| STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. |
IV. THE CHILD'S THOUGHTS ABOUT NATURE.
By JAMES SULLY, M. A., LL. D.,
GROTE PROFESSOR OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND LOGIC AT THE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON.
WE have seen in the previous article how the child-mind behaves when brought face to face with the unknown. We will now examine some of the more interesting results of this early thought-activity, what are known as the characteristic ideas of children. There is no doubt, I think, that children do, by the help of reflection supplementing what they see or otherwise experience and what they are told by others, fashion their own ideas about Nature, death, and the rest. These ideas will probably be proved to vary considerably in the case of different children, yet to preserve throughout these variations a certain general character.
These ideas, moreover, like those of primitive civilized races, will be found to be a crude attempt at a connected system. We must not, of course, expect too much here. The earliest thought of mankind about Nature and the supernatural was very far from being elaborated into a consistent logical whole; yet we can see general forms of conception or tendencies of thought running through the whole. So in the case of this largely spontaneous child-thought. It will disclose to an unsparing critical inspection vast gaps and many unsurmounted contradictions. Thus, in the case of children, as in that of uncultured races, the supernatural realm is at first brought at most into only a very loose connection with the visible world. All the same, there is seen, in the measure of the individual child's intelligence, the endeavor to co-ordinate, and the poor little hard-pressed brain of a child will often pluckily do its best in trying to bring some connection into that congeries of disconnected worlds into which he finds himself so confusingly introduced, partly by the motley character of his own experiences, as the alternations of waking and sleeping, partly by the haphazard miscellaneous instruction, mythological, historical, theological, and the rest, with which we inconsiderately burden his mind.
As was observed in dealing with children's imaginative activity, this primitive childlore, like its prototype in folklore, is largely a product of a naïve vivid fancy. In assigning the relations of things and their reasons the child-mind does not make use of abstract conceptions. It does not talk about "relation," but pictures out the particular relation it wants to express by a figurative expression, as in apperceiving the juxtaposition of
