This serious examination of things begins early. Most of us have been subjected to the searching gaze of an infant's eyes when we first made it overtures of friendship. How much this fixed gaze of a child of six months takes in nobody can say.
What we find when the child grows and can give an account of his observations is that, while often surprisingly minute in particular directions, they are narrowly confined. Thus a child will sometimes be so impressed with the colour of an object as almost to ignore its form. A little girl of eighteen months, who knew lambs and called them "lammies," on seeing two black ones in a field among some white ones called out, "Eh! doggie, doggie!" The likeness of colour to the black dog overpowered the likeness in form to the other lambs close by. We shall find further examples of this one-sided observation when we come to consider children's drawings.
The pressure of practical needs tends, however, to develop a fuller examination of objects. A lamb and a dog, for example, have to be distinguished by a number of marks in which the supremely interesting detail of colour holds a quite subordinate place. Individual things, too, have to be more carefully distinguished, if only for the purpose of drawing the line between what is "mine" and "not mine," for example, spoons and picture-books. The recognition of the mother, say, exacts this fuller inspection, for she cannot always be recognised by her height alone, for example, when she is sitting, nor by her hair alone, as when she has her hat on, so that a group of distinctive features has to be seized.
When once the eye has begun to note differences it makes rapid progress. This is particularly true where the development of a special interest leads to a habit of concentration on a particular kind of object. Thus little boys when the "railway interest" seizes them are apt to be finely observant of the differences between this and that engine and so forth. A boy aged two years and eleven months, after travelling over two railways, asked his mother if she had noticed the difference in the make of the rails on the two lines. Of course she had not, though she afterwards ascertained that there was a slight difference which the boy's keener eyes had detected.
The fineness of children's distinguishing observation is well illustrated in their recognition of small drawings and photographs, as when one child of two instantly picked out the likeness of his father from a small carte de visite group.
In truth, children's observation, when close and prolonged, as it is apt to be under the stimulus of a really powerful interest, is often surprisingly full as well as exact. The boy, John Ruskin, could look for hours together at flowing water, noting all its subtle changes. Another little boy, when three and a half years old, received a picture-book, The Railway Train, and inspected the drawings almost uninterruptedly for a week, retaining the treasure even at meals. "At the end of this time (writes his mother) he had grasped the smallest detail in every picture."
Along with this serious work of observing things there often goes a particularly bright and exact recollection of them and their names. Feats of memory in the first three years are, I suspect, a common theme of discourse among admiring mothers. Here is a sample of many stories sent me. A little girl only nine months old when taken out for a walk was shown some lambs at the gate of a field. On being taken the same road three weeks later she surprised her mother by calling out just before arriving at the gate, "Baa, baa!" Later on children will remember through much longer intervals. A little boy of two years on seeing a girl cousin who lived in the country where he had visited five months before, at once asked whether her dog "Bruce" barked. Another boy aged two years and ten months on revisiting his mother's paternal home in Italy after four or five months remembered small details, e.g., how the grapes were cut, and how the wine was made.
Nor does the busy brain of the child stop at observing and recalling what lies about him. He begins at an early age to compare this thing with that, and to note the relations and connections of things, how he is almost as tall as the table, for example, and a good deal taller than pussy, how he has a spoon while his elders have knives and forks, and so forth. And all the while he is trying to get at the general rule or law which obtains in this and that realm of things.
The first attempts of a child to grasp the causal connections of things are apt to be quaint enough. Professor Preyer tells us that his little boy, having been told to blow on his hand which had been hurt, proceeded afterwards when he had struck his head against something "to blow of his own accord, supposing that the blowing would have a soothing effect, even when it did not reach the injured part".[6]
Since the little searcher in trying to piece his facts together in their proper connections must, as all of us do, make use of such experiences as he happens to have, he will pretty certainly fall into the error of "hasty generalisation," as we call it, taking things to be really connected which accidentally occur together, it may be in a single instance only. An American boy of ten who had happened to have a teacher who was short and cross, and a second who was tall and very kind, said to his new teacher, who struck him as short, "I'm afraid you'll make a cross teacher". Yet while we smile at such simplicity ought we not to remember that older people, too, sometimes commit similar blunders, and that after all the impulse to reason can only work itself into a good sound faculty by risking such blunders?