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The Moral Judgment
of the Child

The Moral Judgment
of the Child

B 7

JEAN PIAGET

Doctor of Science > Professor at ike University of Geneva, Director of the

International Bureau of Education, Co-Director of the Institut

f. J. Rousseau^ Geneva; Author of "Language and Thought

of the Child t " "Judgment and Reasoning in the Child"

"The Child's Conception of the World," "The

Child** Conception of Causality "

WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF SEVEN COLLABORATORS

THE FREE PRESS
GLENCOE, ILLINOIS

Translated by
MARJORY GABAIN

Printed in U.S.A,

CONTENTS

FACE

FOREWORD ........ vii

CHAPTER I. THE RULES OF THE GAME . . i

i. The rules of the game of marbles, p. 4. 2. The
interrogatory and its general results, p. 13. 3. The
practice of rules. I. The first two stages, p. 19. 4. The
practice of rules. II. Third and fourth stages, p. 32.
5. Consciousness of rules. I. The first two stages,
p. 41. 6. The consciousness of rules. II. Third stage,
p. 56. 7. A girls' game : " flet cachant ", p. 69.
8. Conclusion : I. Motor rules and the two kinds of
respect, p. 76. 9. Conclusion : II. Respect for the
group or respect for persons. Search for a guiding
hypothesis, p. 95.

CHAPTER II. ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL

REALISM ..... 104

i. The method, p. 107. 2. Objective responsibility.

I. Clumsiness and stealing, p. 116. 3. Objective
responsibility. II. Lying, p. 135. 4. Lying and the
two kinds of respect, p. 159. 5. Conclusion. Moral
realism, p. 171. General conclusion, p. 192.

CHAPTER III. COOPERATION AND THE DEVELOP-
MENT OF THE IDEA OF JUSTICE . 195

i. The problem of punishments and retributive justice,
p. 197. 2. Collective and communicable responsibility,
p. 231. 3. Immanent Justice, p. 250. 4. Retributive
justice and distributive justice, p. 262.- 5. Equality
and authority, p, 275. 6. Justice between children,
p. 297. 7, Conclusion ; the idea of justice, p. 312.

CHAPTER IV. THE Two MORALITIES OF THE CHILD

AND TYPES OF SOCIAL RELATIONS 326

i. The theories of Durkheim and Fauconnet on respon-
sibility, p. 327. 2. Durkheim 's doctrine of moral
authority. I. Introduction. Durkheim's, p. 341.-
3. The theory of authority according to Durkheim.

II. Moral education, p. 355. 4- M. Pierre liovet's
theory, p. 375. - 5, The point of view of J, M. Baldwin,
p. 392.- 6. General conclusions, p. 401.

INDEX OF SUBJECTS ...... 415

INDEX OF NAMES ...... 418

CM 2 f> 3 4 8

FOREWORD

READERS will find in this book no direct analysis of child
morality as it is practised in home and school life or in
children's societies. It is the moral judgment that we
propose to investigate, not moral behaviour or sentiments.
With this aim in view we questioned a large number of
children from the Geneva and Neuchcltel schools and
held conversations with them, similar to those we had
had before on their conception of the world and of
causality. The present volume contains the results of
these conversations.

First we had to establish what was meant by respect
for rules from the child's point of view. This is why we
have begun with an analysis of the rules of a social game
in the obligatory aspect which these possess for a bona
fide player. From the rules of games we have passed
to the specifically moral rules laid down by adults and
we have tried to see what idea the child forms of these
particular duties. Children's ideas on lying were selected
as being a privileged example. Finally we have examined
the notions that arose out of the relations in which the
children stood to each other and we were thus led to
discuss the idea of justice as our special theme.

Having reached this point, our results seemed to us
sufficiently consistent to be compared to some of the
hypotheses now in favour among sociologists and writers
on the psychology of morals. It is to this final task
that we have devoted our fourth chapter.

We are more conscious than anybody of the defects
as of the advantages of the method we have used. The
great danger, especially in matters of morality, is that
of making the child say whatever one wants him to say.

vii

Vlll

FOREWORD

There is no infallible remedy for this ; neither the good
faith of the questioner nor the precautionary methods
which we have laid stress upon elsewhere * are sufficient.
The only safeguard lies in the collaboration of other
investigators, If other psychologists take up our questions
from different view-points and put them to children of
differing social environment, it will be possible sooner or
later to separate the objective from the arbitrary elements
in the results which we bring forward in this work. An
analogous task has been undertaken in various countries
with regard to child logic and children's ideas on causality ;
and while certain exaggerations of which we had been
guilty came to light in this way, the results up to date
in no way tend to discourage us in the use of the method
we have adopted.

The advantages of this method seem to us to be that
it makes evident what observation left to itself can only
surmise. During the last few years, for example, I have
been engaged in taking down the spontaneous remarks
made by my two little girls, to whom 1 have never set
the questions examined in The Child's Conception of the
World or in The Child's Conception of Causality. Now,
"broadly speaking, the tendencies to Realism, Animism,
Artificialism and dynamic Causality, etc., come very
clearly to light, but the meaning of these children's most
interesting " whys ", as of many of their chance remarks,
would have almost completely eluded me if I had not in
the past questioned hundreds of children personally on
the same subjects. A child's spontaneous remark is, of
course, more valuable than all the questioning in the
world. But in child psychology such a remark cannot
be seen in its right perspective without the work of
preparation constituted by those very interrogatories.

i See The Child's Conception of the World, Kegan Paul, which in the
sequel will be designated by the letters C.W. My other books, Language
and Thought in the Child, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child, and
The Child's Conception of the World, will be referred to by the initials
L.T., /.JR., and C.VK. respectively.

FOREWORD ix

The present book on child morality is just such a
preliminary piece of work. It is my sincere hope tljat
it may supply a scaffolding which those living with
children and observing their spontaneous reactions can
use in erecting the actual edifice. In a sense, child
morality throws light on adult morality. If we want to
form men and women nothing will fit us so well for the
task as to study the laws that govern their formation.

The Moral Judgment of the Child

CHAPTER I
THE RULES OF THE GAME 1

CHILDREN'S games constitute the most admirable social
institutions. The game of marbles, for instance, as
played by boys, contains an extremely complex system
of rules, that is to say, a code of laws, a jurisprudence of
its own. Only the psychologist, whose profession obliges
him to become familiar with this instance of common
law, and to get at the implicit morality underlying it, is
in a position to estimate the extraordinary wealth of these
rules by the difficulty he experiences in mastering their
details.

If we wish to gain any understanding of child morality,
it is obviously with the analysis of such facts as these
that we must begin. All morality consists in a system
of rules, and the essence of all morality is to be sought
for in the respect which the individual acquires for these
rules. The reflective analysis of Kant, the sociology of
Durkheim, or the individualistic psychology of Bovet
all meet on this point. The doctrines begin to diverge
only from the moment that it has to be explained how
the mind comes to respect these rules. For our part,
it will be in the domain of child psychology that we
shall undertake the analysis of this " how ".

Now, most of the moral rules which the child learns
to respect he receives from adults, which means that he

i With the collaboration of Mme V. J, Piaget, MM M. Lambercier
and L. Martinez.

A I

2 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

receives them after they have been fully elaborated, and
often elaborated, not in relation to him and as they are
needed, but once and for all and through an uninterrupted
succession of earlier adult generations.

In the case of the very simplest social games, on the
contrary, we are in the presence of rules which have been
elaborated by the children alone. It is of no moment
whether these games strike us as " moral " or not in
their contents. As psychologists we must ourselves adopt
the point of view, not of the adult conscience, but of
child morality. Now, the rules of the game of marbles
are handed down, just like so-called moral realities, from
one generation to another, and are preserved solely by the
respect that is -felt for them by individuals. The sole
difference is that the relations in this case are only those
that exist between children. The little boys who are
beginning to play are gradually trained by the older ones
in respect for the law ; and in any case they aspire from
their hearts to the virtue, supremely characteristic of
human dignity, which consists in making a correct use of
the customary practices of a game. As to the older
ones, it is in their power to alter the rules. If this is not
" morality ", then where does morality begin ? At least,
it is respect for rules, and it appertains to an enquiry
like ours to begin with the study of facts of this order.
Of course the phenomena relating to the game of marbles
are not among the most primitive. Before playing with
his equals, the child is influenced by his parents. He is
subjected from his cradle to a multiplicity of regulations,
and even before language he becomes conscious of certain
obligations. These circumstances even exercise, as we
shall see, an undeniable influence upon the way in which
the rules of games are elaborated. But in the case of
play institutions, adult intervention is at any rate reduced
to the minimum. We are therefore in the presence here
of realities which, if not amongst the most elementary,
should be classed nevertheless amongst the most spon-
taneous and the most instructive.

THE RULES OF THE GAME 3

With regard to game rules there are two phenomena
which it is particularly easy to study : first the practice
of rules, i.e. the way in which children of different ages
effectively apply rules : second the consciousness of rules,
i.e. the idea which children of different ages form of
the character of these game rules, whether of something
obligatory and sacred or of something subject to their
own choice, whether of heteronomy or autonomy.

It is the comparison of these two groups of data which
constitutes the real aim of this chapter. For the relations
which exist between the practice and the consciousness
of rules are those which will best enable us to define the
psychological nature of moral realities.

One word more. Before embarking upon an analysis
of the practice or of the consciousness of rules, we must
first give some account of the actual content of these
rules. We must therefore establish the social data of the
problem. But we shall confine ourselves only to what
is indispensable. We have not attempted to establish
the sociology of the game of marbles ; this would
have meant finding out how this game was played in
the past and how it is now played in different parts of
the world (it is actually played by negro children). Even
confining ourselves to French Switzerland, we believe
it would need several years of research to discover all
the local variants of the game and, above all, to outline
the history of these variants throughout the last few
generations. Such an enquiry, which might be useful to
the sociologist, is superfluous for the psychologist. All
the latter needs in order to study how rules are learned
is a thorough knowledge of a given custom in actual
use, just as in order to study child language, all he needs
is to know a given dialect, however localized, without
troubling to reconstruct all its semantic and phonetic
changes in time and space. We shall therefore confine
ourselves to a short analysis of the content of the game
as it is played in Geneva and NeucMtel, in the districts
where we conducted our work.

4 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

i. THE RULES OF THE GAME OF MARBLES. Three
essential facts must be noted if we wish to analyse
simultaneously the practice and the consciousness of rules.

The first is that among children of a given generation
and in a given locality, however small, there is never one
single way of playing marbles, there are quantities of
ways. There is the " square game " with which we shall
occupy ourselves more especially. A square is drawn on
the ground and a number of marbles placed within it ;
the game consists in aiming at these from a distance and
driving them out of the enclosure. There is the game of
" courate " where two players aim at each other's marble
in indefinite pursuit. There is the game of " troyat "
from " trou " (=hole) or " creux " (= hollow), where the
marbles are piled into a hole and have to be dislodged
by means of a heavier marble, and so on. Every child
is familiar with several games, a fact that may help
according to his age to reinforce or to weaken his belief
in the sacred character of rules.

In the second place, one and the same game, such as
the Square game, admits of fairly important variations
according to when and where it is played. As we had
occasion to verify, the rules of the Square game are not
the same in four of the communes of NeucMtel l situated
at 2-3 kilometres from each other. They are not the
same in Geneva and in Neuchtel. They differ, on
certain points, from one district to another, from one
school to another in the same town. In addition to this,
as through our collaborators 1 kindness we were able to
establish, variations occur from one generation to another.
A student of twenty assured us that in his village the
game is no longer played as it was " in his days ". These
variations according to time and place are important,
because children are often aware of their existence. A
child who has moved from one town, or merely from one
school building to another will often explain to, us that
such and such a rule is in force in one place but not in

1 Neuch&tel, La Coudre, Hauterive and Saint-Blaise.

THE RULES OF THE GAME 5

tlie other. Very often, too, a child will tell us that his
father played differently from him. Last of all, there
is the boy of 14 who has given up playing because he is
beginning to feel superior to the little ones, and who,
according to his temperament,. laughs or mouras over the
fact that the customs of his generation are going by the
board instead of being piously preserved by the rising
generation,

Finally, and clearly as a result of the convergence of
these local or historical currents, it will happen that one
and the same game (like the Square game) played in the
playground of one and the same school admits on certain
points of several different rules. Children of n to 13 are
familiar with these variants, and they generally agree
before or during the game to choose a given usage to the
exclusion of others. These facts must therefore be borne
in mind, for they undoubtedly condition the judgment
which the child will make on the value of rules.

Having mentioned these points, we shall give a brief
exposition of the rules of the Square game, which will
serve as a prototype, and we shall begin by fixing the
child's language so as to be able to understand the reports
of the conversations which will be quoted later on.
Besides, as is so often the case in child psychology, some
aspects of this language are in themselves highly in-
structive.

