The common childish thought about the wind shows that the young mind is apt to be much impressed by the movements of things. Movement seems for all of us the clearest and most impressive manifestation of life. When the movement of an object is not seen to be caused by some other object, but seems to be spontaneous, it is apt to be taken by children as by uncivilised races to be the sign of life, and of something like human impulse. A child of eighteen months used to throw kisses to the fire. Some children in the infant department of a London Board School were asked what things in the room were alive, and they promptly replied: "The smoke and the fire". Big things moving by some internal contrivance of which the child knows nothing, more especially engines, are of course endowed with life. A little girl of thirteen months offered a biscuit to a steam-tram, and the author of The Invisible Playmate tells us that his little girl wanted to stroke the "dear head" of a locomotive.
Next to movement a sound which seems to be produced by the thing itself leads children to endow it with life. Are not movement and vocal sound the two great channels by which the child itself expresses its feelings and impulses? The wind often owes something of its life to its sound. The common tendency of children to think of the sea as alive, of which M. Pierre Loti gives an excellent illustration in his Roman d'un enfant, is no doubt based on the perception of its noise and movement. A little boy assured his teacher that the wind was alive, for he heard it whistling in the night. The impulse, too, to endow with life an object which looks so very much of a machine as a railway engine, is probably supported by the knowledge of its puffing and whistling.
Closely related to this impulse to ascribe life to what we call inanimate objects is the tendency to conceive of them as growing. This is illustrated in the remark of a little boy of three and a half years who when criticised by his mother for trying to make a walking-stick out of a very short stick, observed: "Me use it for walking-stick when stick be bigger".
I have referred in the last chapter to children's way of thinking of things as made by somebody. The idea of hand-work is extended in odd ways. For example, quite young children are apt to extend the ideas broken and mended to all kinds of objects. Anything which seems to have become reduced by losing a portion of itself is said to be "broken". Thus a little boy of three, on seeing the moon partly covered by a cloud, remarked: "The moon is broken". On the other hand, in the case of one little boy, everything not broken or intact was said to be "mended". Do children when they talk in this fashion really think that things are constantly undergoing repairs at the hand of some mysterious mechanic, or are they using their familiar terms figuratively in default of others? It is hard to say.
Curious thoughts about Nature's processes arise later when the inquirer tries to make them intelligible to himself. Here the first mechanical conceptions of the wind deserve attention. An American child, asked what a tree was, answered oddly, "To make the wind blow". A pupil of mine distinctly recalls that when a child he accounted for the wind at night by the swaying of two large elms which stood in front of the house not far from the windows of his bedroom. This putting of the cart before the horse is funny enough, yet it is perfectly natural. All the wind-making a child can observe, as in blowing with his mouth, waving a newspaper, and so forth, is effected by the movement of a material object.
The Bigger World.
With respect to distant objects, a child is of course freer to speculate, and, as we know, his ideas of the heavenly bodies are wont to be odd enough. His thoughts about these remote objects are rendered quainter by his inability to conceive of great distances.
Children naturally enough take this world to be what it looks to their uninstructed eyes. Thus the earth becomes a circular plain, and the sky a sort of inverted bowl placed upon it. Many children appear like the ancients to suppose that the sky and the heavenly bodies touch the earth somewhere, and could be reached by taking a long, long journey. Other and similar ideas are formed by some. Thus one little girl used on looking at the sky to fancy she was inside a blue balloon. The heavenly bodies are apt to be taken for flat discs. The brother of the little girl just referred to took the sun to be a big kind of cask cover, which could be put on the round globe to make a "see-saw".
When this first simple creed gets corrected, children go to work to put a meaning into what is told them by their instructors. Thus they begin to speculate about the other side of the globe, and, as Mr. Barrie reminds us, are apt to fancy they can know about it by peeping down a well. When religious instruction introduces the new region of heaven they are wont to localise it just above the sky, which to their thought forms its floor. Some hard thinking is carried out by the young heads in the effort to reconcile the various things they learn about the celestial region. Thus the sky is apt to be thought of as thin, probably by way of explaining the light of the stars and moon, which is supposed to shine through the sky-roof. One American child ingeniously applied the idea of the thinness of the sky to explain the appearance of the moon when one part is bright and the other faintly illumined, supposing it to be half-way through a sort of semi-transparent curtain. Others again prettily accounted for the waning of the moon to a crescent by saying it was half stuck or half "buttoned" into the sky.
Characteristic movements of childish thought show themselves in framing ideas of the making of the world. The boy of four described by Mrs. Jardine thought that the stars were "cut out" first, and that then the little bits left over were all rolled into the moon. Such an idea of cosmogony seems nonsense till one remembers the work of cutting out the finer figures in paper.