Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/361

Rh feeling of weakness and insecurity comes to the surface in presence of what is unknown, in so far as this can be brought by the child's mind into a relation to his welfare—as disturbing noises and the movements of things, especially when they take on the form of an approach. The same thing is, as we have seen, illustrated in the fear of the dark. This fact, that children's fears are not the direct product of experience, is expressed otherwise by saying that they are the offspring of the imagination. They are afraid because they fancy things, and it will probably be demonstrated by statistical evidence that the most imaginative children (other things being equal) are the most subject to fear.

In certain of these characteristics, at least, children's fears resemble those of animals. In both alike fear is much more an instinctive recoil from the unknown than an apprehension of known evil. The shying of a horse, the apparent fear of dogs at certain noises, probably, too, the fear of animals at the sight and sound of fire—so graphically described by Mr. Kipling in the case of the jungle beasts—illustrate this. Animals, too, seem to have a sense of the uncanny when something apparently uncaused happens, as when Romanes excited fear in a dog by attaching a fine thread to a bone which he was accustomed to drag about with him and, by surreptitiously drawing it from him, giving to the bone the look of self-movement. The same dog was frightened by soap bubbles. According to Romanes, dogs are frightened by portraits. It is to be added, however, that in animal fears the influence of heredity is clearly recognizable, whereas in children's fears I have regarded it as doubtful.

Another instructive comparison is that of children's fears with those of savages. Both have a like feeling of insecurity and fall instinctively in presence of a big unknown—e.g., at the first sight of the sea—into the attitude of dread. In the region of superstitious fear more particularly we see how in both a gloomy fancy forestalls knowledge, investing the new or unexplored with alarming traits.

Lastly, children's fears have some resemblance to certain abnormal mental conditions. Idiots, who are so near normal childhood in their degree of intelligence, show a marked fear of strangers. More interesting, however, in the present connection is the exaggeration of the childish fear of new objects which shows itself in certain mental aberrations. There is a characteristic dread of newness, "neophobia," just as there is a dread of water.

While, however, these are the dominant characteristics of