A marble is called " un marbre " in NeucMtel and " un
coeillu " or " un mapis " in Geneva. There are marbles
of different value. The cement marble has the place of
honour. The " carron " which is smaller and made of
the more brittle clay is of less value because it costs less.
The marbles that are used for throwing l and are not
placed inside the square are called according to their
consistency " corna " (if in carnelian), " ago ", or " agathe ",

1 The English technical equivalent is the generic term " shooter "
which we shall use in the interrogatories given below. For the rest
we have generally retained the French words as one cannot be sure
that the English terms mean exactly the same. [Trans.]

6 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

" cassine " (glass ball with coloured veins), " plomb "
(large marble containiBg lead), etc. Each is worth so
many marbles or so many " canons ". To throw a
marble is to " tirer " (shoot) and to touch another marble
with ones own is to " tanner " (hit).

Then coifies a set of terms of ritual consecration, that is,
of expressions which the player uses in order to announce
that he is going to perform such-and-such an operation and
which thus consecrate it ritually as an accomplished fact.
For, once these words have been uttered, the opponent
is powerless against his partner's decision ; whereas if he
takes the initiative by means of the terms of ritual
interdiction, which we shall examine in a moment, he will
in this way prevent the operation which he fears. For
example, in order to play first in circumstances when it
is possible to do so, the child will say (at NeucMtel)
lt prems " obviously a corruption of the word ' ' premier "
(first). If he wants to go back to the line that all the
players start from at fheir first turn and which is called
the " coche 'V he simply says " coche ". If he wishes
to advance or retreat to a distance twice as great, he
says " deux coches ", or if to a distance of one, two, or
three hand-breadths he says " one (or two, or three)
empans " (spans). If he wishes to place himself in
relation to the square at a distance equal to that at
which he finds himself at a given moment, but in another
direction (so as to avoid the probable attacks of his
opponent) he says " du mien" (mine), and if he wishes
to prevent Ms opponent from doing the same thing he
says " du tien " (yours). This applies to Neuchatel.
In Geneva these displacements are expressed by the
terms " faire une entasse " or " entorse " (to make a
twist). If you wish to give up your turn and be " dead "
until your opponent has moved, you say '" coup passe "
(my turn passed).

As soon as these terms have been uttered in circum-
stances which of course are carefully regulated by a

1 English, pitch-line (sometimes). [Trans.]

THE RULES OF THE GAME 7

whole juridical system, the opponent has to submit.
But if the opponent wishes to anticipate these operations,
it is sufficient for him to pronounce the terms of ritual
interdiction, which at Neuchatel are simply the same
terms but preceded by the prefix " fan ", from " defendu "
(forbidden). For example, " fan-du-mien **, " fan-du-
tien ", " fan-coche ", " fan-coup-passe ", etc. Some
children, not having understood this prefix, which does
not, after all, correspond with anything in the speech they
hear around them, say " femme-du-tien ", " femme-
coche ", etc.

Two more particularly suggestive terms of consecration
should be noted, which are .current among the little
Genevans : " glaine " and " toumike ". When a player
places a marble of superior value in the square, thinking
that he has put down an ordinary marble (say an " ago "
instead of a " coeillu ") he is naturally allowed, if he has
noticed his mistake, to pick up his " ago " and put an
ordinary marble in its place. Only a dishonest opponent
would take advantage of his partner's absent-mindedness
and pocket this " ago " after having hit it. The children
we questioned on this point were unanimous in pronounc-
ing such procedure equivalent to stealing. But if, on the
other hand, the opponent spots his partner's mistake in
time and utters the word " toumike " or (by doubling
the last syllable) " toumikemik ", then the absent-minded
player no longer has the right to pick up his " ago " ;
he must leave it on the ground like a common-or-garden
" coeillu ", and if one of the players succeeds in hitting it,
this player will be allowed in all fairness to take possession
of it. This shows us a very interesting example of a
word consecrating a mistake and by doing so changing
a dishonest action into one that is legitimate and recognized
as such by all. We have here for the first time an example
of that formalism, which belongs to certain aspects of
childish morality, and into whose nature we shall go more
deeply in the sequel in connection with objective
responsibility.

8 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

In the same way, the word "glaine" legitimatizes
piracy in certain well-defined conditions. When one of
the players has succeeded, either by luck or by skill,
in winning all his partners' marbles, it is a point of honour
similar to that which sociologists designate with the
term " potlatch " that he should offer to play a fresh
set and should himself place in the square the necessary
marbles, so as to give his less fortunate playmates the
chance of recovering a portion of their possessions. If
he refuses, of course no law can force him to do this ;
he has won and there is the end of it. If, however, one
of the players pronounces the word " glaine " then the
whole gang falls- upon the miser, throws him down,
empties his pockets and shares the booty. This act of
piracy which in normal times is profoundly contrary to
morality (since the marbles collected by the winner
constitute his lawfully acquired possession) is thus changed
into a legitimate act and even into an act of retributive
justice approved by the general conscience when the
word " glaine " has been pronounced. 1

At NeucMtel we noticed neither " glaine " nor " tou-
mik ", but, on the other hand, we found " cougac ".
When one of the players has won too much (therefore in
the situation just described) his defeated partner can
force him to offer to play another set by uttering the
word " cougac " (probably derived from coup-gagne just
as " prems " was from premier). If the winner wishes to
evade the obligation laid upon him by the fateful word,
he has only to anticipate the blow by saying " fan-cougac ".

Our reason for emphasizing these linguistic peculiarities
is only to show from the first the juridical complexity of
game rules. It is obvious that these facts could be
analysed more fundamentally from other points of view.

1 This word, " glaine " really has a wider sense. According to several
children it entitles whoever pronounces it simply to pick up all the
marbles that are on the ground when a discussion arises about them,
or if a player forgets to take possession of what is his due. It is in
this sense that the word is taken, for instance, in Philippe Monnier's,
L* Livre de Blaise (3rd ed., p. 135).

THE RULES OF THE GAME 9

One could, for example, work out the whole psychology
of consecration and interdiction in connection with the
child and, above all, the psychology of social games.
But these questions are really outside our scope. 1 Let us
therefore return to what is the essential point so far as we
are concerned, namely, the rules themselves.

The Square game thus consists, in a word, in putting
a few marbles in a square, and in taking possession of
them by dislodging them with a special marble, bigger
than the rest. But when it comes to details this simple
schema contains an indefinite series of complications. Let
us take them in order, so as to get some idea of their
richness.

First of all, there is the " pose J> or outlay. One
of the players draws a square and then each places his
" pose ". If there are two players, each one puts down
two, three, or four marbles. If there are three players,
each puts down two marbles. If there are four or more
players, it is customary to put down only one marble
each. The main thing is equality : each one puts down
what the others do. But in order to reach equality the
relative value of the marbles must be taken into account.
For an ordinary marble, you must put down eight
" carrons ". A little " corna " is worth eight " marbres ",
sixteen " carrons ", and so on. The values are carefully
regulated and correspond roughly to the price paid at
the shop round the corner. But alongside of financial
operations proper, there are between children various
exchanges in kind which appreciably alter current
values.

Then the game begins. A certain distance is agreed
upon where the " coche " is drawn ; this is the line from
which the players start. It is drawn parallel to and generally
one or two metres away from one of the sides of the
square, and from it each player will fire his first shot.

1 With regard to social games we are awaiting the publication of
R. Cousinet's book which will incorporate all the valuable material which
this author has been accumulating for, so many years.

io THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

(To " fire " is to throw one's shooter" agathe " or
" comaline " into the square.)

All, therefore, start from the coche. In some games
yon return to the coche at each fresh turn, but it is more
usual after the first shot to play from the place that your
marble has rolled to. Sometimes this rule is limited by
saying that the marble must not be further removed
from the square than the coche. Thus if your marble
has rolled two metres away from the square in any
direction whatsoever, you bring- it back to a distance of
im. 50 if this is the distance at which the coche itself
stands.

But before the game begins you must settle who is to
play first. For the first player has the advantage of
" firing " into a square full of marbles, whereas ,'those
who follow are faced only with what is left after the
gains of the preceding players. In order to know who
is to begin, a series of well-known rites are put in action.
Two children walk towards each other stepping heel to
toe, and whichever steps on the other's toe has the right
to begin. Or else rhymed formula or even syllables
devoid of any meaning are recited in sacramental order.
Each syllable corresponds to a player, and he on whom
the last syllable falls is the lucky one. In addition to
these customary usages there is a method of procedure
peculiar to the game of marbles. Each boy throws his
" shooter " in the direction of the coche or of a line
specially traced for the purpose. Whoever comes nearest
up to the line begins. The others follow in order of
their nearness up to the line. The last to play is the
boy who has gone beyond the coche, and if several have
gone beyond it, the last to play will be the boy whose
marble has gone furthest.

The order of the players having been settled in this
way, the game begins. Each player in turn stands behind
the coche and " fires " into the square. There are three
ways of throwing one's marble : " Piquette " (Engl.,
" shooting ") which consists in projecting the marble by

THE RULES OF THE GAME n

a jerk of the thumb, the marble being placed against the
thumb-nail and kept in place by the first finger ; " Rou-
lette " (Engl., " bowling J> ) which consists simply in
rolling your marble along the ground, and " Poussette "
(EngL, " hunching ") which consists in addition in carrying
your hand along with it over a sufficient distance to correct
the initial direction. Poussette is always banned and
may in this connection be compared to the push stroke
of a bad billiard player. At Neuchatel it is customary
to say " fan-poussette " or again " femme-poussette ".
In Geneva, the simpler expression " defendu de trainer "
(dragging forbidden) is in use. Roulette (" bowling ")
is also generally banned (" fan-roulette ") but is at times
tolerated, in which case everyone will of course have the
right to play in this way, and absolute equality before
the law will even be agreed upon at the beginning of the
game.

The players are therefore throwing in the manner that
has been agreed upon. Suppose one of the marbles
included in the square has been hit. If it has gone outside
the square it becomes the property of the boy who has
dislodged it. If it remains inside the enclosure it cannot
be taken. If, finally, it remains on the line the case is
judged by the partners : a marble which is half outside
is regarded as out, not otherwise. Here, naturally, a
whole lot of subsidiary rules will establish the procedure
in disputed cases. There remains the case of the marble
with which one shoots (the shooter, or taw, etc.) remaining
in the square or failing to lie beyond one of the lines of
the square by at least half of its diameter : its owner
is " cuit " (dished), i.e. he cannot play any more. If this
marble is projected outside the square by that of another
player, it becomes, like the others, the latter's property,
except in the case of special conventions generally agreed
upon at the beginning of the game. Finally, there are
the possible complications arising from cases of rebounding
marbles. A marble that bounces out of the square off
another is sometimes not held to be won, and a fortiori

12 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

in the case of a marble of value. 1 In other cases, every-
'thing that goes outside the enclosure belongs to the
player who has expelled it. The particular cases that
arise in this way are settled in conformity with principles
that are established either before or during the game by
mutual agreement between all the participants.

Then comes the question of the number of " shots "
to be allowed to each. The player who has succeeded
in winning one or more marbles has the right to play
again, and so on, for as long as he wins. But sometimes
the following reservation is made : for the first round in
each game every player plays once in turn, independently
of gains or losses. Here again, therefore, it is a matter
of previous arrangement.

In addition and this is an essential rule everyone
has the right not only to " fire " at the marbles in the
square; but also to " tanner " (hit) his neighbour's shooter,
even outside the enclosure and indeed wherever it may
happen to be in the course of the game. And of course
the great difficulty is to shoot at the square without
placing yourself within reach of your partners. This is
why, when a shot would involve too many risks, you are
allowed to say " coup-passe " and to remain where you
are, provided, of course, that no one has foreseen this
decision and said " fan-coup-passe ". And this, really,
is why you are allowed to change your position provided
you place yourself at the same distance from the square
as before, and provided you first say " du mien " (mine),
unless, once again, your opponent has anticipated your
move by saying " du tien " (yours).

Finally, a series of special rules deserves mention, the
observance of which depends upon the particular town or
school in question. The first player who says " place-
pour-moi " (place for me) is not obliged to take up his
position at one of the corners of the square. Any player
who has succeeded in winning the equivalent of his
" pose " (i.e. two marbles if he has placed two in the

1 This is expressed by saying that the "revenette " does not count.

THE RULES OF THE GAME 13

square, and so on) can say " queue-de-pose " which will
allow him. to have the first shot from the coche in the
next game, and so on.

