In much of this first crude utterance of the æsthetic sense of the child we have points of contact with the first manifestations of taste in the race. Delight in bright glistening things, in gay tints, in strong contrasts of colour, as well as in certain forms of movement, as that of feathers—the favourite personal adornment—this is known to be characteristic of the savage and gives to his taste in the eyes of civilised man the look of childishness. On the other hand it is doubtful whether the savage attains to the sentiment of the child for the beauty of flowers. Our civilised surroundings, meadows and gardens, as well as the constant action of the educative forces of example, soon carry the child beyond the savage in this particular. How far can children be said to have the germ of a feeling for nature, or, to use the more comprehensive modern term, cosmic emotion? It is a matter of common observation that they have not the power to embrace a multitude of things in a single act of contemplation. Hence they have no feeling for landscape as a harmonious complex of picturesquely varied parts. When they are taken to see a ‘view’ their eye instead of trying to embrace the whole, as a fond parent desires, provokingly pounces on some single feature of interest, and often one of but little æsthetic value. People make a great mistake in taking children to ‘points of view’ under the supposition that they will share in grown people’s impressions. Perez relates that some children taken to the Pic du Midi found their chief pleasure in scrambling up the peak and saying that they were on donkeys.[205] Mere magnitude or vastness of spectacle does not appeal to the child, for a sense of the sublime grows out of a complex imaginative process which is beyond his young powers. So far as immensity affects him at all, as in the case of the sea, it seems to excite a measure of dread in face of the unknown; and this feeling, though having a certain kinship with the emotion of sublimity, is distinct from this last. It has nothing of the joyous consciousness of expansion which enters into the later feeling. It is only to certain limited objects and features of nature that the child is æsthetically responsive. He knows the loveliness of the gilded spring meadow, the fascination of the sunlit stream, the awful mystery of the wood, and something too perhaps of the calming beauty of the broad blue sky. That is to say, he has a number of small rootlets which when they grow together will develop into a feeling for nature. ----- Footnote 205: _Op. cit._, p. 103. -----