APPENDIX
ON THE MENTAL AND MORAL FACULTIES IN CHILDHOOD, AND ON THE DISORDERS TO WHICH THEY ARE LIABLE.
Any remarks on the ailments of children would be incomplete if no notice were taken of the mental and moral peculiarities of early life.
For want of giving heed to them, not only are grave mistakes made in the education of children, but in the management of their ailments, both by doctors and by parents: much needless trouble is given to the doctors, much needless distress to the child, much needless anxiety to the parents.
The common mistake committed by those parents who do not make their child an idol to fall down and worship, and thus turn him, to his own misery and theirs, into the most arbitrary of domestic tyrants, is to treat him as though he were in mind, as well as in body, a miniature man; feebler in intellect as he is inferior in strength, but differing in degree only, not in kind.
Now the child differs essentially from the adult in the three respects; that
1. He lives in the present, not in the future.
2. His perceptions are more vivid, and his sensibilities more acute; while the world, on which he has just entered, surrounds him with daily novelties.