The gradual gathering of a store of such clear memory-images is a necessary preliminary to reflexion and thought. It is because the child remembers as well as sees, remembering even while he sees, that he grows thoughtful, inquiring about the meaning and reason of this and that, or boldly venturing on some explanation of his own. And just as the child’s mind must take on many pictures of things before it reflects upon and tries to understand the world, so it must collect and arrange pictures of the successive scenes and events of its life, before it will grow self conscious and reflect upon its own strange existence.
The only other pre-condition of this primitive thoughtfulness is that imaginative activity which we have already considered on its playful and pleasurable side. We are learning at last that the inventive phantasy of a child, prodigal as it is of delightful illusions, is also a valuable contributor to this sober work of thought. It is just because the young mind is so mobile and agile, passing far beyond the narrow confines of the actual in imaginative conjecture of what lies hidden in the remote, that it begins to think, that is, to reason about the causes of things. In the history of the individual as of the race, thought, even the abstract thought of science, grows out of the free play of imagination. The myth is at once a picturesque fancy, and a crude attempt at an explanation. This primitive thought is indeed so compact of bright picturesque imagery that we with our scientifically trained minds might easily overlook its inherent thoughtfulness. Yet a close inspection shows us that it contains the essential characteristics of thought, an impulse to comprehend things, to reduce the confusing multiplicity to order and system.
We must not hope to trace clearly the lines of this first child-thought. The earliest attitude of the wakening intelligence towards the confusion of novelties, which for us has become a world, is presumably indescribable, and further, by the time that a child comes to the use of words and can communicate his thoughts, in a broken way at least, the scene is already losing something of its first strangeness, the organising work of experience has begun. Yet though we cannot expect to get back to the primal wonderment we can catch glimpses of that later wonderment which arises when instruction supplements the senses, and ideas begin to form themselves of a vast unknown in space and time, of the changefulness of things, and of that mystery of mysteries the beginning of things. The study of this child-thought as it tries to utter itself in our clumsy speech will well repay us. Only we must be ever on the alert lest we read too much into these early utterances, forgetting that the child’s first tentative use of words is very apt to mislead.
The child first dimly reveals himself as thinker in the practical domain. In the evolution of the race the reasoning faculty has been first quickened into action by the ferment of instinctive craving and striving. Man began to reflect on the connexions of things in order to supply himself with food, to ward off cold and other evils. So with the child. Before the age of speech we may observe him thinking out rapidly as occasion arises some new practical expedient, as, for example, seizing a clothes-pin or other available aid in order to reach a toy that has slipped out of his reach; or clutching at our dress and pulling the chair by way of signifying to us that we are to remain and continue to amuse him. The observations of the first months of child-life abound with such illustrations of an initiating practical intelligence.
Yet these exploits, impressive as they often are, hardly disclose the distinctive attributes of the human thinker. The cat, without any example to imitate, will find its way to a quite charming begging gesture by reaching up and tapping your arm.
Probably the earliest unambiguous indication of a human faculty of thought is to be found in infantile comparison. When a baby turns its head deliberately and sagely from a mirror-reflexion or portrait of its mother to the original, we appear to see the first crude beginnings of a process which, when more elaborated, becomes human understanding.
A good deal of comparison of this kind seems to enter into the mental activity of young children. Thus the deep absorbing attention to pictures spoken of above commonly means a careful comparison of this and that form one with another, and in certain cases, at least, a comparison of what is now seen with the mental image of the original. In some children, moreover, comparison under the form of measurement grows into a sort of craze. They want to measure the height of things one with another and so forth. An intelligent child will even find his way to a mediate form of comparison, that is, to measuring things through the medium of a third thing. Thus a boy of five, who had conceived a strong liking for dogs, was in the habit when walking out of measuring on his body how high a dog reached. On returning home he would compare this height with that of the seat or back of a chair, and would finally ask for a yard measure and find out the number of inches.
This comparison of things is of the very essence of understanding, of comprehending things as distinguished from merely apprehending them as concrete isolated objects. The child in his desire to assimilate, to find something in the region of the known with which the new and strange thing may be brought into kinship, is ever on the look-out for likeness. Hence the analogical and half-poetical apperception of things, the metaphorical reduction of a thing to a prototype, as in calling a star an eye, or an eyelid a curtain, may be said to contain the germ at once of poetry and of science.
This comparison for purposes of understanding leads on to what psychologists call classification, or generalisation; the bringing together and keeping before the mind of a number of like things by help of a general name. The child may be said to become a true thinker as soon as he uses names intelligently, calling each thing by an appropriate name, and so classing it with its kind.
This power of infantile generalisation is one full of interest and has been carefully observed. It will, however, be more conveniently dealt with in another chapter where we shall be specially concerned with the child’s use of language.