Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/343

Rh due to the uncanny look of a sort of ghost life as the light, unsubstantial thing slowly moves of itself from the ground and poises in mid-air. Perhaps a dog's uneasiness at the sight of leaves whisked in an eddy over the ground by the wind shows a degree of the same personifying instinct. Sometimes this endowment of things with sensation leads to a quaint manifestation of sympathy. Miss Ingelow writes of herself when a little over two years old and for about a year after: "I had the habit of attributing intelligence not only to all living creatures, the same amount and kind of intelligence that I had myself, but even to stones and manufactured articles. I used to feel how dull it must be for the pebbles in the causeway to be obliged to lie still and only see what was round about. When I walked out with a little basket for putting flowers in I used sometimes to pick up a pebble or two and carry them on to have a change; then at the farthest point of the walk turn them out, not doubting that they would be pleased to have a new view."

This is by no means a unique example of a childish lavishing of pity on what we think the insentient world. Plant life seems often to excite the feeling. Here is a quotation from a parent's chronicle. A girl aged eight brings a quantity of fallen autumn leaves in to her mother, who says, "Oh! how pretty, F!" to which the girl answers: "Yes, I knew you'd love the poor things, mother. I couldn't bear to see them dying on the ground." A few days afterward she was found standing at a window overlooking the garden, crying bitterly at the leaves as they fell in considerable numbers.

This is not the place to speak of the rich endowment of the animal world with human susceptibilities by the childish imagination. We all know how grotesquely the little humanitarian insists on fondling pussy, or wiping her nose, and otherwise tormenting that long-suffering quadruped, all from the kindest of motives.

Now it may be asked whether all this analogical extension of images to what seem to us such incongruous objects involves a vivid and illusory apprehension of these as transformed. Is the eyelid realized and even seen for the moment as a sort of curtain, the curtain image blending with and transforming what is present to the eye? Are the pebbles actually looked at as living things condemned to lie stiffly in one place? It is of course hard to say, yet I think a conjectural answer can be given. In this imaginative contemplation of things the child only half observes what is present to its eyes. One or two points of supreme interest in the visible thing, the falling of the leaf, the hiding of the eye by the