STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 739 



early stage a puzzle to the infant. Later on, too, the young mind 

 continues to be exercised about this mystery. Our little friend's 

 inquiry about the whither of the big, receding sea, " Where does 

 the sea sim (swim) to ?" illustrates this perplexity. A child seems 

 able to understand the shifting of an object of moderate size from 

 one part of space to another, but his conception of space is proba- 

 bly not large enough to permit him to realize how a big tract of 

 water can pass out of the visible scene into the unseen. The 

 child's question, " Where does all the wind go to ? " seems to have 

 sprung from a like inability to picture a vast unseen realm of space. 



C 's question as to where all the days go to may have been 



prompted by the idea that the days or their scenic contents con- 

 tinue to exist somewhere ; that the past is something like the un- 

 seen region of space into which things disappear as they move 

 away from us. 



In addition to this difficulty of the disappearance of big things, 

 there seems to be something in the vastness, the infinite quantity 

 and number of existents perceived and heard about, which puzzles 

 and oppresses the young mind. The inability to take in all the 

 new facts leads to a kind of resentment at their multitude. " Moth- 

 er," asked a boy of four years, " why is there such a lot of things in 

 the world if no one knows all these things ? " One can not be 

 quite sure of the underlying thought here. Did the child mean 

 merely to protest against the production of so confusing a num- 

 ber of objects, or was there a deeper difficulty, a dim presentiment 

 of Berkeley's idealism, that things can exist only as objects of 

 knowledge ? This surmise may seem far-fetched to some, yet I 

 have found what seem to me other traces of this tendency in chil- 

 dren. A girl of six and a half years was talking to her father 

 about the making of the world. He pointed out to her the diffi- 

 culty of creating things out of nothing, showing her that when 

 we made things we simply fashioned materials anew. She pon- 

 dered and then said, " Perhaps the world's a fancy." Here, again, 

 one can not be quite sure of the child-thought behind the words. 

 Yet it certainly looks like a falling back for a moment into the 

 dreamy mood of the idealist that mood in which we seem to see 

 the solid fabric of things dissolve into a shadowy phantasmagoria. 



The subject of origins is, as we know, beset with puzzles for 

 the childish mind. The beginnings of living things are of course 

 the great mystery. " There's such a lot of things," remarked the 

 little zoologist I have recently been quoting, " I want to know, 

 that you say nobody knows, mamma. I want to know who made 

 God, and I want to know if pussy has eggs to help her make ickle 

 (little) kitties." Finding that this was not so, he observed, " Oh, 

 then, I s'pose she has to have God to help her if she doesn't have 

 kitties in eggs given her to sit on." Another little boy, five years 



