STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 653 



of child. Yet there seems to me little doubt that these are common 

 and among the most pronounced characters of the first years. 



Evolution will, no doubt, help us to understand much of this. 

 If the order of development of the child follows and summarizes 

 that of the race, we should expect the child to show a germ at least 

 of the passionateness, the quarrelsomeness of the brute and of the 

 savage before he shows the moral qualities distinctive of civilized 

 man. That he often shows so close a resemblance to the savage 

 and to the brute suggests how little ages of civilized life, with its 

 suppression of these furious impulses, have done to tone down the 

 ancient and carefully transmitted instincts. The child at birth 

 and for a long while after may then be said to be the representa- 

 tive of wild, untamed Nature, which it is for education to subdue 

 and fashion into something softer and gentler. 



At the same time the child is more than this. In this first 

 clash of his will with another's he knows more than the brute's 

 sensual fury. He suffers consciously, he realizes himself in his 

 antagonism to a world outside him. It is probable, as I have 

 pointed out before, that even a physical check bringing pain, as 

 when the child runs his head against a wall, may develop this con- 

 sciousness of self in its antagonism to a not-self. This conscious- 

 ness reaches a higher phase when the opposing force is distinctly 

 apprehended as another will. Self -feeling, a germ of the feeling 

 of " my worth," enters into this early passionateness and differen- 

 tiates it from a mere animal rage. The absolute prostration of 

 infantile anger seems to be the expression of this keen conscious- 

 ness of the self of its rebuff and injury. 



While, then, these outbursts of savage instinct in children are, 

 no doubt, ugly and in their direction contra-moral, they must not 

 hastily be pronounced wholly bad and wicked. To call them 

 wicked in the full sense of that term is indeed to forget that they 

 are the swift reactions of instinct which have in them nothing of 

 reflection or of deliberation. The angry child venting his spite in 

 some wild act of violence is a long, long way from a man who know- 

 ingly and with the consent of his will retaliates and hates. The 

 very fleeting character of the outbreak, the rapid subsidence of 

 passion, and transition to another mood show that there is here 

 no real malice prepense. These instincts will, no doubt, if they 

 are not tamed, develop later into truly wicked dispositions; yet 

 it is by no means a small matter to recognize that they do not 

 amount to full moral depravity. 



On the other hand, we have seen that we do not render com- 

 plete justice to these early manifestations of angry passion if we 

 class them with those of the brute. The child in these first years, 

 though not yet human in the sense of having rational insight into 

 his wrongdoing, is human in the sense of suffering through con- 



