ABSTRACT
Children begin to collect their notions of right and wrong as soon as they are old enough to realise that one course of conduct results in approval and another in disapproval. Approval brings pleasure of various kinds and disapproval pain, and these are forces to which infants react from the start of their lives. A child whose moral code is either defective in important particulars, or differs too widely from that of his community, will tend to develop into a bad man by the standards of that community, or find himself involved in exhausting moral conflicts from which he may never be able to free himself. The moral code of the individual is not derived from his conscience, whose function is merely to enforce that code, whatever its source and its nature. Its source is in the child’s impressions of what is taught to him by parents and others in authority.
