. 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.

Of 48 Boston children, says Stanley Hall,[164] 20 believed the sun, moon,
and stars to live, 16 thought flowers could feel, and 15 that dolls
would feel pain if burnt. The sky was found the chief field in which the
children exercise their philosophic minds. About three-quarters of them
thought the world a plain with the sky like a bowl turned over it,
sometimes believing that it was of such thin texture that one could
easily break through, though so large that much floor-sweeping was
necessary in Heaven. The sun may enter the ground when it sets, but half
the children thought that at night it rolls or flies away, or is blown
or walks, or God pulls it higher up out of sight, taking it up into
Heaven, according to some putting it to bed, and even taking off its
clothes and putting them on again in t