FIRST THOUGHTS: (a) THE NATURAL WORLD.
We have seen in the last chapter that children have their characteristic ways of looking at their new world. These ways often result in the formation of definite ideas or "thoughts" which may last for years. We will now try to follow the little thinker in his first attempt at framing a theory of Nature and her doings.
Here, too, we shall find that the active little brain has its work cut out for it. As already suggested, things are often so puzzling to the child that it is only by dint of a good deal of questioning that he can piece them together at all. And even after he has had his questions answered he sometimes finds it well-nigh impossible to reconcile one fact with another, and to reach a clear view of things as a whole.
The Fashion of Things.
The first thoughts on Nature and her processes are moulded very largely by the tendencies of the young mind touched on in the last chapter. Like the savage the child is apt to think of the wind and the thunder as somebody's doing, and as aimed specially at himself. Hence the strongly marked mythological or supernatural element in children's theories. Here, it is evident, thought is supported by a somewhat capricious fancy. When, for example, a child accounts for the wind by saying that somebody is waving a very big fan somewhere, or, more prettily, that it is made by the fanning of the angels' wings, he comes very near that romancing which we have regarded as the play of imagination. Yet though fanciful it is still thought, just because it aims, however wildly, at explaining something in the real world.
With this fanciful and mythological element there goes a more scientific one. Even the fan myth recognises a mechanical process, viz., the waving of something to and fro, which does undoubtedly produce a movement of the air. Children's first theories of nature often show a queer mingling of supernatural and natural conceptions.
I propose now to examine a few of the commoner ideas of children respecting natural objects.
One characteristic of this first thought about things appears at an early age. A child seems inclined to take all that he sees for real tangible substance: it is some time before he learns that "things are not what they seem". For example, an infant will try to touch shadows, sunlight dancing on the wall and flat objects in pictures. This tendency to make things out of all he sees shows itself in pretty forms, as when a little girl one year eleven months old, "gathered sunlight in her hands and put it on her face," and about a month earlier expressed a wish to wash some black smoke. This was the same child that tried to make the wind behave by tidying her mother's hair; and her belief in the material reality of the wind was shown by her asking her mother to lift her up high so that she might see the wind; which reminds one of R. L. Stevenson's lines to the wind:—
I felt you push, I heard you call,
I could not see yourself at all.
In making a reality out of the wind a child is led not by sight, but by touch. He feels the wind, and so the wind must be something substantial.