VII — Raw Material of Morality
Primitive Egoism
Perhaps there has been more hasty theorising about the child’s moral characteristics than about any other of his attributes. The very fact that diametrically opposed views have been put forward is suggestive of this haste. By certain theologians and others infancy has been painted in the blackest of moral colours. According to M. Compayré it is a bachelor, La Bruyère, and a bishop, Dupanloup, who have said the worst things of children; and the parent or teacher who wants to see how bad this worst is may consult M. Compayré’s account.163 On the other hand, Rousseau and those who think with him have invested the child with an untarnished purity. According to Rousseau the child comes from the Creator’s hand a perfect bit of workmanship, which blundering man at once begins to mar. Children’s freedom from human vices has been a common theme of the poet: their innocence was likened by M. About to the spotless snow of the Jungfrau. Others, as Wordsworth, have gone farther and attributed to the infant positive excellences, glimpses of a higher morality than ours, Divine intuitions brought from a prenatal existence.
Such opposite views of the moral status and worth of a child must be the result of prepossession, and the magnifying of the accidents of individual experience. A theologian who is concerned to maintain the doctrine of natural depravity, or a bachelor who happens to have known children chiefly in the character of little tormentors, may be expected to paint childhood with black pigments. On the other hand the poet, attracted by the charm of infancy, may, as we have seen, easily be led to idealise its moral aspects.
The first thing that strikes one in all such attempts to fix the moral worth of the child is that they are judging of things by wrong standards. The infant, though it has a nature capable of becoming moral or immoral, is not as yet a moral being; and there is a certain impertinence in trying to force it under our categories of good and bad, pure and corrupt.
If then we would know what the child’s ‘moral’ nature is like we must be careful to distinguish. By ‘moral’ we must understand that part of his nature, feelings and impulses, which has for us a moral significance; whether as furnishing raw material out of which education may develop virtuous dispositions, or contrariwise, as constituting forces adverse to this development. It may be well to call the former tendencies favourable to virtue, pro-moral, those unfavourable, contra-moral. Our inquiry, then, must be: In what respects, and to what extent, does the child show himself by nature, apart from all that is meant by education, pro-moral or contra-moral, that is, well or ill fitted to become a member of a good or virtuous community and to exercise what we know as moral functions?
Our especial object here will be if possible to get at natural dispositions, to examine the child in his primitive nakedness, looking out for those instinctive tendencies which according to modern science are only a little less clearly marked in the young of our own species than in a puppy or a chick.
Now there is clearly a difficulty here. How, it may be asked, can we expect to find in a child any traits having a moral significance which have not been developed by social influences and education? In the case of pro-moral dispositions more particularly, as kindness, or truthfulness, we cannot expect to get rid of the effect of the combined personal influence and instruction of the mother, which is of the essence of all moral training. Even with regard to contra-moral traits, as rudeness, or lying, it is evident that example is frequently a co-operating influence.
The difficulty is no doubt a real one, and cannot be wholly got rid of. We cannot completely eliminate the influence of the common life in which the good and bad disposition alike may be said to grow up. Yet we may distinguish. Thus we may look out for the earliest spontaneous and what we may call original manifestations of such dispositions as affection and truthfulness, so as to eliminate the direct action of instruction and example, and thus to reduce the influence of the social medium on the child to a minimum. Similarly in the case of brutal and other unlovely propensities, we may by taking pains get rid of the influence of bad example.
Let us see, then, how far the indictment of the child is a just one. Do children tend spontaneously to manifest the germs of vicious dispositions, and if so, to what extent? Here, as I have suggested, we must be particularly careful not to read wrong interpretations into what we see. It will not do, for example, to say that children are born thieves because they show themselves at first serenely indifferent to the distinction of meum and tuum, and are inclined to help themselves to other children’s toys, and so forth. To repeat, what we have to inquire is whether children by their instinctive inclinations are contra-moral, that is, predisposed to what, if persevered in with reflexion, we call immorality or vice.
