death. Indeed, the "hygienic houses" of to-day, with their bare walls,
and white washable furniture, look like hospitals; while the schools
seem veritable tombs, with their desks ranged in rows like black
catafalques--black, merely because they have to be of the same color
as ink to hide the stains which are looked upon as a necessity, just
as certain sins and certain crimes are still considered to be
inevitable in the world; the alternative of avoiding them has never
occurred to any one. Class-rooms have black desks, and bare, gray
walls, more devoid of ornament than those of a mortuary chamber; this
is to the end that the starved and famishing spirit of the child may
"accept" the indigestible intellectual food which the teacher bestows
upon it. In other words, every distracting element has to be removed
from the environment, so that the teacher, by his oratorical art, and
with the help of his laborious expedients, may succeed in fixing the
rebellious attention of his pupils on himself. On the other hand, the
spiritual school puts no limits to the beauty of its environment, save
economical limits. No ornament can distract a child really absorbed in
his task; on the contrary, beauty both promotes concentration of
thought and offers refreshment to the tired spirit. Indeed, the
churches, which are _par excellence_ places of meditation and of
repose for the life of the soul, have called upon the highest
inspirations of genius to gather every beauty within their precincts.

Such words may seem strange; but if we wish to keep in touch with the
principles of science, we may say that the place best adapted to the
life of man is an artistic environment; and that, therefore, if we
want the school to become "a laboratory for the observation of human
life," we must gather within it things of _beauty_, just as the
laboratory of the bacteriologist must be furnished with stoves and
soils for the culture of bacilli.

Furniture for children, their tables and chairs, should be light, not
only that they may be easily carried about by childish arms, but
because their very fragility is of educational value. The same
consideration leads us to give children china plates and glass
drinking-vessels, for these objects become the _denouncers_ of rough,
disorderly, and undisciplined movements. Thus the child is led to
correct himself, and he accordingly trains himself not to knock
against, overturn, and break things; softening his movements more and
more, he gradually becomes their perfectly free and self-possessed
director. In the same way the child will accustom himself to do his
utmost _not to soil_ the gay and pretty things which enliven his
surroundings. Thus he makes progress in his own perfection, or, in
other words, it is thus he achieves the perfect coordination of his
voluntary movements. It is the same process by which, having enjoyed
silence and music, he will do all in his power to avoid discordant
noises, which have become unpleasant to his educated ear.

On the other hand, when a child comes into collision a hundred times
with an enormously heavy iron-bound desk, which a porter would have
difficulty in moving; when he makes thousands of invisible ink-stains
on a black bench; when he lets a metal plate fall to the ground a
hundred times without breaking it, he remains immersed in his sea of
defects without perceiving them; his environment meanwhile is so
constructed as to hide and therefore to encourage his errors, with
Mephistophelean hypocrisy.

    *    *    *    *    *

=Free movement=.--It is now a hygienic principle universally accepted
that children require movement. Thus, when we speak of "free
children," we generally imply that they are free to move, that is, to
run and jump. No mother nowadays fails to agree with the children's
doctor that her child should go into parks and meadows, and move about
freely in the open air.

When we talk of liberty for children in school, some such conception
of physical liberty as this rises at once in the mind. We imagine the
free child making perilous leaps over the desks, or dashing madly
against the walls; his "liberty of movement" seems necessarily to
imply the idea of "a wide space," and accordingly we suppose that, if
confined to the narrow limits of a room, it would inevitably become a
conflict between violence and obstacles, a disorder incompatible with
discipline and work.

But in the laws of "psychical hygiene," "liberty of movement" is not
limited to a conception so primitive as that of merely "animated
bodily liberty." We might, indeed, say of a puppy or a kitten what we
say of children: that they should be free to run and jump, and that
they should be able to do so, as in fact they often do, in a park or a
field, with and like the children. If, however, we wish to apply the
same conception of motor liberty to our treatment of a bird, we should
make certain arrangements for it; we should place within its reach the
branch of a tree, or crossed sticks which would afford foothold for
its claws, since these are not designed to be spread out on the
ground like the feet of creeping things, but are adapted to gripping a
stick. We know that a bird "left free to move" over a vast,
illimitable plain would be miserable.

How then is it that we never think thus: if it be necessary to prepare
different environments for a bird and a reptile in order to ensure
their liberty of movement, must it not be a mistake to provide the
same form of liberty for our children as that proper to cats and dogs?
Children, indeed, when left to themselves to take exercise, show
impatience, and are prone to quarrel and cry; older children feel it
necessary to invent something whereby they may conceal from themselves
the intolerable boredom and humiliation of walking for walking's sake,
and running for running's sake. They try to find some object for their
exertions; the younger children play pranks. The activity of children
thus left to themselves has rarely a good result; it does not aid
development, save as regards the physical advantage of general
nutrition, that is, of the vegetative life. Their movements become
ungraceful; they invent unseemly capers, walk with a staggering gait,
fall easily, and break things. They are evidently quite unlike the
free kitten, so full of grace, so fascinating in its movements,
tending to perfect its action by the light jumping and running which
are natural to it. In the motor instinct of the child there appears to
be no grace, no natural impulse towards perfection. Hence we must
conclude that the movement which suffices for the cat does not suffice
for the child, and that if the nature of the child is different, his
path of liberty must also be different.

If the child has no "intelligent aim" in his movements, he is without
internal guidance, thus movement tires him. Many men feel the
dreadful emptiness of being compelled to "move without an object." One
of the cruel punishments invented for the chastisement of slaves was
to make them dig deep holes in the earth and fill them up again
repeatedly, in other words, to make them work without an object.

Experiments on fatigue have shown that work with an intelligent object
is far less fatiguing than an equal quantity of aimless work. So much
so, that the psychiatrists of to-day recommend, not "exercise in the
open air," but "work in the open air," to restore the individuality of
the neurasthenic.

"Reconstructive" work--work, that is to say, which is not the product
of a "mental effort," but tends to the coordination of the
psycho-muscular organism. Such are the activities which are not
directed to the _production_ of objects, but to their _preservation_,
as, for instance, dusting or washing a little table, sweeping the
floor, laying or clearing the table, cleaning shoes, spreading out a
carpet. These are the tasks performed by a servant to _preserve_ the
objects belonging to his master, work of a very different order to
that of the artificer, who, on the other hand, _produced_ those
objects by an intelligent effort. The two classes of work are
profoundly different. The one is simple; it is a coordinated activity
scarcely higher in degree than the activity required for walking or
jumping; for it merely gives purpose to those simple movements,
whereas _productive_ work entails a preliminary intellectual work of
preparation, and comprises a series of very complicated motor
movements, together with an application of sensory exercises.

The first is the work suitable for little children, who must
"exercise themselves in order to learn to coordinate their movements."

It consists of the so-called exercises of practical life which
correspond to the psychical principle of "liberty of movement." For
this it will be sufficient to prepare "a suitable environment," just
as we should place the branch of a tree in an aviary, and then to
leave the children to follow their instincts of activity and
imitation. The surrounding objects should be proportioned to the size
and strength of the child: light furniture that he can carry about;
low dressers within reach of his arms; locks that he can easily
manipulate; chests that run on castors; light doors that he can open
and shut readily; clothes-pegs fixed on the walls at a height
convenient for him; brushes his little hand can grasp; pieces of soap
that can lie in the hollow of such a hand; basins so small that the
child is strong enough to empty them; brooms with short, smooth, light
handles; clothes he can easily put on and take off himself; these are
surroundings which invite activity, and among which the child will
gradually perfect his movements without fatigue, acquiring human grace
and dexterity, just as the little kitten acquires its graceful
movement and feline dexterity solely under the guidance of instinct.

The field thus opened to the free activity of the child will enable
him to exercise himself and to form himself as a man. It is not
movement for its own sake that he will derive from these exercises,
but a powerful co-efficient in the complex formation of his
personality. His social sentiments in the relations he forms with
other free and active children, his collaborators in a kind of
household designed to protect and aid their development; the sense of
dignity acquired by the child who learns to satisfy himself in
surroundings he himself preserves and dominates--these are the
co-efficients of humanity which accompany "liberty of movement." From
his consciousness of this development of his personality the child
derives the impulse to persist in these tasks, the industry to perform
them, the intelligent joy he shows in their completion. In such an
environment he undoubtedly _works himself_ and fortifies his spiritual
being, just as when his body is bathed in fresh air and his limbs move
freely in the meadows, he works at the growth of his physical organism
and strengthens it.

VI

ATTENTION

The phenomenon to be expected from the little child, when he is placed
in an environment favorable to his spiritual growth, is this: that
suddenly the child will fix his attention upon an object, will use it
for the purpose for which it was constructed, and will _continue_ to
repeat the same exercise indefinitely. One will repeat an exercise
twenty times, another forty times, and yet another two hundred times;
but this is the first phenomenon to be expected, as initiatory to
those acts with which spiritual growth is bound up.

That which moves the child to this manifestation of activity is
evidently a primitive internal impulse, almost a vague sense of
spiritual hunger; and it is the impulse to satisfy this hunger which
then actually directs the consciousness of the child to the determined
object and leads it gradually to a primordial, but complex and
repeated exercise of the intelligence in comparing, judging, deciding
upon an act, and correcting an error. When the child, occupied with
the solid insets, places and displaces the ten little cylinders in
their respective places thirty or forty times consecutively; and,
having made a mistake, sets himself a problem and solves it, he
becomes more and more interested, and tries the experiment again and
again; he prolongs a complex exercise of his psychical activities
which makes way for an internal development.

It is probably the internal perception of this development which
makes the exercise pleasing, and induces prolonged application to the
same task. To quench thirst, it is not sufficient to see or to sip
water; the thirsty man must drink his fill: that is to say, must take
in the quantity his organism requires; so, to satisfy this kind of
psychical hunger and thirst, it is not sufficient to see things
cursorily, much less "to hear them described"; it is necessary to
possess them and to use them to the full for the satisfaction of the
needs of the inner life.

