Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/358

346 peculiarly keen sense of strangeness and of loneliness, of banishment from all that it knows and loves. The reminiscences of this feeling, described in later life—as that of Mr. James Payn, in his recently published volume, Gleams of Memory—show that it is the sense of loneliness which oppresses the child in its dark room.

This, I take it, would be quite enough to make the situation of confinement in a dark room disagreeable and depressing to a wakeful child even when in bed and there is no restriction of bodily activity. But this sense of banishment through the blotting out of the familiar scene would not, I take it, amount to a full, passionate dread of darkness. It seems to me to be highly probable that a baby of two or three months might feel something of this vague depression and even this craving for the wonted scene, especially just after the removal of a light; yet such a baby, as we have seen, gives no clear indications of fear.

Fear of the dark arises from the development of the child's imagination, and might, I believe, arise without any suggestion from nurse or other children of the notion that there are bogies in the dark. Darkness is precisely the situation most favorable to vivid imagination; the screening of the visible world makes the inner world of fancy bright by contrast. Are we not all apt to shut our eyes when we try to "visualize" or picture things very distinctly? This fact of a preternatural activity of imagination, taken with the circumstance emphasized by Rousseau that in the darkness the child is no longer distinctly aware of the objects that are actually before him, would help us to understand why children are so much given to projecting into the unseen, dark spaces the creatures of the imagination. Not only so—and this Rousseau does not appear to have recognized—the dull feeling of depression which accompanies the sensation of darkness might suffice to give a gloomy and weird turn to the images so projected.

But I am disposed to think that there is yet another element in this childish fear. I have said that darkness gives a positive sensation: we see it; and the sensation, apart from any difference of signification which we afterward learn to give to it, is of the same kind that is obtained by looking at a dull, black surface. To the child the difference between a black object and dark, unillumined space is as yet not clear, and I believe it will be found that children tend to materialize, or, to use a rather technical word, "reify"—that is, make a thing of darkness. When, for example, a correspondent tells me that darkness was envisaged by her when a child as a crushing power, I think I see traces of this childish feeling. I seem able to recall my own childish sense of