Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/359

Rh a big black something on suddenly waking and opening the eyes in a very dark room.

But there is still something else to be noticed in this sensation of darkness. The black field is not uniform, some parts of it showing less black than others, and the indistinct and rude pattern of comparatively light and dark changing from moment to moment, while now and again more definite spots of brightness may form themselves. The varying activity of the retina would seem to account for this apparent changing of the dark scene. What, my reader may not unnaturally ask, has this to do with a child's fear of the dark? If he will recall what was said about the facility with which a child comes to see faces and animal forms in the lines of a cracked ceiling or the veining of a piece of marble, he will, I think, recognize the drift of my remarks. These slight and momentary differences of blackness, these fleeting rudiments of a pattern, may serve as a sensuous base for the projected images: the child's excited fancy sees in these faint differentiations of the black, formless waste definite forms. These will naturally be the forms with which he is most familiar, and since his fancy is tinged with melancholy they will, of course, be gloomy and disturbing forms. Hence we may expect to hear of children seeing the forms of terrifying living things in the dark. Here is an instructive case. A boy of four years had for some time been afraid of the dark, and indulged by having the candle left burning at night. On hearing that the London Crystal Palace had been burned down he asked for the first time to have the light taken away, fear of the dark being now cast out by the bigger fear of fire. Some time after this he volunteered an account of his obsolete terrors to his father. "Do you know," he said, "what I thought dark was? A great, large, live thing, the color of black, with a mouth and eyes." Here we have the "reifying" of darkness, and we probably see the influence of the comparatively bright spots in the attribution of eyes to the monster, an influence still more apparent in the instance quoted above, where a child saw the eyes of lions and tigers glaring as they walked round the room. Another suggestive instance here is that given by M. Compayré, in which a child, on being asked why he did not like to be in a dark place, answered, "I don't like chimney-sweeps." Here the blackness with its dim suggestions of brighter spots determined the image of the black chimney-sweep with his white flashes of mouth and eyes. . I should like to observe here