STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 345 



no longer see anything of the objects that surround me, not to 

 imagine a thousand creatures, a thousand movements which may- 

 hurt me, and against which I am unable to protect myself ?" * 



Rousseau here supplements and corrects Locke. For one 

 thing, I have ascertained in the case of my own child, and in that 

 of others, that a fear of the dark has grown up when the influ- 

 ence of the wicked nurse has been carefully eliminated. Locke 

 forgets that children can get terrifying fancies from other chil- 

 dren and from all sorts of suggestions unwittingly conveyed by 

 the words of respectable grown people. Besides, he leaves un- 

 touched the question why children should choose to dwell on 

 these fearful images in the dark rather than on the bright, pretty 

 ones which they also acquire. Mr. R. L. Stevenson has told us 

 how happy a child can make himself at night with such pleasing 

 fancies. Yet it must be owned that darkness seems rather to 

 favor images of what is weird and terrible. How is this ? Rous- 

 seau gets some way toward answering the question by saying (as 

 I understand him to say) that darkness breeds a sense of insecu- 

 rity. Not that a child lying in his cot is likely to be troubled 

 that he can not see what is at the other end of the room. I do 

 not think that it is the inconvenience of being in the dark which 

 generates the fear ; a child might, I imagine, acquire it without 

 ever having had to explore a dark place. 



I strongly suspect that the fear of darkness takes its rise in a 

 sensuous phenomenon, a kind of physical repugnance. All sen- 

 sations of very low intensity, as very soft vocal sounds, have 

 about them a tinge of melancholy tristesse and this is espe- 

 cially noticeable in the sensations which the eye experiences 

 when confronted with a dark space, or, what is tantamount to 

 this, a black and dull surface. The symbolism of darkness and 

 blackness, as when we talk of "gloomy" thoughts, or liken 

 trouble to a " black cloud," seems to rest on this effect of mel- 

 ancholy. 



Along with this gloomy character of the sensation of dark, 

 and not always easy to distinguish from it, there goes the craving 

 of the eye for its customary light, and all the interest and glad- 

 ness which come from seeing. When the eye and brain are not 

 fatigued that is, when we are wakeful this eyeache may become 

 an appreciable pain; and it is probable that children feel the 

 deprivation more acutely than grown persons, owing to the abun- 

 dance of their visual activity as well as to the comparatively 

 scanty store of their thought resources. Add to this that dark- 

 ness, by extinguishing the world of visible things, would give to 

 a timid child tenacious of the familiar home surroundings a 



* firnile, Book II. 

 vol. xlvii. 28 



