V
The parallelism between the mental development of the individual and of the race, though necessarily incomplete, is yet deeply suggestive and significant. In a very true sense the unfoldment of mental faculty from childhood to maturity reflects the allied course of evolution from savagery to civilization; yet the reflection is distorted and is traceable only in general outlines. Undeveloped forms of thought and instinctive tendencies, of a related though by no means of an identical character, should be traceable in each; and among them the natural proclivity for dependence upon analogies. That children are fond of reasoning by analogy there can be no doubt; their confusion of fact with fancy, their lack of extensive knowledge and the ability to refer effects to proper causes, their great love for sound effects and play of words, the earnestness of their play convictions—all these furnish a rich soil for the growth of such habits of thought as we are now considering. On the other hand, the influence of their adult companions, of their conventional surroundings, of the growth of the make-believe sentiment by which the laws of the real world are differentiated from those of fairy-land, make it difficult to pronounce as an argument by analogy what may really be a half-conscious play of fancy or jugglery of words and ideas. There is, further, considerable difficulty in collecting characteristic and unimpeachable illustrations of arguments by analogy in children, owing to the general lack of suitable collections of children's spontaneous and original mental reactions. What fond parents are apt to observe and newspaper paragraphers to record are sayings that amuse by a quaintness or the assumption of a worldly wisdom beyond their years, while the truly suggestive traits pass unrecorded for lack of psychologically informed observers. There is thus a gap to be supplied by valuable and suggestive study of analogy in childhood. However, not to pass by the topic without illustration, I may cite the reply of the little boy who, when asked his age, said he was nine when he stood on his feet but six when he stood on his head, because an inverted 9 makes a 6; he was certainly reasoning by a far-fetched analogy, however little faith he may have had in the correctness of his reasoning. The children who believed that butter comes from butterflies, and grass from grasshoppers, beans from bees, and kittens from pussy-willows (Stanley Hall), may have been simply misled by sound analogies; but when Sir John Lubbock tells us of a little girl saying to her brother, "If you eat so much goose you will be quite silly," and adds that, "there are perhaps few children to whom the induction would not seem perfectly legitimate," we appreciate that such arguments, so closely paralleling the superstitions of savages, may be more real to children than we suspect.