Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/665

Rh than ours, divine intuitions brought from a loftier prenatal existence.

Such opposite views of the moral status and worth of a child must spring not out of careful observation, but out of prepossession, and the magnifying of the accidents of individual experience. A theologian who is concerned to maintain the doctrine of natural depravity, or a bachelor who happens to have known children chiefly in the character of little tormentors, may be expected to paint childhood with black pigments. On the other hand, the poet attracted by the charm of infancy may easily be led to idealize its moral aspects.

The first thing that strikes one in all such attempts to fix the moral worth of the child is that they are judging of things by wrong standards. The infant, though it has a nature capable of becoming moral or immoral, is not as yet a moral being; and there is a certain impertinence in trying to force it under our categories of good and bad, pure and corrupt.

If, then, we would know what the child's "moral" nature is like, we must be careful to distinguish. By "moral" we must understand that part of its nature, feelings, and impulses which have for us a moral significance; whether as furnishing raw material out of which education may develop virtuous dispositions, or, contrariwise, as constituting forces adverse to this development. It may be well to call the former tendencies favorable to virtue, pro-moral, the latter unfavorable tendencies, contra-moral. Our inquiry, then, must be: In what respects and to what extent does the child show itself by nature apart from all that is meant by education, pro-moral or contra-moral—that is, well or ill fitted to become a member of a good or virtuous community, and to exercise what we know as moral functions?

Our especial object here will be, if possible, to get at natural dispositions, to examine the child in his primitive nakedness, looking out for those instinctive tendencies which, according to modern science, are hardly less clearly marked in a child than in a puppy or a chick.

Now, there is clearly a difficulty here. How, it may be asked, can we expect to find in a child any traits having a moral significance which have not been developed by social influences and education? In the case of pro-moral dispositions more particularly, as kindness or truthfuluess, we can not expect to get rid of that molding effect of the combined personal influence and instruction of the mother which is of the essence of all moral training. And even with regard to contra-moral traits, as rudeness or lying, it is evident that example is frequently a co-operating influence.

The difficulty is, no doubt, a real one, and can not be wholly