no longer see anything of the objects that surround me, not to imagine a thousand creatures, a thousand movements which may hurt me, and against which I am unable to protect myself?"[1]
Rousseau here supplements and corrects Locke. For one thing, I have ascertained in the case of my own child, and in that of others, that a fear of the dark has grown up when the influence of the wicked nurse has been carefully eliminated. Locke forgets that children can get terrifying fancies from other children and from all sorts of suggestions unwittingly conveyed by the words of respectable grown people. Besides, he leaves untouched the question why children should choose to dwell on these fearful images in the dark rather than on the bright, pretty ones which they also acquire. Mr. R. L. Stevenson has told us how happy a child can make himself at night with such pleasing fancies. Yet it must be owned that darkness seems rather to favor images of what is weird and terrible. How is this? Rousseau gets some way toward answering the question by saying (as I understand him to say) that darkness breeds a sense of insecurity. Not that a child lying in his cot is likely to be troubled that he can not see what is at the other end of the room. I do not think that it is the inconvenience of being in the dark which generates the fear; a child might, I imagine, acquire it without ever having had to explore a dark place.
I strongly suspect that the fear of darkness takes its rise in a sensuous phenomenon, a kind of physical repugnance. All sensations of very low intensity, as very soft vocal sounds, have about them a tinge of melancholy—tristesse—and this is especially noticeable in the sensations which the eye experiences when confronted with a dark space, or, what is tantamount to this, a black and dull surface. The symbolism of darkness and blackness, as when we talk of "gloomy" thoughts, or liken trouble to a "black cloud," seems to rest on this effect of melancholy.
Along with this gloomy character of the sensation of dark, and not always easy to distinguish from it, there goes the craving of the eye for its customary light, and all the interest and gladness which come from seeing. When the eye and brain are not fatigued—that is, when we are wakeful—this eye-ache may become an appreciable pain; and it is probable that children feel the deprivation more acutely than grown persons, owing to the abundance of their visual activity as well as to the comparatively scanty store of their thought resources. Add to this that darkness, by extinguishing the world of visible things, would give to a timid child tenacious of the familiar home surroundings a
- ↑ Émile, Book II.
