Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/42

 animal uneasiness, its PLEASURES are expanded, and compounded, and enhanced, incalculably beyond the simple organic gratification. While therefore its pains are as one or as two, its pleasures are as ten, or as a hundred. A child, as compared with an infant, has learned to extend his sufferings a little beyond the limit of animal sensation; but then, in a still larger proportion, he extends his pleasures beyond that boundary; the balance therefore is much on the side of happiness.

Let any one, familiar with children, analyze a child's tranquil felicity while amusing itself, for an hour or more, with nothing better than a crooked stick, or a handful of pebbles. What can be the bare gratification of the sense of touch, or of the muscular power, or of the sight, which such objects can convey? it must be reckoned as extremely small; nor is it possible to watch the movements and countenance of an infant of fifteen months, or two years, whilst so engaged, and fall into the great error of supposing that its delights are chiefly animal. It is the MIND, it is the rich, and grasping, and excursive human mind (such even in infancy) that is at work on the poor materials of its felicity. This crooked stick, or these pebbles are symbols of many things we adults do not dream of in such a connexion: and they suggest conceptions of things dimly recollected, and now absent, which people the fancy in crowds, and lead it on, until the soul is lost in the chace. In a following chapter I shall have occasion to revert to this curious and important class of facts, and shall there adduce instances in illustration of what is now affirmed.

This happy characteristic of infancy, namely, the disproportionate mental enlargement of pleasures as compared with pains, attaches also to childhood, in a modified form, and it is observable until the period when the ripened powers of reflection, and a more ample knowledge of the conditions of human life, induce a new order of