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 the interest and the gladness which come with 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 peculiarly keen sense of strangeness and of loneliness, of banishment from all that he knows and loves. The reminiscences of this feeling described in later life show that it is the sense of solitude which oppresses the child in his dark room.[152] ----- Footnote 152: See especially James Payn, _Gleams of Memory_, pp. 3, 4. ----- This, I take it, would be quite enough to make the situation of confinement in a dark room disagreeable and depressing to a wakeful child even when he is in bed and there is no restriction of bodily activity. But even this would not amount to a full passionate dread of darkness. It seems to me to be highly probable that a baby of two or three months might feel this vague depression and even this craving for the wonted scene, especially just after the removal of a light; yet such a baby, as we have seen, gives no clear indications of fear. Fear of the dark arises from the development of the child’s imagination, and might, I believe, arise without any suggestion from nurse or other children of the notion that there are bogies in the room. Darkness is precisely the situation most favourable to vivid imagination: the screening of the visible world makes the inner world of fancy vivid and distinct by contrast. Are we not all apt to shut our eyes when we try to ‘visualise’ or picture things very distinctly? This fact of a preternatural activity of imagination, taken with the circumstance emphasised by Rousseau that in the darkness the child is no longer distinctly aware of the objects that are actually before him, would help us to understand why children are so much given to projecting into the unseen black spaces the creatures of their imagination. Not only so—and this Rousseau does not appear to have recognised—the dull feeling of depression which accompanies the sensation of darkness might suffice to give a gloomy and weird cast to the images so projected.