Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/360

348 that we still need to learn from children themselves, by talking to them and inviting their confidence when the fear of the dark is first noticed, how they are apt to envisage it.

When imagination becomes abnormally active, and the child is haunted by alarming images, these, by recurring with greatest force in the stillness and darkness of the night, will add to the terrifying associations of darkness. This is illustrated in the case of the boy Stevens, who was haunted by the specter of "Cocky" at night. Dreams, especially the horrible nightmare to which nervous children are subject, may invest the dark with a new terror. A child suddenly waking up, and with open eyes seeing the phantom-object of its dream against the dark background, may be forgiven for acquiring a dread of dark rooms. Possibly this experience gives the clew to the observation already quoted of a boy who did not want to sleep in a particular room because there were so many dreams in it.

If the above explanation of the child's fear of the dark is correct, Rousseau's prescription for curing it is not enough. Children may be encouraged to explore dark rooms and, by touching blindlike the various objects, rendered familiar with the fact that things remain unchanged even when enveloped in darkness—that the dark is nothing but our temporary inability to see things; and this may, no doubt, be helpful in checking the fear when reflection is possible. But a radical cure must go further, must aim at checking the activity of morbid imagination and here what Locke says about effects of the terrifying stories of nurses is very much to the point—and in extreme cases must set about strengthening shaky nerves.

I have probably illustrated children's fears at sufficient length. Without trying to exhaust the subject I have, I think, shown that fear of a well-marked and intense kind is a common feature of the first years of life, and that it assumes a Protean variety of shapes.

Much more will, no doubt, have to be done in the way of methodical observation, and more particularly statistical inquiry into the comparative frequency of the several fears, the age at which they commonly appear, and so forth, before we can build up a theory of the subject. One or two general observations may, however, be hazarded even at this stage.

The thing which strikes one most, perhaps, in these early fears is how little they have to do with any remembered experience of evil. The child is inexperienced and, if humanely treated, knows little of the acute forms of human suffering. It would seem at least as if he feared, not because experience has made him apprehensive of evil, but because he is constitutionally and instinctively nervous, and possessed with a feeling of insecurity. This