The game, regulated in this way by an indefinite
number of rules, is carried on until the square is empty.
The boy who has pocketed the largest number of marbles
has won,

2. THE INTERROGATORY AND ITS GENERAL RESULTS.

The rules that we have outlined above constitute a well-
marked social reality, " independent of individuals " (in
Durkheim's sense) and transmitted, like a language, from
one generation to another. This set of customs is obviously
more or less plastic. But individual innovations, just as
in the case of language, succeed only when they meet
a general need and when they are collectively sanctioned
as being in conformity with the " spirit of the game ".
But while fully recognizing the interest attaching to
this sociological aspect of the problem, it was from a
different standpoint that we raised the questions which
we are now going to study. We simply asked ourselves
(i) how the individuals adapt themselves to these rules,
i.e. how they observe rules at each age and level of
mental development ; (2) how far they become conscious
of rules, in other words, what types of obligation result
(always according to the children's ages) from the increasing
ascendancy exercised by rules.

The interrogatory is therefore easy to carry out. During
the first part, it is sufficient to ask the children (we
questioned about 20 boys ranging from 4 to 12-13) how
one plays marbles. The experimenter speaks more or
less as follows. " Here-are some marbles ". (The marbles
are placed on a large baize-covered table beside a piece
of chalk.) " You must show me how to play. When I
was little I used to play a lot, but now I've quite for-
gotten how to. I'd like to play again. Let's play together.
You'll teach me the rules and I'll play with you." The
child then draws a square, takes half the marbles, puts

14 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

down his " pose ", and the game begins. It is important
to bear in mind all possible contingencies of the game and
to ask the child about each. This means that you must
avoid making any sort of suggestions. All you need do
is to appear completely ignorant, and even to make
intentional mistakes so that the child may each time
point out clearly what the rule is. Naturally, you must
take the whole thing very seriously, all through the
game. Then you ask who has won and why, and if
everything is not quite clear, you begin a new set.

It is of paramount importance during this first half
of the interrogatory to play your part in a simple
spirit and to let the child feel a certain superiority
at the game (while not omitting to show by an occasional
good shot that you are not a complete duffer) . In this way
the child is put at his ease, and the information he gives as
to how he plays is all the more conclusive. Many of our
children became absorbed in the game to the extent of treat-
ing me completely as one of them. " You are dished 1 "
cries Ben (10 years) when my marble stops inside the square.

In the case of the little ones, who find difficulty in
formulating the rules which they observe in practice,
the best way is to make them play in pairs. You begin
by playing with one of them in the manner described
above, and ask him to tell you all the rules he knows.
Then you make the same request of the second boy
(the first being no longer present), and finally you bring
the two together and ask them to have a game. This
control experiment is not needed for older children, except
in doubtful cases.

Then comes the second part of the interrogatory, that,
namely, which bears upon the consciousness of rules.
You begin by asking the child if he could invent a new
rule. He generally does this easily enough, but it is
advisable to make sure that it really is a new rule and
not one of the many existing variants of which this
particular child may already have knowledge. " I want
a rule that is only by you, a rule that you've made up

THE RULES OF THE GAME 15

yourself and that no one else knows the rule of N

(the child's name)/' Once the new rule has been formu-
lated, you ask the child whether it could give rise to a
new game : " Would it be all right to play like that
with your pals ? Would they want to play that way ?
etc." The child either agrees to the suggestion or disputes
it. If he agrees, you immediately ask him whether the
new rule is a " fair " rule, a " real " rule, one " like the
others ", and try to get at the various motives that enter
into the answers. If, on the other hand, the child dis-
agrees with all this, you ask him whether the new rule,
could not by being generalized become a real rule. " When
you are a big boy, suppose you tell your new rule to a
lot of children, then perhaps they'll all play that way
and everyone will forget the old rules. Then which rule
will be fairest yours that everyone knows, or the old
one that everyone has forgotten ? " The formula can
naturally be altered in accordance with the turn which
the conversation is taking, but the main point is to find
out whether one may legitimately alter rules and whether
a rule is fair or just because it conforms to general usage
(even newly introduced), or because it is endowed with
an intrinsic and eternal value.

Having cleared up this point it will be easy enough
to ask the two following questions. (i) Have people
always played as they do to-day : " Did your daddy
play this way when he was little, and your grand-dad,
and children in the time of William Tell, Noah, and Adam
and Eve, etc., did they all play the way you showed me,
or differently ? " (2) What is the origin of rules : Are
they invented by children or laid down by parents and
grown-ups in general ?

Sometimes it is best to begin by these last two questions
before asking whether rules can be changed ; this avoids
perse ver at ion, or rather reverses its direction, and so
facilitates the interpretation of the answers. All this
part of the interrogatory, moreover, requires extremely
delicate handling ; suggestion is always ready to occur,

16 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

and the danger of romancing is ever present. But it
goes without saying that the main thing is simply to
grasp the child's mental orientation. Does he believe
in the mystical virtue of rules or in their finality ? Does
he subscribe to a heteronomy of divine law, or is he
conscious of his own autonomy ? This is the only question
that interests us. The child has naturally got no ready-
made beliefs on the origin and endurance of the rules of
his games ; the ideas which he invents then and there are
only indices of his fundamental attitude, and this must
be steadily borne in mind throughout the whole of the
interrogatory.

The results which we obtained from this double inter-
rogatory and which we shall examine in greater detail
later on, are roughly the following.

From the point of view of the practice or application
of rules four successive stages can be distinguished.

A first stage of a purely motor and individual character,
during which the child handles the marbles at the dictation
of his desires and motor habits. This leads to the for-
mation of more or less ritualized schemas, but since play
is still purely individual, one can only talk of motor
rules and not of truly collective rules.

The second may be called egocentric for the following
reasons. This stage begins at the moment when the
child receives from outside the example of codified rules,
that is to say, some time between the ages of two and
five. But though the child imitates this example, he
continues to play either by himself without bothering to
find play-fellows, or with others, but without trying to
win, and therefore without attempting to unify the
different ways of playing. In other words, children of
this stage, even when they are playing together, play
each one " on his own " (everyone can win at once)
and without regard for any codification of rules. This
dual character, combining imitation of others with a
purely individual use of the examples received, we have
designated by the term Egocentrism,

THE RULES OF THE GAME 17

A third stage appears between 7 and 8, which we
shall call the stage of incipient cooperation. Each player
now tries to win, and all, therefore, begin to concern
themselves with the question of mutual control and of
unification of the rules. But while a certain agreement
may be reached in the course of one game, ideas about
the rules in general are still rather vague. In other
words, children of 7-8, who belong to the same class
at school and are therefore constantly playing with each
other, give, when they are questioned separately, disparate
and often entirely contradictory accounts of the rules
observed in playing marbles.

Finally, between the years of n and 12, appears a
fourth stage, which is that of the codification of rules.
Not only is every detail of procedure in the game fixed,
but the actual code of rules to be observed is known to
the whole society. There is remarkable concordance in
the information given by children of 10-12 belonging to
the same class at school, when they are questioned on the
rules of the game and their possible variations.

These stages must of course be taken only for what
they are worth. It is convenient for the purposes of
exposition to divide the children up in age-classes or
stages, but the facts present themselves as a continuum
which cannot be cut up into sections. This continuum,
moreover, is not linear in character, and its general
direction can only be observed by schematizing the
material and ignoring the minor oscillations which render
it infinitely complicated in detail. So that ten children
chosen at random will perhaps not give the impression 1
of a steady advance which gradually emerges from the
interrogatory put to the hundred odd subjects examined
by us at Geneva and NeucMtel.

If, now, we turn to the consciousness of rules we shall
find a progression that is even more elusive in detail,
but no less clearly marked if taken on a big scale. We
may express this by saying that the progression runs
through three stages, of which the second begins during

i8 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

the egocentric stage and ends towards the middle of the
stage of cooperation (9-10), and of which the third covers
the remainder of this co-operating stage and the whole
of the stage marked by the codification of rules.

During the first stage rules are not yet coercive in
character, either because they are purely motor, or else
(at the beginning of the egocentric stage) because they
are received, as it were, unconsciously, and as interesting
examples rather than as obligatory realities.

During the second stage (apogee of egocentric and
first half of cooperating stage) rules are regarded as
sacred and untouchable, emanating from adults and
lasting forever. Every suggested alteration strikes the
child as a transgression.

Finally, during the third stage, a rule is looked upon
as a law due to mutual consent, which you must respect
if you want to be loyal but which it is permissible to
alter on the condition of enlisting general opinion on
your side.

The correlation between the three stages in the develop-
ment of the consciousness of rules and the four stages
relating to their practical observance is of course only a
statistical correlation and therefore very crude. But
broadly speaking the relation seems to us indisputable.
The collective rule is at first something external to the
individual and consequently sacred to him ; then, as he
gradually makes it his own, it comes to that extent to
be felt as the free product of mutual agreement and an
autonomous conscience. And with regard to practical
use, it is only natural that a mystical respect for laws
should be accompanied by a rudimentary knowledge and
application of their contents, while a rational and well-
founded respect is accompanied by an effective application
of each rule in detail

There would therefore seem to be two types of respect
for rules corresponding to two types of social behaviour.
This conclusion deserves to be closely examined, for if
it holds good, it should be of the greatest value to the

THE RULES OF THE GAME 19

analysis of child morality. One can see at once all that
it suggests in regard to the relation between child and
adult. Take the insubordination of the child towards
its parents and teachers, joined to its sincere respect for
the commands it receives and its extraordinary mental
docility. Could not this be due to that complex of
attitudes which we can observe during the egocentric
stage and which combines so paradoxically an unstable
practice of the law with a mystical attitude towards it ?
And will not cooperation between adult and child, in so
far as it can be realized and in so far as it is facilitated
by co-operation between children themselves, supply the
key to the interiorization of commands and to the auto-
nomy of, the moral consciousness ? Let us therefore not
be afraid of devoting a certain amount of time to the
patient analysis of the rules of a game, for we are here
in possession of a method infinitely more supple, and
consequently more sure, than that of merely questioning
children about little stories, a method which we shall be
obliged to adopt in the latter part of this book.

3. THE PRACTICE OF RULES. L THE FIRST TWO

STAGES. We need not dwell at any length upon the
first stage, as it is not directly connected with our subject.
At the same time, it is important that we should know
whether the rules which come into being previous to any
collaboration between children are of the same type as
collective rules.

Let us give a handful of ten marbles to a child of three
years and four months and take note of its reactions :

Jacqueline has the marbles in her hands and looks
at them with curiosity (it is the first time she has seen
any) ; then she lets them drop on to the carpet. After
this she puts them in the hollow of an arm-chair.
" Aren't they animals? Oh, no. Are they balk? Yes/'
She puts them back on the carpet and lets them drop
from a certain height. She sits on the carpet with her
legs apart and throws the marbles a few inches in front

20 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

of her. She then picks them up and puts them on the
arm-chair and in the same hole as before. (The arm-
chair is studded with buttons which create depressions
in the material.) Then she collects the lot and lets them
drop, first all together, then one by one. After this she
replaces them in the aim-chair, first in the same place
and then in the other holes. Then she piles them up
in a pyramid : " What are marbles ? What do you
think ?..." She puts them on the floor, then back
on to the arm-chair, in the same holes. We both go
out on to the balcony : she lets the marbles drop from a
height to make them bounce,

The following days, Jacqueline again places the marbles
on the chairs and arm-chairs, or puts them into her
little sauce-pan to cook dinner. Or else she simply repeats
the behaviour described above.

Three points should be noted with regard to facts
such as these. In the first place, the lack of continuity
and direction in the sequence of behaviour. The child
is undoubtedly trying first and foremost to understand
the nature of marbles and to adapt its motor schemas to
this novel reality. This is why it tries one experiment
after another : throwing them, heaping them into pyramids
or nests, letting them drop, making them bounce, etc.
But once it has got over the first moments of astonish-
ment, the game still remains incoherent, or rather still
subject to the whim of the moment. On days when the
child plays at cooking dinner, the marbles serve as food
to be stewed in a pot. On days when it is interested in
classifying and arranging, the marbles are put in heaps
in the holes of arm-chairs, and so on. In the general
manner in which the game is carried on there are
therefore no rules.

The second thing to note is that there are certain
regularities of detail, for it is remarkable how quickly
certain particular acts in the child's behaviour become
schematized and even ritualized. The act of collect-
ing the marbles in the hollow of an arm-chair is at
first simply an experiment, but it immediately becomes
a motor schema bound up with the perception of the

THE RULES OF THE GAME 21

marbles. After a few days it is merely a rite, still per-
formed with interest, but without any fresh effort of
adaptation.

In the third place, it is important to note the symbolism 1
that immediately becomes grafted upon the child's motor
schemas. These symbols are undoubtedly enacted in play
rather than thought out, but they imply a certain amount
of imagination : the marbles are food to be cooked, eggs
in a nest, etc.

This being so, the rules of games might be thought to
derive either from rites analogous to those we have just
examined or from a symbolism that has become collective.
Let us briefly examine the genesis and ultimate 'destiny
of these modes of behaviour.

