Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/761

Rh early stage a puzzle to the infant. Later on, too, the young mind continues to be exercised about this mystery. Our little friend's inquiry about the whither of the big, receding sea, "Where does the sea sim (swim) to?" illustrates this perplexity. A child seems able to understand the shifting of an object of moderate size from one part of space to another, but his conception of space is probably not large enough to permit him to realize how a big tract of water can pass out of the visible scene into the unseen. The child's question, "Where does all the wind go to?" seems to have sprung from a like inability to picture a vast unseen realm of space. C's question as to where all the days go to may have been prompted by the idea that the days or their scenic contents continue to exist somewhere; that the past is something like the unseen region of space into which things disappear as they move away from us.

In addition to this difficulty of the disappearance of big things, there seems to be something in the vastness, the infinite quantity and number of existents perceived and heard about, which puzzles and oppresses the young mind. The inability to take in all the new facts leads to a kind of resentment at their multitude. "Mother," asked a boy of four years, "why is there such a lot of things in the world if no one knows all these things?" One can not be quite sure of the underlying thought here. Did the child mean merely to protest against the production of so confusing a number of objects, or was there a deeper difficulty, a dim presentiment of Berkeley's idealism, that things can exist only as objects of knowledge? This surmise may seem far-fetched to some, yet I have found what seem to me other traces of this tendency in children. A girl of six and a half years was talking to her father about the making of the world. He pointed out to her the difficulty of creating things out of nothing, showing her that when we made things we simply fashioned materials anew. She pondered and then said, "Perhaps the world's a fancy." Here, again, one can not be quite sure of the child-thought behind the words. Yet it certainly looks like a falling back for a moment into the dreamy mood of the idealist—that mood in which we seem to see the solid fabric of things dissolve into a shadowy phantasmagoria.

The subject of origins is, as we know, beset with puzzles for the childish mind. The beginnings of living things are of course the great mystery. "There's such a lot of things," remarked the little zoölogist I have recently been quoting, "I want to know, that you say nobody knows, mamma. I want to know who made God, and I want to know if pussy has eggs to help her make ickle (little) kitties." Finding that this was not so, he observed, "Oh, then, I s'pose she has to have God to help her if she doesn't have kitties in eggs given her to sit on." Another little boy, five years