What, it may be asked, does this queer idea of shrinkage in old age mean? By what quaint zig-zag movement of childish thought was the notion reached? I cannot learn that there is any such idea in primitive folk-lore, and this suggests that children find their way to it, in part at least, by the suggestions of older people’s words. A child may, no doubt, notice that old people stoop, and look small, and the fairy book with little old women may strengthen the tendency to think of shrinkage. But I cannot bring myself to believe that this would suffice to produce the idea in so many cases. That there is much in what the little folk hear us say fitted to raise in their minds an idea of shrinking back into child-form is certain. Many children must, at some time or another, have overheard their elders speaking of old feeble people getting childish; and we must remember that even the attributive ‘silly’ applied to old people might lead a child to infer a return to childhood; for if there is one thing that children—true unsophisticated children—believe in it is the all-knowingness of grown-ups as contrasted with the know-nothingness of themselves. C.’s belief in the preternatural calculating powers of Goliath is an example of this correlation in the child’s consciousness between size and intelligence.[49] ----- Footnote 49: That this is not the complete explanation is suggested by a story told by Perez. His nephew, over four years, on meeting a little old man said to his uncle: “When I shall be a little old man, will you be young?” (_L’Enfant de trois à sept ans_, p. 219). ----- But I suspect that there is a further source of this characteristic product of early thought, involving still more of the child’s philosophizing. As we have seen, a child cannot accept an absolute beginning of things, and we shall presently find that he is equally incapable of believing in an absolute ending. He knows that we begin our earthly life as babies. Well, the babies must come from something, and when we die we must pass into something. What more natural, then, than the idea of a rhythmical alternation of cycles of existence, babies passing into grown-ups, and these again into babies, and so the race kept going? Does this seem too far-fetched an explanation? I think it will be found less so if it is remembered that according to our way of instructing these active little brains, people are brought to earth as babies in angels’ arms, and that when they die they are taken back also in angels’ arms. Now as the angel remains of constant size,—for this their pictures vouch—it follows that old people, when they are dead at least, must have shrivelled up to nursable dimensions; and as the child, when he philosophizes, knows nothing of miraculous or cataclasmic changes, he naturally supposes that this shrivelling up is gradual like that of flowers and other things when they fade.[50] ----- Footnote 50: