STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 193 



his having coals run in ideas which show how naively the 

 child-mind envisages the Deity, making him a respectable citi- 

 zen with a house and a coal cellar. In like manner the lightning 

 is attributed to God's burning the gas quick, striking many 

 matches at once, or other familiar human device for getting a 

 brilliant light suddenly. So rain is let down by God from a 

 cistern by a hose, or, better, through a sieve or a dipper with 

 holes.* 



Throughout the whole region of mysterious unexplained and 

 exceptional phenomena we have illustrations of the anthropocen- 

 tric tendency to regard what takes place as designed for us poor 

 mortals. The little girl of whom Mr. Canton writes thought 

 " the wind and the rain and the moon ' walking ' came out to 

 see her, and the flowers wake up with the same laudable object." f 

 When frightened by the crash of the thunder a child instinctively 

 thinks that it is all done to vex his little soul. One of the fun- 

 niest examples of the application of this idea I have met with is in 



the Worcester collection. Two children, D and K , aged ten 



and five respectively, live in a small American town. D , who 



is reading about an earthquake, addresses his mother thus : " Oh, 

 isn't it dreadful, mamma ? Do you suppose we will ever have one 



here?" K (intervening), with the characteristic impulse of 



the young child to correct its elders, " Why, no, D , they don't 



have earthquakes in little towns like this." There is much to 

 unravel in this delightful childish observation. It looks, to my 

 mind, as if the earthquake were envisaged by the little five-year- 

 old as a show, God being presumably the traveling showman, 

 who takes care to display his fearful wonders only where there is 

 an adequate body of spectators. 



Finally, the same impulse to understand the new and strange 

 by assimilating it to the familiar is, so far as I can gather, seen 

 in children's first ideas about those puzzling semblances of visible 

 objects which are due to subjective sensations. To judge from 



C 's case, the bright spectra or after-images caused by looking 



at the sun are instinctively objective that is, regarded as things 

 external to his body. Here is a pretty full account of a child's 

 thought about these subjective optical phenomena : A little boy 

 of five years, in rather poor health at the time, " constantly im- 

 agined he saw angels, and said they were not white, that was a mis- 

 take, they were little colored things, light and beautiful, and they 

 went into the toy basket and played with his toys." Here we 

 have not only objectifying but myth-building. A year later he re- 



* I am greatly indebted here as in other places to Dr. Stanley Hall's well-known article 

 on The Contents of Children's Minds, published in the Princeton Review, 

 f The Invisible Playmate, pp. 2*7, 28. 



VOL. XL VI. 16 



