Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/208

196 "When will she begin to get small?" I have since obtained corroboratory instances from parents and teachers of infant classes.

Here we seem to have to do with a pure product of the childish brain. What does it mean? By what quaint zigzag movement of child-thought, by the use of what far-fetched analogy, was the idea excogitated? I can not learn that there is any idea like it in primitive folklore. This at once suggests that it is the result of the activity of the little brain as employed in deciphering the words of older people. It has been suggested to me that the playful way a nurse will sometimes adopt of speaking to the child when she wants it to do something—e. g., "When I'm a little girl I shall be good and not mess my clothes"—may be taken literally by the serious mind of the child. I do not, however, think that this will account for the frequency of the phenomenon. It seems probable that other processes of childish interpretation assist. Children often hear old people talked about as weak and silly. Now, if there is one proposition of which the child is sure it is that grown people are always able to do things and awfully knowing. C's belief in the preternatural calculating powers of Goliath shows how strongly the child-mind associates size and intelligence. Consequently, it is a shock to a child to overhear his mother talking about grown people as stupid, just as it is a shock to him to hear her characterizing them as bad or wicked. The creed of infancy is that all such defects will disappear with completion of growth. Hence it may be that children who are in the way of hearing old people spoken of as losing power and intelligence carry over the thought of littleness, and imagine that they must be getting small again. This tendency would, of course, be greatly strengthened if the child happened to hear an old person talked about as getting childish or passing into second childhood. Indeed, I am disposed to think, from the frequency of the appearance of the belief, that this reference to the childish condition of old age is probably always co-operant in bringing the tendency to the definiteness of a theory of senility. However the idea arises, it is a curious and striking illustration of the fact that with all our attempts to supply the young brain with our own ideas, it manages to substitute a good many new and thoroughly original ones.

The origin of babies and young animals furnishes, as we know, the child's brain with much food for speculation. Here the little thinker is not often left to excogitate a theory for himself. His inconvenient questionings in this direction have to be firmly checked, and various and truly wonderful are the ways in which the nurse and the mother are wont to do this. Any fiction is supposed to be good enough for the purpose. Divine action is