Part 7
The only other pre-condition of this primitive thoughtfulness is that imaginative activity which we have already considered on its playful and pleasurable side. We are learning at last that the inventive phantasy of a child, prodigal as it is of delightful illusions, is also a valuable contributor to this sober work of thought. It is just because the young mind is so mobile and agile, passing far beyond the narrow confines of the actual in imaginative conjecture of what lies hidden in the remote, that it begins to _think_, that is, to reason about the causes of things. In the history of the individual as of the race, thought, even the abstract thought of science, grows out of the free play of imagination. The myth is at once a picturesque fancy, and a crude attempt at an explanation. This primitive thought is indeed so compact of bright picturesque imagery that we with our scientifically trained minds might easily overlook its inherent thoughtfulness. Yet a close inspection shows us that it contains the essential characteristics of thought, an impulse to comprehend things, to reduce the confusing multiplicity to order and system.
We must not hope to trace clearly the lines of this first child-thought. The earliest attitude of the wakening intelligence towards the confusion of novelties, which for us has become a world, is presumably indescribable, and further, by the time that a child comes to the use of words and can communicate his thoughts, in a broken way at least, the scene is already losing something of its first strangeness, the organising work of experience has begun. Yet though we cannot expect to get back to the primal wonderment we can catch glimpses of that later wonderment which arises when instruction supplements the senses, and ideas begin to form themselves of a vast unknown in space and time, of the changefulness of things, and of that mystery of mysteries the beginning of things. The study of this child-thought as it tries to utter itself in our clumsy speech will well repay us. Only we must be ever on the alert lest we read too much into these early utterances, forgetting that the child’s first tentative use of words is very apt to mislead.
The child first dimly reveals himself as thinker in the practical domain. In the evolution of the race the reasoning faculty has been first quickened into action by the ferment of instinctive craving and striving. Man began to reflect on the connexions of things in order to supply himself with food, to ward off cold and other evils. So with the child. Before the age of speech we may observe him thinking out rapidly as occasion arises some new practical expedient, as, for example, seizing a clothes-pin or other available aid in order to reach a toy that has slipped out of his reach; or clutching at our dress and pulling the chair by way of signifying to us that we are to remain and continue to amuse him. The observations of the first months of child-life abound with such illustrations of an initiating practical intelligence.
Yet these exploits, impressive as they often are, hardly disclose the distinctive attributes of the human thinker. The cat, without any example to imitate, will find its way to a quite charming begging gesture by reaching up and tapping your arm.
Probably the earliest unambiguous indication of a human faculty of thought is to be found in infantile comparison. When a baby turns its head deliberately and sagely from a mirror-reflexion or portrait of its mother to the original, we appear to see the first crude beginnings of a process which, when more elaborated, becomes human understanding.
A good deal of comparison of this kind seems to enter into the mental activity of young children. Thus the deep absorbing attention to pictures spoken of above commonly means a careful comparison of this and that form one with another, and in certain cases, at least, a comparison of what is now seen with the mental image of the original. In some children, moreover, comparison under the form of measurement grows into a sort of craze. They want to measure the height of things one with another and so forth. An intelligent child will even find his way to a _mediate_ form of comparison, that is, to measuring things through the medium of a third thing. Thus a boy of five, who had conceived a strong liking for dogs, was in the habit when walking out of measuring on his body how high a dog reached. On returning home he would compare this height with that of the seat or back of a chair, and would finally ask for a yard measure and find out the number of inches.
This comparison of things is of the very essence of understanding, of comprehending things as distinguished from merely apprehending them as concrete isolated objects. The child in his desire to assimilate, to find something in the region of the known with which the new and strange thing may be brought into kinship, is ever on the look-out for likeness. Hence the analogical and half-poetical apperception of things, the metaphorical reduction of a thing to a prototype, as in calling a star an eye, or an eyelid a curtain, may be said to contain the germ at once of poetry and of science.
This comparison for purposes of understanding leads on to what psychologists call classification, or generalisation; the bringing together and keeping before the mind of a number of like things by help of a general name. The child may be said to become a true thinker as soon as he uses names intelligently, calling each thing by an appropriate name, and so classing it with its kind.
This power of infantile generalisation is one full of interest and has been carefully observed. It will, however, be more conveniently dealt with in another chapter where we shall be specially concerned with the child’s use of language.
