Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/180

168 This respect for custom is related to the imitative instincts of the child. He does what he sees others do, and so tends to fall in with their manner of life. We all know that these small people take their cue from their elders as to what is allowable. Hence, one difficulty of moral training. A little boy when two years and one month old had happened to see his mother tear a piece of calico. The next day he was discovered to have taken the sheet from the bed and made a rent in it. When scolded, he replied in his childish German, "Mamma mach 'put"—i. e., macht caput (breaks the calico). It is well when the misleading effect of "example" is so little serious as it was in this case.

In addition to this effect of others' doings in making things allowable in the child's eyes, there is the binding influence of a repeated regular manner of proceeding. This is the might of "custom" in the full sense of the term, the force which underlies all a child's conceptions of "right." In spite of the difficulties of moral training, of drilling children into orderly habits—and I do not lose sight of these—it may confidently be said that a child has an inbred respect for what is customary and has the appearance of a rule of life. Nor is this, I believe, altogether a reflection, by imitation, of others' orderly ways and of the system of rules which are imposed on him by others. I am quite ready to admit that the institution of social life, the regular procession of the daily doings of the house, aided by the system of parental discipline, has much to do with fixing the idea of orderliness or regularity in the child's mind. Yet I believe the facts point to something more, to an innate disposition to follow precedent and rule which precedes education, and is one of the forces to which education can appeal. This disposition has its roots in habit, which is apparently a law of all life; but it is more than the blind impulse of habit, since it is reflective and rational and implies a recognition of the universal.

The first crude manifestations of this disposition to make rules to rationalize life by subjecting it to a general method, is seen in those actions which seem little more than the working of habit, the insistence on the customary lines of procedure at meals and such like. A mother writes that her boy, when five years old, was quite a stickler for punctilious order in these matters. His cup and spoon had to be put in precisely the right place; the sequences of the day, as the lesson before the walk, the walk before bed, had to be rigorously observed. Any breach of the customary was apt to be resented as a sort of impiety. This may be an extreme instance, but my observation leads me to say that such punctiliousness is not uncommon. What is more, I have seen it developing itself where the system of parental government was by no means characterized by severe insistence on such minutiæ