Some believe that young children have an intuition of personal character quicker and more trustworthy than that of grown people. If this were so it would be a strong argument in favor of the existence of a congenital instinct which does not need experience and is impaired by it. My own belief is that close observation of children under two years of age will lead to the conclusion that personal impressions are developed by experience. Yet it is possibly true that children three years old or more are sometimes quicker and more acute judges of some traits, such as sincerity and good will, than grown people. In so far as it is a fact it may perhaps be explained in this way. The faces that children see and study are mostly full of the expression of love and truth. Nothing like it occurs in later life, even to the most fortunate. These images, we may believe, give rise in the child’s mind to a more or less definite ideal of what a true and kindly face should be, and this ideal he uses with great effect in detecting what falls short of it. He sees that there is something wrong with the false smile; it does not fit the image in his mind; some lines are not there, others are exaggerated. He does not understand what coldness and insincerity are, but their expression puzzles and alarms him, merely because it is not what he is used to. The adult loses this clear, simple ideal of love and truth, and the sharp judgment that flows from it. His perception becomes somewhat vulgarized by a flood of miscellaneous experience, and he sacrifices childish spontaneity to wider range and more complex insight, valuing and studying many traits of which the child knows nothing. It will not be seriously maintained that, on the whole, we know people better when we are children than we do later. I put forward these scanty observations for what little they may be worth, and not as disproving the existence of special instincts in which Darwin and other great observers have believed. I do not maintain that there is no hereditary aptitude to interpret facial expression—there must be some sort of an instinctive basis to start from—but I think that it develops gradually and in indistinguishable conjunction with knowledge gained by experience.