Genetically speaking, the explanation both of rites and
of symbols would seem to lie in the conditions of pre-
verbal motor intelligence. When it is presented with
any new thing, a baby of 5 to 8 months will respond with
a dual reaction; it will accommodate itself to the new
object and it will assimilate the object to earlier motor
schemas. Give the baby a marble, and it will explore
its surface and consistency, but will at the same time
use it as something to grasp, to suck, to rub against the
sides of its cradle, and so on. This assimilation of every
fresh object to already existing motor schemas may be
conceived of as the starting point of ritual acts and
symbols, at any rate from the moment that assimilation
becomes stronger than actual accommodation itself. With
regard to ritual acts, indeed, one is struck by the fact
that from the age of about 8 to 10 months all the child's
motor schemas, apart from moments of adaptation in
the real sense, give rise to a sort of functioning in the
void, in which the child takes pleasure as in a game.
Thus, after having contracted the habit of pressing her face

1 We use the term " symbol " in the sense given to it in the linguistic
school of Saussure, as the contrary of sign. A sign is arbitrary, a
symbol is motivated. It is in this sense, too, that Freud speaks of
symbolic thought.

22 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

against her parents' cheeks, crumpling up her nose and
breathing deeply the while, Jacqueline began to perform
this rite as a joke, crumpling up her nose and breathing
deeply in advance, merely suggesting contact with another
person's face, but without, as before, expressing any
particular affection by the act. Thus from being actual,
and incorporated in an effective adaptation this schema
has become ritualized and serves only as a game. 1 Or
again, Jacqueline in her bath is engaged in rubbing her
hair ; she lets go of it to splash the water. Immediately,
she repeats the movement, touching her hair and the
water alternately, and during the next few days the
schema has become ritualized to such an extent that she
cannot strike the surface of the water without first out-
lining the movement of smoothing her hair. 2 In no way
automatic, this rite is a game that amuses her by its
very regularity. Anyone observing a baby of 10 to
12 months will notice a number of these rites which
undoubtedly anticipate the rules of future games.

As for symbols, they appear towards the end of the
first year and in consequence of the ritual acts. For the
habit of repeating a given gesture ritually, gradually leads
to the consciousness of " pretending ". The ritual of
going to bed, for instance (laying down one's head and
arranging the corner of the pillow with the hundred and
one complications which every baby invents), is sooner
or later utilized " in the void ", and the smile of the
child as it shuts its eyes in carrying out this rite is enough
to show that it is perfectly conscious of " pretending "
to go to sleep. Here already we have a symbol, but a
" played " symbol. Finally, when language and imagery
come to be added to motor intelligence, the symbol
becomes an object of thought. The child who pushes a
box along saying " tuff-tuff " is assimilating in imagination
the box's movement to that of a motor-car : the play
symbol has definitely come into being.

This being so, can one seek among rites and symbols

1 Age : 10 months. a Age : 12 months.

THE RULES OF THE GAME 23

for the origin of the actual rules of games ? Can the
game of marbles, with its infinite complexity both with
regard to the actual rules and to all that relates to the
verbo-motor system of signs in use can the game of
marbles, then, be conceived simply as the result of an
accumulation of individual rites and symbols ? We do
not think that it can. We believe that the individual
rite and the individual symbol constitute the substructure
for the development of rules and collective signs, its
necessary, but not its sufficient condition. There is
something more in the collective rule than in the motor
rule or the individual ritual, just as there is something
more in the sign than in the symbol.

With regard to motor or ritualistic rules, there can be
no doubt that they have something in common with
rules in the ordinary sense, namely the consciousness of
regularity. When we see the delight taken by a baby
of 10 to 12 months or a child of 2-3 in reproducing a
given behaviour in all its details, and the scrupulous
attention with which it observes the right order in these
operations, we cannot help recognizing the Regelbewusstsein
of which Biihler speaks. But we must distinguish care-
fully between the behaviour into which there enters only
the pleasure of regularity, and that into which there
enters an element of obligation. It is this consciousness
of obligation which seems to us, as to Durkheim 1 and
Bovet, 2 to distinguish a rule in the true sense from mere
regularity.

Now this element of obligation, or, to confine ourselves
to the question of the practice of rules, this element of
obedience intervenes as soon as there is a society, i.e. a
relation between at least two individuals. As soon as a
ritual is imposed upon a child by adults or seniors for whom
he has respect (Bovet), or as soon, we would add, as a
ritual comes into being as the result of the collaboration

1 L' Education Morale.

2 " Les Conditions de 1' Obligation de la Conscience *', Annie PsychoL
1912.

24 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

of two children, it acquires in the subject's mind a
new character which is precisely that of a rule. This
character may vary according to the type of respect
which predominates (respect for the senior or mutual
respect) but in all cases there enters an element of sub-
mission which was not contained in the rite pure and
simple.

In actual fact, of course, there is every degree of variety
between the simple regularity discovered by the individual
and the "rule to which a whole social group submits itself.
Thus during the egocentric stage we can observe a whole
series of cases in which the child will use a rule as a mere
rite, to be bent and modified at will, while at the same
time he already tries to submit to the common laws.
Just as the child very soon acquires the use of language
and of the abstract and general concepts while retaining
in his attitude to these much that still belongs to ego-
centric modes of thought and even to the methods
peculiar to symbolic and play thought, so, under the rules
that are imposed upon him, he will for a long time contrive
(in all good faith, needless to say) to maintain his own
phantasy in the matter of personal decisions. But this
factual continuity between ritual and rule does not exclude
a qualitative difference between the two types of behaviour.

Let us not, however, anticipate what will be said in
our analysis of the consciousness of rules, but return to
the matter of ritual. The individual rite develops quite
naturally, as we have just shown, into a more or less
complex symbolism. Can this symbolism be regarded as
the starting point of that system of obligatory verbo-
motor signs which are connected with the rules of every
collective game ? As with the previous problem, we
believe that the symbol is a necessary, but not a sufficient
condition of the appearance of signs. The sign is general
and abstract (arbitrary), the symbol is individual and
motivated. If the sign is to follow upon the symbol, a
group must therefore strip the individual's imagination
of all its personal fantasy and then elaborate a common

THE RULES OF THE GAME 25

and obligatory imagery which will go hand in hand with
the code of rules itself.

Here is an observation showing how far removed are
individual rites and symbols from rules and signs, though
moving towards these realities in so far as collaboration
between children becomes established.

Jacqueline (after the observations given above) is
playing with Jacques (2 years, n months and 15 days),
who sees marbles for the first time. I. Jacques takes the
marbles and lets them drop from a height one after
another. After which he picks them up and goes away,
II. Jacques arranges them on the ground, in a hollow
and says, " Tm making a little nest ". Jacqueline takes
one and sticks it in the ground in imitation. III. Jacques
also takes one, buries it and makes a mud-pie above it.
He digs it up and begins over again. Then he takes 2 at
a time which he buries. Then 3, 4, 5 and up to 6 at a
time, increasing the number of marbles systematically
each time by one. Jacqueline imitates him : she first
puts one marble down and makes a mud-pie over it,
then two or three at random and without adopting a
fixed system of progression. IV. Jacques puts all the
marbles on a pile, then he places an india-rubber ball
beside them and says : '* That's the Mummy ball and the
baby balls." V. He piles them together again and covers
them up with earth which he levels down. Jacqueline
imitates him but with only one marble which she covers
up without levelling the earth. She adds : " It's lost ",
then digs it up and begins over again.

This example shows very clearly how all the elements
of individual fantasy or symbolism remain uncom-
municated ; as soon as the game takes on an imaginative
turn each child evokes its favourite images without
paying any attention to anyone else's. It will also be
observed how totally devoid of any general direction are
the ritualized schemas successively tried. But as soon
as there is reciprocal imitation (end of II and whole
of III) we have the beginnings of a rule : each child
tries to bury the marbles in the same way as the other,
in a common order only more or less successfully adhered
to. In bringing out this aspect, the observation leads us

26 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

to the stage of egocentrism during which the child learns
other peoples' rules but practises them in accordance
with his own fantasy.

We shall conclude this analysis of the first stage by
repeating that before games are played in common, no
rules in the proper sense can come into existence.
Regularities and ritualized schemas are already there,
but these rites, being the work of the individual, cannot
call forth that submission to something superior to the
self which characterizes the appearance of any rule.

The second stage is the stage of egocentrism. In
studying the practice of rules we shall make use of a
notion which has served on earlier occasions in the
descriptions we have given of the child's intellectual
behaviour ; and, in both cases, indeed, the phenomenon is
of exactly the same order. Egocentrism appears to us as a
form of behaviour intermediate between purely individual
and socialized behaviour. Through imitation and language,
as also through the whole content of adult thought which
exercises pressure on the child's mind as soon as verbal
intercourse has become possible, the child begins, in a
sense, to be socialized from the end of its first year. But
the very nature of the relations which the child sustains
with the adults around him prevents this socialization
for the moment from reaching that state of equilibrium
which is propitious to the development of reason. We
mean, of course, the state of cooperation, in which the
individuals, regarding each other as equals, can exercise
a mutual control and thus attain to objectivity. In
other words, the very nature of the relation between
child and adult places the child apart, so that his thought
is isolated, and while he believes himself to be sharing
the point of view of the world at large he is really still
shut up in his own point of view. The social bond itself,
by which the child is held, close as it may seem when
viewed from outside, thus implies an unconscious in-
tellectual egocentrism which is further promoted by the
spontaneous egocentrism peculiar to all primitive mentality.

THE RULES OF THE GAME 27

Similarly, with regard to the rules of games, it is easy
to see, and greater authorities than ourselves 1 have
already pointed out that the beginnings of children's
games are characterized by long periods of egocentrisra.
The child is dominated on the one hand by a whole set
of rules and examples that are imposed upon him from
outside. But unable as he is, on the other hand, to place
himself on a level of equality with regard to his seniors,
he utilizes for his own ends, unaware even of his own
isolation, all that he has succeeded in grasping of the
social realities that surround him.

To confine ourselves to the game of marbles, the child
of 3 to 5 years old will discover, according to what other
children he may happen to come across, that in order to
play this game one must trace a square, put the marbles
inside it, try to expel the marbles from the square by
hitting them with another marble, start from a line
Jhat has been drawn beforehand, and so on. But though
he imitates what he observes, and believes in perfect
good faith that he is playing like the others, the child
thinks of nothing at first but of utilizing these new
acquisitions for himself. He plays in an individualistic
manner with material that is social. Such is egocentrism.

Let us analyse the facts of the case.

MAR (6) 2 seizes hold of the marbles we offer him, and
without bothering to make a square he heaps them up
together and begins to hit the pile. He removes the
marbles he has displaced and puts them aside or re-
places them immediately without any method. " Do you
always play like that ? In the street you make a square.
WeU, you do the same as they do in the street. I'm
waking a square, I am." (He ~draws the square, places
the marbles inside it and begins to play again.) I play

1 Stern in his Psychology of Early Childhood notes the identity of
the stages we have established in children's conversations with those
he has himself established with regard to play, pp. 177 and 332.

2 The numbers in brackets give the child's age. The words of the
child are in italics, those of the examiner in Roman lettering. Inverted
commas mark the beginning and end of a conversation reported
verbatim. All the subjects are boys unless the letter G. is added,
indicating that the subject is a girl.

28 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

with him, imitating each of his movements. " Who has
won? We've both won. But who has won most?. . . "
(Mar does not understand.)

BAUM (61) begins by making a square and puts down
three marbles, adding : " Sometimes you put 4, or 3, or 2.

Or 5 ? No, not 5, but sometimes 6 or 8. Who begins

when you play with the boys ISometimes me, sometimes
the other one. Isn't there a dodge for knowing who is
to begin? No. Do you know what a coche is?
Rather ! " But the sequel shows that he knows nothing
about the coche and thinks of this word as designating
another game. " And which of us will begin ? You.
Why ? / want to see how you do it." We play for a
while and I ask who has won : " The one who has hit a
mib? well, he has won.Wett ! who has won iI have,
and then you' 1 I then arrange things so as to take 4
while he takes 2 : " Who has won ? I have, and then
you." We begin again. He takes two, I none. " Who
has won ? I have. And I ? You've lost: 1

LOEFF (6) often pretends to be playing with Mae, of
whom we shall speak later. He knows neither how to
make a square nor to draw a coche. He immediately
begins to "fire" at the marbles assembled in a heap
and plays without either stopping or paying any attention
to us. "Have you won? I don't know. / think I
h avet wiry ? Yes t because I threw the mils. 1 And I ?
Yes, because you threw the mibs."

DESARZ (6) : " Do you play often ? Yes, rather !
With whom IAll by myself. Do you like playing alone
best ? You don't need two. You can play only one."
He gathers the marbles together without a square and
" fires " into the heap.

