feeling or impulse of curiosity is something that
everybody knows; like other impulses, it is most strongly felt when
the end in view cannot be immediately reached. When you are prevented
by considerations of propriety or politeness from satisfying your
curiosity, then it is that curiosity is most "gnawing". A very
definite emotion that occurs on encountering something extremely novel
and strange is what we know as "surprise", and somewhat akin to this
is "wonder".

Exploration, though fundamentally a form of playful activity, has
great practical value in making the child acquainted with the world.
It contains the germ of seeking for knowledge. We shall have to recur
to this instinct more than once, under the head of "attention" and
again under "reasoning".

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Manipulation and exploration go hand in hand and might be considered
as one tendency rather than two. The child wishes to get hold of an
object, that arouses his curiosity, and he examines it while handling
it. You cannot properly get acquainted with an object by simply
looking at it, you need to manipulate it and make it perform; and you
get little satisfaction from manipulating an object unless you can
watch how it behaves.

Tendencies running counter to exploration and manipulation.

Just as playful activity in general is limited by the counter
tendencies of fatigue and inertia, so the tendency to explore and
handle the unfamiliar is held in check by counter tendencies which we
may call "caution" and "contentment".

Watch an animal in the presence of a strange object. He looks at it,
sniffs, and approaches it in a hesitating manner; suddenly he runs
away for a short distance, then faces about and approaches again. You
can see that he is almost evenly balanced between two contrary
tendencies, one of which is curiosity, while the other is much like
fear. It is not full-fledged fear, not so much a tendency to escape as
an alertness to be ready to escape.

Watch a child just introduced to a strange person or an odd-looking
toy. The child seems fascinated, and can scarcely take his eyes from
the novel object, but at the same time he "feels strange", and cannot
commit himself heartily to getting acquainted. There is quite a dose
of caution in the child's make-up--more in some children than in
others, to be sure--with the result that the child's curiosity gets
him into much less trouble than might be expected. Whether caution is
simply to be identifi