Another instructive comparison is that of children’s fears with those of savages. Both have a like feeling of insecurity, and fall instinctively in presence of a big unknown into the attitude of dread. In the region of superstitious fear more particularly, we see how in both a gloomy fancy forestalls knowledge, investing the new and unexplored with alarming traits. Lastly, children’s fears have some resemblance to certain abnormal mental conditions. Idiots, who are so near normal childhood in their degree of intelligence, show a marked fear of strangers. More interesting, however, in the present connexion, is the exaggeration of the childish fear of new objects which shows itself in certain mental aberrations. There is a characteristic dread of newness, neophobia, just as there is a dread of water.[156] ----- Footnote 156: See Compayré, _op. cit._, pp. 99, 100. ----- While, however, these are the dominant characteristics of children’s fears they are not the only ones. Experience begins to direct the instinctive fear-impulse from the very beginning. How much it does in the first months of life it is difficult to say. In the aversion of a baby to its medicine glass, or its cold bath, one sees, perhaps, more of the rude germ of passion or anger than of fear. Careful observations seem to me to be required on the point, at what definite date signs of fear arising from experience of pain begin to show themselves in the child. Some children, at least, have a surprising way of not minding even considerable amounts of physical pain: the misery of a fall, a blow, a cut, and so forth, being speedily forgotten. It seems doubtful, indeed, whether the venerable saw, ‘The burnt child dreads the fire,’ is invariably true. It appears, in many cases at least, to take a good amount of real agony to produce a genuine fear in a young child.[157] This tendency to belittle pain is not unknown, I suspect, to the tutor of small boys. It may well be that a definite and precise recalling of the misery of a scratch, or even of a moderate burn, may not conduce to the development of a true fear, and that here, too, fear when it arises in all its characteristic masterfulness is at bottom fear of the unknown. This seems illustrated by the well-known fact that a child will be more terrified during a first experience of pain, especially if there be a visible hurt and bleeding, than by any subsequent prospect of a renewal of the catastrophe. Is not the same thing true, indeed, of older fears? Should we dread the wrench of a tooth-extraction if it were experienced very often, and we had a sufficiently photographic imagination to be able to estimate precisely the intensity and duration of the pain? ----- Footnote 157: