But I am disposed to think that there is yet another element in this childish fear. I have said that darkness gives a positive sensation: we _see_ it, and the sensation, apart from any difference of signification which we afterwards learn to give to it, is of the same kind that is obtained by looking at a dull black surface. To the child the difference between a black object and a dark unillumined space is as yet not clear, and I believe it will be found that children tend to materialise or to ‘reify’ darkness. When, for example, a correspondent tells me that darkness was envisaged by her when a child as “a crushing power,” I think I see traces of this childish feeling. I seem able to recall my own childish sense of a big black something on suddenly waking and opening the eyes in a very dark room. But there is still another thing to be noticed in this sensation of darkness. The black field is not uniform; some parts of it show less black than others, and the indistinct and rude pattern of comparatively light and dark changes from moment to moment; while now and again more definite spots of brightness may focus themselves. The varying activity of the retina would seem to account for this apparent changing of the black scene. What, my reader may not unnaturally ask, has this to do with a child’s fear of the dark? If he will recall what was said about the facility with which a child comes to see faces and animal forms in the lines of a cracked ceiling, or the veining of a piece of marble, he will, I think, recognise the drift of my remarks. These slight and momentary differences in the blackness, these fleeting rudiments of a pattern, may serve as a sensuous base for the projected images; the child with a strongly excited fancy sees in these dim traces of the black formless waste definite forms. These will naturally be the forms with which he is most familiar, and since his fancy is at the moment tinged with melancholy they will be gloomy and disturbing forms. Hence we may expect to hear of children seeing the forms of terrifying living things in the dark.