350 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



dren's fears, they are not the only ones. Experience begins to 

 direct the instinctive fear impulse from the very beginning. 

 How much it does in the first months of life it is difficult to say. 

 In the aversion of a baby to its medicine glass or its cold bath 

 one sees perhaps more of the rude germ of passion or anger than 

 of fear. Careful observations seem to me to be required on this 

 point, at what definite date signs of fear arising from experience 

 of pain begin to show themselves in the child. Some children at 

 least have a surprising way of not minding even considerable 

 amounts of physical pain the misery of a fall, a blow, a cut, and 

 so forth, being speedily forgotten. It seems doubtful, indeed, 

 whether the venerable saw, " The burned child dreads the fire," is 

 invariably true. In many cases apparently a good amount of 

 real agony is necessary to produce a genuine fear in a young 

 child.* This tendency to belittle pain is not unknown, I suspect, 

 to the tutor of small boys. It may well be that a definite and 

 precise recalling of the misery of a scratch or even of a moderate 

 burn may not conduce to the development of a true fear, and that 

 here, too, fear, when it arises in all its characteristic masterful- 

 ness, is at bottom fear of the unknown. This seems illustrated 

 by the well-known fact that a child will often be more terrified 

 by a first experience of pain, especially if there is a visible hurt 

 and bleeding, than by any subsequent prospect of a renewal of 

 the catastrophe. Is not the same thing true, indeed, of older 

 fears ? Should we dread the wrench of a tooth extraction if we 

 experienced it often enough and had a sufficiently photographic 

 imagination to be able to estimate precisely the intensity and 

 duration of the pain ? 



Much the same thing shows itself in the cases where fear can 

 be clearly traced to experience and association. In some of these 

 it is, no doubt, remembered experience of suffering which causes 

 fear. A child that has been seriously burned will dread a too 

 close approach to a red-hot poker. But in many cases of this 

 excitation of fear by association it is the primary experience of 

 fear itself which is at the bottom of the apprehension. Thus a 

 child who has been frightened by a dog will betray signs of fear 

 at the sight of a kennel, at a picture of a dog, and so forth. The 

 little boy referred to above, who was afraid of the toy elephant 

 that shook its head, showed signs of fear a fortnight afterward on 

 coming across a picture of an elephant in a picture book. In 

 such ways does fear propagate fear in the timid little breast. 



* On this point there are some excellent observations made by Miss Shinn, who points 

 out that physical pain, when not too severe, is apt to be lost sight of in the new feeling; of 

 personal consequence to which it gives rise. Notes on the Development of a Child, Part II, 

 p. 144 ff. 



