Next to movement apparently spontaneous sound appears to be a common reason for attributing life to inanimate objects. Are not movement and vocal sound the two great channels of utterance of the child’s own impulses? The little girl M., when just two years old, being asked by her mother for a kiss, answered prettily, ‘Tiss (kiss) gone away’. This may, of course, have been merely a child’s way of using language, but the fact that the same little girl asked to see a ‘knock’ suggests that she was disposed to give reality and life to sounds. Its sound greatly helps the persuasion that the wind is alive. A little boy assured his teacher that the wind was alive, for he heard it whistling in the night. The ascription of life to fire is probably aided by its sputtering crackling noises. The impulse, too, to endow so little organic-looking an object as a railway engine with conscious life is probably supported by the knowledge of its puffing and whistling. Pierre Loti, when as a child he first saw the sea, regarded it as a living monster, no doubt on the ground of its movement and its noise. The personification of the echo by the child, of which George Sand’s reminiscences give an excellent example, as also by uncultured man, is a signal illustration of the suggestive force of a voice-like sound.
Closely connected with this impulse to ascribe life to what older folk regard as inanimate objects is the tendency to conceive them as growing. This is illustrated in the remark of the boy C., that his stick would in time grow bigger. On the other hand, there is in the Worcester Collection a curious story of a little American boy of three who, having climbed up into a large waggon, and being asked, “How are you going to get out?” replied, “I can stay here till it gets little and then I can get out my own self”. We shall see presently that shrinkage or diminution of size is sometimes attributed by the child-mind to people when getting old. So that we seem to have in each of these cases the extension to things generally of an idea first formed in connexion with the observation of human life.
Children’s ideas of natural objects are anthropomorphic, not merely as reflecting their own life, but as modelled after the analogy of the effects of their action. Quite young children are apt to extend the ideas broken and mended to objects generally. Anything which seems to have become reduced by losing a portion of itself is said to be ‘broken’. A little boy of three, on seeing the moon partly covered by a cloud, remarked, “The moon is broken”. On the other hand, in the case of one little boy, everything intact was said to be mended. It may be said, however, that we cannot safely infer from such analogical use of common language that children distinctly think of all objects as undergoing breakage and repair: for these expressions in the child’s vocabulary may refer rather to the resulting appearances, than to the processes by which they are brought about.
Clearer evidences of this reflexion on to nature of the characteristics of his own life appear when a child begins to speculate about mechanical processes, which he invariably conceives of after the analogy of his own actions. This was illustrated in dealing with children’s questions. We see it still more clearly manifested in some of their ideas. One of the most curious instances of this that I have met with is seen in early theorisings about the cause of wind. One of the children examined by Mr. Kratz said the tree was to make the wind blow. A pupil of mine distinctly recalls that when a child he accounted for the wind at night by the swaying of two large elms in front of the house and not far from the windows of his bedroom. This reversing of the real order of cause and effect looks silly, until we remember that the child necessarily looks at movement in the light of his own actions. He moves things, e.g., the water, by his moving limbs; we set the air in motion by a moving fan; it seems, therefore, natural to him that the wind-movements should be caused by the pressure of some moving thing; and there is the tree actually seen to be moving.
So far I have spoken for the most part of children’s ideas about near and accessible objects. Their notions of what is distant and inaccessible are, as remarked, wont to be formed on the model of the first. Here, however, their knowledge of things will be largely dependent on others’ information, so that the naïve impulse of childish intelligence has, as best it may, to work under the limitations of an imperfectly understood language.
It is perhaps hardly necessary to remind the reader that children’s ideas of distance before they begin to travel far are necessarily very inadequate. They are disposed to localise the distant objects they see, as the sun, moon and stars, and the places they hear about on the earth’s surface as near as possible. The tendency to approximate things as seen in the infant’s stretching out of the hand to touch the moon lives on in the later impulse to localise the sky and heavenly bodies just beyond the farthest terrestrial object seen, as when a child thought they were just above the church spire, another that they could be reached by tying a number of ladders together, another that the setting sun went close behind the ridge of hills, and so forth. The stars, being so much smaller looking, seem to be located farther off than the sun and moon. Similarly when they hear of a distant place, as India, they tend to project it just beyond the farthest point known to them, say Hampstead, to which they were once taken on a long, long journey from their East End home. A child’s standard of size and distance is, as all know who have revisited the home of their childhood after many years, very different from the adult’s. To the little legs unused as yet to more than short spells of locomotion a mile seems stupendous: and then the half-formed brain cannot yet pile up the units of measurement well enough to conceive of hundreds and thousands of miles.
