As was suggested above, the morality of mere rule and habit becomes the less conspicuous in the life of children the more they are subjected to fresh personal influences. If their sympathies are somewhat dull, or if they are secluded, their minds naturally become grooved; and all children, perhaps, become much bound to habit in matters where personal influence is not likely to interfere. But in most children, and in most matters, it will be found that the moral judgment and feeling are, from the very earliest, intensely sympathetic and personal, charged with shame, affection, anger, jealousy, and desire to please. The mind has already to struggle for harmony among vivid emotions, aroused by the appeals of life to hereditary instinct, each giving intensity to certain ideas of conduct, and tending to sway the judgment of right in their sense. If the boy who refused the candy, as mentioned above, had possessed a vivid imagination of personal attitudes, which he did not, his situation might have been much more intricate. He might have been drawn to accept it not only by the sweet taste but by a desire to please the friends who offered it; and on the other hand he might have been deterred by a vision of the reproving face and voice of his mother. Thus M., nearly sixteen months old, had been frowned at and called naughty in a severe tone of voice when she tried to claw her brother’s face. Shortly after, while sitting with him on the bed, her mother being at a distance, she was observed to repeat the offence and then, without further cause or suggestion, to bow her head and look abashed and guilty. Apparently she had a sense of wrong, a conviction of sin, perhaps consisting only in a reminiscence of the shame she had previously felt when similar behavior was followed by rebuke. Here, then, we have a simple manifestation of a moral force that acts upon every one of us in countless ways, and every day of his life—the imagined approval or disapproval of others, appealing to instinctive emotion, and giving the force of that emotion to certain views of conduct. The behavior that connects itself with such social sentiment as we like and feel the impulse to continue, is so much the more likely to be judged as right; but if the sentiment is one from which we are averse, the behavior is the more likely to be judged as wrong. The child’s moral sense, says Perez, “begins as soon as he understands the signification of certain intonations of the voice, of certain attitudes, of a certain expression of countenance, intended to reprimand him for what he has done or to warn him against something he was on the point of doing. This penal and remunerative sanction gives rise by degrees to a clear distinction of concrete good and evil.”[99]