Miss Miriam Levy once investigated the opinions of 560 children, boys and girls, between the ages of 4 and 14, as to how the man in the moon got there.
- Only 5 were unable to offer a serious explanation;
- 48 thought there was no man there at all;
- 50 offered a scientific explanation of the phenomena;
- but all the rest, the great majority, presented imaginative solutions which could be grouped into seventeen different classes.
Such facts as these—which can easily be multiplied and are indeed familiar to all, though their significance is not usually realized—indicate the special tendencies of the child in the religious sphere.
He is unable to follow the distinctions which the adult is pleased to make between "real," "spiritual" and "imaginary" beings. To him such distinctions do not exist.
He may, if he so pleases, adopt the names or such characteristics as he chooses, of the beings he is told about, but he puts them into his own world, on a footing of more or less equality, and he decides himself what their fate is to be.
The adult's supreme beings by no means always survive in the struggle for existence which takes place in the child's imaginative world.
It was found among many thousand children entering the city schools of Berlin that Red Riding Hood was better known than God, and Cinderella than Christ. That is the result of the child's freedom from the burden of tradition.
Yet at the same time the opposite though allied peculiarity of childhood—the absence of the emotional developments of puberty which deepen and often cloud the mind a few years later—is also making itself felt.