or that is the
method both of education and of art. Here and now stories mean to me
stories which include the children's first-hand experiences as a
starting point, not stories which are literally limited to these
experiences. Therefore to get my basis for the stories I went to the
environment in which a child of each age naturally finds himself and
there I watched him. I tried to see what in his home, in his school, in
the streets, he seized upon and how he made this his own. I tried to
determine what were the relationships he used to order his experiences.
Fortunately for the purposes of writing stories I did not have to get
behind the baffling eyes and the inscrutable sounds of a small baby. Yet
I learned much for understanding the twos by watching even through the
first months. What "the great, big, blooming, buzzing confusion" (as
James describes it) means to an infant, I fancy we grown-ups will really
never know. But I suppose we may be sure that existence is to him
largely a stream of sense impressions. Also I suppose we are reasonably
safe in saying that whatever the impression that reaches him he tends to
translate it into action. At what age a child accomplishes what can be
called a "thought" or what these first thoughts are, is surely beyond
our present powers to describe. But that his early thoughts have a
discernible muscular expression, I fancy we may say. It may well be
that thought is merely associative memory as Loeb maintains. It may well
be that behaviorists are right and that thought is just "the rhythmic
mimetic rehearsal of the first hand experience in motor terms." If the
act of thinking is itself motor, its expression is somewhat attenuated
in adults. Be that as it may, a small child's expressions are still in
unmistakable motor terms. It is obviously through the large muscles that
a baby makes his responses. And even a three-year-old can scarcely think
"engine" without showing the pull of his muscles and the puff-puffing of
exertion. Nor can he observe an object without making some movement
towards it. He takes in through his senses; and he interprets through
his muscles.

For our present purposes this characteristic has an important bearing.
The world pictured for the child must be a world of sounds and smells
and tastes and sights and feeling and contacts. Above all his early
stories must be of activities and they must be told in motor terms.
Often we are tempted to give him reasons in respons