358 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



that children do not wholly depend for their conceptions of these 

 on religious or other instruction. The liveliness of their imagina- 

 tion, and their impulses of dread and trust, push them on to a spon- 

 taneous creation of invisible beings. In C ^s haunting belief in 



the wolf, we see a sort of survival of the tendency of the savage 

 to people the unseen world with monsters in the shape of demons. 

 Another little boy of rather more than two years old who had re- 

 ceived no religious instruction acquired a similar haunting dread 

 of " cocky," the name he had given to the cocks and hens when in 

 the country. He localized this evil thing in the bathroom of the 

 house, and he attributed pains in the stomach to the malign in- 

 fluence of " cocky." * Fear created the gods, according to Lucre- 

 tius, and in this invention of evil beings bent on injuring him 

 the child of a civilized community probably reproduces the pro- 

 cess by which man's thoughts were first troubled by the appre- 

 hension of invisible and supernatural agents. 



On the other hand, we find that the childish impulse to seek 



aid leads to a belief in a more benign sort of being. C 's stanch 



belief in his fairies who could do the most wonderful things for 

 him, and more especially his invention of the rain-god (the 

 Rainer), are a striking illustration of the working of this im- 

 pulse. 



Even here, of course, while we can detect the play of a spon- 

 taneous impulse, we have to recognize the influence of instruction. 



C 's tutelary deities the fairies were, no doubt, suggested by his 



fairy stories ; even though, as in the myth of the Rainer, we see 

 how his active little mind proceeded to work out the hints given 

 him in quite original shapes. This original adaptation shows 

 itself on a large scale where something like systematic religious 

 instruction is supplied. An intelligent child of four or five will 

 in the laboratory of his mind turn the ideas of God and the devil 

 to strange account. It would be interesting, if we could only get 

 it, to have a collection of all the hideous eerie forms by which 

 the young imagination has endeavored to interpret the notion of 

 the devil. His renderings of the idea of God appear to show 

 less of picturesque diversity, f 



It is to be noted at the outset that for the child's intelligence 

 the ideas introduced by religious instruction at once graft them- 

 selves on to those of fairy lore. Mr. Spencer has somewhere ridi- 

 culed our university type of education with its juxtaposition of 

 classical polytheism and Hebrew monotheism. One might perhaps 



* See Mind, vol. xi, p. 149. 



f According to Prof. Earl Barnes, the Californian children seem to occupy themselves 

 but little with the devil or hell. See his interesting paper, Theological Life of a Califor- 

 nian Child, Pedagogical Seminary, vols, ii, iii, pp. 442 et seq. 



