Little by little this idea of a definite purpose and use in this and
that thing falls back and the child gets interested more in the
production or origination of things. He wants to know who made the
trees, the birds, the stars and so forth. Here, though what we call
efficient, as distinguished from final, cause is recognised,
anthropomorphism survives in the idea of a maker analogous to the
carpenter. We shall see later that children habitually envisage the
deity as a fabricator.
All this rage of questioning about the uses and the origin of things is
the outcome, not merely of ignorance and curiosity, but of a deeper
motive, a sense of perplexity, of mystery or contradiction. It is not
always easy to distinguish the two types of question, yet in many cases
at least its form and the manner of putting it will tell us that it
issues from a puzzled and temporarily baffled brain. As long as the
questioning goes on briskly we may infer that a child believes in the
possibility of knowledge, and has not sounded the deepest depths of
intellectual despair. More pathetic than the saddest of questions is the
silencing of questions by the loss of faith.
It is easy to see that children must find themselves puzzled with much
which they see and hear of. The apparent exceptions to rules don’t
trouble the grown-up persons just because as _recurrent_ exceptions they
seem to take on a rule of their own. Thus adults though quite unversed
in hydrostatics would be incapable of being puzzled by C.’s problem: why
my putting my hand in water does not make a hole in it. Similarly,
though they know nothing of animal physiology they are never troubled by
the mystery of fish breathing under water, which when first noted by a
child may come as a sort of shock. The little boy just referred to, in
his far-reaching zoological interrogatory asked his mother: “Can they
(the fish) breathe with their moufs under water?”
In his own investigations, and in getting instruction from others, the
child is frequently coming upon puzzles of this sort. The same boy was
much exercised about the sea and where it went to. He expressed a wish
to take off his shoes and to walk out into the sea so as to see where
the ships go to, and was much troubled on learning that the sea got
deeper and deeper, and that if he walked out into it he would be
drowned. At first he denied the paradox (which he at once saw) of the
incoming sea going uphill: “But, mamma, it doesn’t run up, it doesn’t
run up, so it couldn’t come up over our heads?” He was told that this
was so, and he wisely began to try to accommodate his mind to this
startling revelation. C., it will be seen, was much exercised by this
problem of the moving mass of waters, wanting to know whether it came
half way up the world. Probably in both these cases the idea of water
rising had its uncanny alarming aspect.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account