The idea underlying the common form of the ‘why?’ interrogative deserves a moment’s inspection. A child’s view of causation starts like other ideas from his most familiar experiences. He soon finds out that his own actions are controlled by the desire to get or to avoid something, that, to speak in rather technical language, the idea of the result of the action precedes and determines this action. I have lately come across a very early, and as I think, remarkable illustration of this form of childish thought. A little girl already quoted, whom we will call M., when one year eleven months old, happened to be walking with her mother on a windy day. At first she was delighted at the strong boisterous wind, but then got tired and said: ‘Wind make mamma’s hair untidy, Babba (her own name) make mamma’s hair tidy, _so wind not blow adain_ (again)’. About three weeks later this child was out in the rain, when she said to her mother: ‘Mamma, dy (dry) Babba’s hands, _so not rain any more_’. What does this curious inversion of the order of cause and effect mean? I am disposed to think that this little girl, who was unusually bright and intelligent, was transferring to nature’s phenomena the forms of her own experience. When she is disorderly, and her mother or nurse arranges her hair or washes her hands, it is in order that she may not continue to be disorderly. The child is envisaging the wind and the rain as a kind of naughty child who can be got to behave properly by effacing the effects of its naughtiness. In other words they are both to be deterred from repeating what is objectionable by a visible and striking manifestation of somebody’s objection or prohibition. Here, it seems unmistakable, we have a projection into nature of human purpose, of the idea of determination of action by end: we have a form of anthropomorphism which runs through the whole of primitive thought. It seems to follow from this that there is a stage in the development of a child’s intelligence when questions such as, ‘Why do the leaves fall?’ ‘Why does the thunder make such a noise?’ are answered most satisfactorily by a poetic fiction, by saying, for example, that the leaves are old and tired of hanging on to the trees, and that the thunder giant is in a particularly bad temper and making a noise. It is perhaps permissible to make use of this fiction at times, more especially when trying to answer the untiring questioning about animals and their doings, a region of existence, by the way, of which even the wisest of us knows exceedingly little. Yet the device has its risks; and an ill-considered piece of myth-making passed off as an answer may find itself awkwardly confronted by that most merciless of things, a child’s logic.