A common theory peculiarly favoured by ignorant nurses and mothers is that children’s questioning is a studied annoyance. The child has come to the use of words, and with all a child’s ‘cussedness’ proceeds to torment the ears of those about him. There are signs, however, of a change of view on this point. The fact that the questioning follows on the heels of the reasoning impulse might tell us that it is connected with the throes which the young understanding has to endure in its first collision with a tough and baffling world. The question is the outcome of ignorance coupled with a belief in the boundless knowledge of grown-up people. It is an attempt to add to the scrappy, unsatisfying information about things which the little questioner’s own observation has managed to gather, or others’ half-understood words have succeeded in communicating. It is the outcome of intellectual craving, of a demand for mental food. But it is much more than an expression of need. Just as the child’s articulate demand for food implies that he knows what food is, and that it is obtainable, so the question implies that the little questioner knows what he needs, and in what direction to look for it. The simplest form of question, _e.g._, “What is this flower?” “this insect?” shows that the child by a half-conscious process of reflexion and reasoning has found his way to the truth that things have their qualities, their belongings, their names. Many questions, indeed, _e.g._, ‘Has the moon wings?’ ‘Where do all the days go to?’ reveal a true process of childish thought and have a high value as expressions of this thought. Questioning may take various directions. A good deal of the child’s catechising of his long-suffering mother is prompted by thirst for fact.[38] The typical form of this line of questioning is ‘What?’ The motive here is to gain possession of some fact which will connect itself with and supplement a fact already known. ‘How old is Rover?’ ‘Where was Rover born?’ ‘Who was his father?’ ‘What is that dog’s name?’ ‘What sort of hair had you when you were a little girl?’ These are samples of the questioning activity by help of which the little inquirer tries to make up his connected wholes, to see things with his imagination in their proper attachment and order. And how greedily and pertinaciously the small folk will follow up their questioning, flying as it often looks wildly enough from point to point, yet gathering from every answer some new contribution to their ideas of things. A boy of three years and nine months would thus attack his mother: ‘What does frogs eat, and mice and birds and butterflies? and what does they do? and what is their names? What is all their houses’ names? What does they call their streets and places?’ etc., etc. ----- Footnote 38: The first question put by Preyer’s boy was, ‘Where is mamma?’ _Die Seele des Kindes_, p. 412. (The references are to the third edition, 1890.) -----