Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/362

350 fears, they are not the only ones. Experience begins to direct the instinctive fear impulse from the very beginning. How much it does in the first months of life it is difficult to say. In the aversion of a baby to its medicine glass or its cold bath one sees perhaps more of the rude germ of passion or anger than of fear. Careful observations seem to me to be required on this point, at what definite date signs of fear arising from experience of pain begin to show themselves in the child. Some children at least have a surprising way of not minding even considerable amounts of physical pain—the misery of a fall, a blow, a cut, and so forth, being speedily forgotten. It seems doubtful, indeed, whether the venerable saw, "The burned child dreads the fire," is invariably true. In many cases apparently a good amount of real agony is necessary to produce a genuine fear in a young child. This tendency to belittle pain is not unknown, I suspect, to the tutor of small boys. It may well be that a definite and precise recalling of the misery of a scratch or even of a moderate burn may not conduce to the development of a true fear, and that here, too, fear, when it arises in all its characteristic masterfulness, is at bottom fear of the unknown. This seems illustrated by the well-known fact that a child will often be more terrified by a first experience of pain, especially if there is a visible hurt and bleeding, than by any subsequent prospect of a renewal of the catastrophe. Is not the same thing true, indeed, of older fears? Should we dread the wrench of a tooth extraction if we experienced it often enough and had a sufficiently photographic imagination to be able to estimate precisely the intensity and duration of the pain?

Much the same thing shows itself in the cases where fear can be clearly traced to experience and association. In some of these it is, no doubt, remembered experience of suffering which causes fear. A child that has been seriously burned will dread a too close approach to a red-hot poker. But in many cases of this excitation of fear by association it is the primary experience of fear itself which is at the bottom of the apprehension. Thus a child who has been frightened by a dog will betray signs of fear at the sight of a kennel, at a picture of a dog, and so forth. The little boy referred to above, who was afraid of the toy elephant that shook its head, showed signs of fear a fortnight afterward on coming across a picture of an elephant in a picture book. In such ways does fear propagate fear in the timid little breast.