i66 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 



XIIL UNDER LAW. 



By JAMES SULLY, M. A.,LL.D., 



GEOTE PROFESSOR OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND LOGIC AT THE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, 



LONDON. 



{b) ON THE SIDE OF LAW. 



IN the previous chapters we studied the child as the antagonist 

 of law. It is evident, however, that his [relation to law pre- 

 sents another aspect. Thus a good deal of the early criticism of 

 parental government, so far from implying rejection of all rule, 

 plainly implies its acceptance. Some of the earliest and bitterest 

 protests against interference are directed against what looks to 

 the child exceptional or irregular. He is allowed, for example, 

 for some time to use a pair of scissors as a plaything, and is then 

 suddenly deprived of it, his mother having now first discovered 

 the unsuitability of the plaything. In such a case the passionate 

 outburst, the long, bitter protest, attest the sense of injustice, the 

 violation of custom and unwritten law. Again, the keen, resent- 

 ful opposition of the child to the look of anything like unfairness 

 and partiality in parental government shows that he has a jealous 

 feeling of regard for the universality and the inviolateness of 

 law. Much, too, of the criticism dealt with above reveals a funda- 

 mental acknowledgment of law at least for the purposes of the 

 argument. Thus the very attempt to establish an excuse, a justi- 

 fication, may be said to be a tacit admission that if the action liad 

 been done as alleged it would have been naughty and deserving 

 of punishment. In truth, the small person's challengings of the 

 modus operandi of his mother's rule just because they are often 

 in a true sense ethical, clearly start from the assumption of rules, 

 and of the distinction of right and wrong. 



This of itself shows that there are compliant as well as non- 

 compliant tendencies in the child toward law and toward authority 

 so far as this is lawful. We may now pass to other parts of a 

 child's behavior which help to make more clear the existence of 

 such law-abiding impulses. 



And here we may set out with those reactions of something like 

 remorse which often follow disobedience and punishment in the 

 first tender years. These may at the outset be little more than 

 physical reactions due to the exhaustion of the passionate out- 

 burst. But they soon begin to show traces of other feelings. A 

 child in disgrace, before he has a clear moral feeling of shame, 

 suflfers through a sense of estrangement, of loneliness, of self-re- 

 striction. If the habitual relation between mother and child is a 



