A complete explanation of these early vague alarms of the ear may as yet not be possible. Children show in the matter of sound capricious repugnances which it is exceedingly difficult to account for. They seem sometimes to have their pet aversions like older folk. But I think a general explanation is possible.
To begin with, then, it is probable that in many of these cases, especially those occurring in the first six months, we have to do with an organic phenomenon, with a sort of jar to the nervous system. To understand this we have to remember that the ear is, in the case of man at least, the sense-organ through which the nervous system is most powerfully and profoundly acted on. Sounds seem to go through us, to pierce us, to shake us, to pound and crush us. A child of four or six months has a nervous organization still weak and unstable, and we should naturally expect loud sounds to produce a disturbing effect on it.
To this it is to be added that sounds have a way of taking us by surprise, of seeming to start out of nothing; and this aspect of them, as I have pointed out above, may well excite vague alarm in the small creatures to whom all that is new and exceptional is apt to seem uncanny. The fact that most children soon lose their fear by getting used to the sounds seems to show how much the new and the mysterious has to do with the effect.
Whether heredity plays any part here in the fear of the dog's barking and other sounds of animals seems to me exceedingly doubtful. This point will, however, come up for closer consideration presently, when we deal with children's fear of animals.
Before considering the manifold outgoings of fear produced by impressions of the eye, we may glance at another form of early disturbance which has some analogy with the shocklike effects of certain sounds. I refer here to the feeling of bodily insecurity which appears very early when the child is awkwardly carried, or let down back foremost, and later when it begins to walk. One child in her fifth month was observed, when carried, to hold on to the nurse's dress as if for safety. And it has been noticed by more than one observer that on dandling a baby up and down on one's arms, it will on descending—that is, when the support of the arms is being withdrawn—show signs of discontent in struggling movements.[1] Bell, Preyer, and others regard this as an instinctive form of fear. Such manifestations may, however, be merely the result of sudden and rude disturbances of the sense of bodily ease which attends the habitual condition of adequate support. A child accustomed to lie in a cradle, on the floor, or in somebody's lap, might be expected to be put out when the supporting mass is greatly reduced, as in bad carrying, or wholly removed, as
- ↑ See the quotation from Sir Charles Bell, Perez, First Three Years of Childhood, p. 63.