Here we cannot do better than touch on that group of feelings and dispositions which can be best marked off as anti-social since they tend to the injury of others, such as anger, envy, and cruelty.
The most distant acquaintance with the first years of human life tells us that young children have much in common with the lower animals. Their characteristic passions and impulses are centred in self and the satisfaction of its wants. What is better marked, for example, than the boundless greed of the child, his keen desire to appropriate and enjoy whatever presents itself, and to resent others’ participation in such enjoyment? For some time after birth the child is little more than an incarnation of appetite which knows on restraint, and only yields to the undermining force of satiety.
The child’s entrance into social life through a growing consciousness of the existence of others is marked by much fierce opposition to their wishes. His greed, which at the outset was but the expression of a vigorous nutritive impulse, now takes on more of a contra-moral aspect. The removal of the feeding-bottle before full satisfaction has been attained is, as we know, the occasion for one of the most impressive utterances of the baby’s ‘will to live,’ and of its resentment of all human checks to its native impulses. In this outburst we have the first rude germ of that defiance of control and of authority of which I shall have to say more by-and-by.
In another way, too, the expansion of the infant’s consciousness through the recognition of others widens the terrain of greedy impulse. For ugly envy commonly has its rise in the perception of another child’s consumption of appetite’s dainties.
Here, it is evident, we are still at the level of the animal. A dog is passionately greedy like the child, will fiercely resent any interference with the satisfaction of its appetite, and will be envious of another and more fortunately placed animal.
Much the same concern for self and opposition to others’ having what the child himself desires shows itself in the matter of toys and other possessions of interest. A child is apt not only to make free with another child’s toys, but to show the strongest objection to any imitation of this freedom, often displaying a dog-in-the-manger spirit by refusing to lend what he himself does not want. Not only so, he will be apt to resent another child’s having toys of his own. This envy of other children’s possessions is often wide and profound.
As the social interests come into play so far as to make caresses and other signs of affection sources of pleasure to the child, the field for envy and its ‘green-eyed’ offspring, jealousy, is still more enlarged. As is well known, an infant will greatly resent the mother’s taking another child into her arms.
Here, again, we are at the level of the lower animals. They, too, as our dogs and cats can show us, can be envious not only in the matter of eatables, but in that of human caressings, and even of possessions—witness the behaviour of two dogs when a stick is thrown into the water.
Full illustrations of these traits of the first years of childhood are not needed. We all know them. M. Perez and others have culled a sufficient collection of examples.164
Out of all this unrestrained pushing of appetite and desire whereby the child comes into rude collision with others’ wants, wishes and purposes, there issue the well-known passionateness, the angry outbursts, and the fierce quarrellings of the child. These fits of angry passion or temper are among the most curious manifestations of childhood, and deserve to be studied with much greater care than they have yet received.
The outburst of rage as the imperious little will feels itself suddenly pulled up has in spite of its comicality something impressive. Hitting out right and left, throwing things down on the floor and breaking them, howling, wild agitated movements of the arms and whole body, these are the outward vents which the gust of childish fury is apt to take. Preyer observed one of these violent explosions in the seventeenth month. The outburst tends to concentrate itself in an attack on the offender, be this even the beloved mamma herself. Darwin’s boy at the age of two years three months became a great adept at throwing books, sticks, etc., at any one who offended him.165 But almost anything will do as an object of attack. A child of four on being crossed would bang his chair, and then proceed to vent his displeasure on his unoffending toy lion, banging him, jumping on him, and, as anti-climax, threatening him with the loss of his dinner. Hitting is in some cases improved upon by biting. The boy C. was for some time vigorously mordant in his angry fits. Another little boy would, under similar circumstances, bite the carpet.
Here we have expressive movements which are plainly brutal, which assimilate the aspect of an angry child to that of an infuriated animal. The whole outward attitude is one of fierce reckless assault. The insane, we are told, manifest a like wildness of attack in fits of anger, smashing windows, etc., and striking anybody who happens to be at hand.