This fact stands revealed as the basis of all psychical construction,
and the sole secret of education. The external object is the gymnasium
on which the spirit exercises itself, and such "internal" exercises
are primarily "in themselves" the end and aim of action. Hence the
solid insets are not intended to give the child a knowledge of
dimensions, nor are the plane insets designed to give him a conception
of forms; the purpose of these, as of all the other objects, is to
make the child exercise his activities. The fact that the child really
acquires by these means definite knowledge, the recollection of which
is vivid in proportion to the fixity and intensity of his attention,
is a necessary result; and, indeed, it is precisely the sensory
knowledge of dimensions, forms and colors, etc., thus acquired, which
makes the continuation of such internal exercises in fields
progressively vaster and higher, a possible achievement.

Hitherto, all psychologists have agreed that instability of attention
is the characteristic of little children of three or four years old;
attracted by everything they see, they pass from object to object,
unable to concentrate on any; and generally the difficulty of fixing
the attention of children is the stumbling-block of their education,
William James speaks of "that extreme mobility of the attention with
which we are all familiar in children, and which makes their first
lessons such rough affairs.... The reflex and passive character of the
attention ... which makes the child seem to belong less to himself
than to every object which happens to catch his notice, is the first
thing which the teacher must overcome.... The faculty of voluntarily
bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again is the very
root of judgment, character and will.... An education which should
improve this faculty would be _the_ education _par excellence_."

Thus man, acting by himself alone, never successfully arrests and
fixes that _inquiring_ attention which wanders from object to object.

In fact, in our experiment the attention of the little child was not
artificially maintained by a teacher; it was an object which fixed
that attention, as if it corresponded to some internal impulse; an
impulse which evidently was directed solely to the things "necessary"
for its development. In the same manner, those complex coordinated
movements achieved by a new-born infant in the act of sucking, are
limited to the first and unconscious need of nutrition; they are not a
conscious acquisition directed to a purpose.

Indeed, the conscious acquisition directed to a definite purpose would
be impossible in the movements of a new-born infant's mouth, as also
in the first movements of the child's spirit.

Therefore it is essential that the external stimulus which first
presents itself should be verily the breast and the milk of the
spirit, and then only shall we behold that surprising phenomenon of a
little face concentrated in an intensity of attention.

Behold a child of three years old capable of repeating the same
exercise fifty times in succession; many persons are moving about
beside him; some one is playing the piano; children are singing in
chorus; but nothing distracts the little child from his profound
concentration. Just so does the suckling keep hold of the mother's
breast, uninterrupted by external incidents, and desists only when he
is satisfied.

Only Nature accomplishes such miracles.

If, then, psychical manifestations have their root in Nature, it was
necessary, in order to understand and help Nature, to study it in its
initial periods, those which are the simplest, and the only ones
capable of revealing truths which would serve as guides for the
interpretation of later and more complex manifestations. This, indeed,
many psychologists have done; but, applying the analytical methods of
experimental psychology, they did not start from that point whence the
biological sciences derive their knowledge of life: that is, the
_liberty_ of the living creatures they desire to observe. If Fabre had
not made use of insects, while leaving them free to carry out their
natural manifestations, and observing them without allowing his
presence to interfere in any way with their functions; if he had
caught insects, had taken them into his study, and subjected them to
experiment, he would not have been able to reveal the marvels of
insect life.

If bacteriologists had not instituted, as a method of research, an
environment similar to that which is natural to microbes, both as
regards nutritive substances and conditions of temperature, etc., to
the end that they "might live freely" and thus manifest their
characteristics; if they had confined themselves to fixing the germs
of a disease under the microscope, the science which to-day saves the
lives of innumerable men and protects whole nations from epidemics
would not exist.

Freedom to live is the true basis for every method of observation
applied to living creatures.

_Liberty_ is the experimental condition for studying the phenomena of
the child's attention. It will be enough to remember that the stimuli
of infant attention, being mainly sensory, have a powerful
physiological concomitant of "accommodation" in the organs of sense;
an accommodation, physiologically incomplete in the young child, which
requires to develop itself according to Nature. An object not adapted
to become a useful stimulus to the powers of accommodation in process
of development would not only be incapable of sustaining attention as
a psychical fact, but would also, as a physiological fact, weary or
actually injure the organs of accommodation such as the eye and ear.
But the child who _chooses_ the objects, and perseveres in their use
with the utmost intensity of attention, as shown in the muscular
contractions which give mimetic expression to his face, evidently
experiences _pleasure_, and pleasure is an indication of healthy
functional activity; it always accompanies exercises which are useful
to the organs of the body.

Attention also requires a _preparation_ of the ideative centers in
relation to the external object for which it is to be demanded: in
other words, an internal, psychical "adaptation." The cerebral centers
should be excited in their turn by an internal process, when an
external stimulus acts. Thus, for instance, any one who is expecting a
person, sees him arriving from a considerable distance; not only
because the person presents himself to the senses, but because he was
"expected." The distant figure claimed attention because the cerebral
centers were already excited to that end. By means of similar
activities a hunter is conscious of the slightest sound made by game
in woods. In short, two forces act upon the cerebral cell, as upon a
closed door: the external sensory force which knocks, and the internal
force which says: Open. If the internal force does not open, it is in
vain that the external stimulus knocks at the door. And then the
strongest stimuli may pass unheeded. The absent-minded man may step
into a chasm. The man who is absorbed in a task may be deaf to a band
playing in the street.

The central action that constitutes attention is the factor of the
greatest psychological and philosophic value, and the one which has
always represented the maximum among the practical values in pedagogy.
The whole art of teachers has consisted, in substance, in preparing
the attention of the child to make it _expectant_ of their
instruction, and in securing the cooperation of those internal forces
which should "open the door" when they "knock." And as the thing which
is quite unknown, or that which is inaccessible to the understanding,
can awaken no interest, the fundamentals of the art of teaching were
to go gradually from the known to the unknown, from the easy to the
difficult. It is the preexistent "known" which excites expectation and
_opens the door_ to the novel "unknown"; and it is the already present
"easy work" which opens new ways for penetration, and puts the
attention into a state of expectation.

Thus, according to the conceptions of pedagogy, it should be possible
to "prepare good offices for oneself," the cooperation of the
psychical concomitants of the attention. Everything would depend on
skilful manipulation between the known and the unknown and similar
things: the clever teacher would be like the great military
strategist, who prepares the plan of a battle upon a table; and man
would be able to _direct man_, leading him wheresoever he pleases.

This, moreover, has long been the materialistic principle which
governs psychology. According to Herbert Spencer, the mind is at
first, as it were, an indifferent day, on which external impressions
"rain," leaving traces more or less profound. "Experiences" are,
according to him and the English empiricists, the constructive factors
of the mind even in its highest activities. Man is what experience has
made him; hence, in education, by preparing a suitable structure of
experiences, it is possible to _build up the man_. A conception not
less materialistic than that which presented itself for a moment
before the marvelous progress of organic chemistry, when the series of
syntheses succeeded that of analyses. It was then believed that a
species of albumen might be manufactured synthetically, and as albumen
is the organic basis of the cells, and as the human ovum is nothing
but a cell, man himself might one day be manufactured on the chemist's
table. The conception of man as the creator of man was quickly
discredited in the material domain; but the psychical _homunculus_
still persists among the practical conceptions of pedagogy.

No chemical synthesis could put into the cell, apparently nothing more
than a simple clot of nucleated protoplasm, that _activity sine
matter_, that potential vital force, that mysterious factor which
causes a cell to develop into man.

And the elusive attention of children would seem to tell us that the
psychical man is subject to analogous laws of auto-creation.

The most modern school of spiritualistic psychologists, to which
William James belonged, recognized, in the concomitant of attention, a
fact bound up with the nature of the subject, a "spiritual force," one
of the "mysterious factors of life."

     "... From whence his intellect
     Deduced its primal notices of thought,
     Man therefore knows not; or his appetites
     Their first affection; such In you as zeal
     In bees to gather honey."

     (Carey's translation, Dante's _Purgatorio_, Canto XVIII.)

There is in man a special attitude to external things, which forms
part of his nature, and determines its character. The internal
activities act as cause; they do not react and exist as the _effect_
of external factors. Our attention is not arrested by all things
indifferently, but by those which are congenial to our tastes. The
things which are useful to our inner life are those which arouse our
interest. Our internal world is created upon a selection from the
external world, acquired for and in harmony with our internal
activities. The painter will see a preponderance of colors in the
world, the musician will be attracted by sounds. It is the quality of
our attention which reveals ourselves, and we manifest ourselves
externally by our aptitudes; it is not our attention which creates us.
The individual character, the internal form, the difference between
one man and another, are also obvious among men who have lived in the
same environment, but who from that environment have taken only what
was necessary for each. The "experiences" with which each constructs
his _ego_ in relation to the external world do not form a _chaos_, but
are _directed_ by his intimate individual aptitudes.

If there were any doubt as to the natural force which directs
psychical formation, our experiences with little children would
furnish a decisive proof. No teacher could procure such phenomena of
attention by any artifices; they have evidently an internal origin.
The power of concentration shown by little children from three to four
years old have no counterpart save in the annals of genius. These
little ones seem to reproduce the infancy of men possessing an
extraordinary power of attention, such as Archimedes, who was slain
while bending over his circles, from which rumors of the taking of
Syracuse had failed to distract him; or Newton, who, absorbed in his
studies, forgot to eat; or Vittorio Alfieri, who, when writing a poem,
heard nothing of the noisy wedding procession which was passing with
shouts and clamor before his windows.

Now, these characteristics of the attention of genius could not be
evoked by an "interesting" teacher, however subtle his art; nor could
any accumulation of passive experiences become such an accumulator of
psychical energies.

