrinkage we have one of the most interesting and convincing examples of a child’s philosophizing, of his impulse to reflect on what he sees and hears about with a view to systematise. Yet the matter requires further observation. Is it thoughtful, intelligent children, who excogitate this idea? Would it be possible to get the child’s own explanation of it before he has completely outgrown it?^[51]

The origin of babies and young animals furnishes the small brain, as we have seen, with much food for speculation. Here the little thinker is not often left to excogitate a theory for himself. His inconvenient questionings in this direction have to be firmly checked, and various and truly wonderful are the ways in which the nurse and the mother are wont to do this. Any fiction is supposed to be good enough for the purpose. Divine action, as remarked above, is commonly called in, the questioner being told that the baby has been sent down from heaven in the arms of an angel and so forth. Fairy stories with their pretty conceits, as that of the child Thumbkin growing out of a flower in Hans Andersen’s book, contribute their suggestions, and so there arises a mass of child-lore about babies in which we can see that the main ideas are supplied by others, though now and again we catch a glimpse of the child’s own contributions. Thus according to Stanley Hall’s report the Boston children said, among other things, that God makes babies in heaven, lets them down or drops them for the women and doctors to catch them, or that he brings them down a wooden ladder backwards and pulls it up again, or that mamma, nurse or doctor goes up and fetches them in a balloon. They are said by some to grow in cabbages or to be placed by God in water, perhaps in the sewer, where they are found by the doctor, who takes them to sick folks that want them. Here we have delicious touches of childish fancy, quaint adaptations of fairy and Bible lore, as in the use of Jacob’s ladder and of the legend of Moses placed among the bulrushes, this last being enriched by the thorough master-stroke of child-genius, the idea of the dark, mysterious, wonder-producing sewer. In spite too of all that others do to impress the traditional notions of the nursery here, we find that a child will now and again think out the whole subject for himself. The little boy C. is not the only one I find who is of the opinion that babies are got at a shop. Another little boy, I am informed, once asked his mamma in the abrupt childish manner, “Mamma, vere did Tommy (his own name) tum (come) from?” and then with the equally childish way of sparing you the trouble of answering his question, himself observed, quite to his own satisfaction, “Mamma did tie (buy) Tommy in a s’op (shop)”. Another child, seeing the announcement “Families Supplied” in a grocer’s shop, begged his mother to get him a baby. This looks like a real childish idea. To the young imagination the shop is a veritable wonderland, an Eldorado of valuables, and it appears quite reasonable to the childish intelligence that babies like dolls and other treasures should be procurable there.

The ideas partly communicated by others, partly thought out for themselves are carried over into the beginnings of animal life. Thus, as we have seen, one little boy supposed that God helps pussy to have “’ickle kitties,” seeing that she hasn’t any kitties in eggs given her to sit upon.

Psychological Ideas.

We may now pass to some of the characteristic modes of child-thought about that standing mystery, the self. As our discussion of the child’s ideas of origin, growth and final shrinkage suggests, a good deal of his most earnest thinking is devoted to problems relating to himself.

The date of the first thought about self, of the first dim stage of self-awareness, probably varies considerably in the case of different children according to rapidity of mental development and circumstances. The little girl, who was afterwards to be known as George Sand, may be supposed to have had an exceptional development; and the accident of infancy to which she refers as having aroused the earliest form of self-consciousness was, of course, exceptional too. There are probably many robust and dull children, knowing little of life’s misery, and allowed in general to have their own way, who have but little more of self-consciousness than that, say, of a young, well-favoured porker.

The earliest idea of self seems to be obtained by the child through an examination by the senses of touch and sight of his own body. A child has been observed to study his fingers attentively in the fourth and fifth month, and this scrutiny goes on all through the second year and even into the third.^[52] Children seem to be impressed quite early by the fact that in laying hold of a part of the body with the hand they get a different kind of experience from that which they obtain when they grasp a foreign object. Through these self-graspings, self-strikings, self-bitings, aided by the very varied, and often extremely disagreeable operations of the nurse and others on the surface of their bodies, they probably reach during the first year the idea that their body is different from all other things, is ‘me’ in the sense that it is the living seat of pain and pleasure. The growing power of movement of limb, especially when the crawling stage is reached, gives a special significance to the body as that which can be moved, and by the movements of which interesting and highly impressive changes in the environment, e.g., bangs and other noises, can be produced.

It is probable that the first ideas of the bodily self are ill-defined. It is evident that the head and face are not known at first as a visible object. The upper limbs by their movement across the field of vision would come in for the special notice of the eye. We know that the baby is at an early date wont to watch its hands. The lower limbs, moreover, seem to receive special attention from the exploring and examining hand.

