Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/666

650 got rid of. We can not completely eliminate the influence of the common life in which the good and bad disposition alike may be said to grow up. Yet we may distinguish. Thus we may look out for the earliest spontaneous, and what we may call original, manifestations of such dispositions as affection and truthfulness, so as to eliminate the direct action of instruction and example, and thus reduce the influence of the social medium on the child to a minimum. Similarly, in the case of brutal and other unlovely propensities, we may, by taking pains, get rid of the influence of bad example.

Let us see, then, how far the indictment of the child is a just one. Do children tend spontaneously to manifest the germs of vicious dispositions, and, if so, to what extent? Here, as I have suggested, we must be particularly careful not to read wrong interpretations into what we see. It will not do, for example, to say that children are born thieves because they show themselves at first charmingly indifferent to the distinction of meum and tuum, and are inclined to help themselves to other children's toys, and so forth. To repeat, what we have to inquire is whether children by their instinctive inclinations are contra-moral—that is, predisposed to what, if persevered in with reflection, we call immorality or vice.

Here we can not do better than touch on that group of feelings and dispositions which can be best marked off as antisocial, since they tend to the injury of others, such as anger, envy, and cruelty.

The most distant acquaintance with the first years of human life tells us that young children have much in common with the lower animals. Their characteristic passions and impulses are centered in self and the satisfaction of its wants. What is better marked, for example, than the boundless greed of the child, his keen desire to appropriate and enjoy whatever presents itself, and to resent others' participation in such enjoyment? For some time after its birth the child is little more than an incarnation of appetite which knows no restraint, and only yields to the undermining force of satiety.

The child's entrance into social life through a growing consciousness of the existence of others is marked by much fierce opposition to their wishes. His greed, which at the outset was but the expression of a vigorous nutritive instinct, now takes on more of a contra-moral aspect. The removal of the bottle by another before full satisfaction has been attained is, as we know, the occasion for one of the most impressive utterances of the baby's "will to live," and of its resentment of all human checks to its native impulses. In this outburst we have the first rude germ of that defiance of control and of authority of which I shall have to say more by and by