J.— PSYCHOLOGY, 189 



of two, and as often as one might expect a child of that age to imagine 

 it had something to report which a god-like parent did not already know. 

 I note, for example, at 2 ; 2 that Y repeated something ' over and over 

 again in louder tones till I said " Yes," and so often in the last few months.' 

 Nor is it merely the boasting report of what a child has done. For example, 

 my wife and I were once met, on return home, by an excited little maid 

 of 3 ; who reported to us, with rapid and dramatic speech, a new fact 

 just learned from a young brother, namely that when we died we should 

 be made into birds and fly up into the sky. The impulse to communicate 

 may even become explicitly conscious before four years. Thus I heard one 

 of my youngsters of 3 ; 10 shouting out, ' Mummy, I've got something to 

 tell you.' 



Reciprocal relationships are undoubtedly hard for the child to grasp. 

 Children of nine tested by Piaget showed that they were not clear 

 as to the reciprocity of the brother-brother relationship. Yet it is 

 wrong to suppose that the little child before even five or six cannot 

 in any sense adopt the point of view of another. For example, I noted 

 that when Y at 2 ; 8, sitting opposite to me, wanted me to see a picture 

 in her book, she carefully turned it round so that I saw the picture right 

 side up. And before four years, the reciprocity of the brother-brother 

 relationship apparently begins to be grasped (though it has lapses), and 

 the sentence ' I'm my own nurse to-day ' (3 ; 9) involves a similar grasp 

 of reciprocity. 



Inference from general propositions, at least explicit inference, may 

 not appear at this very early stage, though general statements involving a 

 grouping of individual known facts are made before three, e.g. ' Everybody's 

 here '■ — correctly stated, as to the family of seven, at the age of 2 ; 9 ; and 

 a general proposition may be explicitly referred to as a reason : thus, ' Do 

 you love Daddy ? ' ' Yes.' ' Do you love H ? ' ' Yes.' ' Why ? ' 

 ' 'Cos I love everybody.' Also the absence in a drawing of a general trait 

 common to all members of a class {e.g. the trunk of elephants) may lead 

 to the refusal to apply the name {e.g. ' Is that an elephant ? ' ' No.' 

 ' Why ? ' ' 'Cos it hasn't got a trunk ' 3 ; 5). 



Thus we have at three years at least the beginnings of induction and 

 deduction. 



Lastly, can a little child assume, for a time at least, a hypothesis it 

 knows to be false ? Piaget found children of eight and nine would not do 

 so. In the Binet absurdity test about the man who said, ' If I ever kill 

 myself, I won't do it on Friday, because Friday is unlucky,' Piaget said 

 that the children, even of nine and ten, ' refused to admit the hypothesis. '^^ 

 Now, undoubtedly, in such tests, children are attracted first by the, to them, 

 most glaring absurdity. My boy of seven, for example, when asked what 

 was absurd about it, said ' The man would not want to kill himself ' — 

 quite right from the child's point of view. 



But certainly it is not true to suggest that children can never posit 

 suppositions they know to be false, or that, until eight or ten, they cannot 

 assume a ' detachment from the view of the moment.' Thus, at 3 ; 5 

 one of my little girls asked her mother to jump over the sofa. The 



'^ Judgment and Reasoning in the Child, p. 65. 



