Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/205

Rh his having coals run—in ideas which show how naïvely the child-mind envisages the Deity, making him a respectable citizen with a house and a coal cellar. In like manner the lightning is attributed to God's burning the gas quick, striking many matches at once, or other familiar human device for getting a brilliant light suddenly. So rain is let down by God from a cistern by a hose, or, better, through a sieve or a dipper with holes.

Throughout the whole region of mysterious unexplained and exceptional phenomena we have illustrations of the anthropocentric tendency to regard what takes place as designed for us poor mortals. The little girl of whom Mr. Canton writes thought "the wind and the rain and the moon 'walking' came out to see her, and the flowers wake up with the same laudable object." When frightened by the crash of the thunder a child instinctively thinks that it is all done to vex his little soul. One of the funniest examples of the application of this idea I have met with is in the Worcester collection. Two children, D and K, aged ten and five respectively, live in a small American town. D, who is reading about an earthquake, addresses his mother thus: "Oh, isn't it dreadful, mamma? Do you suppose we will ever have one here?" K (intervening), with the characteristic impulse of the young child to correct its elders, "Why, no, D, they don't have earthquakes in little towns like this." There is much to unravel in this delightful childish observation. It looks, to my mind, as if the earthquake were envisaged by the little five-year old as a show, God being presumably the traveling showman, who takes care to display his fearful wonders only where there is an adequate body of spectators.

Finally, the same impulse to understand the new and strange by assimilating it to the familiar is, so far as I can gather, seen in children's first ideas about those puzzling semblances of visible objects which are due to subjective sensations. To judge from C's case, the bright spectra or after-images caused by looking at the sun are instinctively objective—that is, regarded as things external to his body. Here is a pretty full account of a child's thought about these subjective optical phenomena: A little boy of five years, in rather poor health at the time, "constantly imagined he saw angels, and said they were not white, that was a mistake, they were little colored things, light and beautiful, and they went into the toy basket and played with his toys." Here we have not only objectifying but myth-building. A year later he re