The mind of the child is at once logical and extravagant, matter-of-fact and poetic or rather mytho-poeic. This combination of apparent opposites, though it often seems almost incomprehensible to the adult, is the inevitable outcome of the fact that the child's dawning intelligence is working, as it were, in a vacuum. In other words, the child has not acquired the two endowments which chiefly give character to the whole body of the adult's beliefs and feelings. He is without the pubertal expansion which fills out the mind with new personal and altruistic impulses and transforms it with emotion that is often dazzling and sometimes distorting; and he has not yet absorbed, or even gained the power of absorbing, all those beliefs, opinions, and mental attitudes which the race has slowly acquired and transmitted as the traditional outcome of its experiences. The intellectual processes of children, the attitude and contents of the child's mind, have been explored during recent years with a care and detail that have never been brought to that study before. This is not a matter of which the adult can be said to possess any instinctive or matter-of-course knowledge. Adults usually have a strange aptitude to forget entirely the facts of their lives as children, and children are usually, like peoples of primitive race, very cautious in the deliberate communication of their mental operations, their emotions, and their ideas. That is to say that the child is equally without the internally acquired complex emotional nature which has its kernel in the sexual impulse, and without the externally acquired mental equipment which may be summed up in the word tradition. But he possesses the vivid activities founded on the exercise of his senses and appetites, and he is able to reason with a relentless severity from which the traditionalized and complexly emotional adult shrinks back with horror. The child creates the world for himself, and he creates it in his own image and the images of the persons he is familiar with. Nothing is sacred to him, and he pushes to the most daring extremities--as it seems to the adult--the arguments derived from his own personal experiences. He is unable to see any distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and he is justified in this conviction because, as a matter of fact, he himself lives in what for most adults would be a supernatural atmosphere; most children see visions with closed and sometimes with open eyes;[163] they are not infrequently subject to colour-hearing and other synaesthetic sensations; and they occasionally hear hallucinatory voices. It is possible, indeed, that this is the case with all children in some slight degree, although the faculty dies out early and is easily forgotten because its extraordinary character was never recognized.