Children's Ways: Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matterSully, James
Science
Children's Ways: Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matter
Sully, James
Child development; Child psychology
The knowledge of burial gives a new and alarming turn to the child's
thought. He now begins to speculate much about the grave. The
instinctive tendency to carry over the idea of life and feeling to the
buried body is illustrated in the request made by a little boy to his
mother: "Don't put earth on my face when I am buried".
In the case of children who pick up something of the orthodox creed the
idea of going to heaven has somehow to be grasped and put side by side
with that of burial. Here comes one of the hardest puzzles for the
logical child. One boy tried to reconcile the story of heaven with the
fact of burial, at first by assuming that the good people who went to
heaven were not buried at all; and later by supposing that the journey
to heaven was somehow to be effected after burial and by way of the
grave. Other devices for getting a consistent view of things are also
hit upon. Some children have supposed that the _head_ only passes into
heaven, partly from taking the "body" to be the trunk only, and partly
from a feeling that the head is the seat of the thinking mind.
The idea of dead people going to heaven is, as we know, pushed by the
little brain to its logical consequences. Animals when they die are,
naturally enough, supposed to go to heaven also.
_The Great Maker._
Children seem disposed, apart from religious instruction, to form ideas
of supernatural beings. Sometimes it is a dreadful person who exerts a
malign influence on the child, sending him, for example, his pains in
the stomach. In other cases it is a fairy-like being who is created into
a mighty benefactor, and half-worshipped and prayed to in childish
fashion.
Even when religious instruction supplies the form of the supernatural
being the young thinker deals with this in his own original way. He has
to understand the mysteries of God, Satan and the rest, and he can only
understand them by shedding on them the light of homely terrestrial
facts. Hence the undisguised materialism of the child's theology.
According to Dr. Stanley Hall's inquiries into the thoughts of American
children, God is apt to be imaged as a big, very strong man or giant.
One child thought of him as a huge being with limbs spread all over the
sky; another, as so tall that he could stand with one foot on the
ground, and touch the clouds. He is commonly supposed, in conformity
with what is told him, to dwell just above the sky, which last, as we
have seen, is thought of as a dividing floor, through the chinks of
which we get glimmerings of the glory of the heaven above. But some
children show more of their own thought in localising the Deity, placing
him, for example, in one of the stars, or the moon, or lower down "upon
the hill".
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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