Euthanasia : and other aspects of life and death / by Harry Roberts.

  • Harry Roberts
Date:
[1936]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Euthanasia : and other aspects of life and death / by Harry Roberts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    permitted to read romances, and relations of giants and magicians and genii ? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirma¬ tive. I know of no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole. Those who have been led to the same truths step by step, through the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess. They contemplate nothing but parts, and all parts are necessarily little, and the universe is to them but a mass of little things.” The very young child has an almost uncanny faculty of sensing emotional attitudes in others. Later, this “ intuitive ” capacity becomes confused by intellectual judgments based on inadequate premises. But, at this early stage, emotional attitudes are all-important. Action, not informed by genuine feeling, is to the young child unconvincing. Maternal solicitude, for instance, can be simulated ; but such pretence rarely deceives this sensitive psychologic interpreter. Even the infant is capable of love, fear and hate ; and it is the acts that it comes to associate with these several emotional reactions which largely determine its habits —its code of conduct. The child, even more than does the adult, illustrates the more elementary deductions of Pavlov—the cruder truths of “ reflex conditioning.” Pain and pleasure furnish for the child ultimate criteria. It has no imaginative view of the future, or of those abstract ideas which in later life play so big a part in shaping our conduct. Therefore, it is absurd to drag in notions of “justice” or of moral “rights” and “ wrongs ” in dealing with young children, if we wish