There is some reason to think, however, that in spite of these advantages, the limbs form a less integral and essential part of the bodily self than the trunk. A child in his second year was observed to bite his own finger till he cried with pain. He could hardly have known it as a part of his sensitive body. Preyer tells us of a boy of nineteen months who when asked to give his foot seized it with both hands and tried to hand it over. A like facility in casting off from the self or alienating the limbs is illustrated in a story in the Worcester Collection of a child of three and a half years who on finding his feet stained by some new stockings observed: “Oh, mamma! these ain’t my feet, these ain’t the feet I had this morning”. This readiness to detach the limbs shows itself still more plainly in the boy C.’s complaining when in bed and trying to wriggle into a snug position that his legs came in the way of himself. Here the legs seem to be half transformed into foreign persons; and this tendency to personify the limbs seems to be further illustrated in Laura Bridgman’s pastime of spelling a word wrongly with one hand and then slapping that hand with the other.

Why, it may be asked, should a child attach this supreme importance to the trunk, when his limbs are always forcing themselves on his notice by their movements, and when he is so deeply interested in them as the parts of the body which do things? I suspect that the principal reason is that a child soon learns to connect with the trunk the recurrent and most impressive of his feelings of comfort and discomfort, such as hunger, thirst, stomachic pains and the corresponding reliefs. We know that the “vital sense” forms the sensuous basis of self-consciousness in the adult, and it is only reasonable to suppose that in the first years of life, when it fills so large a place in the consciousness, it has most to do with determining the idea of the sentient or feeling body. Afterwards the observation of maimed men and animals would confirm the idea that the trunk is the seat and essential portion of the living body. The language of others too by identifying ‘body’ and ‘trunk’ would strengthen the tendency.

About this interesting trunk-body, what is inside it, and how it works, the child speculates vastly. References to the making of bone, the work of the stomach, and so forth have to be understood somehow. It would be interesting to get at a child’s unadulterated view of his anatomy and physiology. The Worcester Collection illustrates what funny ideas a child can entertain of the mechanism of his body. A little girl between five and six thought it was the little hairs coming against the lids which made her sleepy.

At a later stage of the child’s development, no doubt, when he comes to form the idea of a conscious thinking ‘I,’ the head will become a principal portion of the bodily self. In the evolution of the self-idea in the race, too, we find that the soul was lodged in the trunk long before it was assigned a seat in the head. As may be seen in C.’s case children are quite capable of finding their way, partly at least, to the idea that the soul has its lodgment in the head. But it is long before this thought grows clear. This may be seen in children’s talk, as when a girl of four spoke of her dolly as having no sense in her eyes. Even when a child learns from others that we think with our brains he goes on supposing that our thoughts travel down to the mouth when we speak.

Very interesting in connexion with the first stages of development of the idea of self is the experience of the mirror. It would be absurd to expect a child when first placed before a mirror to recognise his own face. He will smile at the reflexion as early as the tenth week, though this is probably merely an expression of pleasure at the sight of a bright object. If held in the nurse’s or father’s arms to a glass when about six months old a baby will at once show that he recognises the image of the familiar face of the latter by turning round to the real face, whereas he does not recognise his own. He appears at first and for some months to take it for a real object, sometimes smiling to it as to a stranger and even kissing it, or, as in the case of a little girl (fifteen months old), offering it things and saying ‘Ta’ (sign of acceptance). In many cases curiosity prompts to an attempt to grasp the mirror-figure with the hand, to turn up the glass, or to put the hand behind it in order to see what is really there. This is very much like the behaviour of monkeys before a mirror, as described by Darwin and others. Little by little the child gets used to the reflexion, and then by noting certain agreements between his bodily self and the image, as the movement of his hands when he points, and partly, too, by a kind of inference of analogy from the doubling of other things by the mirror, he reaches the idea that the reflexion belongs to himself. By the sixtieth week Preyer’s boy had associated the name of his mother with her image, pointing to it when asked where she was. By the twenty-first month he did the same thing in the case of his own image.^[53]

An infant will, we know, take a shadow to be a real object and try to touch it. Some children on noticing their own and other people’s shadows on the wall are afraid as at something uncanny. Here, too, in time the strange phenomenon is taken as a matter of course and referred to the sun.

We are told that the phenomena of reflexions and shadows, along with those of dreams, had much to do with the development, in the early thought of the race, of the animistic conception that everything has a double nature and existence. Do children form similar ideas? We can see from the autobiography of George Sand how a clever girl, reflecting on the impressive experience of the echo, excogitates such a theory of her double existence; and we know, too, that the boy Hartley Coleridge distinguished among the ‘Hartleys’ a picture Hartley and a shadow Hartley. C.’s biography suggests that being photographed may appear to a child as a transmutation, if not a doubling, of the self. But much more needs to be known about these matters.

