[39]. Cf. some shrewd remarks by Dr. Venn, Empirical Logic, p. 494.
[40]. See note by E. M. Stevens, Mind, xi., p. 150.
[41]. Illustrations are given by Compayré, op. cit., and by P. Lombroso, Psicologia del Bambino, p. 47 ff.
[42]. Quoted from an article, “Some Comments on Babies,” by Miss Shinn in the Overland Monthly, Jan., 1894.
[43]. Froude, Letters of Erasmus, Lect. vii.
[44]. Cf. Perez, L’Education dès le berceau, p. 45 ff.
IV.
PRODUCTS OF CHILD-THOUGHT.
The Child’s Thoughts about Nature.
We have seen in the previous article how a child’s mind behaves when brought face to face with the unknown. We will now examine some of the more interesting results of this early thought-activity, what are known as the characteristic ideas of children. There is no doubt, I think, that children, by reflecting on what they see or otherwise experience and what they are told by others, fashion their own ideas about nature, death and the rest. This tendency, as pointed out above, discloses itself to some extent in their questions about things. It has now to be more fully studied in their sayings as a whole. The ideas thus formed will probably prove to vary considerably in the case of different children, yet to preserve throughout these variations a certain general character.
These ideas, moreover, like those of primitive races, will be found to be a crude attempt at a connected system. We must not, of course, expect too much here. The earliest thought of mankind about nature and the supernatural was very far from being elaborated into a consistent logical whole; yet we can see general forms of conception or tendencies of thought running through the whole. So in the case of this largely spontaneous child-thought. It will disclose to an unsparing critical inspection vast gaps, and many unsurmounted contradictions. Thus in the case of children, as in that of uncultured races, the supernatural realm is at first brought at most into only a very loose connexion with the visible world. All the same there is seen, in the measure of the individual child’s intelligence, the endeavour to co-ordinate, and the poor little hard-pressed brain of a child will often pluckily do its best in trying to bring some connexion into that congeries of disconnected worlds into which he finds himself so confusingly introduced, partly by the motley character of his own experiences, as the alternations of waking and sleeping, partly by the haphazard miscellaneous instruction, mythological, historical, theological, and the rest, with which we inconsiderately burden his mind.