While thus beginning to arrange things according to such points of likeness as he can discover, the child is noting the connexions of things. He finds out what belongs to a horse, to a locomotive engine, he notes when father leaves home and returns, when the sun declines, what accompanies and follows rain, and so forth. That is to say, he is feeling his way to the idea of connectedness, of regularity, of what we call uniformity or law. We now say that the child reasons, no longer blindly or automatically like the dog, but with a consciousness of what he is doing. We little think how much hard work has to be got through by the little brain before even this dim perception of regularity is attained. In some things, no doubt, the regularity is patent enough, and can hardly be overlooked by the dullest of children. The connexion between the laying of the cloth and the meal—at least in an orderly home—is a matter which even the canine and the feline intelligence is quite able to grasp. But when it comes to finding out the law according to which, say, his face gets dirty, his head aches, or people send out their invitations to children’s parties, the matter is not so simple.
The fact is that there is so large a proportion of apparent disconnectedness and capricious irregularity in the child’s world that it is hard to see how he would ever learn to understand and to reason, were he not endowed with a lively and inextinguishable impulse to connect and simplify. Herein lies a part of the pathos of childhood. It brings its naïve prepossession of a regular well-ordered world, and alas, finds itself confronted with an impenetrable tangle of disorder. How quaint it is to listen to the little thinker, as, with untroubled brow, he begins to propound his beautifully simple theory of the cosmic order. An American boy of ten who had had one cross small teacher, and whose best teacher had been tall, accosted a new teacher thus: “I’m afraid you’ll make a cross teacher”. His teacher replied: “Why, am I cross?” To which he rejoined: “No; but you are so small”. We call this hasty generalisation. We might with equal propriety term it the child’s innate _a priori_ view of things.
With this eagerness to get at and formulate the law of things is inseparably bound up the impulse to bring every new occurrence under some general rule. Here, too, the small thinker may only too easily slip by failing to see the exact import and scope of the rule. We see this in the extension of laws of human experience to the animal world. Rules supplied by others and only vaguely understood, more particularly moral and religious truths, lend themselves to this kind of misapplication. The Worcester collection of _Thoughts and Reasonings of Children_ gives some odd examples of such application. American children, to judge from these examples, appear to be particularly smart at quoting Scripture; not altogether, one suspects, without a desire to show off, and possibly to raise a laugh. But discounting the influence of such motives it seems pretty clear that a child has a marvellous power of reading his own ideas into others’ words, and so of giving them a turn which is apt to stagger their less-gifted authors. Here is a case. R.’s aunt said: “You are so restless, R., I can’t hold you any longer”. R.: “Cast your burden on the Lord, Aunty K., and He will sustain you”. The child, we are told, was only four. He probably understood the Scripture injunction as a useful prescription for getting rid of a nuisance, and with the admirable impartiality of childish logic at once applied it to himself. Other illustrations of such misapplication will meet us when we take up the relation of the child’s thought to language.
_The Questioning Age._
The child’s first vigorous effort to understand the things about him may be roughly dated at the end of the third year, and it is noteworthy that this synchronises with the advent of the questioning age. The first putting of a question occurred in the case of Preyer’s boy in the twenty-eighth month, in that of Pollock’s girl in the twenty-third month. But the true age of inquisitiveness when question after question is fired off with wondrous rapidity and pertinacity seems to be ushered in with the fourth year.
A common theory peculiarly favoured by ignorant nurses and mothers is that children’s questioning is a studied annoyance. The child has come to the use of words, and with all a child’s ‘cussedness’ proceeds to torment the ears of those about him. There are signs, however, of a change of view on this point. The fact that the questioning follows on the heels of the reasoning impulse might tell us that it is connected with the throes which the young understanding has to endure in its first collision with a tough and baffling world. The question is the outcome of ignorance coupled with a belief in the boundless knowledge of grown-up people. It is an attempt to add to the scrappy, unsatisfying information about things which the little questioner’s own observation has managed to gather, or others’ half-understood words have succeeded in communicating. It is the outcome of intellectual craving, of a demand for mental food. But it is much more than an expression of need. Just as the child’s articulate demand for food implies that he knows what food is, and that it is obtainable, so the question implies that the little questioner knows what he needs, and in what direction to look for it. The simplest form of question, _e.g._, “What is this flower?” “this insect?” shows that the child by a half-conscious process of reflexion and reasoning has found his way to the truth that things have their qualities, their belongings, their names. Many questions, indeed, _e.g._, ‘Has the moon wings?’ ‘Where do all the days go to?’ reveal a true process of childish thought and have a high value as expressions of this thought.
