Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/369

Rh. The same little boy that was so concerned to know what his mother had done without him happened one day to be passing a street pump with his mother, when he stopped and observed with perfect gravity, "There are no pumps in heaven where I came from." He had evidently thought out the fiction of the God-sent baby to its logical consequences, and after taxing in vain his prenatal memory had arrived at the conclusion that pumps were not of heaven's furniture.

Children appear to have very vague ideas about the past. On the one hand, as in the case of their measurements of space, their standard of time is not ours; an hour, say the first morning at school, may seem an eternity to a child's consciousness. The days, the months, the years seem to fly faster and faster as we get older. On the other hand, as in the case of space-judgment, too, the child, through his inability to represent time on a large scale, is apt to bring the past too near the present. Mothers and young teachers would be surprised if they knew how children interpreted their first historical instruction introduced by the common phrase "Many years ago," or similar expressions. Here is an illustrative anecdote sent in by the aunt of the child, a boy of five years and a half: "H was beginning to have English history read to him, and had got past the 'Romans,' as he said. One day he noticed a locket on my watch chain, and desired that it should be opened. It contained the hair of two babies both dead long before. He asked about them. I told him they died before I was born. 'Did father know them?' he asked. 'No, they died below he was born.' Then who knew them and when did they live?' he asked, and as I hesitated for a moment, seeking how to make the matter plain, Was it in the time of the Romans?' he gravely asked." The odd-looking historical perspective here was quite natural. He had to localize the babies' existence somewhere, and he could only do it conjecturally by reference to the one far-off time of which he had heard, and which presumably covered all that was before the lifetime of himself and of those about him.

We may now pass to another group of children's ideas—a group already alluded to—those which have to do with the invisible world, with death and what follows, with God and heaven. Here we find an odd patchwork of thought, the patchwork-look being due to the heterogeneous sources of the child's information, his own observations of the seen world on the one hand and the ideas supplied him by what is called religious instruction on the other. The characteristic activity of the child-mind, so far as we can disengage it, is seen in the attempt to co-ordinate the disparate and seemingly contradictory ideas into something like a coherent system.