If there be a spiritual force working within the child, by which he
may open the door of his attention, the problem which necessarily
presents itself is a problem of _liberty_, rather than a problem of
pedagogic art effecting the construction of his mind. The bestowal of
the nourishment suitable to psychical needs, by means of the external
objects, and readiness to respect liberty of development in the most
perfect manner possible, are the foundations which, from a logical
point of view, should be laid down for the construction of a new
pedagogy.

It is no longer a question of attempting to create the homunculus,
like the chemists of the nineteenth century; but rather of taking the
lantern of Diogenes and going in search of the man. A science should
establish _by means of experiments_ what is necessary to the
primordial psychical requirements of the child; and then we shall
witness the development of complex vital phenomena, in which the
intelligence, the will, and the character develop together, just as
the brain, the stomach, and the muscles of the rationally nourished
child develop together.

Together with the first psychical exercises, the first coordinated
cognitions will be fixed in the child's mind, and the _known_ will
begin to exist in him, providing the first germs of an intellectual
interest, supplementing his instinctive interest. When this takes
place, a state of things begins to establish itself which has some
analogy with that mechanism of attention which the pedagogists of
to-day take as the basis of the art of teaching. The transition from
the known to the unknown, from the simple to the complex, from the
easy to the difficult, is reproduced, from a certain point of view;
but with special characteristics.

The progression _from the known to the unknown_ does not proceed from
object to object, as would be assumed by the master who does not bring
about the development of ideas from a center, but merely unites them
in a chain, without any definite object, allowing the mind to wander
aimlessly, though bound to himself. Here, on the other hand, the known
establishes itself in the child as a _complex system_ of ideas, which
system was actively constructed by the child himself during a series
of psychical processes, representing in themselves an internal
_formation_, a psychical growth.

To bring about such a progress we must offer the child a systematic,
complex material, corresponding to his natural instincts. Thus, for
instance, by means of our sensory apparatus we offer the child a
series of objects capable of drawing his instinctive attention to
colors, forms, and sounds, to tactile and baric qualities, etc., and
the child, by means of the characteristically prolonged exercises with
each object, begins to organize his psychical personality, but at the
same time acquires a clear and orderly knowledge of things.

Thenceforth all external objects, for the reason that they have forms,
dimensions, colors, qualities of smoothness, weight, hardness, etc.,
are no longer foreign to the mind. There is something in the
consciousness of the child which prepares him to _expect_ these
things, and invites him to receive them with interest.

When the child has added a cognition to the primitive impulse which
directs his attention to external things, he has acquired other
relations with the world, other forms of interest; these are no longer
merely those primitive ones which are bound up with a species of
primordial instinct, but have become a discerning interest, based upon
the conquests of the intelligence.

It is true that all these new conquests are fundamentally and
profoundly based upon the _psychical needs_ of the individual; but the
intellectual element has now been added, transforming an impulse into
a conscious and voluntary quest.

The old pedagogic conception, which assumed that to call the attention
of the child to the unknown it is necessary to connect it with the
known, because it is thus that his interest may be won for the new
knowledge to be imparted, grasped but a single detail of the complex
phenomenon we now witness after our experiments.

If the _known_ is to represent a new source of interest directed
towards the unknown, it is essential that it should itself have been
acquired in accordance with the tendency of nature; then preceding
knowledge will lend interest to objects of ever-increasing complexity
and of lofty significance. The culture thus created ensures the
possibility of an indefinite _continuation_ in the successive
evolution of such formative phenomena.

Moreover, this culture itself creates _order_ in the mind: when the
teacher, giving her plain and simple lesson, says: This is long, this
is short, this is red, this is yellow, etc., she fixes with a single
word the clearly marked order of the sensations, classifies, and
"catalogues" them. And each impression is perfectly distinct from the
other, and has its own determined place in the mind, which may be
recalled by a word; thenceforth, new acquisitions will not be thrown
aside or mixed together chaotically, but will be duly deposited in
their proper places, side by side with previous acquisitions of the
same kind, like books in a well-arranged library.

Thus the mind not only has within itself the propulsive force required
to increase its knowledge, but also an established order, which will
be steadily maintained throughout its successive and illimitable
enrichment by new material; and as it grows and gains strength, it
retains its "equilibrium." These continual exercises in _comparison_,
_judgment_, and _choice_ carried out among the objects, further tend
to place the internal acquisitions so logically into relation one with
another, that the results are a singular _facility_ and _accuracy_ of
reasoning power, and a remarkable _quickness_ of comprehension: the
law of "the minimum of effort" is truly carried out as it is
everywhere where order and activity reign.

The internal coordination, like physiological adaptation, establishes
itself as a result of the spontaneity of the exercises; the free
development of a personality which grows and organizes itself is that
which determines such an internal condition, just as in the body of
the embryo the heart, in process of development, makes a place for
itself in the space of the diastinum between the lungs, and the
diaphragm assumes its arched form as a result of pulmonary dilation.

The teacher directs these phenomena; but, in so doing, she is careful
to avoid calling the child's attention to herself, since the whole
future depends upon his concentration. Her art consists in
understanding and in avoiding interference with natural phenomena.

That which has been clearly demonstrated as regards the nutrition of
the new-born infant and the first coordinated activities of the spirit
will be repeated at every period of life, with the necessary
modifications induced by the increased complexity of the phenomena.

Continuing the parallel with physical nutrition, let us consider the
growing infant which has cut its teeth, developed its gastric juice,
and so gradually requires a more complicated diet, until we come to
the adult man, nourishing himself by means of all the complications of
modern kitchen and table; to keep himself in health, he should eat
_only_ the things which correspond to the intimate needs of his
organism; and if he introduces over-rich or unusual, unsuitable or
poisonous substances, the result will be impoverishment,
self-poisoning, a "malady." Now it was the study of the child's
nutrition during the period of suckling and during the first years of
life which created alimentary hygiene, not only for the child but for
the adult, and pointed out the perils to which all were alike exposed
during the epoch when infantile hygiene was unknown.

There is a singular parallel in psychical life: the man will have an
infinitely more complex life than the child; but for him, too, there
should always be a correspondence between the needs of his nature and
the manner in which his spirit is nourished. A _rule_ of internal life
will always promote the health of the man.

Turning to attention, the primitive fact of correspondence between
nature and stimulus which is the fundamental of life should prevail,
however modified, when dealing with older children, and should remain
the basis of education.

I am prepared for the objections of "experts." Children must be
accustomed to pay attention to everything, even to things which are
distasteful to them, because practical life demands such efforts.

The objection is based on a prejudice analogous to that which at one
time made good fathers of families say: "Children should be accustomed
to eat everything." In just the same way, moral training is put
outside its rightful sphere--a fatal confusion. When ideas of this
order, now happily obsolete, obtained, fathers would allow their
children to fast all day, if they refused a dish they disliked at the
mid-day meal, forbidding them anything but the rejected portion, which
became ever colder and more disgusting, until at last hunger weakened
the child's will and destroyed his caprice, and the plateful of cold
food was swallowed. Thus, argued such a father, in the various
circumstances in which he may be placed throughout his life, my son
will be ready to eat whatever comes to hand, and will not be greedy
and capricious. In those days also, sweets were forbidden to children
(whose organisms require sugar, because the muscles consume a great
deal of this during growth), in order to teach them to overcome
greediness, and an easy and convenient method of correcting naughty
children was to "send them to bed without any supper."

Very similar methods are now adopted by those who insist that children
should pay attention to things they dislike, in order to accustom them
to the necessities of life. But as in the case of psychical
nourishment hunger is never brought to bear upon the "cold and
distasteful viands," the indigestible and heavy food weakens and
poisons the unwilling recipient.

Not thus shall we prepare the robust spirit, ready for all the
difficult eventualities of life. The boy who swallowed the cold soup
and went fasting to bed was the one whose body developed badly, who
was too weak to resist infection when he encountered it, and fell ill;
and morally it was he who, having a store of unsatisfied appetites
within him, looked upon it as the greatest joy of his liberty, when he
became an adult, to eat and drink to excess. How unlike was he to the
boy of to-day, who, rationally fed and made robust of body, becomes
the _abstemious_ man, who eats to live in health, and combats
alcoholism and excessive and injurious feeding; the modern man, who
can defend himself by so many means against infectious diseases, and
who is so ready for effort that, without any compulsion, he braves the
arduous exertion of sport, and attempts and carries out great
enterprises, such as the discovery of the Poles and the ascent of
lofty mountains.

So, too, the man capable of braving the icy wastes of moral conflict,
of undertaking spiritual ascents, will be he whose will is strong,
whose spirit is well balanced, whose decisions are prompt and
stedfast.

And the more a man's inner life shall have grown _normally_,
organizing itself in accordance with the provident laws of nature, and
forming an individuality, the more richly will he be endowed with a
strong will and a well-balanced mind. To be ready for a struggle, it
is not necessary to have struggled from one's birth, but it is
necessary to be strong. He who is strong is ready; no hero was a hero
before he had performed his heroic deed. The trials life has in store
for us are unforeseen, unexpected; no one can prepare us directly to
meet them; it is only a vigorous soul that can be prepared for
everything.

When a living being is in process of evolution, it is essential to
provide for the special requirements of the moment, in order to ensure
its normal development. The foetus must be nourished with blood; the
new-born infant with milk. If during its intra-uterine life the
foetus should lack blood rich in albuminous substances and oxygen,
or if poisonous substances should be introduced into its tissues, the
living being will not develop normally, and no after-care will
strengthen the man evolved from this impoverished source. Should the
infant lack sufficient milk, the mal-nutrition of the initial stage of
life condemns him to a permanent state of inferiority. The suckling
"prepares himself to walk" by lying stretched out, and spending long,
quiet hours in sleep. It is by sucking that the babe begins his
teething. So, too, the fledgling in the nest does not prepare for
flight by flying, but remains motionless in the little warm shell
where its food is provided. The preparations for life are indirect.

The prelude to such phenomena of Nature as the majestic flight of
birds, the ferocity of wild beasts, the song of the nightingale, the
variegated beauty of the butterfly's wings, is the preparation in the
secret places of a nest or a den, or in the motionless intimacy of the
cocoon. Omnipotent Nature asks only peace for the creature in process
of formation. All the rest she gives herself.