The prominence of the bodily pictorial element in the child’s first idea of self is seen in the tendency to restrict personal identity within the limits of an unchanged bodily appearance. The child of six, with his shock of curls, refuses to believe that he is the same as the hairless baby whose photograph the mother shows him. How different, how new, a being a child feels on a Sunday morning after the extra weekly cleansing and brushing and draping. The bodily appearance is a very big slice of the content of most people’s self-consciousness, and to the child it is almost everything.

But in time the conscious self, which thinks and suffers and wills, comes to be dimly discerned. I believe that a real advance towards this true self-consciousness is marked by the appropriation and use of the difficult forms of language, ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine’. This will be dealt with in another essay.

Sometimes the apprehension of the existence of a hidden self distinct from the body comes as a sudden revelation, as to little George Sand. Such a swift awakening of self-consciousness is apt to be an epoch-making and memorable moment in the history of the child.

A father sends me the following notes on the development of self-consciousness: “My girl, three years old, makes an extraordinary distinction between her body and herself. Lying in bed she shut her eyes and said: ‘Mother, you can’t see me now’. The mother replied: ‘Oh, you little goose, I can see you but you can’t see me’. To which she rejoined: ‘Oh, yes, I know you can see my body, mother, but you can’t see me’.” The same child about the same time was concerned about the reality of her own existence. One day playing with her dolls she asked her mother: “Mother, am I real, or only a pretend like my dolls?” Here again, it is plain, the emphasis was laid on something non-corporeal, something that animated the body, and not a mere bit of mechanism put inside it. Two years later she showed a still finer intellectual differentiation of the visible and the invisible self. Her brother happened to ask her what they fed the bears on at the Zoo. She answered impulsively: “Dead babies and that sort of thing”. On this the mother interposed: “Why, F., you don’t think mothers would give their dead babies to the animals?” To this she replied: “Why not, mother? It’s only their bodies. I shouldn’t mind your giving mine.” This contempt for the body is an excellent example of the way in which a child when he gets hold of an idea pushes it to its logical extreme. This little girl by-the-bye was she who, about the same age, took compassion on the poor autumn leaves dying on the ground, so that we may suppose her mind to have been brooding at this time on the conscious side of existence.

The mystery of self-existence has probably been a puzzle to many a thoughtful child. A lady, a well-known writer of fiction, sends me the following recollection of her early thought on this subject: “The existence of other people seemed natural: it was the ‘I’ that seemed so strange to me. That I should be able to perceive, to think, to cause other people to act, seemed to me quite to be expected, but the power of feeling and acting and moving about myself, under the guidance of some internal self, amazed me continually.”

It is of course hard to say how exactly the child thinks about this inner self. It seems to me probable that, allowing for the great differences in reflective power, children in general, like uncivilised races, tend to materialise it, thinking of it dimly as a film-like shadow-like likeness of the visible self. The problem is complicated for the child’s consciousness by religious instruction with its idea of an undying soul.

As may be seen in the recollections just quoted, this early thought about self is greatly occupied with its action on the body. Among the many things that puzzled the much-questioning little lad already frequently quoted was this: “How do my thoughts come down from my brain to my mouth: and how does my spirit make my legs walk?” C.’s sister when four years and ten months old wanted to know how it is we can move our arm and keep it still when we want to, while the curtain can’t move except somebody moves it. The first attempts to solve the puzzle are of course materialistic, as may be seen in our little questioner’s delightful notion of thoughts travelling through the body. This form of materialism, however, I find surviving in grown-ups and even in students of psychology, who are rather fond of talking about sensations travelling up the nerves to the brain.

Very curious are the directions of the first thought about the past self. The idea of personal identity, so dear to philosophers, does not appear to be fully reached at first. On the contrary, as we shall see in the case of C., the past self is divorced from the present under the image of the opposite sex in the odd expression: “when I was a little girl”. This probably illustrates the importance of the bodily appearance as a factor in the self, for C. had, I believe, been photographed when in the petticoat stage, and no doubt looked back on this person in skirts as a girl. This is borne out by the fact that another little boy when about three and a half years old asked his mother: “Was I a girl when I was small?” and that the little questioner whom I have called our zoologist was also accustomed to say: “When I was a ’ickle dirl (girl)”. But discarded petticoats do not explain all the child’s ideas about his past self. This same little zoologist would also say, “When I was a big man,” to describe the state of things long, long ago. What does this mean? In discussing the quaint idea of senile shrinkage I have suggested that a child may think of human existence as a series of transformations from littleness to bigness, and the reverse, and here we have lighted on another apparent evidence of it. For though we are apt to call children ‘old men’ we do not suggest to them that they are or have been big men.

