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

by James Sully

The difficulty to the child of conceiving of his remote past, is surpassed by that of trying to understand the state of things before he was born. The true mystery of birth for the child, the mystery which fascinates and holds his mind, is that of his beginning to be. This is illustrated in the question of a little boy: "Where was I a hundred years ago? Where was I before I was born?" It remains a mystery for all of us, only that after a time we are wont to put it aside.

Even when a child begins to take in the fact that there was a time when he was not, he is unable to think of absolute non-existence. A little girl of three being shown a photograph of her family and not seeing her own face in the group asked: "Where is me?" Being duly instructed that she was not here, or indeed anywhere, she asked: "Was I killed?"

It is curious to note the differences in the attitude of children's minds towards this mystery, "before you were born". A child accustomed to be made the centre of others' interest may be struck with the blank in the common home life before his arrival. A little girl of three, on being told by her mother of something which happened long before she was born, asked in amazement: "And what did you do without H.? Did you cry all day for her?"

Sometimes again, in the more metaphysical sort of child, the puzzle relates to the past existence of the outer world. We have all been perplexed by the thought of the earth and sky, and other folk existing before we were, and going on to exist after we cease to be; though here again we are apt to "get used" to the puzzle. Children may be deeply impressed with this apparent contradiction. Jean Ingelow in the interesting reminiscences of her childhood writes: "I went through a world of cogitation as to whether it was really true that anything had been and lived before I was there to see it". A little boy of five who was rather given to saying "clever" things, was one day asked by a visitor, who thought to rebuke what she took to be his conceit: "Why, M., however did the world go round before you came into it?" M. at once replied: "Why, it didn't go round. It only began five years ago." This child, too, had probably felt little Jean Ingelow's difficulty.

A child will sometimes try to escape from this puzzle by way of the supernatural ideas already referred to. If of quick intelligence he will see in the legend of babies brought from heaven to earth a way of prolonging his existence backwards. The same little boy that was so concerned to know what his mother had done without him, happened one day to be passing a street pump with his mother, when he stopped and observed with perfect gravity: "There are no pumps in heaven where I came from". He had evidently worked out the idea of heaven-sent babies into a theory of pre-natal existence.

In thinking of their past, children have to encounter that terrible mystery, time. They seem at first quite unable to think of time as we think of it, in an abstract way. "To-day," "to-morrow" and "yesterday" are spoken of as things which move. A girl of four asked: "Where is yesterday gone to?" and "Where will to-morrow come from?"

Another difficulty is the grasping of great lengths of time. A child is apt to exaggerate greatly a short period. The first morning at school has seemed an eternity to some who have carried the recollection of it into middle life. Even the minutes when, as Mrs. Maynell writes, "your mother's visitor held you so long at his knee, while he talked to her the excited gabble of the grown-up," may have seemed very, very big. Possibly this sense of the immeasurable length of certain experiences of childhood gives to the child's sense of past time something of an aching vastness which older people can hardly understand. Do not the words "long, long ago," when we use them in telling a child a story, still carry with them for our ears a strangely far-off sound?

Again, children find it hard to map out the divisions of time, and to see the relations of one period to another. One little boy about five and a half finding that something had happened before his father was born, asked whether it was in the time of the Romans. His historical perspective had, not unnaturally perhaps, set the "time of the Romans" just before the life of the oldest of his household.

The Supernatural World.

A child's first acquaintance with the supernatural is frequently made through the medium of fairy-story or other fiction. And, as has been suggested in an earlier chapter, he can put a germ of thought into the tradition of a fairy-world. It is, however, when something in the shape of theological instruction supervenes that the supernatural becomes a problem for the young intellect. He is told of these mysterious things as of certainties, and in the measure in which he is a thinker, he will try to get a clear intelligent view of things.