Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/674

658 first years. That later on cruelty becomes possible, that the school bully may find his satisfaction in tormenting the "little kids" this is but too certain. Yet even schoolboys with clearest example to guide them are by no means always bullies.

We have now looked at one of the dark sides of the child and have found that, though it is unpleasant, it is not so hideous as it has been painted. Children are, no doubt, apt to be passionate, ferocious in their anger, and sadly wanting in consideration for others; yet it is consolatory to reflect that their savageness is not quite that of brutes, and that their selfishness and cruelty are a long way removed from a deliberate and calculating egoism.

It now remains to point out that there is another and counterbalancing side. If a child has his outbursts of temper he has also his fits of tenderness. If he is now dead to others' sufferings, he is at another time taken with a most amiable, childish concern for their happiness. In order to be just to the child we must recognize both sides.

It must not be forgotten here that children are instinctively attachable and sociable, in so far as they show in the first weeks that they get used to and dependent on the human presence, and are miserable when this is taken from them. The stopping of a child's crying at night on hearing the familiar voice of its mother or nurse shows this.

In this instinct of companionship there is involved a vague inarticulate sympathy. Just as the attached dog may be said to have in a vague way a feeling of oneness with its master, so the child. The intenser realization of this oneness comes in the case of the dog and of the child alike after separation. The wild, caressing leaps of the quadruped are matched by the warm embracings of the little biped. Only that here, too, we see in the child traces of a deeper human consciousness. A girl of thirteen months was separated from her mother for six weeks. On the mother's return she was speechless, and for some time could not bear to leave her mother for a minute.

This sense of joining on one's existence to another's is not full imaginative sympathy—that is, a warm realizing representation of another's feelings—but it is a kind of sympathy, after all, and may grow into something better. This we may see in the return of the childish heart to its resting place after the estrangement introduced by "naughtiness." The relenting after passion, the reconciliation after punishment, are these not the experiences which help to raise the dumb-animal sympathy of the first months into a true human sense of fellowship? But this part of the development of sympathy belongs to another chapter.

Sympathy, it has been said, is a kind of imitation, and this is strikingly illustrated in its early forms. A dog will howl