STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 737 



childish thought that the unknown is assimilated to the known. 

 The one mode of origin which the embryo thinker is really and 

 directly familiar with is the making of things. He himself makes 

 a respectable number of things, including these rents in his clothes, 

 messes on the table cloth, and the like, which he gets firmly im- 

 printed on his memory by the authorities. And, then, he takes 

 a keen interest in watching the making of things by others, such 

 as puddings, clothes, houses, hayricks. To ask who made the 

 animals, the babies, the wind, the clouds, and so forth, then, is 

 for him merely to apply the more familiar type of causation as 

 norm or rule. Similarly in all questions as to the " whence " of 

 things, as in asking whether babies were bought in a shop. 



The " why " takes on a more special meaning when the idea of 

 purpose and adaptation of means to ends becomes clear. The 

 search now is for the end, what philosophers call the teleological 

 cause or reason. Here, again, the child sets out with the familiar 

 type of experience, with human production and action as deter- 

 mined by aim. And it is easy for him, his mind being possessed 

 by this anthropomorphic fancy which gives life to all things, to 

 carry out this kind of inquiry. There is a stage in the develop- 

 ment of a child's intelligence when questions such as "Why do 

 the leaves fall ? " " Why does the thunder make such a noise ? " 

 are answered most satisfactorily by a poetic fiction by saying, 

 for example, that the leaves are old and tired of hanging on to 

 trees, and that the thunder-giant is in a particularly bad temper, 

 and making a row. It is perhaps permissible to make use of this 

 fiction at times, more especially perhaps when trying to answer 

 the untiring questioning about animals and their doings a region 

 of existence, by the way, of which even the wisest of us knows ex- 

 ceedingly little. Yet the device has its risks; and an ill-con- 

 sidered piece of myth-making passed off as an answer may find 

 itself awkwardly confronted by that most merciless of things, a 

 child's logic. 



But there is another sort of anthropomorphism in this interro- 

 gation. Children are apt to think not only that things in general 

 are after our manner, but, what is very different, have their de- 

 signs, so to speak, upon us. The sea, it will be remembered, made 



its noise with special reference to the ears of the small child C . 



We may call this the anthropocentric idea that is, the idea that 

 man is the center of reference in the case of natural phenomena. 

 This anthropocentric tendency is apt to get toned down by the 

 temperament of a child, which is on the whole optimistic and 

 decidedly practical, into a looking out for the uses of things. A 

 boy, already quoted, once (toward the end of the fourth year) 

 asked his mother what the bees do. This question he explained 

 by adding " What is the good of them ? " When told that they 



TOL. XLV. 54 



