While thus beginning to arrange things according to such points of likeness as he can discover, the child is noting the connexions of things. He finds out what belongs to a horse, to a locomotive engine, he notes when father leaves home and returns, when the sun declines, what accompanies and follows rain, and so forth. That is to say, he is feeling his way to the idea of connectedness, of regularity, of what we call uniformity or law. We now say that the child reasons, no longer blindly or automatically like the dog, but with a consciousness of what he is doing. We little think how much hard work has to be got through by the little brain before even this dim perception of regularity is attained. In some things, no doubt, the regularity is patent enough, and can hardly be overlooked by the dullest of children. The connexion between the laying of the cloth and the meal—at least in an orderly home—is a matter which even the canine and the feline intelligence is quite able to grasp. But when it comes to finding out the law according to which, say, his face gets dirty, his head aches, or people send out their invitations to children’s parties, the matter is not so simple.
The fact is that there is so large a proportion of apparent disconnectedness and capricious irregularity in the child’s world that it is hard to see how he would ever learn to understand and to reason, were he not endowed with a lively and inextinguishable impulse to connect and simplify. Herein lies a part of the pathos of childhood. It brings its naïve prepossession of a regular well-ordered world, and alas, finds itself confronted with an impenetrable tangle of disorder. How quaint it is to listen to the little thinker, as, with untroubled brow, he begins to propound his beautifully simple theory of the cosmic order. An American boy of ten who had had one cross small teacher, and whose best teacher had been tall, accosted a new teacher thus: “I’m afraid you’ll make a cross teacher”. His teacher replied: “Why, am I cross?” To which he rejoined: “No; but you are so small”. We call this hasty generalisation. We might with equal propriety term it the child’s innate a priori view of things.
With this eagerness to get at and formulate the law of things is inseparably bound up the impulse to bring every new occurrence under some general rule. Here, too, the small thinker may only too easily slip by failing to see the exact import and scope of the rule. We see this in the extension of laws of human experience to the animal world. Rules supplied by others and only vaguely understood, more particularly moral and religious truths, lend themselves to this kind of misapplication. The Worcester collection of Thoughts and Reasonings of Children gives some odd examples of such application. American children, to judge from these examples, appear to be particularly smart at quoting Scripture; not altogether, one suspects, without a desire to show off, and possibly to raise a laugh. But discounting the influence of such motives it seems pretty clear that a child has a marvellous power of reading his own ideas into others’ words, and so of giving them a turn which is apt to stagger their less-gifted authors. Here is a case. R.’s aunt said: “You are so restless, R., I can’t hold you any longer”. R.: “Cast your burden on the Lord, Aunty K., and He will sustain you”. The child, we are told, was only four. He probably understood the Scripture injunction as a useful prescription for getting rid of a nuisance, and with the admirable impartiality of childish logic at once applied it to himself. Other illustrations of such misapplication will meet us when we take up the relation of the child’s thought to language.
The Questioning Age.
The child’s first vigorous effort to understand the things about him may be roughly dated at the end of the third year, and it is noteworthy that this synchronises with the advent of the questioning age. The first putting of a question occurred in the case of Preyer’s boy in the twenty-eighth month, in that of Pollock’s girl in the twenty-third month. But the true age of inquisitiveness when question after question is fired off with wondrous rapidity and pertinacity seems to be ushered in with the fourth year.
A common theory peculiarly favoured by ignorant nurses and mothers is that children’s questioning is a studied annoyance. The child has come to the use of words, and with all a child’s ‘cussedness’ proceeds to torment the ears of those about him. There are signs, however, of a change of view on this point. The fact that the questioning follows on the heels of the reasoning impulse might tell us that it is connected with the throes which the young understanding has to endure in its first collision with a tough and baffling world. The question is the outcome of ignorance coupled with a belief in the boundless knowledge of grown-up people. It is an attempt to add to the scrappy, unsatisfying information about things which the little questioner’s own observation has managed to gather, or others’ half-understood words have succeeded in communicating. It is the outcome of intellectual craving, of a demand for mental food. But it is much more than an expression of need. Just as the child’s articulate demand for food implies that he knows what food is, and that it is obtainable, so the question implies that the little questioner knows what he needs, and in what direction to look for it. The simplest form of question, e.g., “What is this flower?” “this insect?” shows that the child by a half-conscious process of reflexion and reasoning has found his way to the truth that things have their qualities, their belongings, their names. Many questions, indeed, e.g., ‘Has the moon wings?’ ‘Where do all the days go to?’ reveal a true process of childish thought and have a high value as expressions of this thought.
Questioning may take various directions. A good deal of the child’s catechising of his long-suffering mother is prompted by thirst for fact.[[38]] The typical form of this line of questioning is ‘What?’ The motive here is to gain possession of some fact which will connect itself with and supplement a fact already known. ‘How old is Rover?’ ‘Where was Rover born?’ ‘Who was his father?’ ‘What is that dog’s name?’ ‘What sort of hair had you when you were a little girl?’ These are samples of the questioning activity by help of which the little inquirer tries to make up his connected wholes, to see things with his imagination in their proper attachment and order. And how greedily and pertinaciously the small folk will follow up their questioning, flying as it often looks wildly enough from point to point, yet gathering from every answer some new contribution to their ideas of things. A boy of three years and nine months would thus attack his mother: ‘What does frogs eat, and mice and birds and butterflies? and what does they do? and what is their names? What is all their houses’ names? What does they call their streets and places?’ etc., etc.
Such questions easily appear foolish because, as in the case just quoted, they are directed by quaint childish fancies. The child’s anthropomorphic way of looking out on the world leads him to assimilate animal to human ways.
One feature in this fact-gleaning kind of question is the great store which the child sets by the name of a thing. M. Compayré has pointed out that the form of question: ‘What is this?’ often means, “What is it called?” The child’s unformulated theory seems to be that everything has its own individual name. The little boy just spoken of explained to his mother that he thought all the frogs, the mice, the birds, and the butterflies had names given to them by their mothers as he himself had. Perhaps this was only a way of expressing the childish idea that everything has its name, primordial and unchangeable.
A second direction of this early questioning is towards the reason and the cause of things. The typical form is here ‘why?’ This form of inquiry occurred in the case of Preyer’s boy at the age of two years forty-three weeks. But it becomes the all-predominant form of question somewhat later. Who that has tried to instruct the small child of three or four does not know the long shrill whinelike sound of this question? This form of question develops naturally out of the earlier, for to give the ‘what?’ of a thing, that is its connexions, is to give its ‘why?’ that is its mode of production, its use and purpose.