Let us now see how two children, who have grown
accustomed to playing together, set about it when they
are left alone. They are two boys of whom one (Mae)
is a very representative example of the present stage,
while the other (Wid) stands at the border line between
the present stage and the next. The analyses of these
cases will be all the more conclusive as the children in
question are no mere beginners at the game.

MAE (6) and WID (7) declare that they are always
playing together. Mae tells us that they both "played

1 English equivalent for " marbre ". [Trans.]

THE RULES OF THE GAME 29

again, yesterday ". I first examine Mae by himself.
He piles Ms marbles in a corner without counting them
and throws his shooter into the pile. He then places
4 marbles close together and puts a fifth on top (in a
pyramid). Mae denies that a square is ever drawn.
Then he corrects himself and affirms that he always does
so : " How do you and Wid know which is to begin ?
One of the two throws his shooter and the other tries to hit
it. If he hits it, he begins." Mae then shows us what
the game consists in : he throws his shooter without
taking into account the distances or the manner of playing
("piquette"), and when he succeeds in driving a marble
out of the square he immediately puts it back. Thus the
game has no end. " Does it go on Hke that all the time ?
You take one away to make a change (he takes a marble out
of the square, but not the one that he has touched). It'll
only "be finished when there's only one left (he ' fires * again
twice). One more shot, and then you take one away."
Then he affirms : " every third shot you take one away"
He does so. Mae removes a marble every third shot
independently of whether he has hit or missed, which is
completely irregular and corresponds to nothing in the
game as habitually played, or as we have seen it played
in Neuchatel or Geneva. It is therefore a rule which
he has invented then and there but which he has the
impression of remembering because it presents a vague
analogy with what really happens when the player removes
the marble he has just " hit " (touched) . This game of Mae's
is therefore a characteristic game of the second stage, an
egocentric game in which " to win " does not mean getting
the better of the others, but simply playing on one's own.
Wid, whom I now prepare to question and who
has not assisted at Mae's interrogatory, begins by making
a square. He places 4 marbles at the 4 corners and one
in the middle (the same disposition as Mae's, which was
probably a deformation of it). Wid does not know what
to do to decide which is to begin, and declares that he
understands nothing of the method which Mae had
shewn me as being familiar to both of them (trying to hit
one's partner's shooter). Wid then throws his shooter in
the direction of the square, knocking out one marble
which he puts in his pocket. Then I take my turn,
but fail to touch anything. He plays again and wins
all the marbles, one after the other, keeping them each
time. He also declares that when you have knocked a

30 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

marble out, you have the right to play another shot
straight away. After having taken everything he says :
" I've won. 39 Wid therefore belongs to the third stage
if this explanation is taken as a whole, but the sequel
will show that he takes no notice of Mae's doings when
they are playing together. Wid stands therefore at the
boundary line which separates the stage of egocentrism
from the stage of cooperation.

I then tell Mae to come into the room and the two
children begin to play with each other. Mae draws a
square and Wid disposes the marbles in accordance with
Ms habitual schema, Mae begins (he plays " Roulette "
whereas Wid most of the time plays " Piquette ") and
dislodges four marbles. " I can play four times, now ",
adds Mae. This is contrary to all the rules, but Wid
finds the statement quite natural. So one game succeeds
another. But the marbles are placed in the square by
one child or the other as the spirit moves them (according
to the rules each must put his " pose ") and the dis-
lodged marbles are sometimes put straight back into the
square, sometimes retained by the boy who has won
them. Each plays from whatever place he chooses,
unchecked by his partner, and each " fires " as many
times as he likes (it thus often happens that Mae and
Wid are playing at the same time).

I now send Wid out of the room and ask Mae to
explain the game to us for a last time. Mae places 16
marbles in the middle of the square. " Why so many
as that ? So as to win. How many do you put down
at home with Wid ? / put five, but when I'm alone, I
put lots." Mae then begins to play and dislodges a marble
which he puts on one side. I do the same. The game
continues in this way, each playing one shot at a time
without taking the dislodged marbles into account (which
is contrary to what Mae was doing a moment ago). Mae
then places five marbles in the square, like Wid. This
time I arrange the five marbles as Mae himself had
done at the beginning of the interrogatory (four close
together and one on top) but Mae seems to have forgotten
this way of doing things. In the end Mae plays by taking
away a marble every three shots, as before, and says to
us : " It's so that it should stop"

We have quoted the whole of this example in order
to show how little two children from the same class at

THE RULES OF THE GAME 31

school, living in the same house, and accustomed to
playing with each other, are able to understand each
other at this age. Not only do they tell us of totally
different rules (this still occurs throughout the third
stage), but when they play together they do not watch
each other and do not unify their respective rules even
for the duration of one game. The fact of the matter
is that neither is trying to get the better of the other :
each is merely having a game on Ms own, trying to hit
the marbles in the square, i.e. trying to " win " from his
own point of view.

This shows the characteristics of the stage. The child
plays for himself. His interest does not in any way
consist in competing with his companions and in binding
himself by common rules so as to see who will get the
better of the others. His aims are different. They are
indeed dual, and it is this mixed behaviour that really
defines egocentrism. On the one hand, the child feels
very strongly the desire to play like the other boys,
and especially like those older than himself; he longs,
that is to say, to feel himself a member of the very
honourable fraternity of those who know how to play
marbles correctly. But quickly persuading himself, on
the other hand, that his playing is " right " (he can
convince himself as easily on this point as in all his
attempts to imitate adult behaviour) the child thinks
only of utilizing these acquisitions for himself : Ms
pleasure still consists in the mere development of skill,
in carrying out the strokes he sets himself to play. It
is, as in the previous stage, essentially a motor pleasure,
not a social one. The true " socius " of the player who
has reached this stage is not the flesh and blood partner
but the ideal and abstract elder whom one inwardly
strives to imitate and who sums up all the examples one
has ever received.

It little matters, therefore, what one's companion is
doing, since one is not trying to contend against him.
It little matters what the details of the rules may be,

32 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

since there is no real contact between the players. This
is why the child, as soon as he can schematically copy
the big boys* game, believes himself to be in possession
of the whole truth. Each for himself, and all in com-
munion with the " Elder " : such might be the formula
of egocentric play.

It is striking to note the affinity between this attitude
of children of 4 to 6 in the game of marbles and the
attitude of those same children in their conversations
with each other. For alongside of the rare cases of true
conversation where there is a genuine interchange of
opinions or commands, one can observe in children
between 2 and 6 a characteristic type of pseudo-conver-
sation or " collective monologue ", during which the
children speak only for themselves, although they wish
to be in the presence of interlocutors who will serve as
a stimulus. Now here again, each feels himself to be in
communion with the group because he is inwardly address-
ing the Adult who knows and understands everything,
but here again, each is only concerned with himself, for
lack of having dissociated the "ego " from the " socius ".

These features of the egocentric stage will not, how-
ever, appear in their full light until we come to analyse
the consciousness of rules which accompanies this type
of conduct.

4. THE PRACTICE OF RULES. II. THIRD AND FOURTH

STAGES. Towards the age of 7-8 appears the desire for
mutual understanding in the sphere of play (as also,
indeed, in the conversations between children). This
felt need for understanding is what defines the third
stage. As a criterion of the appearance of this stage we
shall take the moment when by " winning " the child
refers to the fact of getting the better of the others,
therefore of gaining more marbles than the others, and
when he no longer says he has won when he has done no
more than to knock a marble out of the square, regardless
of what his partners have done. As a matter of fact,

THE RULES OF THE GAME 33

no child, even from among the older ones, ever attributes
very great importance to the fact of knocking out a few
more marbles than Ms opponents. Mere competition Is
therefore not what constitutes the affective motive-power
of the game. In seeking to win the child is trying
above all to contend with his partners while observing
common rules. The specific pleasure of the game thus
ceases to be muscular and egocentric, and becomes social.
Henceforth, a game of marbles constitutes the equivalent
in action of what takes place in discussion in words :
a mutual evaluation of the competing powers which
leads, thanks to the observation of common rules, to a
conclusion that is accepted by all.

As to the difference between the third and fourth
stages, it is only one of degree. The children of about
7* to 10 (third stage) do not yet know the rules in detail.
They try to learn them owing to their increasing interest
in the game played in common, but when different
children of the same class at school are questioned on the
subject the discrepancies are still considerable in the
information obtained. It is only when they are at play
that these same children succeed in understanding each
other, either by copying the boy who seems to know
most about it, or, more frequently, by "omitting any
usage that might be disputed. In this way they play
a sort of simplified game. Children of the fourth stage,
on the contrary, have thoroughly mastered their code
and even take pleasure in juridical discussions, whether
of principle or merely of procedure, which may at times
arise out of the points in dispute.

Let us examine some examples of the third stage, and,
in order to point more clearly to the differentiating
characters of this stage, let us begin by setting side by
side the answers of two little boys attending the same
class at school and accustomed to playing together.
(The children were naturally questioned separately in
order to avoid any suggestion between them, but we
afterwards compared their answers with one another.)
c

34 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

BEN (10) and Nus (n, backward, one year below the
school standard) are both in the fourth year of the lower
school and both play marbles a great deal. They agree
in regarding the square as necessary. Nus declares that
you always place 4 marbles in the "square, either at the
corners or else 3 in the centre with one on top (in a
pyramid). Ben, however, tells us that you place 2 to 10
marbles in the enclosure (not less than 2, not more than 10).

To know who is to begin you draw, according to Nus,
a line called the " coche " and everyone tries to get near
it : whoever gets nearest plays first, and whoever goes
beyond it plays last. Ben, however, knows nothing
about the coche : you begin " as you like. Isn't there a
dodge for knowing who is to play first ? No. Don't
you try with the coche ? Yes, sometimes. What is the
coche ? . . . (he cannot explain)/' On the other hand,
Ben affirms that you " fire " the first shot at a distance
of 2 to 3 steps from the square. A single step is not
enough, and "four isn't any good either ". Nus is ignorant
of this law and considers the distance to be a matter of
convention.

With regard to the manner of " firing ", Nus is equally
tolerant. According to him you can play " piquette "
or " roulette ", but " when you play piquette everyone
must play the same. When one boy says that you must
play roulette, everyone plays that way ". Nus prefers
roulette because " that is the best way 31 : piquette is
more difficult. Ben, however, regards piquette as
obligatory in all cases. He is ignorant, moreover, of the
term roulette and when we show him what it is he says :
" That is bowled piquette/ [Fr., Piquette roulee] That's
cheating I "

According to Nus everyone must play from the coche,
and aU through the game. When, after having shot at
the square you land anywhere, you must therefore come
back to the coche to " fire " the next shot. Ben, on
the contrary, who on this point represents the more
genera] usage, is of opinion that only the first shot should
be fired from the coche : after that " you must play from
where you are."

Nus and Ben thus agree in stating that the marbles
that have gone out of the square remain in the possession
of ^ the boy who dislodged them. This is the only point,
this and the actual drawing of the square, on which the
children give us results that are in agreement.

THE RULES OF THE GAME 35

When we begin to play, I arrange to stay in the square
(to leave my shooter inside the enclosure). " You are
dished (Fr. cuit), cries Ben,, delighted, you can't play
again until I get you out ! " Nus knows nothing of this
rule. Again, when I play carelessly and let the shooter
drop out of my hand, Ben exclaims " Fan-coup " to
prevent me from saying " coup-passe " and having another
shot. Nus is ignorant of this rule.

At one point Ben succeeds in hitting my shooter.
He concludes from this that he can have another shot,
just as though he had hit one of the marbles placed in
the square. Nus, in the same circumstances does not
draw the same conclusions (each must play in turn
according to him) but deduces that he wUl be able to
play the first shot in the next game.

In the same way, Ben thinks that everyone plays from
the place the last shot has led him to and knows the rule
that authorizes the player to change places, saying " du
mien " or " un empan ", whereas Nus, who has certainly
heard those words, does not know what they mean.

