Nothing perhaps in child utterance is better worth interpreting, hardly anything more difficult to interpret, than this simple-looking little "why?" Let us in judging of this pitiless "why?" try to understand the situation of the small searcher confronted by so much that is strange and puzzling in nature, and in human life alike. Just because he is born a thinker he must try at least to bring the strange thing into some connection with his familiar world. And what is more natural than to go to the wise lips of the grown-up for a solution of the difficulty? The demand for the reason or explanation of a thing may be satisfied by a bare reference to some other thing which is similar and so fitted to throw the light of familiarity on what is new and strange. For example, you may sometimes still a child's questioning as to why pussy has fur by telling him that it is pussy's hair. A child may find an appeasement, too, of his logical appetite in learning that what is new and strange to him comes under a general rule, that, for example, many other animals besides pussy have fur. Nevertheless, I suspect that a child's "why?" aims farther than this; that it is only fully appeased by a knowledge of what we older folk call a reason, that is to say of the cause which originates a thing, and of the purpose which it serves. It is easy to see, indeed, that this questioning curiosity of the little ones is largely directed to the subject of origins or makings. What hours and hours do they not spend in wondering how the pebbles, the stones, the birds, the babies are made! The inquiry into origin starts with the amiable presupposition that all things have been produced by hand-craft after the manner of household possessions. The world is a sort of big house where everything has been made by somebody, or at least fetched from somewhere. And this is perhaps natural enough, for of the things whose production the child sees are not the larger number fashioned by human hands? He himself makes a considerable number of things, including these rents in his clothes, messes on the tablecloth, and the like, which he gets firmly imprinted on his memory by the authorities. And, then, he is wont to watch with a keen interest the making of things by others, such as puddings, clothes, houses, hay-ricks. To ask, then, who made the animals, the babies, the wind, the clouds, and so forth, is for him merely to apply the type of causation which is familiar to him.