The difficulty to the child of conceiving of his remote past, is surpassed by that of trying to understand the state of things before he was born. The true mystery of birth for the child, the mystery which fascinates and holds his mind, is that of his beginning to be. This is illustrated in C.’s question: “Where was I a hundred years ago? Where was I before I was born?” It remains a mystery for all of us, only that after a time we are wont to put it aside. The child, on the other hand, is stung, so to say, by the puzzle, his whole mind being roused to passionate questioning.

It is curious to note the differences in the attitude of children’s minds towards the mystery. The small person accustomed to petting, to be made the centre of others’ thought and action, may be struck with the blank in the common home life before his arrival. A lady was talking to her little girl H., aged three years, about something she had done when she was a child. H. then wanted to know what she was doing then, and was told by her mother: “Oh, you were not here at all”. She seemed quite amazed at this, and said: “And what did you do without H.? Did you cry all day for her?” On being informed that this was not the case, she seemed quite unable to realise how her mother could have existed without her. There is something of the charming egoism of the child here, but there is more: there is the vague expression of the unifying integrating work of love. Lovers, one is told, are wont to think in the same way about the past before they met, and became all in all to one another. For this little girl with her strong sense of human attachment, the idea of a real life without that which gave it warmth and gladness was a contradiction.

Sometimes again, in the more metaphysical sort of child, the puzzle relates to the past existence of the outer world. We have all been perplexed by the thought of the earth and sky, and other folk existing before we were, and going on to exist after we cease to be; though here again, save in the case of the philosopher perhaps, we get used to the puzzle. Children may be deeply impressed with this apparent contradiction. Jean Ingelow in her interesting reminiscences thus writes of her puzzlings on this head: "I went through a world of cogitation as to whether it was really true that anything had been and lived before I was there to see it.... I could think there might have been some day when I was very little—as small as the most tiny pebble on the road—but not to have been at all was so very hard to believe." A little boy of five who was rather given to saying ‘clever’ things, was one day asked by a visitor, who thought to rebuke what she took to be his conceit: “Why, M., however did the world go round before you came into it?” M. at once replied: “Why, it didn’t go round. It only began five years ago.” Was this, as perhaps nine persons out of ten would say, merely a bit of dialectic smartness, the evasion of an awkward question by denying the assumed fact? I am disposed to think that there was more, that the virtuous intention of the visitor had chanced to discover a hidden child-thought; for the child is naturally a Berkeleyan, in so far at least that for him the reality of things is reality for his own sense-perceptions. A world existent before he was on the spot to see it, seems to the child’s intelligence a contradiction.

A child will sometimes use theological ideas as an escape from this puzzle. The myth of babies being brought down from heaven is particularly helpful. The quick young intelligence sees in this pretty idea a way of prolonging existence backwards. The same little boy that was so concerned to know what his mother had done without him, happened one day to be passing a street pump with his mother, when he stopped and observed with perfect gravity: “There are no pumps in heaven where I came from”. He had evidently thought out the legend of the God-sent baby to its logical consequences.

Children appear to have very vague ideas about time. Their minds cannot at first of course rise to the abstraction, time, or duration, or to its measured portions, as a day. They talk about the days as if they were things. Thus to-day, yesterday, and to-morrow, which, as we may see in C.’s way of talking about time, are used very vaguely for present, past and future, are spoken of as things which move. A girl of four asked: ‘Where is yesterday gone to?’ and ‘Where will to-morrow come from?’ The boy C. as well as other children, as we saw, asked where all the days go to. Such expressions may of course be figurative, a child having no other way of describing the sequence yesterday and to-day, to-day and to-morrow; yet I am disposed to think that these are examples of the child’s ‘concretism,’ his reduction of our abstractions to living realities.^[54]

It is equally noticeable that children have no adequate mental representations of our time-measurements. As in the case of space, so in that of time their standard is not ours: an hour, say the first morning at school, may seem an eternity to a child’s consciousness. The days, the months, the years seem to fly faster and faster as we get older. On the other hand, as in the case of space-judgments, too, the child through his inability to represent time on a large scale is apt to bring the past too near the present. Mothers and young teachers would be surprised if they knew how children interpreted their first historical instruction introduced by the common phrase, ‘Many years ago,’ or similar expression. A child of six years when crossing the Red Sea asked to be shown Pharaoh and his hosts. This looks like the effect of a vivid imagination of the scene, which even in grown people may beget an expectation of seeing it here and now. The following anecdote of a boy of five and a half years sent me by his aunt more clearly illustrates a child’s idea of the historical past. “H. was beginning to have English history read to him and had got past the ‘Romans’ as he said. One day he noticed a locket on my watch-chain, and desired that it should be opened. It contained the hair of two babies both dead long before. He asked about them. I told him they died before I was born. ‘Did father know them?’ he asked. ‘No, they died before he was born.’ ‘Then who knew them and when did they live?’ he asked, and as I hesitated for a moment, seeking how to make the matter plain, ‘Was it in the time of the Romans?’ he gravely asked.” The odd-looking historical perspective here was quite natural. He had to localise the babies’ existence somewhere, and he could only do it conjecturally by reference to the one far-off time of which he had heard, and which presumably covered all that was before the life-time of himself and of those about him.

