Children's Ways Part 4

Here, again, the small investigator finds much hard work to be got through, for nature's doings are apt to be varied and rather complex. A child, for example, finds that when he dips his hand into sand, clay, or what not, he makes a hole. But when he puts it into water no hole is left behind. Hence we can understand one little fellow asking his father, "How _is_ it that when we put our hand into the water we don't make a hole in it?"

Here we have not mere curiosity; we have perplexity at what looks contradictory to the usual run of things. The same thing is ill.u.s.trated in the question of another little boy, "Can they (the fish) breathe with their moufs under water?"

Among the things which are apt to puzzle the young inquirer is the disappearance of things. He can as little understand this as the beginning of things, and so he will ask: "Where does the sea swim to?"

or "Where does the wind go to?" or "Where does the wet (_e.g._, on the pavement after rain) go to?"

As the view of things begins to widen and embrace the absent and the past new puzzles occur and prompt to a more philosophical kind of questioning. Sometimes it is the mere vastness of the world, the mult.i.tude of things, which oppresses and confuses the young understanding. "Mother," asked a small boy of four, "why _is_ there such a lot of things in the world if no one knows all these things?" A little girl about three and a half years old asked her mother, "Mamma, why do there be any more days, why do there? and why don't we leave off eating and drinking?" It is hard for us older folk to get behind questions like this so as to understand the source of the childish bewilderment.

The subject of origins is, as we all know, apt to be a sore puzzle 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 n.o.body knows, mamma. I want to know who made G.o.d, and I want to know if p.u.s.s.y 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 G.o.d 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?" Another little fellow was puzzled to know 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?"

In this bold sweep of inquiry a child is apt to go back to the absolute beginnings of things, as when he asks, "Who made G.o.d?" or, "What was there before G.o.d?" The idea that G.o.d has _always_ been seems to be particularly perplexing and even oppressive to a child's mind.

Sometimes the questioning takes on a still clearer ring of metaphysics, startling and shocking perhaps the patient listener. A little boy of three once put the poser: "If I'd gone upstairs, could G.o.d make it that I hadn't?" Or as another boy of eight put it to a distinguished biologist, "Mr. --, Mr. --, if G.o.d wanted me to be good, and I wouldn't be good, who would win?" Needless to say that this young philosopher was a Britisher.

With many children confronted with the mysteries of G.o.d 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 G.o.d kill the devil and then there would be no more wickedness in the world?"

The different lines of questioning here briefly ill.u.s.trated are apt to run on concurrently from about 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 recognise laws of progress. Thus children will ask first about the things which first interest them, as, for example, animals and babies. Again the questioning grows gradually more intelligent, more reasonable, accommodating itself, often after much suffering, to the adamantine limits of human knowledge.

While I have here regarded children's questioning seriously as the expression of a genuine desire for knowledge, I am well aware that this cannot be said of all of it. The hard-pressed mother knows that a child's "why?" is often 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 reckless kind of children's asking, when one question is followed by another with an irritating pertinacity, appears to be of this formal and lifeless character. Some of it, indeed, as when a little American asked her mother: "Mamma, why ain't Edna Belle (her baby sister) me, and why ain't I Edna Belle?" comes alarmingly near the rage of questioning observed in certain forms of mental disease, and may perhaps be a symptom of an over-wrought brain.

To admit this, however, is far from saying that we ought to treat all this 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?

CHAPTER V.

FIRST THOUGHTS: (_a_) THE NATURAL WORLD.

We have seen in the last chapter that children have their characteristic ways of looking at their new world. These ways often result in the formation of definite ideas or "thoughts" which may last for years. We will now try to follow the little thinker in his first attempt at framing a theory of Nature and her doings.

Here, too, we shall find that the active little brain has its work cut out for it. As already suggested, things are often so puzzling to the child that it is only by dint of a good deal of questioning that he can piece them together at all. And even after he has had his questions answered he sometimes finds it well-nigh impossible to reconcile one fact with another, and to reach a clear view of things as a whole.

_The Fashion of Things._

The first thoughts on Nature and her processes are moulded very largely by the tendencies of the young mind touched on in the last chapter. Like the savage the child is apt to think of the wind and the thunder as somebody's doing, and as aimed specially at himself. Hence the strongly marked mythological or supernatural element in children's theories.

Here, it is evident, thought is supported by a somewhat capricious fancy. When, for example, a child accounts for the wind by saying that somebody is waving a very big fan somewhere, or, more prettily, that it is made by the fanning of the angels' wings, he comes very near that romancing which we have regarded as the play of imagination. Yet though fanciful it is still thought, just because it aims, however wildly, at explaining something in the real world.

With this fanciful and mythological element there goes a more scientific one. Even the fan myth recognises a mechanical process, _viz._, the waving of something to and fro, which does undoubtedly produce a movement of the air. Children's first theories of nature often show a queer mingling of supernatural and natural conceptions.