Then the childish spirit should also find a warm nest where its
nutrition is secure, and after this we should await the revelations of
its development.

It is essential, therefore, to offer objects which correspond to its
formative tendencies, in order to obtain the result which education
makes its goal: the development of the latent forces in man with the
minimum of strain and all possible fulness.

VII

WILL

When the child chooses from among a considerable number of objects the
one he prefers, when he moves to go and take it from the sideboard,
and then replaces it, or consents to give it up to a companion; when
he waits until one of the pieces of the apparatus he wishes to use is
laid aside by the child who has it in his hand at the moment; when he
persists for a long time and with earnest attention in the same
exercise, correcting the mistakes which the didactic material reveals
to him; when, in the silence-exercise, he retains all his impulses,
all his movements, and then, rising when his name is called, controls
these movements carefully to avoid making a noise with his feet or
knocking against the furniture, he performs so many acts of the
"will." It may be said that in him the exercise of the will is
continuous; nay, that the factor which really acts and persists among
his aptitudes is the will, which is built up on the internal
fundamental fact of a prolonged attention.

Let us analyze some of the co-efficients of will.

The whole external expression of the will is contained in _movement_:
whatever action man performs, whether he walks, works, speaks or
writes, opens his eyes to look, or closes them to shut out a scene, he
acts by "motion." An act of the will may also be directed to the
restriction of movement: to restrain the disorderly movements of
anger; not to give way to the impulse which urges us to snatch a
desirable object from the hand of another, are voluntary actions.
Therefore the will is not a simple impulse towards movement, but the
intelligent direction of movements.

There can be no manifestation of the will without completed action; he
who thinks of performing a good action, but leaves it undone; he who
desires to atone for an offense, but takes no step to do so; he who
proposes to go out, to pay a call, or to write a letter, but goes no
farther in the matter, does not accomplish an exercise of the will. To
think and to wish is not enough. It is action which counts. "The way
to Hell is paved with good intentions."

The life of volition is the life of action. Now all our actions
represent a resultant of the forces of impulse and inhibition, and by
constant repetition of actions this resultant may become almost
habitual and unconscious. Such is the case, for instance, with regard
to all those customary actions, the sum of which constitute "the
behavior of a well-bred person." Our impulse might be to pay a certain
visit, but we know that we might disturb our friend, that it is not
her day for receiving, and we refrain; we may be comfortably seated in
a corner of the drawing-room, but a venerable person enters, and we
rise to our feet; we are not much attracted by this lady, but
nevertheless we also bow or shake her hand; the sweetmeat to which our
neighbor helps herself is just the one we desired, but we are careful
to give no sign of this. All the movements of our body are not merely
those dictated by impulse or weariness; they are the correct
expression of what we consider decorous. Without impulses we could
take no part in social life; on the other hand, without inhibitions we
could not correct, direct, and utilize our impulses.

This reciprocal equilibrium between opposite motor forces is the
result of prolonged exercises, of _ancient habits_ within us; we no
longer have any sense of effort in performing these, we no longer
require the support of reason and knowledge to accomplish them; these
acts have almost become reflex. And yet the acts in question are by no
means reflex actions; it is not Nature but habit which produces all
this. We know well how the person who has not been brought up to
observe certain rules, but has been hastily instructed in the
knowledge of them, will too often be guilty of blunders and lapses,
because he is obliged to "perform" there and then all the necessary
coordination of voluntary acts, and there and then direct them under
the vigilant and immediate control of the consciousness; and such a
perpetual effort cannot certainly compete with the "habit" of
distinguished manners. The will stores up its prolonged efforts
outside the consciousness, or at its extreme margin, and leaves the
consciousness itself unencumbered to make new acquisitions and further
efforts. Thus we cease to consider as _evidences of will_ those habits
in which we nevertheless see the consciousness, as it were, hanging
over and watchful of each act, that it may accord with the perfect
rule of an external code of manners. An educated man who acts thus is
merely a man _in himself_, merely a man of "healthy mind."

It is, in fact, only disease which can disintegrate the personality
organized upon its adaptations, and induce a man of society to cease
to act in a becoming manner; it is well known that a neurasthenic
subject who begins to show the first symptoms of paranoia, may at
first seem to be merely one who fails in good breeding.

But he, on the other hand, who remains within the limits of good
breeding, is nothing more than a _normal man_. We will not venture to
call him "a man of will"; the consciousness of such a man is always
being put to the test, and the mechanisms stored up in the margin of
consciousness no longer possess a "volitive value."

But the child is making his first trial of arms, and his personality
is a very different thing from that just described. In comparison with
the adult, he is an unbalanced creature, almost invariably the prey of
his own impulses and sometimes subject to the most obstinate
inhibitions. The two opposite activities of the will have not yet
combined to form the new personality. The psychical embryo has still
the two elements separate. The great essential is that this
"combination," this "adaptation," should take place and establish
itself as a supporting girdle at the margin of consciousness. Hence it
is necessary to induce active exercise as soon as possible, since this
is essential to such a degree of development. The aim in view is not
to make the child a little precocious "gentleman," but to induce him
to exercise his powers of volition, and to bring about as soon as
possible the reciprocal contact of impulses with inhibitions. It is
this "construction" itself which is necessary, not the result which
may be achieved externally by means of this construction.

It is, in fact, merely a means to an end: and the end is that the
child should act together with other children, and practise the
gymnastics of the will in the daily habits of life. The child who is
absorbed in some task, inhibits all movements which do not conduce to
the accomplishment of this work; he makes a selection among the
muscular coordinations of which he is capable, persists in them, and
thus begins to make such coordinations permanent. This is a very
different matter to the disorderly movements of a child giving way to
uncoordinated impulses. When he begins to respect the work of others;
when he waits patiently for the object he desires instead of snatching
it from the hand of another; when he can walk about without knocking
against his companions, without stamping on their feet, without
overturning the table--then he is organizing his powers of volition,
and bringing impulses and inhibitions into equilibrium. Such an
attitude prepares the way for the habits of social life. It would be
impossible to bring about such a result by keeping children
motionless, seated side by side; under such conditions "relations
between children" cannot be established, and infantile social life
does not develop.

It is by means of free intercourse, of real practise which obliges
each one to adapt his own limits to the limits of others, that social
"habits" may be established. Dissertations on what ought to be done
will never bring about the construction of the will; to make a child
acquire graceful movements, it will not suffice to inculcate "ideas of
politeness" and of "rights and duties." If this were so, it would
suffice to give a minute description of the movements of the hand
necessary in playing the piano, to enable an attentive pupil to
execute a sonata by Beethoven. In all such matters the "formation" is
the essential factor; the powers of will are established by exercise.

In education, it is of very great value to organize all the mechanism
useful in the production of personality at an early stage. Just as
_movement_, the _gymnastics_ of children, is necessary, because, as is
well known, muscles which are not exercised become incapable of
performing the variety of movements of which the muscular system is
capable, so an analogous system of gymnastics is necessary to maintain
the activity of the psychical life.

The uneducated organism may be easily directed towards subsequent
deficiencies; he who is weak of muscle is inclined to remain
motionless, and so to perish, when an action is necessary to overcome
danger. Thus the child who is weak of will, who is "hypobulic" or
"abulic," will readily adapt himself to a school where all the
children are kept seated and motionless, listening, or pretending to
listen. Many children of this kind, however, end in the hospital for
nervous disorders and have the following notes on their school
reports: "Conduct excellent; no progress in studies." Of such children
some teachers confine themselves to such a remark as: "They are so
good," and by this they tend to protect them from any intervention,
and leave them to sink undisturbed into the weakness which threatens
to engulf them like a quicksand. Other children, whose natural
impulses are strong, are noted merely as creators of disorder, and are
set down as "naughty." If we enquire into the nature of their
naughtiness, we shall be told almost invariably that "they will never
keep still." These turbulent spirits are further stigmatized as
"aggressive to their companions," and their aggressions are nearly
always of this kind: they try by every possible means to rouse their
companions from their quiescence, and draw them into an association.
There are also children in whom the inhibitory powers are dominant;
their timidity is extreme: they sometimes seem as if they cannot make
up their minds to answer a question; they will do so after some
external stimulus, but in a very low voice, and will then burst into
tears.

The necessary gymnastic in all these three cases is free action. The
constant and interesting movement of others is the best of incitements
to the abulic; motion directed into the channel of orderly exercise
develops the inhibitory powers of the too impulsive child, and the
child who is too much in subjection to his inhibitory powers, when
liberated from the bondage of surveillance, and free to act privately
on his own initiative--in other words, when he is removed from all
external inducements to exercise inhibition, is able to find an
equilibrium between the two opposite volitional forces. This is indeed
the way of salvation for all men: that wherein the weak gain strength
that wherein the strong attain perfection.

The want of balance as between impulse and inhibition is not only a
familiar and interesting fact in pathology; it is further met with,
though in a minor degree, among _normal_ persons, just as frequently
as deficiencies of education are to be met with in the external social
sphere.

Impulse leads criminals to commit evil actions against other men; but
how often normal persons have to regret thoughtless acts and nervous
outbursts which have sad consequences to themselves! For the most part
the normal impulsive person harms himself only, compromises his
career, and is unable to bring his talents to fruition; he suffers
from a conscious servitude, as from a misfortune from which he might
perhaps have been saved.

