Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/156

136 as seen from a bridge. The flashing, running water was plainly for her an object of extraordinary beauty, and she would keep exclaiming, "Water, water" (age, twenty months). A little later (thirty months) she was profoundly impressed on seeing the moon. She wanted to look at it every night. When she walked abroad it seemed to her that the moon also was moving, and this discovery gave her delight; as the moon made her appearance in different localities, according to the hour, being seen at one time in front of the house, and again in the rear, she would exclaim, "Another moon! another moon!" One night (age, three years) she wanted to know where the moon was, and, on being told that it had gone to bed, she asked, "Where, then, is the moon's nurse?" All this very closely resembles the emotions and conjectures of childlike races; their profound wonderment in presence of the great phenomena of Nature; the influence exerted upon them by analogy, language, and metaphor, leading them to form myths of the sun, the moon, etc. Suppose such a state of mind to be universal at any period, and we can readily foresee what religious ideas and legends would be the result; in fact, we have instances of this process of development in the Vedas, the Edda, and even in Homer.

If we speak to the child of an object at some little distance, but which she can represent to herself definitely enough, having seen the object itself or something like it, her first question always is: "What does it say? What does the rabbit say? What does the bird say? What does the horse say? What does the big tree say?" Whether it be an animal or a tree, she always treats the object as a person; wants to know what it thinks, what it says. By a spontaneous induction, she pictures it as like herself or like us—humanizes it. This same tendency is found among primitive races, and it is all the stronger the more primitive they are.

It requires long time and many an effort for the infant to attain to ideas which to us appear simple. When this child's doll had its head broken she was told that now the doll was dead. One day her grandmother said to her: "I am old, and shall not remain long with you; I shall die." "Your head will be broken, then." This she repeated several times. Even yet (age, three years and one month), to be dead means, for her, to have a broken head. Day before yesterday a magpie that had been killed by the gardener was tied to the top of a pole for a scarecrow; on being told that the pie was dead the child wished to see it. "What does the pie do?" she asked. "She does nothing; she will never stir again, she is dead." "Oh!" For the first time the idea of final immobility has entered her mind. Now let us suppose a people to stop at this idea, and to have no other definition of death than this. For them the Beyond will be the Sheol of the Hebrews—the place where the motionless dead live a vague sort of life. For her yesterday means in the past, and to-morrow means in