Theological Ideas.

We may now pass to another group of children’s ideas, a group already alluded to, those which have to do with the invisible world, with death and what follows this—God and heaven. Here we find an odd patchwork of thought, the patchwork-look being due to the heterogeneous sources of the child’s information, his own observations of the visible world on the one hand, and the ideas supplied him by what is called religious instruction on the other. The characteristic activity of the child-mind, so far as we can disengage it, is seen in the attempt to co-ordinate the disparate and seemingly contradictory ideas into something like a coherent system.

Like the beginning of life, its termination, death, is one of the recurring puzzles of childhood. This might be illustrated from almost any autobiographical reminiscences of childhood. Here indeed the mystery, as may be seen in C.’s case, is made the more impressive and recurrent to consciousness by the element of dread. A little girl of three and a half years asked her mother to put a great stone on her head, because she did not want to die. She was asked how a stone would prevent it, and answered with perfect childish logic: “Because I shall not grow tall if you put a great stone on my head; and people who grow tall get old and then die”.

Death seems to be thought of by the unsophisticated child as the body reduced to a motionless state, devoid of breath and unable any longer to feel or think. This is the idea suggested by the sight of dead animals, which but few children, however closely shielded, can escape.

The first way of envisaging death seems to be as a temporary state like sleep, which it so closely resembles. A little boy of two and a half years, on hearing from his mother of the death of a lady friend, at once asked: “Will Mrs. P. still be dead when we go back to London?”

The knowledge of burial gives a new and terrible turn to his idea of death. He now begins to speculate much about the grave. The instinctive tendency to carry over the idea of life and sentience to the buried body is illustrated in C.’s fear lest the earth should be put over his eyes. The following observation from the Worcester Collection illustrates the same tendency. “A few days ago H. (aged four years four months) came to me and said: ‘Did you know they’d taken Deacon W. to Grafton?’ I. ‘Yes.’ H. ‘Well, I s’pose it’s the best thing. His folks (meaning his children) are buried there, and they wouldn’t know he was dead if he was buried here.’” This reversion to savage notions of the dead in speaking of a Christian deacon has a certain grim humour. All thoughts of heaven were here forgotten in the absorbing interest in the fate of the body.

Do children when left to themselves work out a theory of another life, that of the soul away from the dead deserted body? It is of course difficult to say, all children receiving some instruction at least of a religious character respecting the future. One of the clearest approaches to spontaneous child-thought that I have met with here is supplied by the account of the Boston children. "Many children (writes Professor Stanley Hall) locate all that is good and imperfectly known in the country, and nearly a dozen volunteered the statement that good people when they die go to the country—even here from Boston." The reference to good people shows that the children are here trying to give concrete definiteness to something that has been said by another. These children had not, one suspects, received much systematic religious instruction. They had perhaps gathered in a casual way the information that good people when they die are to go to a nice place. Children pick up much from the talk of their better-instructed companions which they only half understand. In any case it is interesting to note that they placed their heaven in the country, the unknown beautiful region, where all sorts of luxuries grow. One is reminded of the idea of the happy hunting grounds to which the American Indian consigns his dead chief. It would have been interesting to examine these Boston children as to how they combined this belief in going to the country with the burial of the body in the city.

In the case of children who pick up something of the orthodox religious creed the idea of going to heaven has somehow to be grasped and put side by side with that of burial. How the child-mind behaves here it is hard to say. It is probable that there are many comfortable and stupid children who are not troubled by any appearance of contradiction. As we saw in the remark of the American child about the deacon, the child-mind may oscillate between the native idea that the man lives on in a sense underground, and the alien idea that he has passed into heaven. Yet undoubtedly the more thoughtful kind of child does try to bring the two ideas into agreement. The boy C. attempted to do this first of all by supposing that the people who went to heaven (the good) were not buried at all; and later by postponing the going to heaven, the true entrance being that of the body by way of the tomb. Other ways of getting a consistent view of things are also hit upon. Thus a little girl of five years thought that the head only passed to heaven. This was no doubt a way of understanding the communication from others that the ‘body’ is buried. This inference is borne out by another story of a boy of four and a half who asked how much of his legs would have to be cut off when he was buried. The legs were not the ‘body’. But the idea of the head passing to heaven meant more than this. It pretty certainly involved a localisation of the soul in the crown of the body, and it may possibly have been helped by pictures of cherub heads. Sometimes this process of child-thought reflects that of early human thought, as when a little boy of six said that God took the breath to heaven (cf. the ideas underlying spiritus and p?e?a).

