658 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



first years. That later on cruelty becomes possible, that the 

 school bully may find his satisfaction in tormenting the "little 

 kids/' this is but too certain. Yet even schoolboys with clearest 

 example to guide them are by no means always bullies. 



We have now looked at one of the dark sides of the child and 

 have found that, though it is unpleasant, it is not so hideous as it 

 has been painted. Children are, no doubt, apt to be passionate, 

 ferocious in their anger, and sadly wanting in consideration for 

 others ; yet it is consolatory to reflect that their savageness is not 

 quite that of brutes, and that their selfishness and cruelty are a 

 long way removed from a deliberate and calculating egoism. 



It now remains to point out that there is another and counter- 

 balancing side. If a child has his outbursts of temper he has also 

 his fits of tenderness. If he is now dead to others' sufferings, he 

 is at another time taken with a most amiable, childish concern 

 for their happiness. In order to be just to the child we must rec- 

 ognize both sides. 



It must not be forgotten here that children are instinctively 

 attachable and sociable, in so far as they show in the first weeks 

 that they get used to and dependent on the human presence, and 

 are miserable when this is taken from them. The stopping of a 

 child's crying at night on hearing the familiar voice of its mother 

 or nurse shows this. 



In this instinct of companionship there is involved a vague 

 inarticulate sympathy. Just as the attached dog may be said to 

 have in a vague way a feeling of oneness with its master, so the 

 child. The intenser realization of this oneness comes in the case 

 of the dog and of the child alike after separation. The wild, 

 caressing leaps of the quadruped are matched by the warm em- 

 bracings of the little biped. Only that here, too, we see in the 

 child traces of a deeper human consciousness. A girl of thirteen 

 months was separated from her mother for six weeks. On the 

 mother's return she was speechless, and for some time could not 

 bear to leave her mother for a minute. 



This sense of joining on one's existence to another's is not full 

 imaginative sympathy that is, a warm realizing representation 

 of another's feelings but it is a kind of sympathy, after all, and 

 may grow into something better. This we may see in the return 

 of the childish heart to its resting place after the estrangement 

 introduced by " naughtiness." The relenting after passion, the 

 reconciliation after punishment, are these not the experiences 

 which help to raise the dumb-animal sympathy of the first 

 months into a true human sense of fellowship ? But this part 

 of the development of sympathy belongs to another chapter. 



Sympathy, it has been said, is a kind of imitation, and this is 

 strikingly illustrated in its early forms. A dog will howl pite- 



