His questionings took about this time the direction of origins or beginnings. As with other children, God did not appear to be the starting-point in the evolution of things, and he once asked quite seriously (end of sixth month): “What was God like in his younger days?” With a like impulse to go back to absolute beginnings he inquired about the same date, after learning that chicken-pox was only caught from other animals: “What was the person or thing that first had chicken-pox?” A little later (beginning of ninth month) he and a boy companion of nearly the same age were talking about the beginnings of human life. C. said “I can’t make out how the first man in the world was able to speak. A word, you know, has a sound, and how did he find out what sound to make?” His friend then said that his puzzle was how the first babies were nursed. This child seems to have set out with the supposition that the history of our race began with the arrival of babies.
Very little is told us in this unfinished chapter of the child’s emotional and moral development. As might be expected from the increase of intellectual activity the movements expressive of the feelings of strain and perplexity which accompany thought grew more distinct. In particular it was noticeable at this time that during the fits of thought the child’s face would take on a quaint old-fashioned look, the eye-brows being puckered up and the eye-lids twitching.
He continued very sensitive about the cruelties of the world, more especially towards animals. One day (at the end of the fifth month) his mother had been reading to him his favourite, Black Beauty, in which a war-horse describes to the equine author the horrors of war. C. was deeply affected by the picture, and at length exclaimed with much emphasis, “Oh, ma! why do they do such things? It’s a beastly, beastly world,” at the same time bursting into tears and hiding his face in his mother’s lap. “So hard,” writes the father, “did the boy still find it, notwithstanding his increased knowledge, to accept this human world as a right and just one.”
The religious thought and sentiment remained thoroughly childish. He was still puzzled about the relations of heaven and the grave. One day (end of sixth month) his father observed, looking at the Christmas pudding on the table wreathed with violet flame: “Oh, how I should like to be burned after death instead of being buried”. On this C. looking alarmed said: “I won’t be burned. I shouldn’t go to heaven then.” On his father remarking: “’Tisn’t your body that goes to heaven,” he continued: “But my head does”. Here, writes the father, we seem to perceive a transition from the old gross materialism of last year to a more refined form. C. was now, it may be presumed, localising the soul in the head, and clinging to the idea that at least that limited portion of our frame might manage to get away from the dark grave to the bright celestial regions. It may be too, he adds, that this fancy was aided by seeing pictures of detached cherub heads.[[330]]
A month or two later (beginning of ninth month) he began to attack the difficult problem of Divine fore-knowledge and free-will. His mother had been remonstrating with him about his naughty ways. He grew very miserable and said: “I can’t make out how it is God doesn’t make us good. I pray to him to make me good.” To this his mother replied that he must help himself to be good. This only drew from C. the following protest: “Then what’s the use of having God if we have to help ourselves”. “Even now,” writes the father, "it looks as if God and heaven were for him institutions, the raison d’être of which was their serviceableness to man."
He brought to the consideration of prayer a childish sense of propriety which sometimes wore a quaint aspect. One day (end of third month) on his return from the Kindergarten he asked his mother: “Does God teach us?” and when bidden explain his question continued: “Because they said that at school” (“Teach us to be good”). He then added: “But anyhow that isn’t a proper way to speak to God”. His notion of what was the proper way was illustrated in his own practice. One evening (end of sixth month) after his bath he was kneeling with his head on his mother’s lap so that she might dry his hair. He began to pray half audibly in this wise: “Please, God, let me find out before my birthday, but at least on my birthday.... So now good-bye!” This ending, obviously borrowed from his sister’s letters, was varied on another occasion in this way: “With my love, good-bye”.[[331]]
It seems strange that the diary should break off at a time when there was so much of the quaint and pretty child-traits left to be observed. No explanation of the abrupt termination is offered, and I am only able to conjecture that the father was at this time pressed with other work, and that when he again found the needed leisure he discovered to his chagrin that time, aided by the school-drill, was already doing its work. We know that it is about this time that the artist, Nature, is wont to rub out the characteristic infantile lines in her first crude sketch of a human mind, and to elaborate a fuller and maturer picture. And while the onlooking parent may rejoice in the unfolding of the higher human lineaments, he cannot altogether suppress a pang at the disappearance of what was so delightfully fresh and lovely.
I will close these extracts, following the father’s own fashion, with a word of apology. C.’s doings and sayings have seemed to me worth recording, not because their author was in any sense a remarkable child, but solely because he was a true child. In spite of his habitual association with grown-up people he retained with childish independence his own ways of looking at things. No doubt something of the intellectual fop, of the assertive prig, peeps out now and again. Yet if we consider how much attention was given to his utterances, this is not surprising. For the greater part the sayings appear to me the direct naïve utterance of genuine childish conviction. And it is possible that the inevitable impulse of the parent to show off his child has done C. injustice by making too much, especially in the last chapter of the diary, of what looks smart. Heaven grant that our observations of the little ones may never destroy the delightful simplicity and unconsciousness of their ways, and turn them into disagreeable little performers, all conscious of their rôle, and greedy of admiration.
[286]. Taste, as involved in the necessary act of taking nourishment, is probably at first hardly differentiated from touch.