The child appears to think of the world as a circular plain, and of the sky as a sort of inverted bowl upon it. C.’s sister used on looking at the sky to fancy she was inside a blue balloon. That is to say he takes them to be what they look. In a similar manner C. took the sun to be a great disc which could be put on the round globe to make a ‘see-saw’. When this ‘natural realism’ gets corrected, children go to work to convert what is told them into an intelligible form. Thus they begin to speculate about the other side of the globe, and, as Mr. Barrie reminds us, are apt to fancy they can know about it by peeping down a well. When religious instruction introduces the new region of heaven they are apt to localise it just above the sky, which to their thought forms its floor. Some genuine thought-work is seen in the effort to harmonise the various things they learn by observation and instruction about the celestial region into a connected whole. Thus the sky is apt to be thought of as thin, this idea being probably formed for the purpose of explaining the shining through of moon and stars. Stars are, as we know, commonly thought of by the child as holes in the sky letting through the light beyond. One Boston child ingeniously applied the idea of the thinness of the sky to explain the appearance of the moon when one half is bright and the other faintly illumined, supposing it to be half-way through the partially diaphanous floor. Others again prettily accounted for the waning of the moon to a crescent by saying it was half stuck or half buttoned into the sky.
The movements of the sun and other heavenly bodies are similarly apperceived by help of ideas of movements of familiar terrestrial objects. Thus the sun was thought by the Boston children half-mythologically, half-mechanically, to roll, to fly, to be blown (like a soap bubble or balloon?) and so forth. The anthropocentric form of teleological explanation is apt to creep in, as when a Boston child said charmingly that the moon comes round when people forget to light some lamps. Theological ideas, too, are pressed into this sphere of explanation, as in the attribution of the disappearance of the sun to God’s pulling it up higher out of sight, to his taking it into heaven and putting it to bed, and so forth. These ideas are pretty obviously not those of a country child with a horizon. There is rather more of nature-observation in the idea of another child that the sun after setting lies under the trees where angels mind it.
The impressive phenomena of thunder and lightning give rise in the case of the child as in that of the Nature-man to some fine myth-making. The American children, as already observed, have different mechanical illustrations for setting forth the modus of the supernatural operation here, thunder being thought of now as God groaning, now as his walking heavily on the floor of heaven (cf. the old Norse idea that thunder is caused by the rolling of Thor’s chariot), now as his hammering, now as his having coals run in—ideas which show how naïvely the child-mind humanises the Deity, making him a respectable citizen with a house and a coal-cellar. In like manner the lightning is attributed to God’s burning the gas quick, striking many matches at once, or other familiar human device for getting a brilliant light suddenly. So God turns on rain by a tap, or lets it down from a cistern by a hose, or, better, passes it through a sieve or a dipper with holes.[[47]] In like manner a high wind was explained by a girl of five and a half by saying that it was God’s birthday, and he had received a trumpet as a present.
Throughout the whole region of these mysterious phenomena we have illustrations of the anthropocentric tendency to regard what takes place as designed for us poor mortals. The little girl of whom Mr. Canton writes thought “the wind, and the rain and the moon ‘walking’ came out to see her, and the flowers woke up with the same laudable object”.[[48]] When frightened by the crash of the thunder a child instinctively thinks that it is all done to vex his little soul. One of the funniest examples of the application of this idea I have met with is in the Worcester Collection. Two children, D. and K., aged ten and five respectively, live in a small American town. D., who is reading about an earthquake, addresses his mother thus: “Oh, isn’t it dreadful, mamma? Do you suppose we will ever have one here?” K., intervening with the characteristic impulse of the young child to correct his elders: “Why, no, D., they don’t have earthquakes in little towns like this”. There is much to unravel in this delightful childish observation. It looks to my mind as if the earthquake were envisaged by the little five-year-old as a show, God being presumably the travelling showman, who takes care to display his fearful wonders only where there is an adequate body of spectators.