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.

2. The specific adaptability of an immature creature for growth
constitutes his plasticity. This is something quite different from the
plasticity of putty or wax. It is not a capacity to take on change
of form in accord with external pressure. It lies near the pliable
elasticity by which some persons take on the color of their surroundings
while retaining their own bent. But it is something deeper than this