of need. Just as the child's articulate demand for food implies that he knows what food is, and that it is obtainable, so the question implies that the little questioner knows what he needs, and in what direction to look for it. The simplest form of question—e. g. . What is this flower, this insect?—shows that the child, by a half-conscious process of reflection and reasoning, has found his way to the truth that things have their qualities, their belongings, their names.
Questioning may take various directions. A good deal of the child's catechising of his long-suffering mother is prompted by thirst for fact.[1] The typical form of this line of questioning is "What?" The motive here is to gain possession of some fact which will connect itself with and supplement a fact already known. How old is Rover? Where was Rover born? Who was his father? What is that dog's name? What sort of hair had you when you were a little girl? These are samples of the questioning activity by the help of which the little inquirer tries to make up his connected wholes—to see things with his imagination in their proper attachment and order. And how greedily and pertinaciously the small people will follow up their questioning, flying, as it often looks, wildly enough from point to point, yet gathering from every answer some new contribution to their ideas of things! A boy of three years and nine months would thus attack his mother: "What does frogs eat, and mice, and birds, and butterflies? and what does they do? and what is their names? What is all their houses' names? What does they call their streets and places?" etc.
Such questions easily appear foolish because, as in the case just quoted, they are directed by quaint childish fancies. The child's anthropomorphic way of looking out on the world leads him to assimilate animal to human ways. Hence one value of these questionings as showing which way the current of the child's thought is setting. Hence, too, it would appear that not every child's question is to be answered. We may, however, set aside, or rather correct, the form of a child's question without treating it with an ill-deserved and quite inappropriate contempt.
One feature in this fact-gleaning kind of question is the great store which the child sets by the name of a thing. M. Compayré has pointed out that the form of question, "What is this?" often means "What is it called?" The child's unformulated theory seems to be that everything has its own individual name. The little boy just spoken of explained to his mother that he thought all the frogs, the mice, the birds, and the butterflies had names
- ↑ The first question put by Preyer's boy was, "Where is mamma?" That is an inquiry as to fact.
