1.
The thoroughgoing character of this helplessness suggests, however,
some compensating power. The relative ability of the young of brute
animals to adapt themselves fairly well to physical conditions from an
early period suggests the fact that their life is not intimately bound
up with the life of those about them. They are compelled, so to speak,
to have physical gifts because they are lacking in social gifts. Human
infants, on the other hand, can get along with physical incapacity just
because of their social capacity. We sometimes talk and think as if
they simply happened to be physically in a social environment; as
if social forces exclusively existed in the adults who take care of them,
they being passive recipients. If it were said that children are
themselves marvelously endowed with power to enlist the coöperative
attention of others, this would be thought to be a backhanded way of
saying that others are marvelously attentive to the needs of children.
But observation shows that children are gifted with an equipment of the
first order for social intercourse. Few grown-up persons retain all of
the flexible and sensitive ability of children to vibrate
sympathetically with the attitudes and doings of those about them.
Inattention to physical things ( going with incapacity to control them)
is accompanied by a corresponding intensification of interest and
attention as to the doings of people. The native mechanism of the child
and his impulses all tend to facile social responsiveness. The
statement that children, before adolescence, are egotistically
self-centered, even if it were true, would not contradict the truth of
this statement. It would simply indicate that their social
responsiveness is employed on their own behalf, not that it does not
exist. But the statement is not true as matter of fact. The facts
which are cited in support of the alleged pure egoism of children really
show the intensity and directness with which they go to their mark. If
the ends which form the mark seem narrow and selfish to adults, it is
only because adults (by means of a similar engrossment in their day)
have mastered these ends, which have consequently ceased to interest
them. Most of the remainder of children's alleged native egoism is
simply an egoism which runs counter to an adult's egoism. To a grown-up
person who is too absorbed in his own affairs to take an interest in
children's affairs, children doubtless seem unreasonably engrossed in
their own affairs.
From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a weakness;
it involves interdependence. There is always a danger that increased personal
independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making
him more self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead to
aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in
his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to
stand and act alone—an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible
for a large part of the remediable suffering of the world.
