Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/758

736 It is only a step further in the same direction when the "why" has to be met by supplying a general statement: for to refer the particular to a general rule is a more perfect and systematic kind of assimilation. Now we know that children are very susceptible to the authority of precedent, custom, general rule. Just as in children's ethics customary permission makes a thing right, so in their logic the fact that a thing generally happens may be said to supply a reason for any single thing happening. Accordingly, when the much-abused nurse answers the child's question, "Why is the pavement hard?" by saying, "Because pavement is always hard," she is perhaps less open to the charge of giving a woman's reason than is sometimes said. In sooth, the child's queries, his searchings for explanation are, as already suggested, prompted by the desire for order and connectedness. And this means that he wants the general rule to which he can assimilate the particular and as yet isolated fact.

From the first, however, the "why" and its congeners have reference to the causal idea, to something which has brought the new and strange thing into existence and made it what it is. In truth, this reference to origin, to bringing about or making, is exceedingly prominent in children's questionings. Nothing is more interesting to a child than the production of things. What hours and hours does he not spend in wondering how the pebbles, the stones, the birds, the babies are made! This vivid interest in production is to a considerable extent practical. It is one of the great joys of children to be able themselves to make things, and the desire to fashion things which is probably at first quite immense, and befitting rather a god than a feeble child, naturally leads on to know something about the mode of producing. Yet from the earliest a true speculative interest blends with this practical instinct. Children are in the complete sense little philosophers, if philosophy, as the ancients said, consists in knowing the cause of things—"causas rerum cognoscere." This is the completed process of assimilation, of the reference of the particular to a general rule or law. Everything remains a mystery, looks distant and foreign, until its history, its origin is ascertained, and it can be classed with the known things whose existence is accounted for.

This inquisition into origin and mode of production starts with the amiable presupposition that all things have been hand-produced after the manner of household possessions. The world is a sort of big house where everything has been made by somebody, or at least fetched from somewhere. This application of the anthropomorphic idea of fashioning follows the law of all