ABSTRACT
If, for the present, we use the term 'conscience' to mean a developed, interior morality, the question at once arises—what is its origin? No study of development in moral concepts is possible unless we assume that the child is born without moral consciousness, without a conscience. This is, in fact, a modern assumption, and hence the lack of studies of such development before about 1900. It had previously been held that the child was born with a conscience. This tradition, allied with a rigid dogma of original sin, meant that the erring child was deliberately delinquent. What we now recognise as his innate immaturity, his egocentricity, was therefore taken as criminal, if not sinful. Hence the enormities of cruelty perpetrated against children in educational history.