Yet these are not all the manifestations. Childish anger has its wretched aspect. There is keen suffering in these early experiences of thwarted will and purpose. A little boy, rather more than a year old, used when crossed to throw himself on the floor and bang the back of his head; and his brother, when fourteen months old, would similarly throw himself on the floor, bang the back of his head, biting the carpet as before mentioned. This act of throwing oneself on the floor, which is common about this age and is apparently quite instinctive, is the expression of the utter dejection of misery. C.’s attitude when crossed, gathered into a heap on the floor, was eloquent of this infantile despair. Such suffering is the immediate outcome of thwarted purpose, and must be distinguished from the moral feeling of shame which often accompanies it.
Such stormy outbursts vary no doubt from child to child. Thus C.’s sister in her angry moments did not bite or roll on the floor, but would dance about and stamp. Some children show little if anything of this savage furiousness. Among those that do show it, it is often a temporary phenomenon only.
This anger, it is to be noted, is due to check, and would show itself to some extent even if there were no intervention of authority. Thus a child will become angry, resentful, and despairingly miserable if another child gets effective hold of something which he wants to have. Yet it is undoubtedly true, as we shall see, that these little storms are most frequently called up by the imposition of authority, and are a manifestation of what we call a defiant attitude.
This slight examination may suffice to show that with the child self, its appetites, its satisfactions, are the centre of its existence, the pivot on which its action turns. I do not forget the real and striking differences here, the specially brutal form of boys’ anger as compared with that of girls, the partial atrophy of some of these impulses, e.g., jealousy, in the more gentle and affectionate type of child. Yet there seems to be little doubt that these are among the commonest and most pronounced characteristics of the first years.
Evolution will, no doubt, help us to understand much of this. If the order of development of the individual follows and summarises that of the race, we should expect the child to show a germ at least of the passionateness, the quarrelsomeness of the brute and of the savage before he shows the moral qualities distinctive of civilised man. That he often shows so close a resemblance to the savage and to the brute suggests how little ages of civilised life with its suppression of these furious impulses have done to tone down the ancient and carefully transmitted instincts. The child at birth, and for a long while after, may then be said to be the representative of wild untamed nature, which it is for education to subdue and fashion into something higher and better.
At the same time the child is more than this. In this first clash of his will with another’s he knows more than the brute’s sensual fury. He suffers consciously, he realises himself in his antagonism to a world outside him. It is probable, as I have pointed out before, that even a physical check bringing pain, as when the child runs his head against a wall, may develop this consciousness of self in its antagonism to a not-self. This consciousness reaches a higher phase when the opposing force is distinctly apprehended as another will. Self-feeling, a germ of the feeling of ‘my worth,’ enters into this early passionateness and differentiates it from a mere animal rage. The absolute prostration of infantile anger seems to be the expression of this keen consciousness of rebuff, of injury.
While, then, these outbursts of savage instinct in children are no doubt ugly, and in their direction contra-moral, they must not hastily be pronounced wholly bad and wicked. To call them wicked in the full sense of that term is indeed to forget that they are the swift reactions of instinct which have in them nothing of reflexion or of deliberation. The angry child venting his spite in some wild act of violence is a long way from a man who knowingly and with the consent of his will retaliates and hates. The very fleeting character of the outbreak, the rapid subsidence of passion and transition to another mood, show that there is here no real malice prépense. These instincts will, no doubt, if they are not tamed, develop later on into truly wicked dispositions; yet it is by no means a small matter to recognise that they do not amount to full moral depravity.
On the other hand, we have seen that we do not render complete justice to these early manifestations of angry passion if we class them with those of the brute. The child in these first years, though not yet human in the sense of having rational insight into his wrong-doing, is human in the sense of suffering through consciousness of an injured self. This reflective element is not yet moral; the sense of injury may turn by-and-by into lasting hatred. Yet it holds within itself possibilities of something higher. But of this more when we come to envisage the child in his relation to authority.