These two cases, chosen at random out of a class of
lo-year-old pupils, show straight away what are the two
differential features of the second stage. i There is
a general will to discover the rules that are fixed and
common to all players (cf. the way Nus explains to us
that if one of the partners plays piquette " everyone
must play the same "). 2 In spite of this there is con-
siderable discrepancy in the children's information, Lest
the reader should think the above examples exceptional
here are, on the same point, the answers of another child
from the same class :

Ross (n ; i) : " First, every one puts two marbles on
the square. You can make the square bigger when there
are more playing." Ross knows the method of the coche
for knowing who is to begin. Like Nus, he allows both
roulette and piquette. He also allows what is not only con-
trary to all established usages but also to the sense of the
words, a way of playing which he calls " femme-poussette "
which consists in carrying one's hand along with the
marble as one throws it (push stroke in billiards). Now
this is always forbidden, and the very word that Ross

36 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

has deformed says so " fan-poussette ". According to
Ross, you play from the place you have reached with the
last shot, and when you have won a marble you have the
right to another shot straight away. To change your place
you must say " du mien ". " // a stone gets in our way, you
say ' coup-pass i ' and have another shot. If it slips [if the
marble slips out of your hand] you say ' laehi* (Engl.
4 gone '). // you don't say that, you can't have another
turn. It's the rules ! " Ross here stands mid-way between
Nus and Ben. Finally, Ross knows of a rather ^ peculiar
custom which is unknown to Nus and Ben. " If you
stay in the square you can be hit and then he picks up the
marbles [ = If your shooter stays inside the square and
is touched by your opponent's shooter, he is entitled to
all the marbles in the square]. He (the opponent) can
have two shots [to try and hit the shooter in question]
and if he misses tfa first he can take [at the second shot]
the shooter from anywhere [though of course only from
the outside of the square] and make the marbles go out
[ = take them] ". This rule has generally only been des-
cribed to us by children of the fourth stage, but the rest
of Ross' interrogatory is typically third stage.

Such then is the third stage. The child's chief interest
is no longer psycho-motor, it is social. In other words,
to dislodge a marble from a square by manual dexterity
is no longer an aim in itself. The thing now is not only
to fight the other boys but also and primarily to regulate
the game with a whole set of systematic rules which will
ensure the most complete reciprocity in the methods used.
The game has therefore become social. We say " become "
because it is only after this stage that any real cooperation
exists between the players. Before this, each played for
himself. Each sought, it is true, to imitate the play of
older boys and of the initiated, but more for the satis-
faction, still purely personal, of feeling himself to be a
member of a mystical community whose sacred institutions
are handed down by the elders out of the remote past,
than from any real desire to cooperate with his playmates
or with anyone else. If cooperation be regarded as more
social than this mixture of egocentrism and respect for
one's seniors which characterizes the beginnings of

THE RULES OF THE GAME 37

collective life among children, then we may say that it
is from the third stage onwards that the game of marbles
begins to be a truly social game.

As yet, however, tMs cooperation exists to a great
extent only in intention. Being an honest man is not
enough to make one to know the law. It is not even
enough to enable us to solve all the problems that may
arise in our concrete "moral experience ". The child fares
in the same way during the present stage, and succeeds,
at best, in creating for himself a " provisional morality ",
putting off till a later date the task of setting up a code of
laws and a system of jurisprudence. Nor do boys of 7 to
10 ever succeed in agreeing amongst themselves for longer
than the duration of one and the same game ; they are
still incapable of legislating on all possible cases that
may arise, for each still has a purely personal opinion
about the rules of the game.

To use an apter comparison, we may say that the child
of 7 to 10 plays as he reasons. We have already L tried
to establish the fact that about the age of 7 or 8, precisely,
that is to say, at the moment when our third stage appears,
in the very poor districts where we conducted our work, 2
discussion and reflection gain an increasing ascendency
over unproved affirmation and intellectual egocentrism.
Now, these new habits of thought lead to genuine
deductions (as opposed to primitive " transductions ")
and to deductions in which the child grapples with a
given fact of experience, either present or past. But
something is still lacking if deduction is to be generalized
and made completely rational : the child must be able
to reason formally, i.e. he must have a conscious realization
of the rules of reasoning which will enable him to apply
them to any case whatsoever, including purely hypo-

* /.#., chap. IV.

* We take this opportunity of reminding the reader of what has not
been sufficiently emphasized in our earlier books, viz. that most of
our research has been carried out on children from the poorer parts
of Geneva. In different surroundings the age averages would certainly
have been different.

38 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

thetical cases (mere assumptions). In the same way, a
child who, with regard to the rules of games, has reached
the third stage, will achieve momentary coordinations
of a coEective order (a well ordered game may be com-
pared on this point to a good discussion), but feels no
interest as yet in the actual legislation of the game, in
the discussions of principle which alone will give him
complete mastery of the game in all its strictness. (From
this point of view the juridico-moral discussions of the
fourth stage may be compared to formal reasoning in
general.)

It is, on an average, towards the age of u or 12 that
these interests develop. In order to understand what is
the practice of rules among children of this fourth stage
let us question separately several children from the same
class at school, and we shall see how subtle are their
answers, and how well they agree with one another.

RIT (12), GROS (13) and VUA (13) often play marbles.
We questioned them each separately and took steps to
prevent them from communicating to each other during
our absence the contents of our interrogatory.

With regard to the square, the " pose ", the manner
of throwing, and generally speaking all the rules we
have already examined, these three children are naturally
in full agreement with each other. To know who is to
play first, Rit, who has lived in two neighbouring villages
before coming to town, tells us that various customs are
in usage. You draw a line, the coche, and whoever gets
nearest to it plays first. If you go beyond the line,
either, according to some, it does not matter, or else
" there is another game : when you go beyond the line, you
play last 3 '. Gros and Vua know only of this custom,
the only one that is really put into practice by the boys
of the neighbourhood.

But there are complications about which the younger
boys left us in the dark. " Whoever, according to Gros,
says ' queue ' plays second. It's easier because he doesn't
get^ ' hit ' [ = if a player's shooter lands near the square,
it is exposed to hits from the other players]." In the same
way, Vua tells us that " whoever says ' queue de deux '
plays last ' ' . And he adds the following rule, also recognized

THE RULES OF THE GAME 39

by Gros : * ' When you are all at the same distance from the
cache whoever cries ' egaux-queue ' plays second " (the
problem is therefore to play sufficiently soon still to
find marbles in the square, but not first, for fear of
being hit).

On the other hand, Gros tells us : " Whoever takes out
two [two of the marbles placed inside the square, i.e. the
equivalent of the player's ' pose '] can say ' queue-de-
pose '. In that way he can play second from the coche in
the next game." And Vua : " When there are two outside
[when two marbles have been knocked out of the square]
you can dare to say ' queue-de-pose ', and you can play
second from the coche again in the second game. 13 Rit
gives us the same information.

This is not all. According to Rit, " if you say f deux-
coups-de-coche ' you can have two shots from the line. If
you say ' deux-coups-d* empan ' you play the second shot
from where you are. You can only say that when the
other [ = the opponent] has made up his pose [ = has won
back as many marbles as he had originally deposited in
the square] ". This rule is observed in the same way by
the other two children.

In addition, there is a whole set of rules, unknown
to the younger boys, which bear upon the position of the
marbles in the square. According to Gros " the first boy
who says ' place-pour-moi * [Eng., place-for-me] does not
have to place himself at one of the corners of the square ",
and "the one who has said ' places-des-marbres* (Engl.,
place for the marbles) can put them down as he likes, in a
' troy at ' (all in a heap) or at the four corners ". Vua is
of the same opinion and adds : " If you say ' place-pour-
toi-pour-tout-le-jeu (Engl., your-place-for-the-whole-game)
the other chap [ = the opponent] must stay at the same
place" Rit, who knows both these rules, adds the further
detail that "you can't say 'place-pour-moi' if you have
already said ' place-pour-toi V This gives some idea of
the complications of procedure !

Our three legal experts also point the measures of
clemency in use for the protection of the weak. According
to Vua " if you knock out three at one shot and there s
only one left [one marble in the square] the other chap
[the opponent] has the right to play from half-way [half-
way between the coche and the square] because the first
boy has made more than his ' pose V Also : " the boy
who has been beaten is allowed to begin. 1 ' According to

40 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

Gros, " if there is one marble left at the end, the boy who
has won, instead of taking it, can give to the other chap''
And again, ** When there's one boy who has won too much,
the others say ' coufac ', and he is bound to play another
game"

The number of shots at the disposal of each player also
gives rise to a whole series of regulations on which the
three boys lay stress, as before, in full agreement with
each other. For the sake of brevity we refer the reader
on this point to the general rules outlined in Section I.

There is only one point on which we saw our subjects
differ. Rit who, it will be remembered, has known the
game in three different districts, tells us that the boy
whose shooter stays inside the square may generally
come out of it. He added, it is true, that in some games
the player in such a plight is " dished " (Fr., bride), but
this rule does not seem to him obligatory. Vua and
Gros, on the contrary, are of opinion that in all cases
" when you stay inside the square you are dished ". We
think we may confuse Vua by saying : " Rit didn't say
that ! The fact is, answers Vua, that sometimes people
play differently. Then you ask each other what you want
to do. And 2 you can't agree ? We scrap for a bit and
then we fix things up."

These answers show what the fourth stage is. Interest
seems to have shifted its ground since the last stage.
Not only do these children seek to cooperate, to " fix
things up/' as Vua puts it, rather than to play for them-
selves alone, but also and this undoubtedly is something
new they seem to take a peculiar pleasure in anticipating
all possible cases and in codifying them. Considering
that the square game is only one of the five or ten
varieties of the game of marbles, it is almost alarming
in face of the complexity of rules and procedure in the
square game, to think of what a child of twelve has to
store away in his memory. These rules, with their over-
lapping and their exceptions, are at least as complex as
the current rules of spelling. It is somewhat humiliating,
in this connection, to see how heavily traditional education
sets about the task of making spelling enter into brains
that assimilate with such ease the mnemonic contents of

THE RULES OF THE GAME 41

the game of marbles. But then, memory is dependent
upon activity, and a real activity presupposes interest.

Throughout this fourth stage, then, the dominating
interest seems to be interest in the rules themselves. For
mere cooperation would not require such subtleties as
those attending the disposition of the marbles in the
square (" place-pour-moi ", " place-des-marbres ", " place-
pour-toi-pour-tout-le-jeu ", etc.). The fact that the child
enjoys complicating things at will proves that what he
is after is rules for their own sake. We have described
elsewhere l the extraordinary behaviour of eight boys of
10 to ii who, in order to throw snow-balls at each other,
began by wasting a good quarter-of-an-hour in electing
a president, fixing the rules of voting, then in dividing
themselves into two camps, in deciding upon the distances
of the shots/ and finally in foreseeing what would be the
sanctions to be applied in cases of infringement of these
laws. Many other facts analogous to this could be culled
from studies that have been made on children's societies.

In conclusion, the acquisition and practice of the rules
of a game follow very simple and very natural laws, the
stages of which may be defined as follows : i Simple
individual regularity. 2 Imitation of seniors with ego-
centrism. 3 Cooperation. 4 Interest in rules for their
own sake. Let us now see whether the consciousness of
rules describes in its evolution an equally uncomplicated
curve.

5. CONSCIOUSNESS OF RULES. I. THE FIRST TWO
STAGES. As all our results have shown, consciousness of
rules cannot be isolated from the moral life of the child
as a whole. We might, at the most, study the practical
applications of rules without bothering about obedience
in general, i.e. about the child's whole social and moral
behaviour. But as soon as we try, as in the present
case, to analyse a child's feelings and thoughts about
rules, we shall find that he assimilates them unconsciously

i /.*., p. 96.

42 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

along with the commands to which he is subjected taken
as a whole. This comes out particularly clearly in the
case of the little ones, for whom the constraint exercised
by older children evokes adult authority itself in an
attenuated form.

Thus the great difficulty here, even more than with
the practice of rules, is to establish the exact significance
of the primitive facts. Do the simple individual regu-
larities that precede the rules imposed by a group of
players give rise to the consciousness of rules, or do they
not ? And if they do, is this consciousness directly
influenced by the commands of adults ? This very
delicate point must be settled before we can embark
upon the analysis of the more transparent data furnished
by the interrogatory of older children. With regard to
consciousness of rules, we shall designate as the first
stage that which corresponds to the purely individualistic
stage studied above. During this stage the child, as we
noted, plays at marbles in its own way, seeking merely
to satisfy its motor interests or its symbolic fantasy.
Only, it very soon contracts habits which constitute
individual rules of a sort.. This phenomenon, far from
being unique, is the counterpart of that sort of ritualization
of behaviour which can be observed in any baby before
it can speak or have experienced any specifically moral
adult pressure. Not only does every act of adaptation
extend beyond its content of intellectual effort into a
ritual kept up for its own sake, but the baby will often
invent such rituals for its own pleasure ; hence the
primitive reactions of very young children in the presence
of marbles.

