Studies of childhood / by James Sully.

  • James Sully
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies of childhood / by James Sully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    fusing a number of objects in the world. This certainly seems to be the motive in some children’s inquiries, as when a little girl, aged three years seven months, said : ‘Mamma, why do there be any more days, why do there ? and why don’t we leave off eating and drinking?’ Here the burden¬ someness of mere multiplicity, of the unending procession of days and meals, seems to be the motive. Yet it is possible that the question about a lot of things not known to anybody was prompted by a deeper difficulty, a dim presentiment of Berkeley’s idealism, that things can exist only as objects of knowledge. This surmise may seem far¬ fetched to some, yet I have found what seem to me other traces of this tendency in children. A girl of six and a half years was talking to her father about the making of the world. He pointed out to her the difficulty of creating things out of nothing, showing her that when we made things we simply fashioned materials anew. She pondered and then said: “Perhaps the world’s a fancy”. Here again one cannot be quite sure of the child-thought behind the words. Yet it certainly looks like a falling back for a moment into the dreamy mood of the idealist, that mood in which we seem to see the solid fabric of things dissolve into a shadowy phantasmagoria. The subject of origins is, as we know, beset with puzzles for the childish mind. The beginnings of living things are, of course, the great mystery. “ There’s such a lot of things,” remarked the little zoologist I have recently been quoting, “ I want to know, that you say nobody knows, mamma. I want to know who made God, and I want to know if Pussy has eggs to help her make ickle (little) kitties.” Finding that this was not so, he observed : “ Oh, then, I s’pose she has to have God to help her if she doesn’t have kitties in eggs given her to sit on ”. Another little boy, five years old, found his way to the puzzle of the reciprocal genetic relation of the hen and the egg, and asked his mother: “ When there is no egg where does the hen come from ?
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