Child and childhood

Use in the book

The boys, παῖδες, mingle with the young men at the festival (206d). In addressing Lysis or Menexenus as a named man’s παῖς, Socrates means “son” (207b–c, 209a). The word marks youth and family relationship, whereas τὰ παιδικά identifies a beloved’s courtship role.

The related diminutive παιδίον appears as παιδία in the example of newborn children who remain dear to parents even without loving them back (212e–213a). That example extends the inquiry beyond the older boys conversing with Socrates.

Places to read

1. 207b–cὮ παῖ Δημοφῶντος — Son of Demophon.
2. 206d
3. 209a
4. 212e–213a

Use in the book

The Republic comparison observes spirit in children before developed reasoning and also in animals. Children provide an example for distinguishing psychic powers by their different development. The speaker’s sweeping remark about some never reasoning is part of the argument’s rhetoric, not a diagnostic classification.

Places to read

1. I.49.31.2Children exemplify spirit operating before developed reasoning.

Translation in this edition

“Children” fits the developmental comparison; no servile meaning is intended.

Use in the book

The Third Century's remembered child receives the world before learning the conventions that divide its riches into jealous possessions. Corn, trees, streets, people, and daylight appear fresh, enduring, and personally given. The narrative attributes extraordinary value to that apprehension without saying the child possessed a mature explanation of everything. Indeed, not knowing about death, quarrels, or exactions helps produce the apparent peace of Eden. Traherne's mature understanding knows more about human misery than the child's first vision could contain.

Childhood is also vulnerable. The power to learn can transmit false valuation as readily as truth. Adults repeatedly talk about trifles and fail to name common gifts; the child's desire to please them then helps extinguish the original clarity. In this account education is not an optional layer added to a self-contained innocent mind. Other people's thoughts become the environment in which the child perceives.

The return to childhood is consequently selective and demanding. III.5 refuses to define it merely as simple passions or careless reliance on providence. Evil habits, false colours, and prejudicial customs must be removed so that the objects themselves can be seen. Recovery is achieved through mature judgment, not through erasing acquired knowledge. The child becomes a teacher of wonder, while reason supplies the discrimination needed to keep that wonder truthful.

Places to read

1. I.1The infant soul’s receptivity is compared with a book not yet filled.
2. III.2Early delight is connected with ignorance of sin, sickness, death, and conflict.
3. III.3The vivid catalogue of childhood perception leads to the wish to become a child again.
4. III.5Childlike purity is defined as freedom from acquired false colours and habits.
5. III.8Social examples are treated as a principal means of corrupting originally teachable nature.

In this edition

The autobiographical “I” offers remembered and interpreted experience, not a universal empirical report about every infant. Its language of Eden does not remove III.8's explicit connection of corruption with Adam.

Preparing senses as well as objects

The practical consequence appears in the injunction to parents and nurses to magnify what is genuinely great. A stock of possessions cannot by itself teach enjoyment. Children need a language of value that agrees with the things before them: the sun's glory, the person's dignity, and the world's availability. The same requirement governs the adult reader of the Centuries. A book can put objects before the mind, but it must also help prepare the light and faculties through which they become visible as goods. Childhood is thus a continuing problem for education, not merely a lost episode to lament.