i86 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 



IV. THE CHILD'S THOUGHTS ABOUT NATURE. 

 By JAMES SULLY, M. A., LL. D., 



GROTE PROFESSOR OF THE rHILOSOPIIY OF WIND 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 expe- 

 rience 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 char- 

 acter. 



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 pluck- 

 ily do its best in trying to bring some connection into that con- 

 geries of disconnected worlds into which he finds himself so con- 

 fusingly 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 activ- 

 ity, this primitive childlore, like its prototype in folklore, is 

 largely a product of a naive vivid fancy. In assigning the rela- 

 tions 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 



