Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/202

190 been able to ascertain. As we shall see, they seem to be mainly occupied with the mystery of our being able to move our limbs when we wish to do so. The idea has occurred to me that children's passion for pulling flowers to pieces may be prompted in part by a vague expectation of finding the mechanical secret of their growth and of the opening and shutting of their petals. Movement plays, I believe, the chief part in children's first ideas of the life of plants, though this idea grows more definite when they get knowledge of their fading and dying.

Next to movement apparently spontaneous sound appears to be a common motive for attributing life to inanimate objects. Are not movement and phonation the two great channels of utterance of the child's own impulses? A little boy assured his teacher that the wind was alive, for he heard it whistling in the night. The ascription of life to fire is greatly aided by the observation of its sputtering, crackling noises. The impulse, too, illustrated in the case given above, to endow so little organic-looking an object as a railway engine with conscious life was probably supported by the knowledge of its puffing and whistling. M. Pierre Loti, when as a child he first saw the sea, regarded it as a living monster, no doubt on the ground of its movement and its noise. The personification of the echo by the child, of which George Sand's reminiscences give an excellent example, as by uncultured man, is a signal illustration of the suggestive force of a voicelike sound.

Closely connected with this impulse to ascribe life to what older people regard as inanimate objects is the tendency to conceive them as growing. This is illustrated in the remark of the boy C that his stick would in time grow bigger. On the other hand, there is in the Worcester collection a curious story of a little American boy of three years, who, having climbed up into a large wagon and being asked, "How are you going to get out?" replied, "I can stay here till it gets little and then I can get out my own self." We shall see presently that shrinkage or diminution of size is sometimes attributed by the child-mind to people when getting old. So that we seem to have in each of these cases the extension to things generally of an idea first formed in connection with the observation of human life.

Children's ideas of natural objects are anthropomorphic, not merely as reflecting their own life, but as modeled after the analogy of the effects of human action. Thus I find that they are apt to extend the ideas broken and mended to objects generally. Anything which seems to have become reduced by losing a portion of itself is said to be "broken." A little boy of three years, on seeing the moon partly covered by a cloud, remarked, "The moon is broken." On the other hand, in the case of one little boy everything intact was said to be mended. We can not, of course, infer