have been helped by pictures of cherub heads. Sometimes this process of child-thought reflects that of early human thought, as when a little boy of six said that God took the breath to heaven (_cf._ the ideas underlying _spiritus_ and πνεῦμα). In what precise manner children imagine the entrance into heaven to take place I do not feel certain. The legend of being borne by angels through the air probably assists here. As we have seen, children tend to think of people when they die as shrinking back to baby-dimensions so as to be carried in the angels’ arms. The idea of people going to heaven is, as we know, pushed by the little brain to its logical consequences. Animals when they die pass to another place also. A boy three years and nine months asked whether birds, insects, and so forth go to heaven where people go when they die. Yet a materialistic tendency shows itself here, especially in connexion with the observation that animals are eaten. A little American boy in his fifth year was playing with a tadpole till it died. Immediately the other tadpoles ate it up, and the child burst out crying. His elder sister with the best of intentions tried to comfort him by saying: ‘Don’t cry, William, he’s gone to a better place’. To which rather ill-timed assurance he retorted sceptically: ‘Are his brothers and sisters’ stomachs a better place?’ Coming now to ideas of supernatural beings, it is to be noted that children do not wholly depend for their conceptions of these on religious or other instruction. The liveliness of their imagination and their impulses of dread and trust push them on to a spontaneous creation of invisible beings. In C.’s haunting belief in the wolf we see a sort of survival of the tendency of the savage to people the unseen world with monsters in the shape of demons. Another little boy of rather more than two years who had received no religious instruction acquired a similar haunting dread of ‘cocky,’ the name he had given to the cocks and hens when in the country. He localised this evil thing in the bathroom of the house, and he attributed pains in the stomach to the malign influence of ‘cocky’.[55] Fear created the gods according to Lucretius, and in this invention of evil beings bent on injuring him the child of a modern civilised community may reproduce the process by which man’s thoughts were first troubled by the apprehension of invisible and supernatural agents. ----- Footnote 55: See _Mind_, vol. xi., p. 149. ----- On the other hand we find that the childish impulse to seek aid leads to a belief in a more benign sort of being. C.’s staunch belief in his fairies who could do the most wonderful things for him, and more especially his invention of the rain-god (the “Rainer”), are a clear illustration of the working of this impulse.