The subject of origins is, as we all know, apt to be a sore puzzle for the childish mind. The beginnings of living things are, of course, the great mystery. "There's such a lot of things," remarked the little zoologist I have recently been quoting, "I want to know, that you say nobody knows, mamma. I want to know who made God, and I want to know if pussy has eggs to help her make ickle (little) kitties." Finding that this was not so, he observed: "Oh, then, I s'pose she has to have God to help her if she doesn't have kitties in eggs given her to sit on". Another little boy, five years old, found his way to the puzzle of the reciprocal genetic relation of the hen and the egg, and asked his mother: "When there is no egg where does the hen come from? When there was no egg, I mean, where did the hen come from?" Another little fellow was puzzled to know how the first child was suckled, or, as a little girl of four and a half years put it: "When everybody was a baby—then who could be their nurse—if they were all babies?"
In this bold sweep of inquiry a child is apt to go back to the absolute beginnings of things, as when he asks, "Who made God?" or, "What was there before God?" The idea that God has always been seems to be particularly perplexing and even oppressive to a child's mind.
Sometimes the questioning takes on a still clearer ring of metaphysics, startling and shocking perhaps the patient listener. A little boy of three once put the poser: "If I'd gone upstairs, could God make it that I hadn't?" Or as another boy of eight put it to a distinguished biologist, "Mr. —, Mr. —, if God wanted me to be good, and I wouldn't be good, who would win?" Needless to say that this young philosopher was a Britisher.
With many children confronted with the mysteries of God and the devil this questioning often reproduces the directions of theological speculation. Thus the problem of the necessity of evil is clearly recognisable in the question once put by an American boy under eight years of age to a priest who visited his home: "Father, why don't God kill the devil and then there would be no more wickedness in the world?"
The different lines of questioning here briefly illustrated are apt to run on concurrently from about the end of the third year, a fit of eager curiosity about animals or other natural objects giving place to a fit of theological inquiry, this again being dropped for an equally eager inquiry into the making of clocks, railway engines, and so on. Yet, through these alternating bouts of questioning we can recognise laws of progress. Thus children will ask first about the things which first interest them, as, for example, animals and babies. Again the questioning grows gradually more intelligent, more reasonable, accommodating itself, often after much suffering, to the adamantine limits of human knowledge.
While I have here regarded children's questioning seriously as the expression of a genuine desire for knowledge, I am well aware that this cannot be said of all of it. The hard-pressed mother knows that a child's "why?" is often used in a sleepy mechanical way with no real desire for knowledge, any semblance of answer being accepted without an attempt to put a meaning into it. A good deal of the more reckless kind of children's asking, when one question is followed by another with an irritating pertinacity, appears to be of this formal and lifeless character. Some of it, indeed, as when a little American asked her mother: "Mamma, why ain't Edna Belle (her baby sister) me, and why ain't I Edna Belle?" comes alarmingly near the rage of questioning observed in certain forms of mental disease, and may perhaps be a symptom of an over-wrought brain.
To admit this, however, is far from saying that we ought to treat all this questioning with a mild contempt. The little questioners flatter us by attributing superior knowledge to us, and good manners should compel us to treat their questions with some attention. And if now and then they torment us with a string of random reckless questioning, in how many cases, one wonders, are they not made to suffer, and that wrongfully, by having perfectly serious questions rudely cast back on their hands?