The most distant acquaintance with the first years of human life tells us that young children have much in common with the lower animals. Their characteristic passions and impulses are centred in self and the satisfaction of its wants. What is better marked, for example, than the boundless greed of the child, his keen desire to appropriate and enjoy whatever presents itself, and to resent others’ participation in such enjoyment? For some time after birth the child is little more than an incarnation of appetite which knows on restraint, and only yields to the undermining force of satiety.
The child’s entrance into social life through a growing consciousness of the existence of others is marked by much fierce opposition to their wishes. His greed, which at the outset was but the expression of a vigorous nutritive impulse, now takes on more of a contra-moral aspect. The removal of the feeding-bottle before full satisfaction has been attained is, as we know, the occasion for one of the most impressive utterances of the baby’s ‘will to live,’ and of its resentment of all human checks to its native impulses. In this outburst we have the first rude germ of that defiance of control and of authority of which I shall have to say more by-and-by.
In another way, too, the expansion of the infant’s consciousness through the recognition of others widens the terrain of greedy impulse. For ugly envy commonly has its rise in the perception of another child’s consumption of appetite’s dainties.
Here, it is evident, we are still at the level of the animal. A dog is passionately greedy like the child, will fiercely resent any interference with the satisfaction of its appetite, and will be envious of another and more fortunately placed animal.
Much the same concern for self and opposition to others’ having what the child himself desires shows itself in the matter of toys and other possessions of interest. A child is apt not only to make free with another child’s toys, but to show the strongest objection to any imitation of this freedom, often displaying a dog-in-the-manger spirit by refusing to lend what he himself does not want. Not only so, he will be apt to resent another child’s having toys of his own. This envy of other children’s possessions is often wide and profound.
As the social interests come into play so far as to make caresses and other signs of affection sources of pleasure to the child, the field for envy and its ‘green-eyed’ offspring, jealousy, is still more enlarged. As is well known, an infant will greatly resent the mother’s taking another child into her arms.
Here, again, we are at the level of the lower animals. They, too, as our dogs and cats can show us, can be envious not only in the matter of eatables, but in that of human caressings, and even of possessions—witness the behaviour of two dogs when a stick is thrown into the water.
Full illustrations of these traits of the first years of childhood are not needed. We all know them. M. Perez and others have culled a sufficient collection of examples.[[164]]
Out of all this unrestrained pushing of appetite and desire whereby the child comes into rude collision with others’ wants, wishes and purposes, there issue the well-known passionateness, the angry outbursts, and the fierce quarrellings of the child. These fits of angry passion or temper are among the most curious manifestations of childhood, and deserve to be studied with much greater care than they have yet received.
The outburst of rage as the imperious little will feels itself suddenly pulled up has in spite of its comicality something impressive. Hitting out right and left, throwing things down on the floor and breaking them, howling, wild agitated movements of the arms and whole body, these are the outward vents which the gust of childish fury is apt to take. Preyer observed one of these violent explosions in the seventeenth month. The outburst tends to concentrate itself in an attack on the offender, be this even the beloved mamma herself. Darwin’s boy at the age of two years three months became a great adept at throwing books, sticks, etc., at any one who offended him.[[165]] But almost anything will do as an object of attack. A child of four on being crossed would bang his chair, and then proceed to vent his displeasure on his unoffending toy lion, banging him, jumping on him, and, as anti-climax, threatening him with the loss of his dinner. Hitting is in some cases improved upon by biting. The boy C. was for some time vigorously mordant in his angry fits. Another little boy would, under similar circumstances, bite the carpet.