352 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



To which she rejoined, ' Oh, yes, I know you can see my body, 

 mother, but you can't see me.' " This chikl 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 differ- 

 entiation of the visible and the invisible self. Her brother hap- 

 pened to ask her what they fed the bears on at the Zoo. She an- 

 swered 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 re- 

 plied : " 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 primi- 

 tive man, tend to materialize it, as indeed we all can not help do- 

 ing, thinking of it dimly as a filmlike, shadowlike likeness of the 

 visible self. The problem is complicated for the child's conscious- 

 ness 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 some- 

 body moves it. The first attempts to solve the puzzle are of 

 course materialistic, as may be seen in our little questioner's de- 

 lightful notion of thoughts traveling through the body and out 

 at the mouth. 