He who is pathologically the victim of his own powers of inhibition is
certainly the more unhappy sufferer; he remains immobile and silent;
but internally he longs to move. A thousand impulses which can find no
outlet torture the soul which aspires to art, to work; and eloquent
speech on his own misfortunes would fain flow from his lips to implore
help from a physician, or comfort from some lofty soul; but his lips
are sealed. He feels the horrible oppression of one buried alive. But
how many normal persons suffer from something of the same kind! On
some propitious occasion in their lives they ought to have come
forward and shown their worth, but they were unable to do so. A
thousand times they have thought that a sincere expression of feeling
might have straightened out a difficult situation; but the heart has
closed and the lips have remained mute. How passionately they have
longed to speak to some noble soul who would have understood them,
illuminated and comforted them! But when they have been face to face
with this person, they have been unable to speak a word. The
longed-for individual encouraged them, questioned them, urged them to
express themselves, but the sole response to the invitation was an
internal anguish. Speak! Speak! said impulse in the depths of their
consciousness; but inhibition was inexorable as a resistless material
force.

It is in the education of the will by means of free exercises wherein
the impulses balance the inhibitions that the cure of such subjects
might be found, provided such a cure could be undertaken at the age
when the will is in process of formation.

    *    *    *    *    *

Such an equilibrium established as a mechanism at the margin of
consciousness, which makes a man of the world "correct" in his
conduct, is by no means that which constitutes the "person of will."
It has been said above that the consciousness remains free for other
voluntary requirements. The most refined and aristocratic lady might
nevertheless be a person "without will" and "without character,"
although she might have acquired the most rigorous mechanisms
productive of a mechanical will directed solely to external objects.

There is a voluntary fundamental quality upon which not only are the
superficial relations between man and man based, but on which the very
edifice of society is erected. This quality is known as "continuity."
The social structure is founded upon the fact that men can work
steadily and produce within certain average limits on which the
economic equilibrium of a people is constructed. The social relations
which are the basis of the reproduction of the species are founded
upon the continuous union of parents in marriage. The family and
productive work: these are the two pivots of society; they rest upon
the greatest volitive quality: constancy, or persistence.

This quality is really the exponent of the uninterrupted concord of
the inner personality. Without it, a life would be a series of
episodes, a chaos; it would be like a body disintegrated into its
cells, rather than an organism which persists throughout the mutations
of its own material. This fundamental quality, when it embraces the
sentiment of the individual and the direction of his ideation, that is
to say, his whole personality, is what we have called _character_. The
man of character is the persistent man, the man who is faithful to his
own word, his own convictions, his own affections.

Now the sum of these various manifestations of constancy has an
exponent of immense social value: persistence in work.

The degenerate, even before he gave way to criminal impulse, before he
betrayed the inconstancy of his affections, before he broke his word,
before he made havoc of all the convictions that ennoble the soul of
man, had a certain stigma which marked him as one lost and
disintegrated: this was laziness, incapacity to persist in work.
Directly an honest and well-behaved man begins to suffer from
brain-disease, before he shows any violent impulses, disorder in
conduct, or signs of delirium, he has a premonitory symptom: he can no
longer apply himself to work. Among the masses, it is justly thought
that a girl will make a good wife when she is industrious, and a man
is said to be an honest fellow and one who can offer good prospects to
the girl who is to be his wife, when he is a good workman. This
_goodness_ is not a matter of ability; it implies steadiness,
perseverance. For instance, a pseudo-artist of great skill in
producing small artistic objects, but lacking the will to work, would
not be considered a good match. Every one knows that he is not only
incapable of economic production, but that he is a suspicious and
dangerous character, that he might become a bad husband, a bad father,
a bad citizen. On the other hand, the humblest artisan who "works"
undoubtedly contains within himself all the elements which make for
happiness and security in life. This unquestionably was the meaning of
the great Roman encomium: "She stayed indoors and spun the wool," that
is to say, she was a woman of character, a worthy companion for the
conquerors of the world.

Now the little child who manifests perseverance in his work as the
first constructive act of his psychical life, and upon this act builds
up internal order, equilibrium, and the growth of personality,
demonstrates, almost as in a splendid revelation, the true manner in
which man renders himself valuable to the community. The little child
who persists in his exercises, concentrated and absorbed, is obviously
elaborating the constant man, the man of character, the man who will
find in himself all human values, crowning that unique fundamental
manifestation: persistence in work. Whatever task the child may
choose it will be all the same, provided he persists in it. For what
is valuable is not the work itself, but the work as a means for the
construction of the psychic man.

He who interrupts the children in their occupations in order to make
them learn some pre-determined thing; he who makes them cease the
study of arithmetic to pass on to that of geography and the like,
thinking it is important to direct their culture, confuses the means
with the end and destroys the man for a vanity. That which it is
necessary to direct is not the culture of man, but the man himself.

    *    *    *    *    *

If persistence be the true foundation of the will, we nevertheless
recognize _decision_ as the act of the will _par excellence_. In order
to accomplish any conscious act whatever, it is necessary that we
should decide. Now a _decision_ is always the result of a _choice_. If
we have several hats, we must decide which one we will put on when we
go out; it may not in the least matter whether it be the brown hat or
the gray, but we must choose one of them. For such a choice we must
have our motives, whether they be in favor of the gray or the brown;
but finally one of the motives will prevail and the choice will be
made. Obviously, the habit of taking a hat and going out will
facilitate our choice; we are almost unconscious which of the motives
stirred and struggled within us. It is the question of a minute and
leaves no impression of effort. Our knowledge as to which hat will be
suitable for the morning or the afternoon, for the theater or for
sport, saves us from any mental conflict.

But this will not be the case if, for instance, we are about to spend
a certain sum of money on a present. What shall we buy among the
various objects from which it will be possible to choose? If we have
no very definite knowledge of the things, our task may become an
anxiety. We should like to choose something artistic, but we do not
know much about art, and we fear to be deceived and so to cut a sorry
figure; we know not what is customary and have no idea whether a piece
of lace or a silver bowl would be suitable. We then feel the need of
some one to enlighten us as to all these unknown details, and we go to
ask advice. It does not, however, follow that we shall take the advice
we receive. To tell the truth, the advice was to deal with our
ignorance; we required an aid to knowledge rather than an incitement
to an effort of the will. Volition is something which we jealously
reserve for ourselves, and is a very different matter from the
knowledge indispensable to a decision. The choice which we make after
the advice of one or more persons will bear our own impress, it will
be the decision of our _ego_.

The choice which the mistress of a house will make to prepare a dinner
for guests is of the same nature; but there she has a perfect
knowledge of the subject, and good taste, and the decision will be
made with pleasure and without any extraneous aid.

But who does not know that in every case this making a decision is an
_internal labor_, a genuine effort; so much so that persons of feeble
will try to avoid it, as a thing irksome to them. If possible, the
mistress of the house will leave the decisions to the cook, and to a
dressmaker all the arguments necessary to make one of the many motives
that come into play in the choice of a gown prevail over the rest; the
dressmaker, seeing that a decision will only be reached after long
hesitation, will say at a certain moment: Choose this which suits you
so well, and the lady will agree, more to evade the effort of a
decision than because the garment pleases her. Our entire life is a
continual exercise of decisions. When we go out of the house after
having locked the door, we have a clear consciousness of this act, a
certainty that the house is well protected, and we _decide_ to step
out and walk away from it.

The stronger we are in such exercises, the more independent we shall
be of others. Clarity of ideas, the mechanism of the habit of
decision, give us a sense of liberty. The heaviest chain, which may
bind us in a humiliating form of slavery, is an incapacity to make our
own decisions, and the consequent need to refer to others; the fear of
making "a mistake," the sense of groping in the dark, of having to
bear the consequences of an error we are not certain to recognize,
makes us run behind another person like a dog on a chain. Finally, we
shall fall into an extremity of dependence; we shall no longer be able
to despatch a letter or buy a pocket-handkerchief without asking
advice.

But when an actual conflict arises in such a consciousness, and the
decision has to be instantaneous, irresolution is the portion of one
whose weakness has placed him in subjection to another stronger will,
and then we behold a subjection which has almost imperceptibly become
an incubus: the victim has taken the first step towards an abyss where
the feeble in will run the risk of perdition. Thus the more the young
are placed in subjection, without power to exercise their own wills,
the more easily do they fall a prey to the perils of which the world
is full.

That which gives strength to resist is not the _moral vision_, it is
the _exercise of will-power_; and this exercise is to be found in the
routine of life itself. The mother of a family, much occupied in her
mission of domestic work, and accustomed to decide in all matters
pertaining to the daily round, is more likely to gain the victory in
the event of moral conflict than a childless woman who lives in an
enervating atmosphere of domestic idleness, and has accustomed herself
to accept her husband's will as her own. Yet both of these women might
have the same moral vision. The first-mentioned, if left a widow,
might make herself conversant with business and carry on the
undertaking managed by her husband; but the second in like
circumstances would require tutelage, and would run every risk of
disaster. To ensure moral salvation, it is primarily necessary to
_depend_ on oneself, because in the moment of peril we are _alone_.
And strength is not to be acquired instantaneously. He who knows that
he will have to fight, prepares himself for boxing and dueling by
strength and skill; he does not sit still with folded hands, because
he knows that he will then either be lost or he will have to depend,
like the shadow of a body, on some one to protect him step by step
throughout his life, which in practise is impossible.

     One single moment served to conquer us,

says Francesca, in Dante's _Inferno_.

Temptation, if it is not to conquer, must not fall like a bomb against
another bomb of instantaneous moral explosions, but against the strong
walls of an impregnable fortress strongly built up, stone by stone,
beginning at that distant day when the foundations were first laid.
Persistent work, clarity of ideas, the habit of sifting conflicting
motives in the consciousness, even in the minutest actions of life,
decisions taken every moment on the smallest things, the gradual
master over one's actions, the power of self-direction increasing by
degrees in the sum of successively repeated acts, these are the stout
little stones on which the strong structure of personality is built
up. This may then be inhabited by morality, as by a princess who lives
among the embattled towers and moats of a medieval fortress that is in
a perpetual state of defense, always under arms, but with every
probability of remaining the "lady," the "_châtelaine_." If to "build
up the house" which morality will inhabit, some mastery of the body is
also necessary, such as abstinence from alcohol, which is the chief
example of poison taken from without and tending to weaken, and
movement in the open air, which facilitates material recuperation by
freeing us from the poisons which we ourselves manufacture and which
weaken us, how much more essential must be the continual exercise of
the will as a vivifying means of psychical recuperation?

