instinctive desire for the
good opinion of others; and the other, a corresponding instinct for
living out my own life fully and freely, not so as to infringe upon the
just rights of others, but not stinting or distorting or amputating
myself, even though others set the example. It was the old fable
reversed,--the fox disinclined to cut off his tail, even though all the
other foxes had cut off theirs. And the fact that people older than I,
and several of them, and for year after year, urged upon me the
considerations I have spoken of, never availed. That key would not move
the mechanism of my mind. It did not fit.

My childhood seems to me far more memorable for what it had not, was
not, than for what it had and was. I do not believe this is because mine
was an especially unfortunate or unhappy childhood. As I have hinted
before, it was because childhood is empty,--an unconscious, imperfect
life,--almost animal,--germinal,--a life in the egg, in the jelly, in
the sap. The experiences of childhood are seed-leaves. They drop quickly
away and utterly disappear, and even the scars where they grew cease to
show on the stem. Probably I seemed to myself to enjoy life when I was a
child. Children whom I see daily seem to do so. But thought is life.
Mere enjoyment is dreaming. It may seem to cover hours or days or years
of experience, but when we awake it has been only a point of time. But
this pleasure-dream is worse than a sleep-dream. Over its costly
actuality of time, cut out and dropped down out of life, the hither and
thither ends of the shortened thread of existence must be knotted
together into a cord of diminished length, strength, and value.

In sum: This child which I was was a semi-embryonic creature, mostly
unconscious, whose ten years' career, now chiefly faded into entire
blankness, showed not many mental traits. The chief were quick and
retentive verbal memory, quick, undiscriminating, impulsive,
unreasonable kind-heartedness, and an insensibility, even an instinctive
opposition, to the approvings or disapprovings of others. Or the child
might be stated thus: Nervous and sensitive organization, intellect
predominant; in the intellect the perceptive faculties most active, and
of these chiefly that which notices and compares exteriors; beside the
intellect, a kind-heartedness without balance, and therefore too great;
too little caution, and too little love of approbation. Around these
features others have grown up