The same predominance of self, the same kinship with the unsocial brute which shows itself in these germinal animosities, is said to reappear in the insensibility or unfeelingness of children. The commonest charge against children from those who are not on intimate terms with them, and sometimes, alas, from those who are, is that they are heartless and cruel.
That children often appear to the adult as unfeeling as a stone, is, I suppose, incontestable. The troubles which harass and oppress the mother leave her small companion quite unconcerned. He either goes on playing with undisturbed cheerfulness, or he betrays a momentary curiosity about some circumstance connected with the affliction which is worse than the absorption in play through its tantalising want of any genuine feeling. A brother or a sister may be ill, but if the vigorous little player is affected at all, it is only through the loss of his companion, if this is not more than made up for by certain advantages of the solitary situation. If the mother is ill, the event is interesting merely as supplying him with new treats. A little boy of four, after spending half an hour in his mother’s sick-room, coolly informed his nurse: ‘I have had a very nice time, mamma’s ill!’ The order of the two statements is significant of the child’s mental attitude towards others’ sufferings. If his faithful nurse has her face bandaged, his interest in her torments does not go beyond a remark on the ‘funniness’ of her new appearance.
When it comes to the bigger human troubles this want of fellow-feeling is still more noticeable. Nothing is more shocking to the adult observer of children than their coldness and stolidity in presence of death. While a whole house is stricken with grief at the loss of a beloved inmate the child is wont to preserve his serenity, being affected at most by a feeling of awe before a great mystery. Even the sight of the dead body does not always excite grief. Mrs. Burnett in her interesting reminiscences of childhood has an excellent account of the feelings of a sensitive and refined child when first brought face to face with death. In one case she was taken with fearsome longing to touch the dead body, so as to know what ‘as cold as death’ meant, in another, that of a pretty girl of three with golden brown eyes and neat small brown curls, she was impressed by the loveliness of the whole scene, the nursery bedroom being hung with white and adorned with white flowers. In neither case was she sorry, and could not cry though she had imagined beforehand that she would.166 Even in this case, then, where so much feeling was called forth, commiseration for the dead companion seems to have been almost wholly wanting.167
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 so 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 oppressed neither by our anxieties nor by our griefs, just because these are to a large extent beyond his sympathetic comprehension.
We must remember, too, that there are moods and attitudes of mind favourable and unfavourable to sympathy. None of us are uniformly and consistently compassionate, and children are frequently the subject of moods which exclude the feeling. 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 spy 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 class-mate. 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, and the laugh not a ‘nervous’ one. The odd situation—the sudden hush of a class—had affected childish sensibilities 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.168
Children, says the misopædist, are not only unfeeling where we look for sympathy and kindness, they are positively unkind, their unkindness amounting to cruelty. What we mean by the brute in the child is emphatically this cruelty. By cruelty is here understood cold-blooded infliction of pain. “Cet âge,” wrote La Fontaine of childhood, “est sans pitié.” The idea that children, especially boys, are cruel in this sense is, I think, a common one.
This cruelty will now and again show itself in relation to other children. One of the trying situations of early life is to find oneself supplanted by the arrival of a new baby. Children, I have reason to think, are, in such circumstances, capable of coming shockingly near to a feeling of hatred. I have heard of one little girl who was taken with so violent an antipathy to a baby which she considered outrageously ugly as to make attempts to smash its head, much as she would no doubt have tried to destroy a doll which had become unsightly to her. The baby, it is comforting to know, was not really hurt by this precocious explosion of infanticidal impulse—perhaps the smashing was more than half a “pretence”—and the little girl has since grown up to be a kind-hearted woman.
Such cruel-looking handling of smaller infants is probably rare. More common is the exhibition of the signs of cruelty in the child’s dealings with animals. It is of this, indeed, that we mostly think when we speak of a child’s cruelty.