Our little children are constructing their own wills when, by a
process of self-education, they put in motion complex internal
activities of comparison and judgment, and in this wise make their
intellectual acquisitions with order and clarity; this is a kind of
"knowledge" capable of preparing children to form their own decisions,
and one which makes them independent of the suggestions of others;
they can then _decide_ in every act of their daily life; they decide
to take or not to take; they decide to accompany the rhythm of a song
with movement; they decide to check every motor impulse when they
desire silence. The _constant work_ which builds up their personality
is all set in motion by _decisions_; and this takes the place of the
primitive state of _chaos_, in which, on the other hand, _actions_
were the outcome of _impulses_. A voluntary life develops gradually
within them; and doubt and timidity disappear, together with the
darkness of the primitive mental confusion.

Such a development of the will would be impossible if, instead of
allowing order and clarity to mature in the mind, we should seek to
encumber it with chaotic ideas, or with stores of lessons learnt by
heart, and then prevent children from making decisions by deciding
everything for them. Teachers who adopt these methods are justified in
saying that "a child ought not to have a will of his own," and in
teaching him that "there is no such plant as 'I will.'" Indeed, they
prevent the infantine will from developing. Under such conditions
children are conscious of a power which inhibits all their actions;
they become timid, and have no courage to undertake anything without
the help and consent of the person on whom they depend entirely. "What
color are these cherries?" a lady once asked a child, who knew quite
well that they were red. But the timid, nervous child, doubtful as to
whether it would be right or wrong to answer, murmured: "I will ask my
teacher."

The volitive mechanism which prepares for decision is one of the most
important mechanisms of the will; it is valuable in itself, and should
be established and strengthened in itself. Pathology illustrates it
for us apart from the other factor of the will, and thus places it
before our eyes as a pillar of the great vault which supports the
human personality. The so-called "mania of doubt" is one of the most
frequent phases in the degenerative forms of psychopathy, and
sometimes precedes certain obsessions, which urge the sufferer on
irresistibly to the commission of immoral or harmful acts. But there
may also be a mania of doubt simple and genuine, which is confined to
the impossibility of taking a decision, and which produces a serious
state of distress, though it induces no moral lapses, and may even
arise from a moral scruple. In a hospital for nervous disorders I once
encountered a characteristic case of the "mania of doubt" which had a
moral basis. The patient was a man whose business it was to go round
to houses collecting refuse; he was seized with misgivings lest some
useful object should have accidentally fallen into the rubbish-baskets,
and that he would be suspected of appropriating it. Hereupon the
unhappy man, just when he was about to go off with his load, climbed
all the stairs again, and knocked again at all the doors, asking
whether something valuable might not perhaps have chanced to be in the
baskets. Going away after assurances to the contrary, he would return
and knock again, and so on. In vain he applied to the doctor for some
means of strengthening his will. We told him repeatedly that there was
nothing of any value in the baskets, that he might be quite easy on
this point, and carry on his business without any preoccupations. Then
a gleam of hope shone in his eyes. "I may be quite easy!" he repeated,
going away. In a minute he was back again. "Then I may really be
easy?" In vain we reassured him. "Yes, indeed, quite easy." His wife
led him away, but from the window we saw the man stop at a certain
point in the street, struggle with her, and come back in great
agitation. Once more he appeared at the door to ask: "I may be quite
easy then?"

But how often normal persons harbor in their minds the germs of such a
mania! Here, for instance, is a person who is going out; he locks the
door and shakes it; but when he has gone a few steps he is assailed by
doubt: did he fasten the door? He knows that he did, he perfectly
remembers having shaken it, but an irresistible impulse makes him go
back to see if the door is really fastened. There are children who,
before getting into bed at night, always look under it to see if there
are any animals there--cats, for instance; they see there are none,
and quite understand there are none. Nevertheless, after a while they
get out again "to see if there is anything." These germs are carried
about enclosed like tubercular bacilli in some tiny lymphatic gland;
the whole organism is weak. But the mischief is hidden and causes no
uneasiness, just as the pallor of the face may be concealed for a time
by rouge.

If we consider that the will must manifest itself in actions which the
body must carry out effectively, we shall understand that a formative
exercise is necessary to develop it by means of its mechanisms.

There is a perfect parallel between the formation of the will and the
coordination of movement of its physiological structure, the striated
muscles. It is evident that exercise is necessary to establish
precision in our movements. We know that we cannot learn to dance
without preliminary exercises, that we cannot play the piano without
practising the movements of the hand; but prior to this, the
fundamental coordination of movements, that is to say, ambulation and
prehension, must have already been established from infancy. It is not
yet so evident to us that similar gradual preparations are necessary
to develop the will.

In the purely physiological functions of the muscular apparatus, our
voluntary muscles do not all act in the same manner, but rather in two
opposite senses; some, for instance, serve to thrust the arm out from
the body, others to draw it near; some serve to bend, others to
straighten the knee; they are, that is to say, "antagonistic" in their
action. Every movement of the body is the result of a combination
between antagonistic muscles, in which now one, now the other prevails
in a kind of collaboration by which the greatest diversity of
movements is made possible to us: movements energetic, graceful,
elegant. It is thus we are enabled to establish not only a noble
attitude of the body, but a delightful motor correspondence with
musical rhythm.

To bring about this intimate combination between antagonistic forces,
all that is necessary is exercise in movement. True, we can _educate_
movement; but this only after the natural coordination has already
taken place; then we can "provoke" special movements as in sporting
games, dances, etc., which movements must, however, be repeatedly
executed by the performer himself in order to produce in him the
possibility of new combinations of movement. Not only in the case of
movements of grace and agility, but also in those of strength, it is
necessary that the performer himself should act repeatedly. The will
certainly comes into play here: the performer wishes to devote himself
to sport, or to dancing, or to the arts of self-defense, to compete in
matches, etc.... but in order to _will_ this it is necessary that he
should have practised continually, thus making ready the apparatus on
which the volitive act will finally depend, and to which it will issue
its commands. Movement is always voluntary, both when the first
movements established by "muscular coordination" take place, and when
exercises designed to produce fresh combinations of movements (skill)
follow each other--as, in short, when the will acts like a commander
whose orders are carried out by a well organized, disciplined, and
highly skilled army. Voluntary action, in respect of its "powers,"
increases in degree as its dependent muscles perfect themselves and so
achieve the necessary conditions for seconding its efforts.

It would certainly never occur to any one that in order to educate the
voluntary motility of a child, it would be well first of all to keep
it absolutely motionless, covering its limbs with cement (I will not
say fracturing them!) until the muscles become atrophied and almost
paralyzed; and then, when this result had been attained, that it would
suffice to read to the child wonderful stories of clowns, acrobats and
champion boxers and wrestlers, to fire him by such examples, and to
inspire in him an ardent desire to emulate them. It is obvious that
such a proceeding would be an inconceivable absurdity.

And yet we do something of the same kind when, in order to educate the
child's "will," we first of all attempt to annihilate it, or, as we
say, "break" it, and thus hamper the development of every factor of
the will, substituting ourselves for the child in everything. It is by
_our_ will that we keep him motionless, or make him act; it is we who
choose and decide for him. And after all this we are content to teach
him that "to will is to do" (_volere è potere_). And we present to his
fancy, in the guise of fabulous tales, stories of heroic men, giants
of will, under the illusion that by committing their deeds to memory a
vigorous feeling of emulation will be aroused and will complete the
miracle.

When I was a child, attending the first classes of the elementary
schools, there was a kind teacher who was very fond of us. Of course,
she kept us captive and motionless on our seats, and talked
incessantly herself, though she looked pale and exhausted. Her fixed
idea was to make us learn by heart the lives of famous women, and
more especially "heroines," in order to incite us to imitate them; she
made us study an immense number of biographies; in order to
demonstrate to us all the possibilities of becoming illustrious and
also to convince us that it was not beyond our powers to be heroines,
since these were so numerous. The exhortation which accompanied these
narratives was always the same: "You, too, should try to become
famous; would not you, too, like to be famous?" "Oh, no!" I answered
one day, drily; "I shall never do so. I care too much for the children
of the future to add yet another biography to the list."

    *    *    *    *    *

The unanimous reports of the educationists from all parts of the world
who attended the last pedagogic and psychological international
congresses lamented the "lack of character" in the young as
constituting a great danger to the race. But it is not that character
is lacking in the race; it is that school distorts the body and
weakens the spirit. All that is needed is an act of liberation; and
the latent forces of man will then develop.

The manner in which we are to make use of our strong will is a higher
question, which, however, can rest only upon one basis: that the will
exists--that is, has been developed, and has become strong. One of the
examples usually given to our children, to teach them to admire
strength of will, is that of Vittorio Alfieri, who began to educate
himself late in life, overcoming the drudgery of the rudiments by a
great effort. He, who had hitherto been a man of the world, set to
work to study the Latin grammar, and persevered until he became a man
of letters, and, in virtue of his ardent genius, one of our greatest
poets. The phrase by which he explained his transformation is just the
phrase every child in Italy has heard quoted by his teachers: "I
willed, perpetually I willed, with all my strength I willed."

Now, before he made the great "decision," Vittorio Alfieri was the
victim of a capricious society lady whom he loved. Alfieri felt that
he was ruining himself by remaining the slave of his passion; an
internal impulse urged him to raise himself; he felt the great man
latent within him, full of powers not yet developed, but potential and
expansive; he would fain have turned them to account, responded to
their inner call, and dedicated himself to them; but then a scented
note from the lady would summon him to join her in her box at the
play, and the evening would be wasted. The power this lady exercised
over him overcame his own will, which would gladly have resisted.
Nevertheless, the rage and weariness he endured as he sat through the
silly performances at the theater caused him such acute suffering that
at last he felt that he hated the fascinating lady.

