STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. ^ 353 



Very carious are the directions of the first thoughts about the 

 past self. The idea of personal identity so dear to philosophers 

 does not appear to be fully reached at first. On the contrary, in 



the case of the Boy C , the past self was divorced from the 



present under the image of the opposite sex in the odd expression 

 " When I was a little girl." This idea I find is not confined to 



C . Another little boy when about three years and a half old 



asked his mother, " Was I a girl when I was small ? " and the 

 little questioner whom I have called our zoologist was also accus- 

 tomed to, say, "When I was a iclde dirl" (girl). But, funnily 

 enough, this same little boy would also say, " When I was a big- 

 man," to describe the state of things long long ago. What does 

 this mean ? Is the child apt to think of his life as a series of 

 transformations, of transitions from littleness to bigness and the 

 reverse, and even of transmutation from the one sex into the 

 other ? And if so, how does he come by this odd view of life ? It 

 seems probable to me that to the child's lively fancy such meta- 

 morphoses of the self present themselves as easy and natural. Is 

 not much of his time passed in fancying himself transformed by 

 some wondrous magic into a prince, a fairy, and what not ? It 

 may be hard to trace out all the little misapprehensions of lan- 

 guage, all the quaint childish inferences, which lie behind such 

 thoughts as these. It is possible, however, after all, that the 

 child does not mean to be taken too literally in this talk about his 

 past self. The little boy's reference to his past girlhood or big- 

 ness may be only his bold, figurative way of trying to express the 

 idea of a state very, very different from the present, a phase of his 

 existence which he can not join on to the later and nearer, and 

 which he is forced to regard as another existence. 



The difficulty to the child of conceiving of his remote past is 

 surpassed by that of trying to understand the state of things 

 before he was born. The true mystery of birth for the child, the 

 mystery which fascinates and holds his mind, is that of his begin- 

 ning to be. This was illustrated in C 's question : " Where 



was I a hundred years ago ? Where was I before I was born ? " 

 It remains a mystery to all of us, only that after a time we are 

 wont to put it aside. The child, on the other hand, is stung, so 

 to say, by the puzzle, his whole mind being thrown into energetic 

 movement. 



It is curious to note the differences in the attitude of cliildren's 

 minds toward the mystery. The small person accustomed to pet- 

 ting, to be made the center of others' thought and action, may be 

 struck with the blank in the common home life before his arrival. 



A lady was talking to her little girl H , aged three years, about 



something she had done when she was a child. H then Avanted 



to know what she was doing then, and was told by her mother, 



VOL. XLVI. 26 



