Studies of childhood / by James Sully.

  • James Sully
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies of childhood / by James Sully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    24/544 page 12
    Things grow a great deal worse when we try to throw our scientific lassoo about the elusive spirit of a child of four or six, and to catch the exact meaning of its swiftly changing movements. Children are, no doubt, at this age frank before the eye of love, and their minds are vastly more accessible than that of the dumb dog that can only look his ardent thoughts. Yet they are by no means so open to view as is often supposed. All kinds of shy reticences hamper them : they feel unskilled in using our cumbrous language ; they soon find out that their thoughts are not as ours, but often make us laugh. And how carefully are they wont to hide from our sight their nameless terrors, physical and moral. Much of the deeper childish experience can only reach us, if at all, years after it is over, through the faulty medium of adult memory— faulty even when it is the memory of a Goethe, a George Sand, a Robert Louis Stevenson.1 Even when there is perfect candour, and the little one does his best to instruct us as to what is passing in his mind by his ‘ whys 5 and his ‘ I s’poses,’ accompanied by the most eloquent of looks, we find ourselves ever and again unequal to comprehending. Child-thought follows its own paths— roads, as Mr. Rudyard Kipling has well said, “ unknown to those who have left childhood behind ”. The dark sayings of childhood, as when a child asks, ‘ Why am I not some¬ body else ? ’ will be fully illustrated below. This being so, it might well seem arrogant to speak of Development in the Child and the Race, chap. ii.). In this optimistic presentment of the subject there is not the slightest reference to the difficult work of interpretation. Child-study is talked of as a perfectly simple mode of observation, requiring at most to be supple¬ mented by a little experiment, and, it may be added, backed by a firm theory. 1 In these days of published reminiscences of childhood it is quite refreshing to meet with a book like Mr. James Payn’s Gleams of Memory, which honestly confesses that its early recollections are almost nilt
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3