But in order to know to what consciousness of rules
these individual schemas correspond it should be re-
membered that from its tenderest years everything con-
spires to impress upon the baby the notion of regularity.
Certain physical events (alternation of day and night,
sameness of scenery during walks, etc.) are repeated with
sufficient accuracy to produce an awareness of "law",

THE RULES OF THE GAME 43

or at any rate to favour tie appearance of motor schemas
of prevision. The parents, moreover, impose upon the
baby a certain number of moral obligations, the source
of further regularities (meals, bed-time, cleanliness, etc.)
which are completely (and to the child indissociably)
connected with the external regularities. From its earliest
months the child is therefore bathed in an atmosphere
of rules, so that the task of discerning what comes from
itself in the rites that it respects and what results from
the ^ pressure of things or the constraint of the social
environment is one of extreme difficulty. In the content
of each ritual act it is certainly possible to know what
has been invented by the child, what discovered in nature,
and what imposed by the adult. But in the consciousness
of rules, taken as a formal structure, these differentiations
are non-existent from the point of view of the subject
himself. 1

An analysis of the rites practised by older children,
however, will allow us to introduce a fundamental dis-
tinction at this point. On the one hand, certain forms
of behaviour are, as it were, ritualized by the child himself
(e.g. not to walk on the lines that separate the paving
stones from the kerb of the pavement). Now, so long
as no other factor intervenes, these motor rules never
give rise to the feeling of obligation proper. (This is true
even of the example we selected intentionally just now
that of a simple game which only becomes obligatory
when it becomes connected later on with a pact, i.e. with
a social operation, for the pact with oneself is undoubtedly
a derivative of the pact with others.) On the other
hand, certain rules it matters not whether they were
previously invented by the child, imitated, or received
from outside are at a given moment sanctioned by the

1 e.g. Heat burns (physical law), it is forbidden to touch the fire
(moral law) and the child playing about in the kitchen will amuse
himself by touching every piece of furniture except the stove (individual
ritual). How can the subject's mind distinguish at first between these
three types of regularity ?

44 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

environment, i.e. approved of or enjoined. Only in such
a case as this are rules accompanied by a feeling of
obligation. Now, although it is always difficult to know
to what extent an obligatory rale covers up in the mind
of a child of one or two years a motor ritual, it is at any
rate obvious that the two things are psychologically dis-
tinct. And this distinction should be borne in mind when
we come to the study of the rules of the game.

The reader will recognize in the way in which we have
stated the problem the striking thesis of M. Bovet on
the genesis of the feeling of moral obligation in man's
conscience : the feeling of obligation only appears when
the child accepts a command emanating from someone
whom he respects. All the material analysed in the present
work, beginning with the facts relating to consciousness
of the rules of the game, confirm this thesis, which is
parallel rather than contradictory to Durkheim's doctrine
of the social genesis of respect and morality. The only
change we wish to effect in Bovet's theory is to extend it
and to introduce alongside of the unilateral respect of the
younger child for the grown-up, the mutual respect that
is entertained among equals. Consequently, a collective
rule will appear to us as much the product of the reciprocal
approbation of two individuals as of the authority of one
individual over another.

What then does consciousness of rules amount to during
our first stage ? In so far as the child has never seen
anyone else play, we can allow that it is engaged here
upon purely personal and individual ritual acts. The
child, enjoying as it does any form of repetition, gives
itself schemas of action, but there is nothing in this that
implies an obligatory rule. At the same time, and this is
where the analysis becomes so difficult, it is obvious that
by the time a child can speak, even if it has never
seen marbles before, it is already permeated with rules
and regulations due to the environment, and this in the
most varied spheres. It knows that some things are
allowed and others forbidden. Even in the most modern

THE RULES OF THE GAME 45

form of training one cannot avoid imposing certain
obligations with regard to sleeping, eating, and even in
connection with certain details of no apparent importance
(not to touch a pile of plates, daddy's desk, etc., etc.).
It is therefore quite possible that when the child comes
across marbles for the first time, it is already convinced
that certain rules apply to these new objects. And this
is why the origins of consciousness of rules even in so
restricted a field as that of the game of marbles are
conditioned by the child's moral life as a whole.

This becomes clear in the second stage, the most
interesting for our thesis. This second stage sets in from
the moment when the child, either through imitation or
as the result of verbal exchange, begins to want to play
in conformity with certain rules received from outside.
What idea does he form of these rules ? This is the point
that we must now try to establish.

We made use of three groups of questions for the
purpose of analysing the consciousness of rules in this
second stage. Can rules be changed ? Have rules always
been the same as they are to-day ? How did rules begin ?
Obviously the first of these questions is the best. It is
the least verbal of the three. Instead of making the
child think about a problem that has never occurred to
him (as do the other two), it confronts the subject with a
new fact, a rule invented by himself, and it is relatively
easy to note the child's resulting reactions, however
clumsy he may be in formulating them. The other
two questions, on the contrary, incur all the objections
that can be made against questioning pure and simple
the possibility of suggestion, of perseveration, etc. We
are of opinion, nevertheless, that these questions have
their use, if only as indices of the respect felt for rules
and as complementary to the first.

Now, as soon as the second stage begins, i.e. from the
moment that the child begins to imitate the rules of
others, no matter how egocentric in practice his play may
be, he regards the rules of the game as sacred and un-

46 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

touchable ; he refuses to alter these rules and claims that
any modification, even if accepted by general opinion,
would be wrong.

Actually, it is not until about the age of 6 that this
attitude appears quite clearly and explicitly. Children of
4-5 seem, therefore, to form an exception and to take
rules rather casually, a feature which, if judged purely
externally, recalls the liberalism of older children. In
reality, we believe that this analogy is superficial, and
that little children, even when they seem not to be so,
are always conservative in the matter of rules. If they
accept innovations that are proposed to them, it is
because they do not realize that there was any innovation.

Let us begin by one of the more difficult cases, the
difficulty being all the greater because the child is very
young and consequently very much inclined to romance.

FAL (5) is at the second stage with regard to the
practice of rules. " Long ago when people were beginning
to build the town of Neuchitel, did little children play
at marbles the way you showed me ? Yes. Always that
way ? Yes, How did you get to know the rules ?
When I was quite little my brother showed me. My Daddy
showed my brother. And how did your daddy know?
My Daddy just knew. No one told him. How did he
know ? No one showed him ! " " Am I older than your
Daddy ? No, you're young. My Daddy had been born
when we came to Neuchdtel. My Daddy was born before
me. Tell me some people older than your daddy. My
grand-dad. Did he play marbles ? Yes. Then he played
before your daddy ? Yes, but not with rules ! [said with
great conviction]. What do you mean by rules ? . . .
[Fal does not know this word, which he~ has just heard
from our lips for the first time. But he realizes that it
means an essential property of the game of marbles ;
that is why he asserts so emphatically that his grand-dad
did not play with rules so as to show how superior his
daddy is to everyone else in the world.] Was it a long
time ago when people played for the first time ? Oh,
yes. How did they find out how to play ? Well, they
took some marbles, and then they made a square, and then
they put the marbles inside it . . . etc. [he enumerates the

THE RULES OF THE GAME 47

rules that he knows]. Was it little children who found
out or grown-up gentlemen ? Grown-up gentlemen.
Tell me who was born first, your daddy or your grand-
dad ? My Daddy was born before my grand-dad. Who
invented the game of marbles ? My Daddy did. Who
is the oldest person in Neuchatel ? / dunno. Who do
you think ? God. Did people know how to play marbles
before your daddy ? Other gentlemen played [before ?
at the same time ?]. In the same way as your daddy ?
Yes. How did they know how to ? They made it up.
Where is God ? In the sky. Is he older than your daddy ?
Not so old." " Could one find a new way of playing ?
I can't play any other way. Try . . . [Fal does not
move]. Couldn't you put them like this [we place the
marbles in a circle without a square] ? Oh, yes. Would
it be fair ? Oh, yes. As fair as the square ? Yes.
Did your daddy use to play that way or not ? Oh, yes.
Could one play still other ways ? Oh, yes." We then
arrange the marbles in the shape of a T, we put them
on a matchbox, etc. Fal says he has never seen this
done before, but that it is all quite fair and that you can
change things as much as you like. Only his daddy
knows all this !

Fal is typical of the cases we were discussing above.
He is ready to change all the established rules. A circle,
a T., anything will do just as well as the square. It looks,
at first, as though Fal were near those older children
who, as we shall see, no longer believe in the sacred
character of rules and adopt any convention so long as
it is received by all. But in reality this is not the case.
However great a romancer Fal may be, the text of which
we have quoted the greater part seems to show that he
has a great respect for rules. He attributes them to his
father, which amounts to saying that he regards them
as endowed with divine right. Fal's curious ideas about
his father's age are worth noting in this connection ; his
daddy was born before his grand-dad, and is older than
God ! These remarks, which fully coincide with those
collected by M. Bovet, 1 would seem to indicate that in
attributing the rules to his father, Fal makes them more

1 P. Bovet, The Child's Religion, London, 1930.

48 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

or less contemporaneous with what is for him the beginning
of the world. Characteristic, too, is the manner in which
the child conceives this invention of rules on the part
of his father : this gentleman thought of them without
having been told or shown anything, but other gentlemen
may equally have thought of the same thing. This is
not, in our opinion, mere psittacism. One should be
careful, of course, not to read into these remarks more
logic than they contain : they simply mean that rules
are sacred and unchangeable because they partake of
paternal authority. But this affective postulate can be
translated into a sort of infantile theory of invention, and
of the eternity of essences. To the child who attaches no
precise meaning to the terms " before " and " after " and
who measures time in terms of his immediate or deeper
feelings, to invent means almost the same thing as to
discover an eternal and pre-existing reality in oneself. Or
to put it more simply, the child cannot differentiate as
we do between the activity which consists in inventing
something new and that which consists in remembering
the past. (Hence the mixture of romancing and exact
reproduction which characterizes his stories or his memory.)
For the child, as for Plato, intellectual creation merges
into reminiscence, 1 What, then, is the meaning of Fal's
tolerance with regard to the new laws we suggested to
him ? Simply this, that confident of the unlimited
wealth of rules in the game of marbles, he imagines, as
soon as he is in possession of a new rule, that he has
merely rediscovered a rule that was already in existence.

In order to understand the attitude of the children of
the early part of the second stage they all answer more
or less like Fal we must remember that up till the age
of 6-7 the child has great difficulty in knowing what
comes from himself and what from others in his own
fund of knowledge. This comes primarily from his

1 Cf. C.W., p. 52, the case of Kauf ( 8 ; 8) : this child believes that
the stones she tells were written in her brain by God. " Before I was
born, he put them there."

THE RULES OF THE GAME 49

'difficulty in retrospection (see /. R., Chap. IV, i), and
secondly from the lack of organization in memory itself.
In this way the child is led to think that he has always
known something which in fact he has only just learned.
We have often had the experience of telling a child
something which immediately afterwards he will imagine
himself to have known for months. This indifference to
distinctions of before and after, old and new, explains
the inability of which we spoke just now to differentiate
between invention and reminiscence. The child very often
feels that what he makes up, even on the spur of the
moment, expresses, in some way, an eternal truth. This
being so, one cannot say that very young children have
no respect for rules because they allow these to be changed ;
innovations are not real innovations to them.

Added to this there is a curious attitude which appears
throughout the whole of the egocentric stage, and which
may be compared to the mental states characteristic of
inspiration. The child more or less pleases himself in his
application of the rules. At the same time, Fal and others
like him will allow any sort of change in the established
usage. And yet they one and all insist upon the point
that rules have always been the same as they are at
present, and that they are due to adult authority,
particularly the authority of the father. Is this con-
tradictory ? It is so only in appearance. If we call to
mind the peculiar mentality of children of this age, for
whom society is not so much a successful cooperation
between equals as a feeling of continuous communion
between the ego and the Word of the Elder or Adult,
then the contradiction ceases. Just as the mystic can
no longer dissociate his own wishes from the will of his
God, so the little child cannot differentiate between the
impulses of his personal fancy and the rules imposed on
him from above.

Let us now pass on to the typical cases of this stage,
i.e. to children who out of respect to rules are hostile to
any innovation whatsoever.

50 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

We must begin by quoting a child of 5| years, LEH,
whose reaction was among the most spontaneous that
we had occasion to note. Leh was telling us about the
rules of the game before we had questioned him about
consciousness of rules. He had just begun to speak and
was showing us how to play from the coche (which was
about the only thing in the game that he knew) when
the following dualogue took place. We asked Leh quite
simply if everyone played from the coche or whether one
could not (as is actually done) put the older ones at the
coche and let the little ones play closer up. "No,
answered Leh, that wouldn't be fair. Why not ? Because
God would make the little boy's shot not reach the marbles
and the big boy's shot would reach them." In other words,
divine justice is opposed to any change in the rules of
marbles, and if one player, even a very young one were
favoured in any way, God Himself would prevent him
from reaching the square.

