To which she rejoined, 'Oh, yes, I know you can see my body, mother, but you can't see me.'" This child about the same time was concerned about the reality of her own existence. One day, playing with her dolls, she asked her mother, "Mother, am I real, or only a pretend like my dolls?" Here, again, it is plain, the emphasis was laid on something non-corporeal, something that animated the body, and not a mere bit of mechanism put inside it. Two years later she showed a still sharper intellectual differentiation of the visible and the invisible self. Her brother happened to ask her what they fed the bears on at the Zoo. She answered impulsively, "Dead babies and that sort of thing." On this the mother interposed, "Why, F, you don't think mothers would give their dead babies to the animals?" To this she replied: "Why not, mother? It's only their bodies. I shouldn't mind your giving mine." It is worth noting that this was the same girl who about the same age took compassion on the poor autumn leaves dying on the ground. Her mind was plainly brooding at this time on the conscious side of existence.
The mystery of self-existence has probably been a puzzle to many a thoughtful child. A lady, a well-known writer of fiction, sends me the following recollection of her early thought on this subject: "The existence of other people seemed natural; it was the 'I' that seemed so strange to me. That I should be able to perceive, to think, to cause other people to act, seemed to me quite to be expected, but the power of feeling and acting and moving about myself, under the guidance of some internal self, amazed me continually."
It is, of course, hard to say how exactly the child thinks about this inner self. It seems to me probable that, allowing for the great difference in reflective power, children in general, like primitive man, tend to materialize it, as indeed we all can not help doing, thinking of it dimly as a filmlike, shadowlike likeness of the visible self. The problem is complicated for the child's consciousness by religious instruction with its idea of an undying soul.
As may be seen in the recollections just quoted, this early thought about self is greatly occupied with its action on the body. Among the many things that puzzled the much-questioning little lad already frequently quoted was this: "How do my thoughts come down from my brain to my mouth, and how does my spirit make my legs walk?" C's sister, when four years and ten months old, wanted to know how it is we can move our arm and keep it still when we want to, while the curtain can't move except somebody moves it. The first attempts to solve the puzzle are of course materialistic, as may be seen in our little questioner's delightful notion of thoughts traveling through the body and out at the mouth.
