When this more definitely scientific direction is taken by a child’s
questioning we may observe that the ambitious ‘why?’ begins to play a
second _rôle_, the first being now taken by the more modest ‘how?’ The
germ of this kind of inquiry may be present in some of the early
questioning about growth. “How,” asked our little zoologist, “does
plants grow when we plant them, and how does boys grow from babies to
big boys like me? Has I grown now whilst I was eating my supper? See!”
and he stood up to make the most of his stature. Clearer evidence of a
directing of inquiry into the processes of things appears in the fifth
and sixth years. A little girl of four years seven months among other
questionings wanted to know what makes the trains move, and how we move
our eyes. The incessant inquiries of the boy Clark Maxwell into the ‘go’
of this thing or the ‘particular go’ of that illustrate in a clearer
manner the early tendency to direct questioning to the more manageable
problems to which science confines itself.
These different lines of questioning are apt to run on concurrently from
the end of the third year, a fit of eager curiosity about animals or
other natural objects giving place to a fit of theological inquiry, this
again being dropped for an equally eager inquiry into the making of
clocks, railway engines, and so on. Yet through these alternating bouts
of questioning we can distinguish something like a law of intellectual
progress. Questioning as the most direct expression of a child’s
curiosity follows the development of his groups of ideas and of the
interests which help to construct these. Thus I think it a general rule
that questioning about the make or mechanism of things follows
questioning about animal ways just because the zoological interest (in a
very crude form of course) precedes the mechanical. The scope of this
early questioning will, moreover, expand with intellectual capacity, and
more particularly the capability of forming the more abstruse kind of
childish idea. Thus inquiries into absolute beginnings, into the origin
of the world and of God himself, indicate the presence of a larger
intellectual grasp of time-relations and of the processes of becoming.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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