PHA (sJ) : " Do people always play like that ? Yes,
always like that. Why ? 'Cos you couldn't play any other
way ^ Couldn't you play like this [we arrange the marbles
in a circle, then in a triangle] ? Yes, but the others wouldn't
wan i 20. Why ? 'Cos squares is better. Why better ?
. . ." We are less successful, however, with regard
to the origins of the game : " Did your daddy play at
marbles before you were born ? No, never, because I
wasn't there yet! But he was a child like you before
you were born, / was there already when he was like
me. He was bigger." " When did people begin to play
marbles ? When the others began, I began too." It would
be impossible to outdo Pha in placing oneself at the
centre of the universe, in time as well as in space ! And
yet Pha feels very strongly that rules stand above him :
they cannot be changed.

GEO (6) tells us that the game of marbles began \yith
" people, with the Gentlemen of the Commune [the Town
Council whom he has probably heard mentioned in
connection with road-mending and the police]. How was
that ? It came into the gentlemen's heads and they made
some marbles. How did they know how to play ? In
their head. They taught people. Daddies show little boys
how to. Can one play differently from how you showed
me ? Can you change the game ? I think you can, but
I don't know how [Geo is alluding here to the variants
already in existence]. Anyhow ? No there are no games

THE RULES OF THE GAME 51

you play anyhow. Why ? Because God didn't leach
them [the Town Council]. Try and change the game.
[Geo then invents an arrangement which he regards as
quite new and which consists in making a big square
with three rows of three marbles each], Is that one
fair, like the other one ? No, becatise there are only three
lines of three. Could people always play that way and
stop playing the old way ? Yes, M'sieu. How did you
find this game ? In my head. -Can we say, then, that
the other games don't count and this is the one people
must take ? Yes, M'sieur. There's others too that the
Gentlemen of the Commune know. Do they know this
one that you have made up ? Yes [/]. But it was you
who found it out. Did you find that game in your
head ? Yes. How ? All of a sudden. God told it to
me. You know, I have spoken to the gentlemen of the
Commune, and I don't think they know your new game.
Oh ! [Geo is very much taken aback]. But I know some
children who don't know how to play yet. Which game
shall I teach them, yours, or the other one ? The one
of the Gentlemen of the Commune. Why ? Because it is
prettier." " Later on when you are a big man and have
got moustaches perhaps there won't be many children
left who play the game of the Gentlemen of the Commune.
But there may be lots of boys who play at your game.
Then which game will be fairest, yours, which will be
played most, or the game of the Gentlemen of the Com-
mune, which will be nearly forgotten ? The game of the
Gentlemen of the Commune"

The case of Geo comes as a beautiful confirmation
of what we said in connection with Fal, viz. that for
little children inventing a game comes to the same
thing as finding in one's head a game that has already
been anticipated and classified by the most competent
authorities. Geo attributes the game he has invented to
divine inspiration, and supposes it to be already known
to the "Gentlemen of the Commune." As soon as we
undeceive him he undervalues his own invention and
refuses to regard it as right even if ratified by general
usage.

MAR (6), whose behaviour in the practice of rules we
have already examined in 3, declares that in the time

52 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

of his daddy and of Jesus, people played as they do now.
He refuses to invent a new game. " I've never invented
games" We then suggest a new game which consists of
putting marbles on a box and making them fall off by
hitting the box : " Can one play like this IYes [He does
so, and seems to enjoy it]. Could this game ever become
a fair game ? No, because it's not the same. 1 ' Another
attempt calls forth the same reaction.

STOR (7) tells us that children played at marbles before
Noah's ark : " How did they play ? Like we played.
How did it begin ? They bought some marbles. But how
did they learn ? His daddy taught them" Stor invents
a new game in the shape of a triangle. He admits that
his friends would be glad to play at it, " but not all of them.
Not the big ones, the quite big ones. Why ? Because it
isn't a game for the big ones. Is it as fair a game as ^ the
one you showed me ? No. Why ? Because it isn't a
square. And if everyone played that way, even the big
ones, would it be fair ? No. Why not ? Because it isn't
a square"

With regard to the practical application of rules all
these children therefore belong to the stage of egocentrism.
The result is clearly paradoxical. Here are children
playing more or less as they choose ; they are influenced,
it is true, by a few examples that have been set before
them and observe roughly the general schema of the
game ; but they do so without troubling to obey in
detail the rules they know or could know with a little
attention, and without attributing the least importance
to the most serious infringements of which they may be
guilty. Besides all this, each child plays for himself, he
pays no attention to his neighbour, does not seek to
control him and is not controlled by him, does not even
try to beat him " to win " simply means to succeed in
hitting the marbles one has aimed at. And yet these
same children harbour an almost mystical respect for
rules : rules are eternal, due to the authority of parents,
of the Gentlemen of the Commune, and even of an
almighty God. It is forbidden to change them, and even
if the whole of general opinion supported such a change,
general opinion would be in the wrong : the unanimous

THE RULES OF THE GAME 53

consent of all the children wauld be powerless against
the truth of Tradition. As to any apparent changes,
these are only complementary additions to the initial
Revelation : thus Geo (the most primitive of the above
cases, and therefore nearest to those represented by Fal
and so confirming what we said about the latter) believes
the rule invented by Mm to be directly due to a divine
inspiration analogous to the inspiration of which the
Gentlemen of the Commune were the first recipients.

In reality, however, this paradox is general in child
behaviour and constitutes, as we shall show towards the
end of the book, the most significant feature of the
morality belonging to the egocentric stage. Childish
egocentrism, far from being asocial, always goes hand
in hand with adult constraint. It is presocial only in
relation to cooperation. In all spheres, two types of
social relations must be distinguished ; constraint and
cooperation. The first implies an element of unilateral
respect, of authority and prestige ; the second is simply
the intercourse between two individuals on an equal
footing. Now egocentrism is contradictory only to
cooperation, for the latter alone is really able to socialize
the individual. Constraint, on the other hand, is always
the ally of childish egocentrism. Indeed it is because
the child cannot establish a genuinely mutual contact
with the adult that he remains shut up in his own ego.
The child is, on the one hand, too apt to have the illusion
of agreement where actually he is only following his own
fantasy ; the adult, on the other, takes advantage of his
situation instead of seeking equality. With regard to
moral rules, the child submits more or less completely
in intention to the rules laid down for him, but these,
remaining, as it were, external to the subject's conscience,
do not really transform his conduct. This is why the
child looks upon rules as sacred though he does not really
put them into practice.

As far as the game of marbles is concerned, there is
therefore no contradiction between the egocentric practice

54 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

of games and the mystical respect entertained for rales.
This respect is the mark of a mentality fashioned, not by
free cooperation between equals, but by adult constraint.
When the child imitates the rules practised by his older
companions he feels that he is submitting to an unalterable
law, due, therefore, to his parents themselves. Thus
the pressure exercised by older on younger children is
assimilated here, as so often, to adult pressure. This
action of the older children is still constraint, for co-
operation can only arise between equals. Nor does the
submission of the younger children to the rules of the
older ones lead to any sort of cooperation in action ;
it simply produces a sort of mysticism, a diffused feeling
of collective participation, which, as in the case of many
mystics, fits in perfectly well with egocentrism. For
we shall see eventually that cooperation between equals
not only brings about a gradual change in the child's
practical attitude, but that it also does away with the
mystical feeling towards authority.

In the meantime let us examine the subjects of the
final period of the present stage. We found only three
stages with regard to consciousness of rules, whereas
there seemed to be four with regard to the practice of
the game. In other words, the cooperation that sets in
from the age of 7-8 is not sufficient at first to repress
the mystical attitude to authority, and the last part of
the present stage (in the consciousness of rules) really
coincides with the first half of the cooperative stage (in
the practice of the game).

BEN (10 yrs.), whose answers we have given with regard
to the practice of rules (third stage) is still at the second
stage from the point of view that is occupying us just
now : " Can one invent new rules ? Some boys do, so
as to win more marbles, but it doesn't always come off.
One chap [quite recently, in his class] thought of saymg
' Deux Empans ' (two spans) so as to get nearer [actually
this is a rule already known to the older boys]. It didn't
come off. And with the little ones ? Yes, it came off
all right with them. Invent a rule. / couldn't invent one

THE RULES OF THE GAME 55

straight away like that. Yes you could. I can see that
you are cleverer than you make yourself out to be.
Well, let's say that you're not caught when you are in the
square. Good. Would that come off with the others ?
Oh, yes, they'd like to do that. Then people could play
that way ? Oh, no, because it would be cheating. But
all your pals would like to, wouldn't they ? Yes, they
all would. Then why would it be cheating ? Because
I invented it : it isn't a rule ! It's a wrong rule because
it's outside of the rules. A fair rule is one that is in the
game. How does one know If it is fair ? The good players
know it. And suppose the good players wanted to play
with your rule ? It wouldn't work. Besides they would
say it was cheating. And if they all said that the rale
was right, would it work ? Oh, yes, it would. . . . But
it's a wrong rule ! But if they all said it was right how
would anyone know that it was wrong ? Because when
vou are in the square it's like a garden with a fence, you're
"shut in [so that if the shooter stays inside the square,
you are ' dished ']. And suppose we draw a square like
this [we draw a square with a break in one of the sides
like a fence broken by a door] ? Some boys do that. But
it isn't fair. It's just for fun for passing the time. Why ?
Because the square ought to be closed. But if some boys
do it, is it fair or not ? Ifs both fair and not fair. Why
is it fair ? It is fair for waiting [for fun]. And why is
it not fair ? Because the square ought to be closed.
When you are big, suppose everyone plays that way,
will it be right or not ? It will be right then because there
will be new children who will learn the rule. And for
y OU ? ft w m be wrong. And what will it be ' really
and truly ' ? It will really be wrong." Later on, however,
Ben admits that his father and grandfather played
differently from him, and that rules can therefore be
changed by children. But this does not prevent ^hira
from sticking to the view that rules contain an intrinsic
truth which is independent of usage.

Borderline cases like these are particularly interesting.
Ben stands midway between the second and third stages.
On the one hand, he has already learned, thanks to
cooperation, the existence of possible variations in the
use of rules, and he knows, therefore, that the actual
rules are recent and have been made by children. But

56 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD

on the other hand, he believes in the absolute and intrinsic
truth- of rules. Does cooperation, then, impose upon
this child a mystical attitude to law similar to the respect
felt by little children for the commands given them by
adults ? Or is Ben's respect for the rales of the game
inherited from the constraint that has not yet been
eliminated by cooperation ? The sequel will show that
the latter interpretation is the right one. Older children
cease to believe in the intrinsic value of rules, and they
do so in the exact measure that they learn to put them
into practice. Ben's attitude should therefote be regarded
as a survival of the features due to constraint.

Generally speaking, it is a perfectly normal thing that
in its beginnings cooperation on the plane of action
should not immediately abolish the mental states created
on the plane of thought by the complexus : ego-
centricity and constraint. Thought always lags behind
action and cooperation has to be practised for a very
long time before its consequences can be brought fully
to light by reflective thought. This is a fresh example
of the law of prise de conscience or conscious realization
formulated by Clapar&de 1 and of the time-lag 2 or " shift-
ing " which we have observed in so many other spheres (see
J. R. t Chap. V, 2 and C.C., 2nd part) . A phenomenon such
as this is, moreover, well fitted to simplify the problem
of egocentrism in general since it explains why intellectual
egocentrism is so much more stubborn than egocentrism
in action.

6. CONSCIOUSNESS OF RULES. II. THIRD STAGE.
After the age of 10 on the average, i.e. from the second
half of the cooperative stage and during the whole of

1 This term (Claparede's prise de conscience) simply means "coming
into consciousness," and has nothing to do with intellectual formula-
tion. [Trans.].

2 This is the term that has been selected by the author ior the French
decalage, a somewhat more complex notion which in previous volumes,
cf. L.T., p. 208, ff., has been rendered as a process of "shifting,"

Trans.].

THE RULES OF THE GAME 57

the stage when the rules are codified, consciousness of
rules undergoes a complete transformation. Autonomy
follows upon heteronomy : the rule of a game appears
to the child no longer as an external law, sacred in so
far as it has been laid down by adults ; but as the
outcome of a free decision and worthy of respect in the
measure that it has enlisted mutual consent.

This change can be seen by three concordant symptoms.
In the first place, the child allows a change in the rules
so long as it enlists the votes of all. Anything is possible,
so long as, and to the extent that you undertake to
respect the new decisions. Thus democracy follows on
theocracy and gerontocracy : there are no more crimes
of opinion, but only breaches in procedure. All opinions
are tolerated so long as their protagonists urge their
acceptance by legal methods. Of course some opinions
are more reasonable than others. Among the new rules
that may be proposed, there are innovations worthy of
acceptance because they will add to the interest of the
game (pleasure in risks, art for art's sake, etc.). And
there are new rules that are worthless because they give
precedence to easy winning as against work and skill.
But the child counts on the agreement among the players
to eliminate these immoral innovations. He no longer
relies, as do the little ones, upon an all-wise tradition.
He no longer thinks that everything has been arranged
for the best in the past and that the only