Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/671

Rh cry, though she had imagined beforehand that she would. Even in this case, then, where so much feeling was called forth, commiseration for the dead companion seemed to have been almost wholly wanting.

No one, I think, will doubt that, judged by our standards, children are often profoundly and shockingly callous. But the question arises here, too, whether we are right in applying our grown-up standards. It is one thing to be indifferent with full knowledge of suffering, another to be indifferent in the sense in which a cat might be said to be indifferent at the spectacle of your falling or burning your finger. We are apt to assume that children know our sufferings instinctively, or at least that they can always enter into them when they are openly expressed. But this assumption is highly unreasonable. A large part of the manifestation of human suffering is unintelligible to a little child. He is not oppressed by our anxieties, our griefs, because these are to a large extent beyond his sympathetic comprehension.

We must remember, too, that there are moods and attitudes of mind favorable and unfavorable to sympathy. None of us are uniformly and consistently compassionate. It is wonderful how insensible really kind-hearted people can show themselves on occasion, as, for example, toward the afflictions of those whose previous good fortune they have envied. Children are the subject of moods which are exclusive of sympathy. They are impelled by their superabundant nervous energy to wild, romping activity; they are passionately absorbed in their play; they are intensely curious about the many new things they see and hear of. These dominant impulses issue in mental attitudes which are indifferent to the spectacle of others' troubles.

Again, where an appeal to serious attention is given, a child is apt to see something besides the sadness. The little girl already spoken of saw the prettiness of the death-room rather than its mournfulness. A teacher once told her class of the death of a classmate. There was, of course, a strange stillness, which one little girl presently broke with a loud laugh. The child is said to have been by no means unemotional, the laugh not a "nervous" one. The odd situation—the sudden hush of a class—had affected childish risibilities more than the distressing announcement.

One other remark by way of saving clause here. It is by no means true that children are always unaffected by the sad and sorrowful things in life. The first acquaintance with death, as we know from a number of published reminiscences, has sometimes shaken a child's whole being with an infinite nameless sense of woe. But of this more, presently, after we have heard the rest of the indictment.

Children, says the misopædistchild hater [sic], are not only unfeeling when