742 THE POPULAR SCIENCJ^ MONTHLY. 



deal of the more importunate varieties of children's questionings 

 when they follow up question by question recklessly, as it seems, 

 and without definite aim, appears to be of this formal and lifeless 

 character, an expression not of a sound intellectual activity, but 

 merely of a mood of general mental discontent and peevishness. In 

 a certain amount of childish questioning, indeed, we have, I suspect, 

 to do with a distinctly abnormal mental state, with an analogue 

 of that mania of questions or passion for mental rummaging or 

 prying into everything Oriihelsuclit, as the Germans call it 

 which is a well-known phase of mental disease, and in which the 

 patient will put such questions as these: "Why do I stand here 

 where I stand ?" "Why is a glass a glass, a chair a chair ?" * 

 Such questioning ought, it is evident, not to be treated too seri- 

 ously. We may attach too much significance to a child's ques- 

 tion, laboring hard to grasp its meaning, with a view to answer- 

 ing it, when we should be wiser if we viewed it as a symptom 

 of mental irritability and peevishness, to be got rid of as quickly 

 as possible by a good romp or other healthy distraction. 



To admit, however, that children's questions may now and 

 again need this sort of wholesome snubbing is far from saying 

 that we ought to treat all their questioning with a mild contempt. 

 If now and then they torment their elders with a string of ran- 

 dom, reckless questionings, in how many cases, one wonders, are 

 they not made to sufi'er and that wrongfully by having per- 

 fectly serious questions rudely cast back on their hands ? The 

 truth is, that to understand and to answer children's questions 

 is a considerable art, including a large and deep knowledge of 

 things, and a quick, sympathetic insight into the little questioners' 

 minds. It is one of the tragi-comic features of human life that 

 the ardent little explorer, looking out with wide-eyed wonder 

 upon his new world, should now and again find as his first guide 

 a nurse or even a mother who will resent the majority of his 

 questions as disturbing the luxurious mood of indolence in which 

 she chooses to pass her days. We can never know how much 

 valuable mental activity has been checked, how much hope and 

 courage cast down, hj this kind of treatment. Yet happily the 

 questioning impulse is not easily eradicated, and a child who has 

 suffered at the outset from this wholesale contempt may be fortu- 

 nate enough to meet, while the spirit of investigation is still upon 

 him, one who knows and who has the good nature and the pa- 

 tience to impart what he knows in response to a child's appeal. 



* See W. James, Psychology, vol. ii, p. 284. 



