Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/372

358 that children do not wholly depend for their conceptions of these on religious or other instruction. The liveliness of their imagination, and their impulses of dread and trust, push them on to a spontaneous creation of invisible beings. In C's haunting belief in the wolf, we see a sort of survival of the tendency of the savage to people the unseen world with monsters in the shape of demons. Another little boy of rather more than two years old who had received no religious instruction acquired a similar haunting dread of "cocky," the name he had given to the cocks and hens when in the country. He localized this evil thing in the bathroom of the house, and he attributed pains in the stomach to the malign influence of "cocky." Fear created the gods, according to Lucretius, and in this invention of evil beings bent on injuring him the child of a civilized community probably reproduces the process by which man's thoughts were first troubled by the apprehension of invisible and supernatural agents.

On the other hand, we find that the childish impulse to seek aid leads to a belief in a more benign sort of being. C's stanch belief in his fairies who could do the most wonderful things for him, and more especially his invention of the rain-god (the Rainer), are a striking illustration of the working of this impulse.

Even here, of course, while we can detect the play of a spontaneous impulse, we have to recognize the influence of instruction. C's tutelary deities the fairies were, no doubt, suggested by his fairy stories; even though, as in the myth of the Rainer, we see how his active little mind proceeded to work out the hints given him in quite original shapes. This original adaptation shows itself on a large scale where something like systematic religious instruction is supplied. An intelligent child of four or five will in the laboratory of his mind turn the ideas of God and the devil to strange account. It would be interesting, if we could only get it, to have a collection of all the hideous eerie forms by which the young imagination has endeavored to interpret the notion of the devil. His renderings of the idea of God appear to show less of picturesque diversity.

It is to be noted at the outset that for the child's intelligence the ideas introduced by religious instruction at once graft themselves on to those of fairy lore. Mr. Spencer has somewhere ridiculed our university type of education with its juxtaposition of classical polytheism and Hebrew monotheism. One might perhaps