Children's Ways / Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matter

by James Sully

The inquiry into origin starts with the amiable presupposition that all things have been produced by hand-craft 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. And this is perhaps natural enough, for of the things whose production the child sees are not the larger number fashioned by human hands? He himself makes a considerable 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 is wont to watch with a keen interest the making of things by others, such as puddings, clothes, houses, hay-ricks. To ask, then, who made the animals, the babies, the wind, the clouds, and so forth, is for him merely to apply the type of causation which is familiar to him.

The demand for a reason takes on a more special meaning when the idea of purpose becomes clear. The search now is for the use of a thing, the end which the maker had in view when he fashioned it. When, for example, a child asks, "Why is there such a lot of dust?" he seems to be seeking the purpose which the maker of dust had in mind, or in other words the use of dust. Similarly when things are endowed with life and their own purpose, as in asking, "Why does the wind blow?" Here the child thinks of nature's processes as if they were a kind of human action which we can understand by seeing into its aim.

Here are some curious observations which seem to illustrate this childish idea of how nature's processes originate. A little girl 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 the same child being out in the rain with her mother said: "Mamma, dy (dry) Babba's hands, so not rain any more". This little inquirer seems clearly to have conceived of the wind and rain as a kind of naughty child who can be got to behave properly by effacing the effects of its naughtiness.

We may notice something more in this early form of questioning. Children are apt to think not only that things behave in general after the manner of people, that their activity is motived by some aim, but that this aim concerns us human creatures. The wind and the rain came and went in our little girl's nature-theory just to vex and not to vex "mamma" and "Babba". A little boy of two years two months sitting on the floor one day in a bad temper looked up and saw the sun shining and said captiously, "Sun not look at Hennie," and then more pleadingly, "Please, sun, not look at poor Hennie". Such observations show that children, like savages, and possibly, too, some persons who would not like to be called savages, are inclined to look at nature's doings as specially designed to injure or benefit themselves.

There is reason to think that the idea of use is prominent in the first conceptions of things. A French inquirer, M. Binet, has brought this fact out by questioning a considerable number of children. Thus, when asked what a hat is, one child answered, "Pour mettre sur la tête". Similarly children asked by other inquirers, "What is a tree?" answered, "To make the wind blow," "To sit under," and so forth.

Later on a more scientific form of questioning arises. The little searcher begins to understand something about the processes of nature, and tries by questioning his elders to get a glimpse into their manner of working. This quest of a natural explanation of things marks the transition to the level of thought of the civilised man.

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 illustrated 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 multitude 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.