His determination took a material form: he resolved to create an
_insurmountable_ obstacle between himself and her; he accordingly cut
off the thick plait of hair which adorned his head, the badge of
gentle birth, without which he would have been ashamed to leave the
house; then he had himself bound with ropes to his armchair, where he
spent several days in such agitation that he was unable even to read a
line; it was only the material impossibility of moving, and the
thought of cutting a ridiculous figure, which kept him there, in spite
of the impulse to hasten to the beloved one.

It was thus that he "willed, willed perpetually, with all his
strength," and so left the man within him free to expand; it was thus
he saved himself from futility and perdition and worked for his own
immortality.

And it is something of the same sort that we desire to bring about in
our children by the education of the will; we wish them to learn to
save themselves from the vanities that destroy man, and concentrate on
work which causes the inner life to expand, and leads to great
undertakings; we wish them to work for their own immortality.

This loving and anxious desire inclines us to draw them along shielded
by us. But is there not within the child himself a power which enables
him to save himself? The child loves us with all his heart and follows
us with all the devotion of which his little soul is capable;
nevertheless he has something within himself which governs his inner
life: it is the force of his own expansion. It is this force, for
instance, which leads him to touch things in order to become
acquainted with them, and we say to him, "Do not touch"; he moves
about to establish his equilibrium, and we tell him to "keep still";
he questions us to acquire knowledge, and we reply, "Do not be
tiresome." We relegate him to a place at our side, vanquished and
subdued, with a few tiresome playthings, like an Alfieri in the box at
the theater. He might well think: Why does she, whom I love so dearly,
want to annihilate me? Why does she wish to oppress me with her
caprices? It is caprice which makes her prevent me from developing the
expansive forces within me, and relegate me to a place among vain and
wearisome things, merely because I love her.

Thus, to save himself, the child should be a strong spirit, like
Vittorio Alfieri; but too often he cannot.

We do not perceive that the child is a victim and that we are
annihilating him; and then we demand _everything_ from his _nullity_
by a _fiat_, by an act of our omnipotence. We want the adult man, but
without allowing him to grow.

Many will think, when they read the story of Vittorio Alfieri, that
they would have wished something more in their sons; they would have
wished it to be unnecessary to set up material obstacles against
temptation, such as the cutting off of the hair and the binding to the
armchair with ropes; and would have hoped that a spiritual force would
have sufficed to resist it. Like one of our great poets who, singing
of the Roman Lucrezia, reproves her for having killed herself; since
she ought to have died of grief at the outrage, had she been even more
virtuous than she was.

Now that father with the spiritual ideals would not, in all
probability, ask himself what he himself had done to enable his son to
become strong and rise to the level of spiritual aid. Very likely he
is a father who did his utmost to break the will of his son and make
him submissive to his own will. No earthly father can make the spirit
rise to such heights; this can only be accomplished by the mysterious
voice which speaks within the heart of the man in the silence. A voice
which is strident because it is raised against the laws of Nature,
like the voice of the father who wishes to subdue another creature to
himself, disturbs that "silence" where, in peace and liberty, the
divine works are being accomplished. Without the "strong man" all is
vain.

It is recorded that a priest once presented to Saint Teresa a young
girl who wished to become a Carmelite nun, and who, according to him,
had angelic qualities. Saint Teresa, accepting the neophyte, replied:
"See, my father, our Lord has given this maiden devotion, but she has
no judgment, and never will have any; and she will always be a burden
to us."

One of the greatest of contemporary theologians, who during the
proceedings to obtain the canonisation of Joan of Arc had made a
profound study of her personality, says, in reference to the
suggestion that she was simply the instrument of divine inspiration:
"Let no one deceive himself. Joan of Arc was no blind and passive
instrument of a supernatural power. The liberator of France _had
entire command of her personality_; she gave proof of this by her
independent action, both in decisions and in deeds."

I believe that the work of the educator consists primarily in
protecting the powers and directing them without disturbing them in
their expansion; and in the bringing of man into contact with the
spirit which is within him and which should operate through him.

VIII

INTELLIGENCE

Let us pause a moment to consider what is the "key" by means of which
we may bring about the realization of the liberty of the child; that
key which sets in motion the mechanisms essential to education.

The child who is "free to move about," and who perfects himself by so
doing, is he who has an "intelligent object" in his movements; the
child who is free to develop his inner personality, who perseveres in
a task for a considerable time, and organizes himself upon such a
fundamental phenomenon, is sustained and guided by an intelligent
purpose. Without this his persistence in work, his inner formation,
and his progress would not be possible. When we refrain from guiding
the subjugated child step by step, when, liberating the child from our
personal influence, we place him in an environment suited to him and
in contact with the means of development, we leave him confidently to
"his own intelligence." His motor activity will then direct itself to
definite actions: he will wash his hands and face, sweep the room,
dust the furniture, change his clothes, spread the rugs, lay the
table, cultivate plants, and take care of animals. He will choose the
tasks conducive to his development and persist in them, attracted and
guided by his interest towards a sensory material which leads him to
distinguish one thing from another, to select, to reason, to correct
himself; and the acquirements thus made are not only "a cause of
internal growth" but a strong propulsive force to further progress.
Thus, passing from simple objects to objects of ever increasing
complexity, he becomes possessed of a culture; moreover, he organizes
his character by means of the internal order which forms itself within
him, and by the skill which he acquires.

Therefore, when we leave the child to himself, we leave him to his
intelligence, not, as is commonly supposed, "to his instincts,"
meaning by the word "instincts" those designated as animal instincts.
We are so accustomed to; treat children like dogs and other domestic
animals, that a "free child" makes us think of a dog, barking,
jumping, and stealing dainties. And so accustomed are we to regard as
manifestations of evil instincts the _rebellions_ of the child treated
as a beast, his obscure protests and desperations, or the protective
devices he has to invent to save himself from such a humiliating
situation, that, by way of elevating him, we first compare him to
plants and flowers, and then actually try to keep him as far as
possible in the state of physical immobility of vegetables, subjecting
him to the same sensations, reducing him to slavery. But he never
becomes the "plant with angelic perfume" we would fain believe him to
be; rather do signs of corruption gradually manifest themselves as his
"human substance" mortifies and dies.

But when we leave the child "free as a man" in the palestra of his own
intelligence, his type changes entirely. It is of this type we must
form new conceptions in discussing the question of "liberty."

That of intelligence should also, I believe, be the key to the problem
of the social liberty of man. We have heard much talk of late years,
of a very superficial kind, concerning "liberty of thought." The issue
being obscured by prejudices akin to those prevalent concerning
children, it has been supposed that man would be "liberated" were he
"abandoned" to his own thoughts. But was he capable of "thinking"? Was
not the epoch of such "freedom" also that of cerebral neurasthenia?
Was it not also that epoch when laws for extending social rights to
illiterates were under discussion?

Now let us take an example: if we told a sick person to choose between
disease and health, would this make him free to do so? If we offer an
uneducated peasant good and bad paper money, leaving him "free to
choose" which he will take, and he chooses the bad notes, he is not
free, he is cheated; if he chooses the good, he is not free, he is
lucky. He will be free when he has sufficient knowledge not only to
distinguish the good from the bad, but to understand the social
utility of each. It is the giving of this "internal formation" which
makes a man free, irrespective of a "social sanction" which is merely
an external conquest of liberty. If the liberty of man were such a
simple problem, we should only need to pass a law, enabling the blind
to see and the deaf to hear, in order to restore "poor humanity" to
health.

Our honesty ought to make us recognize one day that the fundamental
rights of man are those of his own "formation," free from obstacles,
free from slavery, and free to draw from his environment the means
required for his development. In short, it is in education that we
shall find the fundamental solution of the social problems connected
with "personality."

Deeply instructive is the revelation made to us by the children, that
"the intelligence" is the key which reveals the secrets of their
formation, and is the actual means of their internal construction.

The hygiene of the intelligence thus assumes cardinal importance. When
intelligence is recognized as the means of formation, the pivot of
life itself, it can no longer be exhausted for dubious ends, or
oppressed and suffocated without discernment.

At a not-far-distant day, the intelligence of children must become the
object of treatment much wiser and more elaborate than that which we
now bestow on their bodies, to adjuncts of which, such as teeth,
nails, and hair, we devote costly and laborious processes. When we
reflect that a mother who is perfectly conscious of the dangers and
remedies connected with the hair of her child, can oppress and enslave
his intelligence quite unknowingly, we are at once obliged to admit
that the new road leading to civilization must needs be a long one, if
such contrasts in our attitude to the superfluities and the essentials
of life are still possible at the present day.

    *    *    *    *    *

What is intelligence? Without rising to the heights of the definitions
given by the philosophers, we may, for the moment, consider the sum of
those reflex and associative or reproductive activities which enable
the mind to construct itself, putting it into relation with the
environment. According to Bain, the consciousness of difference is the
beginning of every intellectual exercise; the first step of the mind
is appreciation of "distinction." The bases of its perceptive
functions towards the external world are the "sensations." To collect
facts and distinguish between them is the initial process in
intellectual construction.

Let us try to infuse a little more precision and clarity into the
analysis of intelligence.

The first characteristic which presents itself to us as an indication
of intellectual development is related to _time_. The masses are so
much alive to this primitive characteristic, that the popular
expression "quick" is synonymous with intelligent. To be rapid in
reacting to a stimulus, in the association of ideas, in the capacity
of formulating a judgment--this is the most obvious external
manifestation of intelligence. This "quickness" is certainly related
to the capacity for receiving impressions from the environment,
elaborating images, and externalizing the internal results. All these
activities may be developed by means of an exercise comparable to a
system of mental "gymnastics" to collect numerous sensations, to put
them constantly in relation one with another, to deduce judgments
therefrom, to acquire the habit of manifesting these freely, all this
ought, as the psychologists would say, to render the conductive
channels and the associative channels more and more permeable, and the
"period of reaction" ever briefer. As in intelligent muscular
movement, the repetition of the act not only renders it more perfect
in itself, but more rapid in execution. An intelligent child at school
is not only one who understands, but one who understands quickly. On
the other hand, one who learns the same things, but who takes a longer
time in so doing, say two years instead of one, is _slow_. Of a
"quick" child, the people say that "nothing escapes him"; his
attention is always on the alert, and he is ready to receive every
kind of stimulus: as a sensitive scale will show the slightest
variation in weight, so the sensitive brain will respond to the
slightest appeal. It is Equally rapid in its associative processes:
"He understands in a flash" is a familiar saying to indicate accurate
conception.

