STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 347 



a big black something on suddenly waking and opening the eyes 

 in a very dark room. 



But there is still something else to be noticed in this sensation 

 of darkness. The black field is not uniform, some parts of it 

 showing less black than others, and the indistinct and rude pat- 

 tern of comparatively light and dark changing from moment to 

 moment, while now and again more definite spots of brightness 

 may form themselves. The varying activity of the retina would 

 seem to account for this apparent changing of the dark scene. 

 What, my reader may not unnaturally ask, has this to do with a 

 child's fear of the dark ? If he will recall what was said about 

 the facility with which a child comes to see faces and animal 

 forms in the lines of a cracked ceiling or the veining of a piece 

 of marble, he will, I think, recognize the drift of my remarks. 

 These slight and momentary differences of blackness, these fleet- 

 ing rudiments of a pattern, may serve as a sensuous base for the 

 projected images : the child's excited fancy sees in these faint dif- 

 ferentiations of the black, formless waste definite forms. These 

 will naturally be the forms with which he is most familiar, and 

 since his fancy is tinged with melancholy they will, of course, be 

 gloomy and disturbing forms. Hence we may expect to hear of 

 children seeing the forms of terrifying living things in the dark. 

 Here is an instructive case. A boy of four years had for some 

 time been afraid of the dark, and indulged by having the candle 

 left burning at night. On hearing that the London Crystal Pal- 

 ace had been burned down he asked for the first time to have the 

 light taken away, fear of the dark being now cast out by the big- 

 ger fear of fire. Some time after this he volunteered an account of 

 his obsolete terrors to his father. " Do you know," he said, "what 

 I thought dark was ? A great, large, live thing, the color of 

 black, with a mouth and eyes." Here we have the " reifying " of 

 darkness, and we probably see the influence of the comparatively 

 bright spots in the attribution of eyes to the monster, an influence 

 still more apparent in the instance quoted above, where a child 

 saw the eyes of lions and tigers glaring as they walked round the 

 room. Another suggestive instance here is that given by M. 

 Compayre', in which a child, on being asked why he did not like 

 to be in a dark place, answered, " I don't like chimney-sweeps." * 

 Here the blackness with its dim suggestions of brighter spots de- 

 termined the image of the black chimney-sweep with his white 

 flashes of mouth and eyes.f I should like to observe here paren- 



* Op. cit., pp. 100, 101. 



f It is supposable too that disturbance of the retina giving rise to subjective luminous 

 sensations, as the well-known small bright moving disks, might assist in the case of nervous 

 children in suggesting glaring eyes. 



