It is of course hard to say how exactly the child thinks about this inner self. It seems to me probable that, allowing for the great differences in reflective power, children in general, like uncivilised races, tend to materialise it, thinking of it dimly as a film-like shadow-like likeness of the visible self. The problem is complicated for the child’s consciousness by religious instruction with its idea of an undying soul.
As may be seen in the recollections just quoted, this early thought about self is greatly occupied with its action on the body. Among the many things that puzzled the much-questioning little lad already frequently quoted was this: “How do my thoughts come down from my brain to my mouth: and how does my spirit make my legs walk?” C.’s sister when four years and ten months old wanted to know how it is we can move our arm and keep it still when we want to, while the curtain can’t move except somebody moves it. The first attempts to solve the puzzle are of course materialistic, as may be seen in our little questioner’s delightful notion of thoughts travelling through the body. This form of materialism, however, I find surviving in grown-ups and even in students of psychology, who are rather fond of talking about sensations travelling up the nerves to the brain.
Very curious are the directions of the first thought about the past self. The idea of personal identity, so dear to philosophers, does not appear to be fully reached at first. On the contrary, as we shall see in the case of C., the past self is divorced from the present under the image of the opposite sex in the odd expression: “when I was a little girl”. This probably illustrates the importance of the bodily appearance as a factor in the self, for C. had, I believe, been photographed when in the petticoat stage, and no doubt looked back on this person in skirts as a girl. This is borne out by the fact that another little boy when about three and a half years old asked his mother: “Was I a girl when I was small?” and that the little questioner whom I have called our zoologist was also accustomed to say: “When I was a ’ickle dirl (girl)”. But discarded petticoats do not explain all the child’s ideas about his past self. This same little zoologist would also say, “When I was a big man,” to describe the state of things long, long ago. What does this mean? In discussing the quaint idea of senile shrinkage I have suggested that a child may think of human existence as a series of transformations from littleness to bigness, and the reverse, and here we have lighted on another apparent evidence of it. For though we are apt to call children ‘old men’ we do not suggest to them that they are or have been big men.
The difficulty to the child of conceiving of his remote past, is surpassed by that of trying to understand the state of things before he was born. The true mystery of birth for the child, the mystery which fascinates and holds his mind, is that of his beginning to be. This is illustrated in C.’s question: “Where was I a hundred years ago? Where was I before I was born?” It remains a mystery for all of us, only that after a time we are wont to put it aside. The child, on the other hand, is stung, so to say, by the puzzle, his whole mind being roused to passionate questioning.
It is curious to note the differences in the attitude of children’s minds towards the mystery. The small person accustomed to petting, to be made the centre of others’ thought and action, may be struck with the blank in the common home life before his arrival. A lady was talking to her little girl H., aged three years, about something she had done when she was a child. H. then wanted to know what she was doing then, and was told by her mother: “Oh, you were not here at all”. She seemed quite amazed at this, and said: “And what did you do without H.? Did you cry all day for her?” On being informed that this was not the case, she seemed quite unable to realise how her mother could have existed without her. There is something of the charming egoism of the child here, but there is more: there is the vague expression of the unifying integrating work of love. Lovers, one is told, are wont to think in the same way about the past before they met, and became all in all to one another. For this little girl with her strong sense of human attachment, the idea of a real life without that which gave it warmth and gladness was a contradiction.
Sometimes again, in the more metaphysical sort of child, the puzzle relates to the past existence of the outer world. We have all been perplexed by the thought of the earth and sky, and other folk existing before we were, and going on to exist after we cease to be; though here again, save in the case of the philosopher perhaps, we get used to the puzzle. Children may be deeply impressed with this apparent contradiction. Jean Ingelow in her interesting reminiscences thus writes of her puzzlings on this head: "I went through a world of cogitation as to whether it was really true that anything had been and lived before I was there to see it.... I could think there might have been some day when I was very little—as small as the most tiny pebble on the road—but not to have been at all was so very hard to believe." A little boy of five who was rather given to saying ‘clever’ things, was one day asked by a visitor, who thought to rebuke what she took to be his conceit: “Why, M., however did the world go round before you came into it?” M. at once replied: “Why, it didn’t go round. It only began five years ago.” Was this, as perhaps nine persons out of ten would say, merely a bit of dialectic smartness, the evasion of an awkward question by denying the assumed fact? I am disposed to think that there was more, that the virtuous intention of the visitor had chanced to discover a hidden child-thought; for the child is naturally a Berkeleyan, in so far at least that for him the reality of things is reality for his own sense-perceptions. A world existent before he was on the spot to see it, seems to the child’s intelligence a contradiction.
A child will sometimes use theological ideas as an escape from this puzzle. The myth of babies being brought down from heaven is particularly helpful. The quick young intelligence sees in this pretty idea a way of prolonging existence backwards. The same little boy that was so concerned to know what his mother had done without him, happened one day to be passing a street pump with his mother, when he stopped and observed with perfect gravity: “There are no pumps in heaven where I came from”. He had evidently thought out the legend of the God-sent baby to its logical consequences.
Children appear to have very vague ideas about time. Their minds cannot at first of course rise to the abstraction, time, or duration, or to its measured portions, as a day. They talk about the days as if they were things. Thus to-day, yesterday, and to-morrow, which, as we may see in C.’s way of talking about time, are used very vaguely for present, past and future, are spoken of as things which move. A girl of four asked: ‘Where is yesterday gone to?’ and ‘Where will to-morrow come from?’ The boy C. as well as other children, as we saw, asked where all the days go to. Such expressions may of course be figurative, a child having no other way of describing the sequence yesterday and to-day, to-day and to-morrow; yet I am disposed to think that these are examples of the child’s ‘concretism,’ his reduction of our abstractions to living realities.[[54]]
It is equally noticeable that children have no adequate mental representations of our time-measurements. As in the case of space, so in that of time their standard is not ours: an hour, say the first morning at school, may seem an eternity to a child’s consciousness. The days, the months, the years seem to fly faster and faster as we get older. On the other hand, as in the case of space-judgments, too, the child through his inability to represent time on a large scale is apt to bring the past too near the present. Mothers and young teachers would be surprised if they knew how children interpreted their first historical instruction introduced by the common phrase, ‘Many years ago,’ or similar expression. A child of six years when crossing the Red Sea asked to be shown Pharaoh and his hosts. This looks like the effect of a vivid imagination of the scene, which even in grown people may beget an expectation of seeing it here and now. The following anecdote of a boy of five and a half years sent me by his aunt more clearly illustrates a child’s idea of the historical past. “H. was beginning to have English history read to him and had got past the ‘Romans’ as he said. One day he noticed a locket on my watch-chain, and desired that it should be opened. It contained the hair of two babies both dead long before. He asked about them. I told him they died before I was born. ‘Did father know them?’ he asked. ‘No, they died before he was born.’ ‘Then who knew them and when did they live?’ he asked, and as I hesitated for a moment, seeking how to make the matter plain, ‘Was it in the time of the Romans?’ he gravely asked.” The odd-looking historical perspective here was quite natural. He had to localise the babies’ existence somewhere, and he could only do it conjecturally by reference to the one far-off time of which he had heard, and which presumably covered all that was before the life-time of himself and of those about him.