Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/763

Rh, was that put by a boy of the same age: "If I'd gone upstairs, could God make it that I hadn't?"

All children's questioning does not, of course, take this sublime direction. Along with the tendency to push back inquiry to the unreachable beginning of things we mark a more modest and scientific line of investigation into the observable and explainable processes of Nature. Some questions which a busy listener would pooh-pooh as dreamy have a genuinely scientific value, showing that the little inquirer is trying to work out some problem of fact. This is illustrated by a question put by a little boy aged three years and nine months. "Why don't we see two things with our two eyes?" a problem which, as we know, has exercised older psychologists.

When this more definitely scientific direction is taken by a child's questioning we may observe that the ambitious "Why?" begins to play a second role, the first being now taken by the more modest "How?" The boy Clerk Maxwell, with his incessant inquiries into the "go" of this thing or the "particular go" of that, illustrates this early tendency to direct questioning to the more manageable problems to which science confines itself.

These different lines of questioning are apt to run on concurrently from the end of the third year, a fit of eager curiosity about animals or other natural objects giving place to a fit of theological inquiry; this, again, being dropped for an equally eager inquiry into the making of clocks, railway engines, and so on. Yet through these alternating bouts of questioning we can distinguish something like a law of intellectual progress. Questioning as the most direct expression of a child's curiosity follows the development of his groups of ideas and of the interests which help to construct these. Thus I think it a general rule that questioning about the make or mechanism of things follows questioning about animal ways just because the zoological interest (in a very crude form, of course) precedes the mechanical. The scope of this early questioning will, moreover, expand with intellectual capacity, and more particularly the capability of forming the more abstruse kind of childish idea. Thus, inquiries into absolute beginnings, into the origin of the world and of God himself, indicate the presence of a larger intellectual grasp of time relations and of the processes of becoming.

Our survey of the field of childish questioning suggests that it is by no means an easy matter to deal with. It must be admitted, I think, by the most enthusiastic partisan of children that their questioning is of very unequal value. It may often be noticed that a child's "Why?" is used in a sleepy, mechanical way, with no real desire for knowledge, any semblance of answer being accepted, without an attempt to put a meaning into it. A good