Before we go on with our consideration of the use of “the expression of possibility”, let us get clearer about that department of our language in which things are said about past & future, that is, about the use of sentences containing such expressions as “yesterday”, “a year ago”, “in five minutes”, “before I did this”, etc. Consider this example:
50).   Imagine how a child might be trained in the practice of “narration of past events”. He was first trained in asking for certain things (as it were, in giving orders. See 1).) Part of this training was the exercise of “naming the things”. He has thus learnt to name (& ask for) a dozen of his toys. Say now that he has played with three of them (e.g., a ball, a stick, and a rattle), then they are taken away from him, and now the grown-up says such a phrase as, “He's had a ball, a stick, and a rattle”. On a similar occasion he stops short in the enumeration and induces the child to complete it. On another occasion, perhaps, he only says, “He's had … ” and leaves the child to give the whole enumeration. Now the way of “inducing the child to go on” can be this: He stops short in his enumeration with a facial expression and a raised tone of voice which we should call one of expectancy. All then depends on whether the child will react to this “inducement” or not. Now there is a queer misunderstanding we are most liable to fall into, which consists in regarding the “outward means” the teacher uses to induce the child to go on as what we might call an indirect means of making himself understood to the child. We treat || regard the case as though the child already possessed a language in which it thought and that the teacher's job is to induce it to guess his meaning in the realm of meanings before the child's mind, as though the child could in his own private language ask himself such a question as, “Does he want me to continue, or repeat what he said, or something else?” (Cf. with 30)).
51).   Another example of a primitive kind of narration of past events: we live in a landscape with characteristic natural landmarks against the horizon. It is therefore easy to remember the place at which the sun rises at a particular season, or the place above which it stands when at its highest point, or the place at which it sets. We have some characteristic pictures of the sun in different positions in our landscape. Let us call this series of pictures the sun series. We have also some characteristic pictures of the activities of a child, lying in bed, getting up, dressing, lunching, etc. This set I'll call the life pictures. I imagine that the child can frequently see the position of the sun while about the day's activities. We draw the child's attention to the sun's standing in a certain place while the child is occupied in a particular way. We then let it look both at a picture representing its occupation and at a picture showing the sun in its position at that time. We can thus roughly tell the story of the child's day by laying out a row of the life pictures, and above it what I called the sun series, the two rows in the proper correlation. We shall then proceed to let the child supplement such a picture story, which we leave incomplete. And I wish to say at this point that this form of training (see 50) and 30)) is one of the big characteristic features in the use of language, or in thinking.
52).   A variation of 51). There is a big clock in the nursery, for simplicity's sake imagine it with an hour hand only. The story of the child's day is narrated as above, but there is no sun series; instead we write one of the digits || numbers of the dial against each life picture.