Part 11

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]

Footnote 54:

A child quoted by P. Lombroso thought of a year as a round thing having the different festivals on it, and bringing these round in due order by its rotation (_op. cit._, p. 49).

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 πνεῦμα).

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.

Footnote 55:

See _Mind_, vol. xi., p. 149.

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]

Footnote 56:

According to Professor Earl Barnes, the Californian children seem to occupy themselves but little with the devil and hell. See his interesting paper, “Theological Life of a Californian Child,” _Pedagogical Seminary_, ii., 3, p. 442 _seq._

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]

Footnote 57: