If the above explanation of the child’s fear of the dark is a sound one Rousseau’s prescription for curing it is not enough. Children may be encouraged to explore dark rooms, and by touching blind-like their various objects rendered familiar with the fact that things remain unchanged even when enveloped in darkness, that the dark is nothing but our temporary inability to see things; and this may no doubt be helpful in checking the fear when calm reflexion becomes possible. But a radical cure must go farther, must aim at checking the activity of morbid imagination—and here what Locke says about the effects of the terrifying stories of nurses is very much to the point—and in extreme cases must set about strengthening shaky nerves. Mothers would do well to remember that even religious instruction when injudiciously presented may add to the terrors of the dark for these wee tremulous organisms. One observation sent me strongly suggests that a child may take a strong dislike to being shut up in the dark with the terrible all-seeing God.
Fears and their Palliatives.
I have probably illustrated the first fears of children at sufficient length. Without trying to exhaust the subject I have, I think, shown that fear of a well-marked and intense kind is a common feature of the first years of life, and that it assumes a Protean variety of shapes.
Much more will no doubt have to be done in the way of methodical observation, and more particularly statistical inquiry into the comparative frequency of the several fears, the age at which they commonly appear, and so forth, before we can build up a theory of the subject. One or two general observations may, however, be hazarded even at this stage.
The thing which strikes one most perhaps in these early fears is how little they have to do with any remembered experience of evil. The child is inexperienced, and if humanely treated knows little of the acuter forms of human suffering. It would seem at least as if he feared not because experience had made him apprehensive of evil, but because he was constitutionally and instinctively nervous, and possessed with a feeling of insecurity. This feeling of weakness and insecurity comes to the surface in presence of what is unknown in so far as this can be brought by the child’s mind into a relation to his welfare—as disturbing noises, and the movements of things, especially when they take on the form of approaches. The same thing is, as we have seen, illustrated in the fear of the dark. A like explanation seems to offer itself for other common forms of fear, especially those excited by others’ threats, as the dread of the policeman, and little George Sand’s horror at the idea of being shut up all night in the ‘crystal prison’ of a lamp. The fact that children’s fears are not the direct product of experience is expressed otherwise by saying that they are the offspring of the imagination. A child is apt to be afraid because he fancies things, and it will probably be demonstrated by statistical evidence that the most imaginative children (other things being equal) are the most subject to fear.
In certain of these characteristics, at least, children’s fears resemble those of animals. In both alike fear is much more an instinctive recoil from the unknown than an apprehension of known evil. The shying of a horse, the apparent fear of dogs at certain noises, probably too the fear of animals at the sight and sound of fire—so graphically described by Mr. Kipling in the case of the jungle beasts—illustrate this. Animals too seem to have a sense of the uncanny, when something apparently uncaused happens, as when Romanes excited fear in a dog by attaching a fine thread to a bone, and by surreptitiously drawing it from the animal, giving to the bone the look of self-movement. The same dog was frightened by soap-bubbles. According to Romanes, dogs are frightened by portraits. It is to be added, however, that in certain of animal fears the influence of heredity is clearly recognisable, whereas in children’s fears I have regarded it as doubtful. The fact that a child is not frightened at fire, which terrifies many animals, seems to illustrate this difference.[[155]]
Another instructive comparison is that of children’s fears with those of savages. Both have a like feeling of insecurity, and fall instinctively in presence of a big unknown into the attitude of dread. In the region of superstitious fear more particularly, we see how in both a gloomy fancy forestalls knowledge, investing the new and unexplored with alarming traits.
Lastly, children’s fears have some resemblance to certain abnormal mental conditions. Idiots, who are so near normal childhood in their degree of intelligence, show a marked fear of strangers. More interesting, however, in the present connexion, is the exaggeration of the childish fear of new objects which shows itself in certain mental aberrations. There is a characteristic dread of newness, neophobia, just as there is a dread of water.[[156]]
While, however, these are the dominant characteristics of children’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 the 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 burnt child dreads the fire,’ is invariably true. It appears, in many cases at least, to take a good amount of real agony to produce a genuine fear in a young child.[[157]] 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 masterfulness is at bottom fear of the unknown. This seems illustrated by the well-known fact that a child will be more terrified during a first experience of pain, especially if there be 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 it were experienced very often, and we 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 the fear. A child that has been seriously burned will unquestionably be frightened at a too close approach of a red-hot poker. But in many cases of this excitation of fear by association it is the primary experience of fear itself which seems to be the real object of the apprehension. Thus a child who has been frightened by a dog will betray signs of fear at the sight of a kennel, of 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 afterwards on coming across a picture of an elephant in a picture-book. In such ways does fear propagate fear in the timid little breast.