The most distant acquaintance with the first years of human life tells
us that young children have much in common with the lower animals. Their
characteristic passions and impulses are centred in self and the
satisfaction of its wants. What is better marked, for example, than the
boundless greed of the child, his keen desire to appropriate and enjoy
whatever presents itself, and to resent others’ participation in such
enjoyment? For some time after birth the child is little more than an
incarnation of appetite which knows on restraint, and only yields to the
undermining force of satiety.
The child’s entrance into social life through a growing consciousness of
the existence of others is marked by much fierce opposition to their
wishes. His greed, which at the outset was but the expression of a
vigorous nutritive impulse, now takes on more of a contra-moral aspect.
The removal of the feeding-bottle before full satisfaction has been
attained is, as we know, the occasion for one of the most impressive
utterances of the baby’s ‘will to live,’ and of its resentment of all
human checks to its native impulses. In this outburst we have the first
rude germ of that defiance of control and of authority of which I shall
have to say more by-and-by.
In another way, too, the expansion of the infant’s consciousness through
the recognition of others widens the terrain of greedy impulse. For ugly
envy commonly has its rise in the perception of another child’s
consumption of appetite’s dainties.
Here, it is evident, we are still at the level of the animal. A dog is
passionately greedy like the child, will fiercely resent any
interference with the satisfaction of its appetite, and will be envious
of another and more fortunately placed animal.
Much the same concern for self and opposition to others’ having what the
child himself desires shows itself in the matter of toys and other
possessions of interest. A child is apt not only to make free with
another child’s toys, but to show the strongest objection to any
imitation of this freedom, often displaying a dog-in-the-manger spirit
by refusing to lend what he himself does not want. Not only so, he will
be apt to resent another child’s having toys of his own. This envy of
other children’s possessions is often wide and profound.
As the social interests come into play so far as to make caresses and
other signs of affection sources of pleasure to the child, the field for
envy and its ‘green-eyed’ offspring, jealousy, is still more enlarged.
As is well known, an infant will greatly resent the mother’s taking
another child into her arms.
Here, again, we are at the level of the lower animals. They, too, as
our dogs and cats can show us, can be envious not only in the matter
of eatables, but in that of human caressings, and even of
possessions—witness the behaviour of two dogs when a stick is thrown
into the water.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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