Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/759

Rh childish thought that the unknown is assimilated to the known. The one mode of origin which the embryo thinker is really and directly familiar with is the making of things. He himself makes a respectable number of things, including these rents in his clothes, messes on the table cloth, and the like, which he gets firmly imprinted on his memory by the authorities. And, then, he takes a keen interest in watching the making of things by others, such as puddings, clothes, houses, hayricks. To ask who made the animals, the babies, the wind, the clouds, and so forth, then, is for him merely to apply the more familiar type of causation as norm or rule. Similarly in all questions as to the "whence" of things, as in asking whether babies were bought in a shop.

The "why" takes on a more special meaning when the idea of purpose and adaptation of means to ends becomes clear. The search now is for the end, what philosophers call the teleological cause or reason. Here, again, the child sets out with the familiar type of experience, with human production and action as determined by aim. And it is easy for him, his mind being possessed by this anthropomorphic fancy which gives life to all things, to carry out this kind of inquiry. There is a stage in the development of a child's intelligence when questions such as "Why do the leaves fall?" "Why does the thunder make such a noise?" are answered most satisfactorily by a poetic fiction—by saying, for example, that the leaves are old and tired of hanging on to trees, and that the thunder-giant is in a particularly bad temper, and making a row. It is perhaps permissible to make use of this fiction at times, more especially perhaps when trying to answer the untiring questioning about animals and their doings—a region of existence, by the way, of which even the wisest of us knows exceedingly little. Yet the device has its risks; and an ill-considered piece of myth-making passed off as an answer may find itself awkwardly confronted by that most merciless of things, a child's logic.

But there is another sort of anthropomorphism in this interrogation. Children are apt to think not only that things in general are after our manner, but, what is very different, have their designs, so to speak, upon us. The sea, it will be remembered, made its noise with special reference to the ears of the small child C. We may call this the anthropocentric idea—that is, the idea that man is the center of reference in the case of natural phenomena. This anthropocentric tendency is apt to get toned down by the temperament of a child, which is on the whole optimistic and decidedly practical, into a looking out for the uses of things. A boy, already quoted, once (toward the end of the fourth year) asked his mother what the bees do. This question he explained by adding "What is the good of them?" When told that they