ABSTRACT
the explanation of movement is the central point to which all the child's ideas about the world converge. Childish animism, in the first place, shows that the child endows nearly all bodies with a certain spontaneity of movement. It shows, above all, that the distinction between a body's own movement and that which is determined from outside is only reached after much groping and many difficulties whose causes it will be interesting to examine. Further, the affinity between artificialism and animism shows that physical objects, which are conceived both as made and as alive, are obedient to a sort of perpetual moral constraint, as well as to their own spontaneity. This means that their movement is thought of neither as fundamentally free nor as physically determined. Finally, the ideas relating to the problem of air throw a fuller light upon these difficulties. Bodies make air, but are themselves moved along by air. How are we to understand this relation? We must analyse all ideas relating to movement as fundamentally as possible, and we must also do so as objectively as possible, that is to say, without being influenced by our own adult logic and what it might be inclined to deduce from previously acquired results.