In what precise manner children imagine the entrance into heaven to take place I do not feel certain. The legend of being borne by angels through the air probably assists here. As we have seen, children tend to think of people when they die as shrinking back to baby-dimensions so as to be carried in the angels’ arms.

The idea of people going to heaven is, as we know, pushed by the little brain to its logical consequences. Animals when they die pass to another place also. A boy three years and nine months asked whether birds, insects, and so forth go to heaven where people go when they die. Yet a materialistic tendency shows itself here, especially in connexion with the observation that animals are eaten. A little American boy in his fifth year was playing with a tadpole till it died. Immediately the other tadpoles ate it up, and the child burst out crying. His elder sister with the best of intentions tried to comfort him by saying: ‘Don’t cry, William, he’s gone to a better place’. To which rather ill-timed assurance he retorted sceptically: ‘Are his brothers and sisters’ stomachs a better place?’

Coming now to ideas of supernatural beings, it is to be noted that children do not wholly depend for their conceptions of these on religious or other instruction. The liveliness of their imagination and their impulses of dread and trust push them on to a spontaneous creation of invisible beings. In C.’s haunting belief in the wolf we see a sort of survival of the tendency of the savage to people the unseen world with monsters in the shape of demons. Another little boy of rather more than two years who had received no religious instruction acquired a similar haunting dread of ‘cocky,’ the name he had given to the cocks and hens when in the country. He localised this evil thing in the bathroom of the house, and he attributed pains in the stomach to the malign influence of ‘cocky’.^[55] Fear created the gods according to Lucretius, and in this invention of evil beings bent on injuring him the child of a modern civilised community may reproduce the process by which man’s thoughts were first troubled by the apprehension of invisible and supernatural agents.

On the other hand we find that the childish impulse to seek aid leads to a belief in a more benign sort of being. C.’s staunch belief in his fairies who could do the most wonderful things for him, and more especially his invention of the rain-god (the “Rainer”), are a clear illustration of the working of this impulse.

Even here, of course, while we can detect the play of a spontaneous impulse, we have to recognise the influence of instruction. C.’s tutelary deities, the fairies, were no doubt suggested by his fairy stories; even though, as in the myth of the Rainer, we see how his active little mind proceeded to work out the hints given him into quite original shapes. This original adaptation shows itself on a large scale where something like systematic religious instruction is supplied. An intelligent child of four or five will in the laboratory of his mind turn the ideas of God and the devil to strange account. It would be interesting, if we could only get it, to have a collection of all the hideous eerie forms by which the young imagination has endeavoured to interpret the notion of the devil. His renderings of the idea of God appear to show hardly less of picturesque diversity.^[56]

It is to be noted at the outset that for the child’s intelligence the ideas introduced by religious instruction at once graft themselves on to those of fairy-lore. Mr. Spencer has somewhere ridiculed our university type of education with its juxtaposition of classical polytheism and Hebrew monotheism. One might, perhaps, with still greater reason, satirise the mixing up of fairy-story and Bible-story in the instruction of a child of five. Who can wonder that the little brain should throw together all these wondrous invisible forms, and picture God as an angry or amiable old giant, the angels as fairies and so forth? In George Sand’s child-romance of CorambÉ we see how far this blending of the ideas of the two domains of the invisible world can be carried.

For the rest, the child in his almost pathetic effort to catch the meaning of this religious instruction proceeds in his characteristic matter-of-fact way by reducing the abstruse symbols to terms of familiar every-day experience. He has to understand and he can only understand by assimilating to homely terrestrial facts. Hence the undisguised materialism of the child’s theology. According to Stanley Hall’s collection of observations, God was imaged by one child as a man preternaturally big—a big blue man; by another as a huge being with limbs spread all over the sky; by another as so immensely tall that he could stand with one foot on the ground, and touch the clouds,—strong like the giant, his prototype. He is commonly, in conformity with what is told, supposed to dwell in heaven, that is just the other side of the blue and white floor, the sky. He is so near the clouds that according to one small boy (our little friend the zoologist) these are a sort of pleasaunce, composed of hills and trees, which he has made to saunter in. But some children are inventive even in respect of God’s whereabouts. He has been regarded as inhabiting one of the stars. One of Mr. Kratz’s children localised him ‘up in the moon,’ an idea which probably owes something to observation of the man in the moon. We note, too, a tendency to approximate heaven and earth, possibly in order to account for God’s frequent presence and activity here. Thus one of Mr. Kratz’s children said that God was “up on the hill,” and one little girl of five was in the habit of climbing an old apple tree to visit him and tell him what she wanted.

