Studies of childhood

by James Sully

Primitive Egoism.

Perhaps there has been more hasty theorising about the child’s moral characteristics than about any other of his attributes. The very fact that diametrically opposed views have been put forward is suggestive of this haste. By certain theologians and others infancy has been painted in the blackest of moral colours. According to M. Compayré it is a bachelor, La Bruyère, and a bishop, Dupanloup, who have said the worst things of children; and the parent or teacher who wants to see how bad this worst is may consult M. Compayré’s account.[^[163]] On the other hand, Rousseau and those who think with him have invested the child with an untarnished purity. According to Rousseau the child comes from the Creator’s hand a perfect bit of workmanship, which blundering man at once begins to mar. Children’s freedom from human vices has been a common theme of the poet: their innocence was likened by M. About to the spotless snow of the Jungfrau. Others, as Wordsworth, have gone farther and attributed to the infant positive excellences, glimpses of a higher morality than ours, Divine intuitions brought from a prenatal existence.

Such opposite views of the moral status and worth of a child must be the result of prepossession, and the magnifying of the accidents of individual experience. A theologian who is concerned to maintain the doctrine of natural depravity, or a bachelor who happens to have known children chiefly in the character of little tormentors, may be expected to paint childhood with black pigments. On the other hand the poet, attracted by the charm of infancy, may, as we have seen, easily be led to idealise its moral aspects.

The first thing that strikes one in all such attempts to fix the moral worth of the child is that they are judging of things by wrong standards. The infant, though it has a nature capable of becoming moral or immoral, is not as yet a moral being; and there is a certain impertinence in trying to force it under our categories of good and bad, pure and corrupt.

If then we would know what the child’s ‘moral’ nature is like we must be careful to distinguish. By ‘moral’ we must understand that part of his nature, feelings and impulses, which has for us a moral significance; whether as furnishing raw material out of which education may develop virtuous dispositions, or contrariwise, as constituting forces adverse to this development. It may be well to call the former tendencies favourable to virtue, pro-moral, those unfavourable, contra-moral. Our inquiry, then, must be: In what respects, and to what extent, does the child show himself by nature, apart from all that is meant by education, pro-moral or contra-moral, that is, well or ill fitted to become a member of a good or virtuous community and to exercise what we know as moral functions?

Our especial object here will be if possible to get at natural dispositions, to examine the child in his primitive nakedness, looking out for those instinctive tendencies which according to modern science are only a little less clearly marked in the young of our own species than in a puppy or a chick.

Now there is clearly a difficulty here. How, it may be asked, can we expect to find in a child any traits having a moral significance which have not been developed by social influences and education? In the case of pro-moral dispositions more particularly, as kindness, or truthfulness, we cannot expect to get rid of the effect of the combined personal influence and instruction of the mother, which is of the essence of all moral training. Even with regard to contra-moral traits, as rudeness, or lying, it is evident that example is frequently a co-operating influence.

The difficulty is no doubt a real one, and cannot be wholly got rid of. We cannot completely eliminate the influence of the common life in which the good and bad disposition alike may be said to grow up. Yet we may distinguish. Thus we may look out for the earliest spontaneous and what we may call original manifestations of such dispositions as affection and truthfulness, so as to eliminate the direct action of instruction and example, and thus to reduce the influence of the social medium on the child to a minimum. Similarly in the case of brutal and other unlovely propensities, we may by taking pains get rid of the influence of bad example.

Let us see, then, how far the indictment of the child is a just one. Do children tend spontaneously to manifest the germs of vicious dispositions, and if so, to what extent? Here, as I have suggested, we must be particularly careful not to read wrong interpretations into what we see. It will not do, for example, to say that children are born thieves because they show themselves at first serenely indifferent to the distinction of meum and tuum, and are inclined to help themselves to other children’s toys, and so forth. To repeat, what we have to inquire is whether children by their instinctive inclinations are contra-moral, that is, predisposed to what, if persevered in with reflexion, we call immorality or vice.

Here we cannot do better than touch on that group of feelings and dispositions which can be best marked off as anti-social since they tend to the injury of others, such as anger, envy, and cruelty.