Questioning may take various directions. A good deal of the child’s catechising of his long-suffering mother is prompted by thirst for fact.[38] The typical form of this line of questioning is ‘What?’ The motive here is to gain possession of some fact which will connect itself with and supplement a fact already known. ‘How old is Rover?’ ‘Where was Rover born?’ ‘Who was his father?’ ‘What is that dog’s name?’ ‘What sort of hair had you when you were a little girl?’ These are samples of the questioning activity by help of which the little inquirer tries to make up his connected wholes, to see things with his imagination in their proper attachment and order. And how greedily and pertinaciously the small folk will follow up their questioning, flying as it often looks wildly enough from point to point, yet gathering from every answer some new contribution to their ideas of things. A boy of three years and nine months would thus attack his mother: ‘What does frogs eat, and mice and birds and butterflies? and what does they do? and what is their names? What is all their houses’ names? What does they call their streets and places?’ etc., etc.
Footnote 38:
The first question put by Preyer’s boy was, ‘Where is mamma?’ _Die Seele des Kindes_, p. 412. (The references are to the third edition, 1890.)
Such questions easily appear foolish because, as in the case just quoted, they are directed by quaint childish fancies. The child’s anthropomorphic way of looking out on the world leads him to assimilate animal to human ways.
One feature in this fact-gleaning kind of question is the great store which the child sets by the name of a thing. M. Compayré has pointed out that the form of question: ‘What is this?’ often means, “What is it called?” The child’s unformulated theory seems to be that everything has its own individual name. The little boy just spoken of explained to his mother that he thought all the frogs, the mice, the birds, and the butterflies had names given to them by their mothers as he himself had. Perhaps this was only a way of expressing the childish idea that everything has its name, primordial and unchangeable.
A second direction of this early questioning is towards the reason and the cause of things. The typical form is here ‘why?’ This form of inquiry occurred in the case of Preyer’s boy at the age of two years forty-three weeks. But it becomes the all-predominant form of question somewhat later. Who that has tried to instruct the small child of three or four does not know the long shrill whinelike sound of this question? This form of question develops naturally out of the earlier, for to give the ‘what?’ of a thing, that is its connexions, is to give its ‘why?’ that is its mode of production, its use and purpose.
Nothing perhaps in child utterance is better worth interpreting, hardly anything more difficult to interpret, than this simple-looking little ‘why?’
We ourselves perhaps do not use the word ‘why’ and its correlative ‘because’ with one clear meaning; and the child’s first use of the words is largely imitative. What may be pretty safely asserted is that even in the most parrot-like and wearisome iteration of ‘why?’ and its equivalents ‘what for?’ etc., the child shows a dim recognition of the truth that a thing is understandable, that it has its reasons if only they can be found.
Let us in judging of this pitiless ‘why?’ try to understand the situation of the young mind confronted by so much that is strange and unassimilated, meeting by observation and hearsay with new and odd occurrences every day. The strange things standing apart from his tiny familiar world, the wide region of the quaint and puzzling in animal ways, for example, stimulate the instinct to appropriate, to master. The little thinker must try at least to bring the new odd thing into some recognisable relation to his familiar world. And what is more natural than to go to the wise lips of the grown-up person for a solution of the difficulty? The fundamental significance of the ‘why?’ in the child’s vocabulary, then, is the necessity of connecting new with old, of illuminating what is strange and dark by light reflected from what is already matter of knowledge. And a child’s ‘why?’ is often temporarily satisfied by supplying from the region of the familiar an analogue to the new and unclassed fact. Thus his impulse to understand why pussy has fur, is met by telling him that it is pussy’s hair.
It is only a step further in the same direction when the ‘why?’ has to be met by supplying a general statement; for to refer the particular to a general rule is a more perfect and systematic kind of assimilation. Now we know that children are very susceptible to the authority of precedent, custom, general rule. Just as in children’s ethics customary permission makes a thing right, so in their logic the truth that a thing generally happens may be said to supply a reason for its happening in a particular case. Hence, when the much-abused nurse answers the child’s question, ‘Why is the pavement hard?’ by saying, ‘Because pavement is always hard,’ she is perhaps less open to the charge of giving a woman’s reason than is sometimes said.[39] In sooth the child’s queries, his searchings for explanation, are, as already suggested, prompted by the desire for order and connectedness. And this means that he wants the general rule to which he can assimilate the particular and as yet isolated fact.