Differences of feeling, as well as differences in the mode of instruction and in intelligence, seem to reflect themselves in these ideas of the divine dwelling-place. As we have seen, the childish intelligence is apt to envisage God as a sort of grand lord with a house or mansion. Two different tendencies show themselves in the thought about this dwelling-place. On the one hand the feeling of childish respect, which led a German girl of seven to address him in the polite form, ‘Ich bitte Sie,’ leads to a beautifying of his house. According to some of the Bostonian children he has birds, children, and Santa Claus living with him. Others think of him as having a big park or pleasaunce with trees, flowers, as well as birds. The children are perhaps our dead people who in time will be sent back to earth. Whether the birds, that I find come in again and again in the ideas of heaven, are dead birds, I am not sure. While however there is this half-poetical adorning of God’s palace, we see also a tendency to humanise it, to make it like our familiar houses. This is quaintly illustrated in the following prayer of a girl of seven whose grandfather had just died: “Please, God, grandpapa has gone to you. Please take great care of him. Please always mind and shut the door, because he can’t stand the draughts.” We see the same leaning to homely conceptions in the question of a little girl of four: ‘Isn’t there a Mrs. God?’

While thus relegated to the sublime regions of the sky God is supposed to be doing things, and of course doing them for us, sending down rain and so forth. What seems to impress children most, especially boys, in the traditional account of God is his power of making things. He is emphatically the artificer, the demiurgos, who not only has made the world, the stars, etc., but is still kept actively employed by human needs. According to the Boston children he fabricates all sorts of things from babies to money, and the angels work for him. The boy has a great admiration for the maker, and our small zoologist when three years and ten months old, on seeing a group of working men returning from their work, asked his astonished mother: “Mamma, is these gods?” “God!” retorted his mother, “why?” “Because,” he went on, “they makes houses, and churches, mamma, same as God makes moons, and people, and ’ickle dogs.” Another child watching a man repairing the telegraph wires that rested on a high pole at the top of a lofty house, asked if he was God. In this way the child is apt to think of God descending to earth in order to make things. Indeed, in their prayers, children are wont to summon God as a sort of good genius to do something difficult for them. A boy of four and a half years was one day in the kitchen with his mother, and would keep taking up the knives and using them. At last his mother said: “L., you will cut your fingers, and if you do they won’t grow again”. He thought for a minute and then said with a tone of deep conviction: “But God would make them grow. He made me, so he could mend my fingers, and if I were to cut the ends off I should say, ‘God, God, come to your work,’ and he would say, ‘All right’.”^[57]

While this way of recognising God as the busy artificer is common, it is not universal. The child’s deity, like the man’s (as Feuerbach showed), is a projection of himself, and as there are lazy children, so there is a child’s God who is a luxurious person sitting in a lovely arm-chair all day, and at most putting out from heaven the moon and stars at night.

This admiration of God’s creative power is naturally accompanied by that of his skill. A little boy once said to his mother he would like to go to heaven to see Jesus. Asked why, he replied: “Oh! he’s a great conjurer”. The child had shortly before seen some human conjuring and used this experience in a thoroughly childish fashion by envisaging in a new light the New Testament miracle-worker.

The idea of God’s omniscience seems to come naturally to children. They are in the way of looking up to older folks as possessing boundless information. C.’s belief in the all-knowingness of the preacher, and his sister’s belief in the all-knowingness of the policeman, show how readily the child-mind falls in with the notion.

On the other hand I have heard of the dogma of God’s infinite knowledge provoking a sceptical attitude in the child-mind. This seems to be suggested in a rather rude remark of a boy of four, bored by the long Sunday discourse of his mother: “Mother, does God know when you are going to stop?” Our astute little zoologist, when five years and seven months old, in a talk with his mother, impiously sought to tone down the doctrine of omniscience in this way: “I know a ’ickle more than Kitty, and you know a ’ickle more than me; and God knows a ’ickle more than you, I s’pose; then he can’t know so very much after all”.