I propose now to examine a few of the commoner ideas of children respecting natural objects.

One characteristic of this first thought about things appears at an early age. A child seems inclined to take all that he sees for real tangible substance: it is some time before he learns that "things are not what they seem". For example, an infant will try to touch shadows, sunlight dancing on the wall and flat objects in pictures. This tendency to make things out of all he sees shows itself in pretty forms, as when a little girl one year eleven months old, "gathered sunlight in her hands and put it on her face," and about a month earlier expressed a wish to wash some black smoke. This was the same child that tried to make the wind behave by tidying her mother's hair; and her belief in the material reality of the wind was shown by her asking her mother to lift her up high so that she might see the wind; which reminds one of R. L.

Stevenson's lines to the wind:--

I felt you push, I heard you call, I could not see yourself at all.

In making a reality out of the wind a child is led not by sight, but by touch. He _feels_ the wind, and so the wind must be something substantial.

The common childish thought about the wind shows that the young mind is apt to be much impressed by the movements of things. Movement seems for all of us the clearest and most impressive manifestation of life. When the movement of an object is not seen to be caused by some other object, but seems to be spontaneous, it is apt to be taken by children as by uncivilised races to be the sign of life, and of something like human impulse. A child of eighteen months used to throw kisses to the fire.

Some children in the infant department of a London Board School were asked what things in the room were alive, and they promptly replied: "The smoke and the fire". Big things moving by some internal contrivance of which the child knows nothing, more especially engines, are of course endowed with life. A little girl of thirteen months offered a biscuit to a steam-tram, and the author of _The Invisible Playmate_ tells us that his little girl wanted to stroke the "dear head" of a locomotive.

Next to movement a sound which seems to be produced by the thing itself leads children to endow it with life. Are not movement and vocal sound the two great channels by which the child itself expresses its feelings and impulses? The wind often owes something of its life to its sound.

The common tendency of children to think of the sea as alive, of which M. Pierre Loti gives an excellent ill.u.s.tration in his _Roman d'un enfant_, is no doubt based on the perception of its noise and movement.

A little boy a.s.sured his teacher that the wind was alive, for he heard it whistling in the night. The impulse, too, to endow with life an object which looks so very much of a machine as a railway engine, is probably supported by the knowledge of its puffing and whistling.

Closely related to this impulse to ascribe life to what we call inanimate objects is the tendency to conceive of them as growing. This is ill.u.s.trated in the remark of a little boy of three and a half years who when criticised by his mother for trying to make a walking-stick out of a very short stick, observed: "Me use it for walking-stick when stick be bigger".

I have referred in the last chapter to children's way of thinking of things as made by somebody. The idea of hand-work is extended in odd ways. For example, quite young children are apt to extend the ideas broken and mended to all kinds of objects. Anything which seems to have become reduced by losing a portion of itself is said to be "broken".

Thus a little boy of three, on seeing the moon partly covered by a cloud, remarked: "The moon is broken". On the other hand, in the case of one little boy, everything not broken or intact was said to be "mended".

Do children when they talk in this fashion really think that things are constantly undergoing repairs at the hand of some mysterious mechanic, or are they using their familiar terms figuratively in default of others? It is hard to say.

Curious thoughts about Nature's processes arise later when the inquirer tries to make them intelligible to himself. Here the first mechanical conceptions of the wind deserve attention. An American child, asked what a tree was, answered oddly, "To make the wind blow". A pupil of mine distinctly recalls that when a child he accounted for the wind at night by the swaying of two large elms which stood in front of the house not far from the windows of his bedroom. This putting of the cart before the horse is funny enough, yet it is perfectly natural. All the wind-making a child can observe, as in blowing with his mouth, waving a newspaper, and so forth, is effected by the movement of a material object.

_The Bigger World._

With respect to distant objects, a child is of course freer to speculate, and, as we know, his ideas of the heavenly bodies are wont to be odd enough. His thoughts about these remote objects are rendered quainter by his inability to conceive of great distances.

Children naturally enough take this world to be what it looks to their uninstructed eyes. Thus the earth becomes a circular plain, and the sky a sort of inverted bowl placed upon it. Many children appear like the ancients to suppose that the sky and the heavenly bodies touch the earth somewhere, and could be reached by taking a long, long journey. Other and similar ideas are formed by some. Thus one little girl used on looking at the sky to fancy she was inside a blue balloon. The heavenly bodies are apt to be taken for flat discs. The brother of the little girl just referred to took the sun to be a big kind of cask cover, which could be put on the round globe to make a "see-saw".

When this first simple creed gets corrected, children go to work to put a meaning into what is told them by their instructors. Thus they begin to speculate about the other side of the globe, and, as Mr. Barrie reminds us, are apt to fancy they can know about it by peeping down a well. When religious instruction introduces the new region of heaven they are wont to localise it just above the sky, which to their thought forms its floor. Some hard thinking is carried out by the young heads in the effort to reconcile the various things they learn about the celestial region. Thus the sky is apt to be thought of as _thin_, probably by way of explaining the light of the stars and moon, which is supposed to shine through the sky-roof. One American child ingeniously applied the idea of the thinness of the sky to explain the appearance of the moon when one part is bright and the other faintly illumined, supposing it to be half-way through a sort of semi-transparent curtain.

