3. He has less self-consciousness, less self-dependence, lives as a part of the world by which he is surrounded—a real practical pantheist.
The child lives in the present, not in the future, nor much even in the past, till the world has been some time with him, and he by degrees shares the common heritage of retrospect and anticipation. This is the great secret of the quiet happiness which strikes almost all visitors to a children's hospital.
No one can have watched the sick bed of the child without remarking the almost unvarying patience with which its illness is borne, and the extremity of peril from which apparently, in consequence of that patience, a complete recovery takes place. Much, indeed, is no doubt due to the activity of the reparative powers in early life, but much also to the unruffled quiet of the mind. No sorrow for the past, no gloomy foreboding of the future, no remorse, disappointment, nor anxiety depresses the spirits and enfeebles the vital powers. The prospect of death, even when its approach is realised—and this is not so rare as some may imagine—brings in general but small alarm. This may be from the vagueness of the child's ideas; it may be, as the poet says, that in his short life's journey, 'the heaven that lies about us in our infancy' has been so much with him, that he recognises more clearly than we can do
'The glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.'
I dwell on this truth, because it is of great practical moment that we should bear in mind to how very large an extent the child lives only in the present; because it follows from it that to keep the sick child happy; to remove from it all avoidable causes of alarm, of suffering, of discomfort; to avoid, as far as may be, any direct struggle with its waywardness; and even if death seems likely to occur, to look at it from a child's point of view—not from that which our larger understanding of good and evil suggests to our minds—are duties of the gravest kind which weigh on the parent and the nurse, no less than on the physician.
But not only does the child live in the present far more than it is possible for the adult, but there are, besides, other important mental differences between the two. Not only is the mind of the child feebler in all respects than that of the adult, but, in proportion to the feebleness of his reasoning power, there is an exaggerated activity of his perceptive faculties, a vividness of his imagination. The child lives at first in the external world, as if it were a part of himself, or he a part of it, and the gladheartedness which it rejoices us to see is as much a result of the vividness with which he realises the things around him, as of that absence of care to which it is often attributed. This peculiarity shows itself in the dreams of childhood, which exceed in the distinctness of their images those which come in later life. It shows itself, too, in the frequency with which, even when awake, the active organs perceive unreal sounds, or in the dark, at night, conjure up ocular spectra; and then not merely colours, but distinct shapes, which pass in long procession before the eyes. This power fades away with advancing life; except under some conditions of disease, the occasional appearance of luminous objects in the dark is the only relic with most of us of the gift of seeing visions with which, at least in some degree, we were endowed in our early years. The child who dreads to be alone, and asserts that he hears sounds, or perceives objects, is not expressing merely a vague apprehension of some unknown danger, but often asserts a literal truth. The sounds have been heard; in the stillness of its nursery the little one has listened to what seemed a voice calling it; or, in the dark, phantasms have risen before its eyes, and the agony of terror with which it calls for a light, or begs for its mother's presence, betrays an impression far too real to be explained away, or to be met by hard words or by unkind treatment.
Impressions such as these are not uncommon in childhood, even during health. Disorder, direct or indirect, of the functions of the brain, more commonly the latter, greatly exaggerates them, and I have known them to outlast for many weeks all other signs of failing health after convalescence from fevers. The unreal sights are far more common than the sounds. The sounds are usually of the simplest kind—as the tinkling of a bell, of which we all remember the exquisite use made by Hans Andersen in one of his nursery tales; or the child's own name, at intervals repeated, just as the little watchful boy heard it in far off Judæa, when it was the prelude to a wondrous communication from the unseen world. It came to him as he woke from sleep, before the morning dawned, while the lamp, lighted overnight, was burning still; and still it is so far the same that these occurrences which suggest to us problems that we cannot attempt to solve, mostly take place at times of transition from the sleeping to the waking state.
The ocular spectra are usually far more vivid and detailed. Those which occur in the waking state are by no means always painful, though their strangeness not infrequently alarms the child, and his horror at the dark arises, not from his seeing nothing, but from his seeing too much.
Some imaginative children amuse themselves with these phantasms, and then, if encouraged to relate them, will constantly transgress the boundary line between truth and falsehood, and weave their little romance. When they happen on waking they are usually preceded by frightful dreams, but the image which the child sees then is not the mere recollection of the dream, but a new, distinct, though painful impression; generally of some animal to which the child points, as now here, now there. These night terrors from the very circumstantial character of the impressions which attend them, often, as I have already said, occasion needless anxiety as to the importance of the cause on which they depend.
Sleep-walking in its smaller degrees of getting out of bed at night, is by no means unusual in childhood; but the greater degrees of somnambulism are certainly rare; and I have always found them dependent on undue mental work; not always, indeed, on the tasks being excessive, but sometimes on the over-anxiety of the child to make progress. I have not yet known a poor person's child a somnambulist.