STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 735 



given to them by their mothers, as he himself had. Perhaps this 

 was only a way of expressing the childish idea that everything 

 has its name, primordial and unchangeable. A nameless thing 

 may well seem to a child no less of a contradiction than a thing 

 without any size. Perhaps, too, the name as an external sound 

 joins itself to and qualifies the thing in a way that we, who are 

 wont to employ words as our own created signs, can hardly enter 

 into. 



A second direction of this early questioning is toward the 

 reason and the cause of things. The typical form is " why ? " 

 This form of inquiry occurred in the case of Preyer's boy at the 

 age of two years and forty-three weeks. But it becomes the all- 

 predominant form of question somewhat later. Who that has 

 tried to instruct the small child of three or four does not know 

 the long, shrill, whinelike sound of this question ? This form of 

 question develops naturally out of the earlier, for to give the 

 " what " of a thing that is, its connections is to give its " why " 

 that is, its mode of production, its use and purpose. 



Nothing, perhaps, in child utterance is better worth interpret- 

 ing, hardly anything more difficult to interpret, than this simple- 

 looking little " why ?" 



We ourselves, perhaps, do not use the word "why" and its 

 correlative "because" with one clear meaning; and the child's 

 first use of the words is largely imitative. What may be pretty 

 safely asserted is that even in the most parrotlike and wearisome 

 iteration of " why " and its equivalents " what for ? " etc., the 

 child shows a dim recognition of the truth that a thing is under- 

 standable, that it has its reasons if only they can be found. 



Let us, in judging of this pitiless " why ? " try to understand 

 the situation of the young mind confronted by so much that is 

 strange and unassimilated, meeting by observation and hearsay 

 with new and odd occurrences every day. The strange things 

 standing apart from his tiny familiar world, the wide region of 

 the quaint and puzzling in animal ways, for example, stimulate 

 the instinct to appropriate, to master. The little thinker must 

 try at least to bring the new and the odd into some recognizable 

 relation to this familiar world. And what is more natural than 

 to go to the wise lips of the grown-up person for a solution of the 

 difficulty ? The fundamental significance of the " why ? " in the 

 child's vocabulary, then, is the necessity of connecting new with 

 old, of illuminating what is strange and dark by light reflected 

 from what is already matter of knowledge. And a child's " why ? " 

 is often temporarily satisfied by supplying from the region of the 

 familiar an analogue to the new and unclassed fact. Thus his 

 impulse to understand why pussy has fur is fully met by telling 

 him that it is pussy's hair. 