Another of the divine attributes does undoubtedly shock the childish intelligence: I mean God’s omnipresence. It seems, indeed, amazing that the so-called instructor of the child should talk to him almost in the same breath about God’s inhabiting heaven, and about his being everywhere present. Here, I think, we see most plainly the superiority of the child’s mind to the adult’s, in that it does not let contradictory ideas lie peacefully side by side, but makes them face one another. To the child, as we have seen, God lives in the sky, though he is quite capable of coming down to earth when he wishes or when he is politely asked to do so. Hence he rejects the idea of a diffused ubiquitous existence. The idea which is apt to be introduced early as a moral instrument, that God can always see the child, is especially resented by that small, sensitive, proud creature, to whom the ever-following eyes of the portrait on the wall seem a persecution. Miss Shinn, a careful American observer of children, has written strongly, yet not too strongly, on the repugnance of the child-mind to this idea of an ever-spying eye.^[58] My observations fully confirm her conclusions here. Miss Shinn speaks of a little girl, who, on learning that she was under this constant surveillance, declared that she “would not be so tagged”. A little English boy of three, on being informed by his older sister that God can see and watch us while we cannot see him, thought awhile, and then in an apologetic tone said: “I’m very sorry, dear, I can’t (b)elieve you”. What the sister, aged fifteen, thought of this is not recorded. An American boy of five, learning that God was in the room and could see even if the shutters were closed, said: “I know, it’s jugglery”.

When the idea is accepted odd devices are excogitated for the purpose of making it intelligible. Thus one child thought of God as a very small person who could easily pass through the keyhole. The idea of God’s huge framework illustrated above is probably the result of an attempt to figure the conception of omnipresence. Curious conclusions too are sometimes drawn from the supposition. Thus a little girl of three years and nine months one day said to her mother in the abrupt childish manner: “Mr. C. (a gentleman she had known who had just died) is in this room”. Her mother, naturally a good deal startled, answered: “Oh, no!” Whereupon the child resumed: “Yes, he is. You told me he is with God, and you told me God was everywhere, so as Mr. C. is with God he must be in this room.” With such trenchant logic does the child’s intelligence cut through the tangle of incongruous ideas which we try to pass off as methodical instruction.

It might easily be supposed that the child’s readiness to pray to God is inconsistent with what has just been said. Yet I think there is no real inconsistency. Children’s idea of prayer is, probably, that of sending a message to some one at a distance. The epistolary manner noticeable in many prayers seems to illustrate this.^[59] The mysterious whispering is, I suspect, supposed in some inscrutable fashion known only to the child to transmit itself to the divine ear.

Of the child’s belief in God’s goodness it is needless to say much. For these little worshippers he is emphatically the friend in need who can help them out of their difficulties in a hundred ways. Our small zoologist thanked God for making “the sea, the holes with crabs in them, and the trees, the fields, and the flowers,” and regretted that he did not follow up the making of the animals we eat by doing the cooking also. As their prayers show he is ever ready to make nice presents, from a fine day to a toy-gun, and will do them any kindness if only they ask prettily. Happy the reign of this untroubled optimism. For many children, alas, it is all too short, the colour of their life making them lose faith in all kindness, and think of God as cross and even as cruel.

One of the real difficulties of theology for the child’s intelligence is the doctrine of God’s eternity. Puzzled at first with the fact of his own beginning, he comes soon to be troubled with the idea of God’s having had no beginning. C. showed a common trend of childish thought in asking what God was like in his younger days. The question, “Who made God?” seems to be one to which all inquiring young minds are led at a certain stage of child-thought. The metaphysical impulse of the child to follow back the chain of events ad infinitum finds the ever-existent unchanging God very much in the way. He wants to get behind this “always was” of God’s existence, just as at an earlier stage of his development he wanted to get behind the barrier of the blue hills. This is quaintly illustrated in the reasoning of a child observed by M. Egger. Having learnt from his mother that before the world there was only God the Creator, he asked: “And before God?” The mother having replied, “Nothing,” he at once interpreted her answer by saying: “No; there must have been the place (i.e., the empty space) where God is”. So determined is the little mind to get back to the ‘before,’ and to find something, if only a prepared place.

Other mysteries of which the child comes to hear find their characteristic solution in the busy little brain. A friend tells me that when a child he was much puzzled by the doctrine of the Trinity. He happened to be an only child, and so he was led to put a meaning into it by assimilating it to the family group, in which the Holy Ghost became the mother.

I have tried to show that children seek to bring meaning, and a consistent meaning, into the jumble of communications about the unseen world to which they are apt to be treated. I agree with Miss Shinn that children about three and four are not disposed to theologise, and are for the most part simply confused by the accounts of God which they receive. Many of the less bright of these small minds may remain untroubled by the incongruities lurking in the mixture of ideas, half mythological or poetical, half theological, which is thus introduced. Such children are no worse than many adults, who have a wonderful power of entertaining contradictory ideas by keeping them safely apart in separate chambers of their brain. The intelligent thoughtful child on the other hand tries at least to reconcile and to combine in an intelligible whole. His mind has not, like that of so many adults, become habituated to the water-tight compartment arrangement, in which there is no possibility of a leakage of ideas from one group into another. Hence his puzzlings, his questionings, his brave attempts to reduce the chaos to order. I think it is about time to ask whether parents are doing wisely in thus adding to the perplexing problems of early days.