To follow farther the influence that the use of speech as a means of understanding has upon the intellectual development of the child lies outside the problem dealt with in this book. Let me, in conclusion, simply give a brief estimate of the questioning-activity that makes its appearance very early after the first attempts at speech, and also add a few remarks on the development of the "I"-feeling.
The child's questioning as a means of his culture is almost universally underrated. The interest in causality that unfolds itself more and more vigorously with the learning of speech, the asking why, which is often almost unendurable to parents and educators, is fully justified, and ought not, as unfortunately is too often the case, to be unheeded, purposely left unanswered, purposely answered falsely. I have from the beginning given to my boy, to the best of my knowledge invariably, an answer to his questions intelligible to him and not contrary to truth, and have noticed that in consequence at a later period, in the fifth and the sixth and especially in the seventh year, the questions prove to be more and more intelligent, because the previous answers are retained. If, on the contrary, we do not answer at all, or if we answer with jests and false tales, it is not to be wondered at that a child even of superior endowments puts foolish and absurd questions and thinks illogically—a thing that rarely occurs where questions are rightly answered and fitting instruction is given, to say nothing of rearing the child to superstition. The only legend in which I allow my boy to have firm faith is that of the stork that brings new babes, and what goes along with that.
With regard to the development of the "I"—feeling the following holds good:
This feeling does not awake on the day when the child uses for the first time the word "I" instead of his own name—the date of such use varies according as those about it name themselves and the child by the proper name and not by the pronoun for a longer or a shorter period; but the "I" is separated from the "not-I" after a long series of experiences, chiefly of a painful sort, as these observations have made clear, through the becoming accustomed to the parts of one's own body. These, which at first are foreign objects, affect the child's organs of sense always in the same manner, and thereby become uninteresting after they have lost the charm of novelty. Now, his own body is that to which the attractive objective impressions (i. e., the world) are referred, and with the production by him of new impressions, with the changes wrought by him (in the experimenting which is called "playing"), with the experience of being-a-cause, is developed more and more in the child the feeling of self. With this he raises himself higher and higher above the dependent condition of the animal, so that at last the difference, not recognizable at all before birth and hardly recognizable at the beginning after birth, between animal and human being attains a magnitude dangerous for the latter, attains it, above all, by means of language.
But if it is necessary for the child to appropriate to himself as completely as possible this highest privilege of the human race and through this to overcome the animal nature of his first period; if his development requires the stripping off of the remains of the animal and the unfolding of the responsible "I"—then it will conduce to the highest satisfaction of the thinking man, at the summit of his experience of life, to go back in thought to his earliest childhood, for that period teaches him plainly that he himself has his origin in nature, is intimately related to all other living creatures. However far he gets in his development, he is ever groping vainly in the dark for a door into another world; but the very fact of his reflecting upon the possibility of such a door shows how high the developed human being towers above all his fellow-beings.
The key to the understanding of the great enigma, how these extremes are connected, is furnished in the history of the development of the mind of the child.