34-6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



peculiarly keen sense of strangeness and of loneliness, of banish- 

 ment from all that it knows and loves. The reminiscences of this 

 feeling, described in later life as that of Mr. James Payn, in 

 his recently published volume, Gleams of Memory show that it 

 is the sense of loneliness which oppresses the child in its dark 

 room. 



This, I take it, would be quite enough to make the situation 

 of confinement in a dark room disagreeable and depressing to a 

 wakeful child even when in bed and there is no restriction of 

 bodily activity. But this sense of banishment through the blot- 

 ting out of the familiar scene would not, I take it, amount 

 to a full, passionate dread of darkness. It seems to me to be 

 highly probable that a baby of two or three months might 

 feel something of this vague depression and even this crav- 

 ing for the wonted scene, especially just after the removal of a 

 light ; yet such a baby, as we have seen, gives no clear indica- 

 tions of fear. 



Fear of the dark arises from the development of the child's 

 imagination, and might, I believe, arise without any suggestion 

 from nurse or other children of the notion that there are bogies 

 in the dark. Darkness is precisely the situation most favorable 

 to vivid imagination ; the screening of the visible world makes 

 the inner world of fancy bright by contrast. Are we not all apt 

 to shut our eyes when we try to " visualize " or picture things 

 very distinctly ? This fact of a preternatural activity of imagi- 

 nation, taken with the circumstance emphasized by Rousseau 

 that in the darkness the child is no longer distinctly aware of the 

 objects that are actually before him, would help us to understand 

 why children are so much given to projecting into the unseen, 

 dark spaces the creatures of the imagination. Not only so and 

 this Rousseau does not appear to have recognized the dull feeling 

 of depression which accompanies the sensation of darkness might 

 suffice to give a gloomy and weird turn to the images so pro- 

 jected. 



But I am disposed to think that there is yet another element 

 in this childish fear. I have said that darkness gives a positive 

 sensation : we see it ; and the sensation, apart from any difference 

 of signification which we afterward learn to give to it, is of the 

 same kind that is obtained by looking at a dull, black surface. 

 To the child the difference between a black object and dark, unil- 

 lumined space is as yet not clear, and I believe it will be found 

 that children tend to materialize, or, to use a rather technical 

 word, " reify " that is, make a thing of darkness. When, for ex- 

 ample, a correspondent tells me that darkness was envisaged by 

 her when a child as a crushing power, I think I see traces of this 

 childish feeling. I seem able to recall my own childish sense of 



