body's unwholesomely dominated pet and parasite. And doubtless the most important point of all is that the child's own strong, eager effort to relate himself to life is persistently frustrated until, at the very age when maturity concedes that the time for a little decorous initiative has begun, he has become silenced and dulled. For these years are irremediably the age of unanswered whys. Almost every child has some genial relative who, when not too busy, will now and then answer a What or a How. But who ever candidly and conscientiously answers a Why?
Yet the first inquiries that a child frames may be said to represent brave attempts to define for himself, in wide outline, the particular universe that he is thereafter always to live in. They deserve responses that are square and unafraid. If, as is so often the case, no material whatever is supplied him, he has to adapt himself to an intellectual homelessness, to groping through a meaningless blur. Or he is offered such mean, false, scanty substance that the best universe he can construct is one that is tiny, dark, and goblin-ridden, that leaks and gapes, that is full of locked closets stuffed with skeletons, and of mystery-choked corridors that lead nowhere. The pity of it is that the normal child's own early impulses are dauntless ones, up to the time when enough fears are taught him, enough dogmas and taboos imposed, to destroy his chance of becoming a thinking being.
It is not of course a fresh discovery that a child doesn't spend his early years in a mental vacuum. Something is happening to him continuously, whatever hypocritical pretence of unawareness the world about him may affect. Every grown person must know through his own observation that at the age of seven, or at the close of that pre-school period whose influences by conventional agreement have been held not to matter, appalling if invisible things may already have befallen a child. His mind may have become conventionalized, the habit of acceptance fixed, the tendency toward inquiry and initiative arrested. He may have been made a snob. Perversities of temperament may have been established, dangerous secret complexes formed. Through repression he may have learned, in a polite and elaborate way, to lie and steal. He may have made the basest approach to sex knowledge. And none of these calamities is in the least incompatible with a charming exterior or with the stupid stock requirements of home and school.
