Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/200

188 these the more important is the impulse to think of what is far off, whether in space or time, and so unobservable as like what is near and observed. Along with this tendency, or rather as one particular development of it, there goes the disposition, already illustrated, to vivify Nature, to personify things and so to assimilate their behavior to the child's own, and to explain the origin of things by ideas of making and aiming at some purpose. Since at the same time that these tendencies are still dominant the child by his own observation and by such instruction as he gets is gaining insight into the "how," the mechanism of things, we find that his cosmology is apt to be a quaint jumble of the scientific and the mythological. The boy C tried to conceive of the divine creation of men as a mechanical process with well-marked stages, the fashioning of the stone men, iron men, and then real men. In many cases we can see that Nature-myth comes in to eke out the deficiencies of mechanical insight. Thus the production of thunder and other strange and inexplicable phenomena is referred, as by the savage and even by many so-called civilized men and women, to the direct interposition of a supernatural agency. The theological idea with which children are supplied shapes itself into that of a capricious and awfully clever demiurgos who not only made the world-machine, but alters its working as often as he likes: for miracle is of the essence of the child's "Naturanschauung." Contradictions are not infrequent, the mythological impulse sometimes alternating with a more distinctly scientific impulse to grasp the mechanical process, as when wind is sometimes thought of as caused by a big fan, and sometimes—e. g., when heard moaning in the night—endowed with life and feeling. In many cases, too, the impulses combine, as when thunder is conceived of as God's action, but effected by mechanical means, such as shooting bricks on to the floor of heaven.

I shall make no attempt to give a methodical account of children's thoughts about Nature. I suspect that a good deal more material will have to be collected before a complete description of these thoughts is possible. I shall content myself with giving a few samples of their ideas so far as my own observations and those of others have thrown light on them.

With respect to the make or substance of things, children are disposed to regard all that they see as having the resistant quality of solid material substance. Just as the infant wants to touch pictures, the reflected sunlight dancing on the wall, and the shadows of objects, so later on the child continues to attribute the resistant quality of body to clouds or other inaccessible contents of the visible scene. Air at rest is of course not perceived by the child, but when in motion as wind it seems, so far as I can ascertain, to be