Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
A child of a year or less has neither knowledge nor imagination to see
the point of these animal resemblances--much less to appreciate either
quaintness or prettiness. That comes only in the second year. He is much
more interested in the crumpling and tearing of paper, in the crumpling
of chintz, and in the taking off and replacing of the lid of a little
box. I think it would be possible to devise a much more entertaining
set of toys for an infant than is at present procurable, but, unhappily,
they would not appeal to the intelligence of the average parent. There
would be, for example, one or two little boxes of different shapes and
substances, with lids to take off and on, one or two rubber things that
would bend and twist about and admit of chewing, a ball and a box
made of china, a fluffy, flexible thing like a rabbit’s tail, with the
vertebræ replaced by cane, a velvet-covered ball, a powder puff, and so
on. They could all be plainly and vividly coloured with some non-soluble
inodorous colour. They would be about on the cot and on the rug where
the child was put to kick and crawl. They would have to be too large to
swallow, and they would all get pulled and mauled about until they were
more or less destroyed. Some would probably survive for many years as
precious treasures, as beloved objects, as powers and symbols in the
mysterious secret fetichism of childhood--confidants and sympathetic
friends.
§ 2
While the child is engaged with its first toys, and with the collection
of rudimentary sense impressions, it is also developing a remarkable
variety of noises and babblements from which it will presently
disentangle speech. Day by day it will show a stronger and stronger bias
to associate definite sounds with definite objects and ideas, a bias so
comparatively powerful in the mind of man as to distinguish him from
all other living creatures. Other creatures may think, may, in a sort
of concrete way, come almost indefinably near reason (as Professor Lloyd
Morgan in his very delightful _Animal Life and Intelligence_ has shown);
but man alone has in speech the apparatus, the possibility, at any rate,
of being a reasoning and reasonable creature. It is, of course, not
his only apparatus. Men may think out things with drawings, with little
models, with signs and symbols upon paper, but speech is the common way,
the high road, the current coin of thought.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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