Strange, bizarre, altogether puzzling to the listener, are some of these childish questions. A little American girl of nine years after a pause in talk re-commenced the conversation by asking: “Why don’t I think of something to say?” A play recently performed in a London theatre made precisely this appeal to others by way of getting at one’s own motives a chief amusing feature in one of its comical characters. Another little American girl aged three one day left her play and her baby sister named Edna Belle to find her mother and ask: “Mamma, why isn’t Edna Belle me, and why ain’t I Edna Belle?”[[42]] The narrator of this story adds that the child was not a daughter of a professor of metaphysics but of practical farmer folk. One cannot be quite sure of the precise drift of this question. It may well have been the outcome of a new development of self-consciousness, of a clearer awareness of the self in its distinctness from others. A question with a much clearer metaphysical ring about it, showing thought about the subtlest problems, was that put by a boy of the same age: “If I’d gone upstairs, could God make it that I hadn’t?” This is a good example of the type of question: ‘Can he make a thing done not to have been done?’ which according to Erasmus was much debated by theologians.[[43]]
With many children confronted with the mysteries of God and the devil this questioning often reproduces the directions of theological speculation. Thus the problem of the necessity of evil is clearly recognisable in the question once put by an American boy under eight years of age to a priest who visited his home: “Father, why don’t God kill the devil and then there would be no more wickedness in the world?”
All children’s questioning does not of course take this sublime direction. Along with the tendency to push back inquiry to the unreachable beginning of things we mark a more modest and scientific line of investigation into the observable and explainable processes of nature. Some questions which a busy listener would pooh-pooh as dreamy have a genuinely scientific value, showing that the little inquirer is trying to work out some problem of fact. This is illustrated by a question put by a little boy aged three years nine months: “Why don’t we see two things with our two eyes?” a problem which, as we know, has exercised older psychologists.
When this more definitely scientific direction is taken by a child’s questioning we may observe that the ambitious ‘why?’ begins to play a second rôle, the first being now taken by the more modest ‘how?’ The germ of this kind of inquiry may be present in some of the early questioning about growth. “How,” asked our little zoologist, “does plants grow when we plant them, and how does boys grow from babies to big boys like me? Has I grown now whilst I was eating my supper? See!” and he stood up to make the most of his stature. Clearer evidence of a directing of inquiry into the processes of things appears in the fifth and sixth years. A little girl of four years seven months among other questionings wanted to know what makes the trains move, and how we move our eyes. The incessant inquiries of the boy Clark Maxwell into the ‘go’ of this thing or the ‘particular go’ of that illustrate in a clearer manner the early tendency to direct questioning to the more manageable problems to which science confines itself.
These different lines of questioning are apt to run on concurrently from the end of the third year, a fit of eager curiosity about animals or other natural objects giving place to a fit of theological inquiry, this again being dropped for an equally eager inquiry into the making of clocks, railway engines, and so on. Yet through these alternating bouts of questioning we can distinguish something like a law of intellectual progress. Questioning as the most direct expression of a child’s curiosity follows the development of his groups of ideas and of the interests which help to construct these. Thus I think it a general rule that questioning about the make or mechanism of things follows questioning about animal ways just because the zoological interest (in a very crude form of course) precedes the mechanical. The scope of this early questioning will, moreover, expand with intellectual capacity, and more particularly the capability of forming the more abstruse kind of childish idea. Thus inquiries into absolute beginnings, into the origin of the world and of God himself, indicate the presence of a larger intellectual grasp of time-relations and of the processes of becoming.
Our survey of the field of childish questioning suggests that it is by no means an easy matter to deal with. It must be admitted, I think, by the most enthusiastic partisan of children that their questioning is of very unequal value. It may often be noticed that a child’s ‘why?’ is used in a sleepy mechanical way with no real desire for knowledge, any semblance of answer being accepted without an attempt to put a meaning into it. A good deal of the more importunate kind of children’s questioning, when they follow up question by question recklessly, as it seems, and without definite aim, appears to be of this formal and lifeless character, an expression not of a healthy intellectual activity, but merely of a mood of general mental discontent and peevishness. In a certain amount of childish questioning, indeed, we have, I suspect, to do with a distinctly abnormal mental state, with an analogue of that mania of questions, or passion for mental rummaging or prying into everything, “Grubelsucht” as the Germans call it, which is a well-known phase of mental disease, and prompts the patient to put such questions as this: “Why do I stand here where I stand?” “Why is a glass a glass, a chair a chair?” Such questioning ought, it is evident, not to be treated too seriously. We may attach too much significance to a child’s question, labouring hard to grasp its meaning, with a view to answering it, when we should be wiser if we viewed it as a symptom of mental irritability and peevishness, to be got rid of as quickly as possible by a good romp or other healthy distraction.[[44]]
To admit, however, that children’s questions may now and again need this sort of wholesome snubbing is far from saying that we ought to treat all their questioning with a mild contempt. The little questioners flatter us by attributing superior knowledge to us, and good manners should compel us to treat their questions with some attention. And if now and then they torment us with a string of random reckless questioning, in how many cases, one wonders, are they not made to suffer, and that wrongfully, by having perfectly serious questions rudely cast back on their hands? The truth is that to understand and to answer children’s questions is a considerable art, including both a large and deep knowledge of things, and a quick sympathetic insight into the little questioners’ minds, and few of us have at once the intellectual and the moral excellences needed for an adequate treatment of them. It is one of the tragi-comic features of human life that the ardent little explorer looking out with wide-eyed wonder upon his new world should now and again find as his first guide a nurse or even a mother who will resent the majority of his questions as disturbing the luxurious mood of indolence in which she chooses to pass her days. We can never know how much valuable mental activity has been checked, how much hope and courage cast down by this kind of treatment. Yet happily the questioning impulse is not easily eradicated, and a child who has suffered at the outset from this wholesale contempt may be fortunate enough to meet, while the spirit of investigation is still upon him, one who knows and who has the good nature and the patience to impart what he knows in response to a child’s appeal.
[37]. Works, vol. iii., p. 396.
[38]. The first question put by Preyer’s boy was, ‘Where is mamma?’ Die Seele des Kindes, p. 412. (The references are to the third edition, 1890.)