STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 74.1 



lems, was that put by a boy of the same age : " If I'd gone upstairs, 

 could God make it that I hadn't ? " 



All children's questioning does not, of course, take this sub- 

 lime direction. Along with the tendency to push back inquiry to 

 the unreachable beginning of things we mark a more modest and 

 scientific line of investigation into the observable and explain- 

 able processes of Nature. Some questions which a busy listener 

 would pooh-pooh as dreamy have a genuinely scientific value, 

 showing that the little inquirer is trying to work out some prob- 

 lem of fact. This is illustrated by a question put by a little boy 

 aged three years and nine months. " Why don't we see two things 

 with our two eyes ? " a problem which, as we know, has exercised 

 older psychologists. 



When this more definitely scientific direction is taken by a 

 child's questioning we may observe that the ambitious " Why ? " 

 begins to play a second role, the first being now taken by the more 

 modest " How ? " The boy Clerk Maxwell, with his incessant in- 

 quiries into the " go " of this thing or the " particular go " of that, 

 illustrates this early tendency to direct questioning to the more 

 manageable problems to which science confines itself. 



These diiferent lines of questioning are apt to run on concur- 

 rently from the end of the third year, a fit of eager curiosity about 

 animals or other natural objects giving place to a fit of theological 

 inquiry ; this, again, being dropped for an equally eager inquiry 

 into the making of clocks, railway engines, and so on. Yet 

 through these alternating bouts of questioning we can distinguish 

 something like a law of intellectual progress. Questioning as the 

 most direct expression of a child's curiosity follows the develop- 

 ment of his groups of ideas and of the interests which help to 

 construct these. Thus I think it a general rule that questioning 

 about the make or mechanism of things follows questioning about 

 animal ways just because the zoological interest (in a very crude 

 form, of course) precedes the mechanical. The scope of this early 

 questioning will, moreover, expand with intellectual capacity, and 

 more particularly the capability of forming the more abstruse 

 kind of childish idea. Thus, inquiries into absolute beginnings, 

 into the origin of the world and of God himself, indicate the pres- 

 ence of a larger intellectual grasp of time relations and of the 

 processes of becoming. 



Our survey of the field of childish questioning suggests that 

 it is by no means an easy matter to deal with. It must be ad- 

 mitted, I think, by the most enthusiastic partisan of children that 

 their questioning is of very unequal value. It may often be no- 

 ticed that a child's " Why ? " is used in a sleepy, mechanical way, 

 with no real desire for knowledge, any semblance of answer being 

 accepted, without an attempt to put a meaning into it. A good 



