ABSTRACT
The need for study in earliest infancy. The question of the innate bases of fear-how far experience, or suggestion, causes fears supposed to have an instinctive basis-can hardly be settled except by a careful study of early childhood. To obtain reports from adults, as Stanley Hall did, about fears that obsessed them, while of great interest psychologically in other ways, helps us little as to the problem of innate fears, because of the unreliability of the memory of the very earliest experiences which may have started such fears and obsessions.
