Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/179

Rh loving and happy one, the situation becomes exceedingly painful. The pride and obstinacy notwithstanding, the culprit feels that he is cut off from more than one half of his life, that his beautiful world is laid in ruins. The same little boy who said, "I'd be a worser mother," when four years and nine months old remarked to his mother that if he could say what he liked to God 'twould be, "Love me when I'm naughty." I think one can hardly conceive of a more eloquent testimony to the suffering of the child in the lonesome, loveless state of punishment.

Is there any analogue of our sense of remorse in this early suffering? The question of an instinctive moral sense in children is a perplexing one, and I do not propose to discuss it now. I would only venture to suggest that in these poignant griefs of child-life there seem to be signs of a consciousness of violated instincts. This is, no doubt, in part the smarting of a loving heart on remembering its unloving action. But there may be more than this. A child of four or five is, I conceive, quite capable of reflecting at such a time that in his fit of naughtiness he has broken with his normal orderly self, that he has set at defiance that which he customarily honors and obeys.

What, it may be asked, are these instincts? In their earliest discernible form they seem to me to be respect for rule, for a regular manner of proceeding as opposed to an irregular. A child, so I understand the little sphinx, is at once the subject of ever-changing caprices—whence the delight in playful defiance of all rule and order—and the reverer of custom, precedent, rule. And, as I conceive, this reverence for precedent and rule is the deeper and stronger, holding full sway in his serious moments.

If this view is correct, the suffering of naughty children is not, as has been said by some, wholly the result of the externals of discipline, punishment, and the loss of the agreeable things which follow good behavior, though this is commonly an element; nor is it merely the sense of loneliness and lovelessness though that is probably a large slice of it; but it contains the germ of something nearer a true remorse, viz., a sense of normal feelings and dispositions set at naught and contradicted.

And now we may ask what evidence there is for the existence of this respect for order and regularity other than that afforded by the childish protests against apparent inconsistencies in the administration of discipline.

Mr. Walter Bagehot tells us that the great initial difficulty in the formation of communities was the fixing of custom. However this be in the case of primitive communities, it seems to me indisputable that in the case of a child brought up in normal surroundings there is a clearly observable instinct to fall in with a common mode of behavior.