Footnote 39:
_Cf._ some shrewd remarks by Dr. Venn, _Empirical Logic_, p. 494.
From the first, however, the ‘why?’ and its congeners have reference to the causal idea, to something which has brought the new and strange thing into existence and made it what it is. In truth this reference to origin, to bringing about or making, is exceedingly prominent in children’s questionings. Nothing is more interesting to a child than the production of things. What hours and hours does he not spend in wondering how the pebbles, the stars, the birds, the babies are made. This vivid interest in production is to a considerable extent practical. It is one of the great joys of children to be able themselves to make things, and this desire to fashion, which is probably at first quite immense, and befitting rather a god than a feeble mannikin of three years, naturally leads on to inquiry into the mode of producing. Yet from the earliest a true speculative interest blends with this practical instinct. Children are in the complete sense little philosophers, if philosophy, as the ancients said, consists in knowing the causes of things. This discovery of the cause is the completed process of assimilation, of the reference of the particular to a general rule or law.
This inquiry into origin and mode of production starts with the amiable presupposition that all things have been hand-produced after the manner of household possessions. The world is a sort of big house where everything has been made by somebody, or at least fetched from somewhere. This application of the anthropomorphic idea of fashioning follows the law of all childish thought, that the unknown is assimilated to the known. The one mode of origin which the embryo thinker is really and directly familiar with is the making of things. He himself makes a respectable number of things, including these rents in his clothes, messes on the tablecloth, and the like, which he gets firmly imprinted on his memory by the authorities. And, then, he takes a keen interest in watching the making of things by others, such as puddings, clothes, houses, hayricks. To ask, then, who made the animals, the babies, the wind, the clouds, and so forth, is for him merely to apply the more familiar type of causation as norm or rule. Similarly in all questions as to the ‘whence?’ of things, as in asking whether babies were bought in a shop.
The ‘why?’ takes on a more special meaning when the idea of purpose becomes clear. The search now is for the end, what philosophers call the teleological cause or reason. When, for example, a child asks ‘Why does the wind blow?’ he means, ‘What is its object in blowing?’ or ‘Of what use is the blowing of the wind?’
The idea underlying the common form of the ‘why?’ interrogative deserves a moment’s inspection. A child’s view of causation starts like other ideas from his most familiar experiences. He soon finds out that his own actions are controlled by the desire to get or to avoid something, that, to speak in rather technical language, the idea of the result of the action precedes and determines this action.
I have lately come across a very early, and as I think, remarkable illustration of this form of childish thought. A little girl already quoted, whom we will call M., when one year eleven months old, happened to be walking with her mother on a windy day. At first she was delighted at the strong boisterous wind, but then got tired and said: ‘Wind make mamma’s hair untidy, Babba (her own name) make mamma’s hair tidy, _so wind not blow adain_ (again)’. About three weeks later this child was out in the rain, when she said to her mother: ‘Mamma, dy (dry) Babba’s hands, _so not rain any more_’. What does this curious inversion of the order of cause and effect mean? I am disposed to think that this little girl, who was unusually bright and intelligent, was transferring to nature’s phenomena the forms of her own experience. When she is disorderly, and her mother or nurse arranges her hair or washes her hands, it is in order that she may not continue to be disorderly. The child is envisaging the wind and the rain as a kind of naughty child who can be got to behave properly by effacing the effects of its naughtiness. In other words they are both to be deterred from repeating what is objectionable by a visible and striking manifestation of somebody’s objection or prohibition. Here, it seems unmistakable, we have a projection into nature of human purpose, of the idea of determination of action by end: we have a form of anthropomorphism which runs through the whole of primitive thought.
It seems to follow from this that there is a stage in the development of a child’s intelligence when questions such as, ‘Why do the leaves fall?’ ‘Why does the thunder make such a noise?’ are answered most satisfactorily by a poetic fiction, by saying, for example, that the leaves are old and tired of hanging on to the trees, and that the thunder giant is in a particularly bad temper and making a noise. It is perhaps permissible to make use of this fiction at times, more especially when trying to answer the untiring questioning about animals and their doings, a region of existence, by the way, of which even the wisest of us knows exceedingly little. Yet the device has its risks; and an ill-considered piece of myth-making passed off as an answer may find itself awkwardly confronted by that most merciless of things, a child’s logic.