As the moral consciousness develops and new problems arise, new openings for such suggestive guidance will offer themselves. How valuable, for example, is the mother’s encouragement of the weakly child, shrinking from a difficult self-repressive action, when she says with inspiring voice: ‘You can do it if you try’. Thus pilot-like she conducts the little navigator out into the open main of duty where he will have to steer himself.
I have tried to show that the moral training of children is not beyond human powers. It has its strong supports in child-nature, and these, when there are wisdom and method on the ruler’s side, will secure success. I have not said that the trainer’s task is easy. So far from thinking this, I hold that a mother who bravely faces the problem, neither abandoning the wayward will to its own devices, nor, hardly less weakly, handing over the task of disciplining it to a paid substitute, and who by well-considered and steadfast effort succeeds in approaching the perfection I have hinted at, combining the wise ruler with the tender and companionable parent, is among the few members of our species who are entitled to its reverence.
[192]. My correspondent, discreetly perhaps, does not explain why the uncle was selected as fellow-outcast.
[193]. Cf. the excuse given by a little girl of three when her grandmother called her, “I can’t come, I am suckling baby” (the doll). P. Lombroso, op. cit., p. 126.
[194]. Emile, livre v., quoted by Perez, L’Art et la Poésie chez l’Enfant, p. 127. Rousseau uses this story in order to show that girls are more artful than boys.
[195]. On the nature of this contrary suggestion see Mark Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and the Race, p. 145 f.
[196]. The bearings of (hypnotic) suggestion on moral education have been discussed by Guyau, Education and Heredity (Engl. transl.), chap. i. Compare also Preyer, op. cit., p. 267 f., and Compayré, op. cit., p. 262.
IX.
THE CHILD AS ARTIST.
One of the most interesting, perhaps also one of the most instructive, phases of child-life is the beginnings of art-activity. This has been recognised by one of the best-known workers in the field of child-psychology, M. Bernard Perez, who has treated the subject in an interesting monograph.[[197]] This department of our subject will, like that of language, be found to have interesting points of contact with the phenomena of primitive race-culture.