Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/185

Rh him with a man's fierce emphasis. This mode of admonition, so far from cowing the child, simply offended his sense of propriety, for he rejoined, "You souldn't souldn't Assum" (i.e., "Arthur," the father's name), "you sould speak nicely."

The lengths to which a child with the impulse of moral correction strong in him will sometimes go are quite appalling. One evening a little girl of six had been repeating the Lord's prayer. When she had finished she looked up and said, "I don't like that prayer, you ought not to ask for bread, and all that greediness, you ought only to ask for goodness!" There is probably in this an imitative reproduction of something the child had had said to herself by her mother or had overheard. Yet allowing for this, one can not but recognize a quite alarming degree of precocious moral priggishness.

We may now turn to what my readers will probably regard as still clearer evidence of a law-fearing instinct in children, viz., their voluntary submission to its commands. We are apt to think of these little ones as doing right only under external compulsion. But although a child of four may be far from attaining to the state of "autonomy of will," or self-legislation spoken of by the philosopher, he may show a germ of such free adoption of law. It is possible that we see the first faint traces of this in a small child's way of giving orders to, rebuking, and praising himself. The little girl M, when twenty months old, would, when left by her mother alone in a room, say to herself, "Tay dar" (stay there). About the same time, after being naughty and squealing "like a railway whistle," she would after each squeal say in a deep voice, "Be dood, Babba" (her name). At the age of twenty-two months she had been in the garden and misbehaving by treading on the box border, so that she had to be carried away by her mother. She had to confess her fault, wanted to go into the garden again, and promised, "Baba will not be naughty adain." When she was out she looked at the box, saying, "If oo (you) do dat I shall have to take oo in, Babba." Here, no doubt, we see quaint mimicries of the external control; but they seem to me to indicate a movement in the direction of self-control.

Very instructive here is the way in which children will voluntarily come and submit themselves to our discipline. The little girl M, when less than two years old, would go to her mother, confess some piece of naughtiness, and suggest the punishment. A little boy aged two years and four months, was deprived of a pencil from Thursday to Sunday for scribbling on the wall paper. His punishment was, however, tempered by permission to draw when taken downstairs. On Saturday he had finished a picture downstairs which pleased him. When his nurse fetched him, she wanted to look at the drawing, but the boy strongly objected.