Many sensations which delighted us as children, prove to us either
insipid or offensive in adult life. Why? Because there have grown up
with our growth feelings which, though now related to them, were dormant
during childhood; ideas now associated with them, but undeveloped during
childhood; and experiences connected with them, never imagined in
childhood.
For the mind, at our birth, is even less developed than the body; and
its full ripening demands very much more time than is needed for the
perfect bodily growth. Both by his faults and by his virtues the child
resembles the savage, because the instincts and the emotions of the
primitive man are the first to mature within him;--and they are the
first to mature in the individual because they were the first evolved in
the history of the race, being the most necessary to self-maintenance.
That in later adult life they take a very inferior place is because the
nobler mental and moral qualities--comparatively recent products of
social discipline and civilized habit--have at last gained massiveness
enough to dominate them under normal conditions;--have become like
powerful new senses upon which the primitive emotional nature learns to
depend for guidance.
All emotions are inheritances; but the higher, because in evolutional
order the latest, develop only with the complete unfolding of the brain.
Some, ethically considered the very loftiest, are said to develop only
in old age,--to which they impart a particular charm. Other faculties
also of a high order, chiefly æsthetic, would seem in the average of
cases to mature in middle life. And to this period of personal evolution
probably belongs the finer sense of beauty in color,--a much simpler
faculty than the ethical sense, though possibly related to it in ways
unsuspected.
Vivid colors appeal to the rudimentary æsthetic sense of our children,
as they do to the æsthetic sense of savages; but the civilized
adult dislikes most of the very vivid colors: they exasperate his
nerves like an excessive crash of brass and drums during a cheap
orchestral performance. Cultured vision especially shrinks from a
strong blaze of red. Only the child delights in vermilion and scarlet.
Growing up he gradually learns to think of what we call “loud red”
as vulgar, and to dislike it much more than did his less delicate
ancestors of the preceding century. Education helps him to explain
why he thinks it vulgar, but not to explain why he _feels_ it to be
unpleasant,--independently of the question whether it tires his eyes.