At first nothing seems clearer than the evidence of malicious intention in a child’s treatment of animals. The little girl M. when just a year old would lift two kittens by the neck and try to stamp on them. The little girl described by Miss Shinn would when two years old run up to a dog and jerk his ear till he snapped at her, and on one occasion resolutely thrust her hand into a bush to seize pussy, minding not the scratches.169 Do we not see in this mauling of animals, even when it brings the child himself pain, evidences of a rooted determination to plague, and of a fierce delight in plaguing?
The question of the innermost nature of human cruelty is too difficult a one to be discussed here. I will only say that whatever the cruelty of adults may be children’s so-called cruelty towards animals is very far from being a pure delight in the sight of suffering. The torments to which a child will subject a long-suffering cat are, I suspect, due not to a clear intention to inflict pain, but to the childish impulse to hold, possess, and completely dominate the pet animal. He feels he must have the pet, no matter at what cost to himself: of the cost to his victim he does not think. The stamping on the kittens was perhaps merely a childish way of holding them fast. Such actions are a manifestation of that odd mixture of sociability and love of power which makes up a child’s attachment to the lower animals.
The case of destructive cruelty, as when a small boy crushes a fly, is somewhat different. Let me give a well-observed instance. A little boy of two years and two months, “after nearly killing a fly on the window-pane, seemed surprised and disturbed, looking round for an explanation, then gave it himself: ‘Mr. Fy dom (gone) to by-by’. But he would not touch it or another fly again—a doubt evidently remained and he continued uneasy about it.” Here we have, I think, the instinctive attitude of a child towards the outcome of his destructive impulse. This impulse, which, as we know, becomes more clearly destructive when experience has taught what result will follow, is not necessarily cruel in the sense of including an idea of the animal’s suffering. Animal movement, especially that of tiny things, has something exciting and provoking about it. The child’s own activity and the love of power which is bound up with it impel him to arrest the movements of small manageable things. This is the meaning, I suspect, of the fascination of the fly on the window-pane, and of tiny creeping things, and especially, perhaps, of the worm with its tangle of wriggling movement. The cat’s prolonged chase of the mouse, into which, as we have seen, something of a dramatic make-believe enters, probably owes its zest to a like delight in the realisation of power.
Along with this love of power there goes often something of a child’s fierce untamable curiosity. A boy of four, finding that his mother was shocked at hearing him express a wish to see a pigeon which a dog had just killed, remarked: ‘Is it rude to look at a dead pigeon? I want to see where its blood is.’ I am disposed to think that the crushing of flies and moths and the pulling of worms to pieces and so forth are prompted by this curiosity. The child wants to see where the blood is, what the bones are like, how the wings are fastened in, and so forth. Perez tells of a little boy, afterwards an artist, who used to crush flies between the leaves of a book for the sake of the odd designs resulting.170 By such various lines of concentrated activity does the child-mind overlook the suffering which it causes.
A like combination of love of power and of curiosity seems to underlie other directions of childish destructiveness, as the breaking of toys and the pulling of flowers to pieces. In certain cases, as in C.’s annihilation of a garden of peonies, the love of power or effect may overtop and outlive the curiosity, becoming a sort of iconoclastic fury.171
I think, then, that we may give the little child the benefit of the doubt, and not assign his rough handling of sentient things to a wish to inflict pain, or even to an indifference to pain of which he is clearly aware. Wanton activity, the curiosity of the experimenter, and delight in showing one’s power and producing an effect, seem sufficient to explain most of the alleged brutality of the first years.
Probably the same considerations apply to those milder forms of annoyance which children are apt to practise on other people and animals alike. That a child early develops a decided taste for ‘teasing’ is, I think, certain. But whether carried out by word or by action this early teasing seems to be in the main the outcome of the love of power, the impulse to impose one’s will on other creatures. We must remember that these wee beings feel themselves so subject to others’ power that they are very naturally driven to use all opportunities of shaking off the shackles, and exercising for themselves a little domination. Cruelty, that is the impulse to inflict pain, where it appears, grows up later, and though it has its roots in this love of power ought to be distinguished from it.
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.