Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/367

Rh Very carious are the directions of the first thoughts about the past self. The idea of personal identity so dear to philosophers does not appear to be fully reached at first. On the contrary, in the case of the Boy C, the past self was divorced from the present under the image of the opposite sex in the odd expression "When I was a little girl." This idea I find is not confined to C. Another little boy when about three years and a half old asked his mother, "Was I a girl when I was small?" and the little questioner whom I have called our zoölogist was also accustomed to, say, "When I was a ickle dirl" (girl). But, funnily enough, this same little boy would also say, "When I was a big man," to describe the state of things long long ago. What does this mean? Is the child apt to think of his life as a series of transformations, of transitions from littleness to bigness and the reverse, and even of transmutation from the one sex into the other? And if so, how does he come by this odd view of life? It seems probable to me that to the child's lively fancy such metamorphoses of the self present themselves as easy and natural. Is not much of his time passed in fancying himself transformed by some wondrous magic into a prince, a fairy, and what not? It may be hard to trace out all the little misapprehensions of language, all the quaint childish inferences, which lie behind such thoughts as these. It is possible, however, after all, that the child does not mean to be taken too literally in this talk about his past self. The little boy's reference to his past girlhood or bigness may be only his bold, figurative way of trying to express the idea of a state very, very different from the present, a phase of his existence which he can not join on to the later and nearer, and which he is forced to regard as another existence.

The difficulty to the child of conceiving of his remote past is surpassed by that of trying to understand the state of things before he was born. The true mystery of birth for the child, the mystery which fascinates and holds his mind, is that of his beginning to be. This was illustrated in C's question: "Where was I a hundred years ago? Where was I before I was born?" It remains a mystery to all of us, only that after a time we are wont to put it aside. The child, on the other hand, is stung, so to say, by the puzzle, his whole mind being thrown into energetic movement.

It is curious to note the differences in the attitude of children's minds toward the mystery. The small person accustomed to petting, to be made the center of others' thought and action, may be struck with the blank in the common home life before his arrival. A lady was talking to her little girl H, aged three years, about something she had done when she was a child. H then wanted to know what she was doing then, and was told by her mother,