e way to some bigger reaction tending towards the same result.
The climax of the avoiding reactions is flight or running away. Akin
to flight are cowering, shrinking, dodging or warding off a blow,
huddling into the smallest possible space, getting under cover,
clinging to another person; and most or all of these, too, are
instinctive reactions. With flight and the other larger
danger-avoiding reactions there is often present, along with the
impulse to escape, the stirred up organic and conscious state of
_fear_.

The stimuli that arouse movements of escape are of two sorts: those
that directly cause some irritating sensation, and those that are
simply signs of danger. The smaller avoiding reactions--flexion
reflex, coughing, etc.--are {143} aroused by stimuli that are directly
painful or irritating; whereas flight, cowering, etc., are mostly
responses to mere signs of danger. A "sign of danger" is usually seen
or heard at some distance, not felt directly on or in the body. Now,
while avoiding reactions are attached by nature to the irritating
stimuli, it is not at all clear whether escape movements are
_natively_ attached to any signs of danger, or, if they are, to what
particular signs of danger they are attached. What visual or auditory
stimuli, that are not directly irritating, will arouse escape
movements in a young child? For the youngest children, no such stimuli
have been found. You can easily get avoiding reactions from a little
baby by producing pain or discomfort; you can get the clinging
response by letting the child slip when he is being held in your arms;
and you get crying and shrinking on application of a loud, grating
noise, such a noise as is irritating in itself without regard to what
it may signify. But you cannot get any shrinking from stimuli that are
not directly irritating.

For example, you get no sign of fear from a little child on suddenly
confronting him with a furry animal. With older children, you do get
shrinking from animals, but it is impossible to be sure that the older
child has not _learned_ to be afraid of them. I have seen a child of
two years simply laugh when a large, strange dog came bounding towards
him in the park; but a year later he would shrink from a strange dog.
Whence the change? There are two possibilities: either a native
connection between this stimulus and the shrinking response only
reached its maturity when the child was about three years old--and
there is nothin