Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/764

742 deal of the more importunate varieties of children's questionings when they follow up question by question recklessly, as it seems, and without definite aim, appears to be of this formal and lifeless character, an expression not of a sound intellectual activity, but merely of a mood of general mental discontent and peevishness. In a certain amount of childish questioning, indeed, we have, I suspect, to do with a distinctly abnormal mental state, with an analogue of that mania of questions or passion for mental rummaging or prying into everything—Grübelsucht, as the Germans call it—which is a well-known phase of mental disease, and in which the patient will put such questions as these: "Why do I stand here where I stand?" "Why is a glass a glass, a chair a chair?" Such questioning ought, it is evident, not to be treated too seriously. We may attach too much significance to a child's question, laboring hard to grasp its meaning, with a view to answering it, when we should be wiser if we viewed it as a symptom of mental irritability and peevishness, to be got rid of as quickly as possible by a good romp or other healthy distraction.

To admit, however, that children's questions may now and again need this sort of wholesome snubbing is far from saying that we ought to treat all their questioning with a mild contempt. If now and then they torment their elders with a string of random, reckless questionings, in how many cases, one wonders, are they not made to suffer—and that wrongfully—by having perfectly serious questions rudely cast back on their hands? The truth is, that to understand and to answer children's questions is a considerable art, including a large and deep knowledge of things, and a quick, sympathetic insight into the little questioners' minds. It is one of the tragi-comic features of human life that the ardent little explorer, looking out with wide-eyed wonder upon his new world, should now and again find as his first guide a nurse or even a mother who will resent the majority of his questions as disturbing the luxurious mood of indolence in which she chooses to pass her days. We can never know how much valuable mental activity has been checked, how much hope and courage cast down, hj this kind of treatment. Yet happily the questioning impulse is not easily eradicated, and a child who has suffered at the outset from this wholesale contempt may be fortunate enough to meet, while the spirit of investigation is still upon him, one who knows and who has the good nature and the patience to impart what he knows in response to a child's appeal.