Others again prettily accounted for the waning of the moon to a crescent by saying it was half stuck or half "b.u.t.toned" into the sky.

Characteristic movements of childish thought show themselves in framing ideas of the making of the world. The boy of four described by Mrs.

Jardine thought that the stars were "cut out" first, and that then the little bits left over were all rolled into the moon. Such an idea of cosmogony seems nonsense till one remembers the work of cutting out the finer figures in paper.

In much the same way children try to understand the movements of the sun and other heavenly bodies by help of the familiar movements of terrestrial objects. Thus the sun was thought by American children to fly, to be blown, perhaps like a soap-bubble or air-ball, and, by a child with a more mechanical turn, to roll, presumably as a hoop rolls, and so forth. Theological ideas, too, are pressed into the service of childish explanation, as when the disappearance of the sun is ascribed to G.o.d's pulling it up higher out of sight, to his taking it into heaven and putting it to bed, and the like.

The impressive phenomena of thunder and lightning give rise in the case of the child as in that of the Nature-man to some fine myth-making. The American children, as already observed, have different mechanical ill.u.s.trations for describing the supernatural operation here, thunder being thought of as the noise made by G.o.d when groaning, when walking heavily on the floor of heaven, when he has coals "run in"--ideas which show how navely 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 G.o.d's lighting the gas, or striking many matches at once. By a similar use of familiar household operations G.o.d is supposed to cause rain by turning on a tap, or by letting it down from a cistern by a hose, or, better, by pa.s.sing it through a sieve or a dipper with holes.[7]

[7] I am indebted for these ill.u.s.trations to an article by Dr.

Stanley Hall on "The Contents of Children's Minds".

Throughout the whole region of these mysterious phenomena we have ill.u.s.trations of the tendency to regard what takes place as designed for us poor mortals. Thus one of the American children referred to said charmingly that the moon comes round when people forget to light the lamps. The little girl of whom Mr. Canton writes thought "the wind and the rain and the moon 'walking' came out to see _her_, and the flowers woke up with the same laudable object". When frightened by the crash of the thunder a child instinctively thinks that it is all done to vex his little soul. An earthquake may be thought of as a kind of wonder show, specially got up for the admiration of a sufficient body of spectators.

Two children, D. and K., aged ten and five respectively, lived in a small American town. D., who was reading about an earthquake, addressed his mother thus: "Oh, isn't it dreadful, mamma? Do you suppose we will ever have one here?" K., intervening with the characteristic impulse of the young child to correct his elders, answered: "Why, no, D., they don't have earthquakes in little towns like this". Later on Nature's arrangements are criticised from the same point of view. A girl of seven, going back to the interesting question of babies, remarked to her mother: "Wouldn't it be convenient if you laid an egg, and then if you changed your mind you needn't hatch it?"

_Dreams._

Children are apt to have their own thoughts about the strange semblances of objects which sometimes present themselves to their eyes, more particularly the "spectra" which we see after looking at the sun or when the circulation of the retina is disturbed. One little fellow spun quite a romance about the spectra he used to see when poorly, saying that they were angels, and that they went into his toy-basket and played with his toys.

The most common form of such illusory appearance is, of course, the dream, and I believe that children dwell much on the mystery of dreaming. The simpler kind of child, like the savage, is disposed to take his dreams for sensible realities. A boy in an elementary school in London, aged five years, said one day: "Teacher, I saw an old woman one night against my bed". Another child, a little girl in the same school, told her mother that she had seen a funeral last night, and on being asked, "Where?" answered quaintly, "I saw it in my pillow". A little boy whom I know once asked his mother not to put him to bed in a certain room, "because there were so many dreams in the room".

Yet children who reflect soon find out that dream-objects do not belong to the common world, in the sights of which we all partake. Another theory has then to be found. I believe that many children, especially those who, being imaginative when awake, make their fairy-stories and their own romancings very real to themselves, and who, as a result of this, are wont to return to them in their dreams, are inclined to identify dreamland and fairyland. If they want to see their "fairies" by day they will shut their eyes; and so the idea may naturally enough occur to them that when closing their eyes for sleep they are going to see the beloved fairies again, and for a longer time. Other ideas about dreams also occur among children. A gentleman tells me that when a child he used to think that dreaming, though different from actual seeing, was yet more than having one's own individual fancies; on dreaming, for example, that he had met certain people he supposed that each of these must have had a dream in which he had met him. This, it may be remembered, is very much the fanciful idea of dreaming which Mr. Du Maurier works out in his pretty story _Peter Ibbetson_.