Now an exercise which "puts in motion" the intellectual mechanisms
can only be an "auto-exercise." It is impossible that another person,
exercising himself in our stead, should make us acquire skill.

The sensory exercises arouse and intensify the central activities in
our children. When, sense and stimulus duly isolated, the child has
clear perceptions in his consciousness; when sensations of heat, cold,
roughness, smoothness, weight, and lightness, when a sound, an
isolated noise, are perceived by him, when, in almost complete
silence, he closes his eyes and waits for a voice to murmur a word, it
is as if the external world had knocked at the door of his soul,
awakening its activities. And further, when the multitudinous
sensations are all contained in the richness of the environment, the
two react harmoniously one upon the other, intensifying the activities
that have been awakened: this is exemplified in the case of the child
absorbed in coloring his designs, who will choose the most beautiful
tints while music is being played, or in that of another who,
contemplating the gay and gracious environment of the school and the
flowering plants, will sing his song to perfection.

The first characteristic which manifests itself in our children, after
their process of auto-education has been initiated, is that their
reactions become ever more ready and more rapid: a sensory stimulus
which might before have passed unobserved or might have roused a
languid interest, is vividly perceived. The relation between things is
easily recognized, and thus errors in their use are quickly detected,
judged, and corrected. By means of the sensory gymnastics the child
carries out just this primordial and fundamental exercise of the
intelligence, which _awakens and sets in motion_ the central nervous
mechanisms.

When we see these external manifestations of our quick and active
children--sensitive to the slightest call, ready to run swiftly
towards us without relaxing the attention they give to their own
movements and to all the external objects they encounter--and compare
them with the torpid children in the ordinary schools--clumsy in their
movements, indifferent to stimuli, incapable of spontaneous
association of ideas--we are led to think of the civilization of our
own days as compared with that of olden times. The civil environment
of bygone years, as compared with our own, was more leisurely: we have
learnt how to save time. The stage-coach was once the means of
transport, whereas now we travel in motor-cars and even in aeroplanes;
the voice was the medium of speech from a distance, whereas now we
speak through the telephone; men killed each other one by one, whereas
now they kill each other _en masse_. All this makes us realize that
our civilization is not based upon "respect for life" and "respect for
the soul," but rather is it based upon "respect for time." It is
solely in an external sense that civilization has pursued its course.
It has become more rapid, it has set in motion _machinery_.

But man has not had the same preparation to keep up with it:
individuals have not _accelerated_ themselves methodically; the
children of this bewildering environment are not new men, more active,
readier, more intelligent. The transformed human personality has not
yet arisen ready to meet all eventualities and to utilize for his own
benefit the external conquests of his environment. Torpid man saves
time and money in this civilization; but his soul remains defrauded
and oppressed.

If he does not rise to the task of reforming himself in harmony with
the new world he has created, he runs the risk of being some day
overthrown and crushed by it.

    *    *    *    *    *

The swift reactions occurring among our children are not merely an
external manifestation of the intelligence. They are related not only
to the _exercise_, but also to the _order_ which has been established
within: and it is this intimate work of rearrangement which is in
itself a more exact indication of intellectual formation.

Order is, in short, the true key to rapidity of reaction. In a chaotic
mind, the recognition of a sensation is no less difficult than the
elaboration of a reasoned discourse. In all things, social as well as
others, it is organization and order which make it possible to proceed
rapidly.

"To be able to distinguish" is the characteristic sign of
intelligence: to _distinguish_ is to arrange and also, in life, it is
to prepare for "creation."

Creation finds its expansion in _order_. We find this conception in
the Genesis of Scripture. God did not begin to create without
preparation; and this preparation was the introduction of order into
chaos. "And God divided the light from the darkness. And he said: Let
the waters be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land
appear." The consciousness may possess a rich and varied content; but
when there is _mental confusion_, the intelligence does not appear.
Its appearance is exactly like the kindling of a light which makes it
possible to distinguish things clearly: "Let there be light."

Thus we may justly say that to help the development of the
intelligence is to help to put the images of the consciousness in
order.

We ought to think of the mental state of the little child of three
years old, who has already looked upon a world. How often he has
fallen asleep utterly weary from having seen so many things. It has
not occurred to any one that for him to walk is, in fact, to work;
that seeing and hearing, when the organs are not as yet accommodated,
so that he is obliged to be perpetually correcting the errors of his
senses, and verifying with his hand what he cannot as yet appraise
correctly with his eye, is a great exertion. Hence the little one who
is over-taxed by stimuli, in places where these abound, cries or falls
asleep.

The little child of three years old carries within him a heavy
_chaos_.

He is like a man who has accumulated an immense quantity of books,
piled up without any order, and who asks himself "What shall I do with
them?" When will he be able to arrange them in such fashion as to
enable him to say: "I possess a library"?

By means of our so-called "sensory exercises" we make it possible for
the child to _distinguish_ and to _classify_. Our sensory material, in
fact, analyses and represents the attributes of things: dimensions,
forms, colors, smoothness or roughness of surface, weight,
temperature, flavor, noise, sounds. It is the qualities of the
objects, not the objects themselves which are important; although
these qualities, isolated one from the other, are themselves
represented by objects. For the attributes long, short, thick, thin,
large, small, red, yellow, green, hot, cold, heavy, light, rough,
smooth, scented, noisy, resonant, we have a like number of
corresponding "objects" arranged in graduated series. This gradation
is important for the establishment of order; indeed, the attributes of
the objects differ not only in quality, but also in quantity. They may
be more or less high or more or less low, more or less thick or more
or less thin; the sounds have various tones; the colors have various
degrees of intensity; the shapes may resemble each other in varying
degrees; the states of roughness and smoothness are by no means
absolute.

The material for the education of the senses lends itself to the
purpose of distinguishing between these things. First of all it
enables the child to ascertain the _identity_ of two stimuli by means
of numerous exercises in matching and fitting. Afterwards _difference_
is appreciated when the lessons direct the child's attention to the
external objects of a series: light, dark, long, short.

At last he begins to distinguish the _degrees of the various
attributes_, arranging a series of objects in gradation, such as the
tablets which show the various degrees of intensity of the same
chromatic tone; the bells which produce the notes of an octave, the
objects which represent length in decimal proportions, or thickness in
centimetric proportions, etc.

These exercises, which are so attractive to children, are, as we have
seen, repeated by them indefinitely. The teacher puts the seal upon
each acquisition with a word; thus the classification is complete, and
finally has its schedule: that is, it becomes possible to recall the
attribute and its _image_ by a name.

Now as we have no possible means of distinguishing things other than
by their attributes, the classification of these entails a fundamental
order of arrangement comprehending everything. Henceforth the world is
no longer a chaos for the child; his mind bears some resemblance to
the orderly shelves of a library or a rich museum; each object is in
its place, in its proper category. And each acquisition he makes will
be no longer merely "stored," but duly "allocated." This primitive
order will never be disturbed, but only enriched by fresh material.

Thus the child, having acquired the power of distinguishing one thing
from another, has laid the foundations of the intelligence. It is
unnecessary to repeat what an internal impulse the acquired order
contributes towards the seeking after objects in the environment;
henceforth the child "recognizes" the objects which surround him. When
he discovers with so much emotion that the sky is blue, that his hand
is smooth, that the window is rectangular, he does not in reality
discover sky, nor hand, nor window, but he discovers their position in
the order of his mind by arrangement of his ideas. And this determines
a stable equilibrium in the internal personality, which produces calm,
strength, and the possibility of fresh conquests, just as the muscles
which have coordinated their functions enable the body to maintain its
equilibrium, and to acquire that stability and security which
facilitate all movements. This order conduces to an economy of time
and strength; like a well-arranged museum, it saves the time and
strength of inquirers. The child can therefore perform a greater
quantity of work without fatigue, and can react to stimuli in a
briefer space of time.

    *    *    *    *    *

To be able to distinguish, classify, and catalogue external things on
the basis of a secure order already established in the mind--this is
at once intelligence and culture. This is, indeed, the popular
conception; when an educated person can recognize an author by his
style, or the characteristics of the literary compositions of a
period, he is pronounced "versed (_intelligente_) in literature." In
the same way we say of one who can recognize a painter by the manner
in which he lays his colors on the canvas, or fix the period of a
sculptor from the fragment of a bas-relief, that he is "versed
(_intelligente_) in art." The scientist is of the same type. He is
able to observe things, and to give due value even to their minutest
details; hence the differences between the characteristics of things
are clearly perceived and classified. The scientist distinguishes
objects in accordance with the orderly content of his mind. A
seedling, a microbe, an animal or the remains of an animal, are not
enigmas to him, though in themselves they may be strange to him. We
may say the same of the chemist, the physicist, the geologist, the
archaeologist.

It is not the accumulation of a direct knowledge of things which forms
the man of letters, the scientist, and the connoisseur; it is the
prepared order established in the mind which is to receive such
knowledge. On the other hand, the uncultivated person has only the
direct knowledge of objects; such a person may be a lady who spends a
great part of the night reading books, or a gardener who spends his
life making material distinctions between the plants in his garden.
The knowledge of such uncultured minds is not only disorderly, but it
is confined to the objects with which it comes into direct contact,
whereas the knowledge of the scientist is infinite, because,
possessing the power of classifying the attributes of things, he can
recognize them all, and determine now the class, now the
relationships, now the origins of each; facts much more profound than
the actual things could of themselves reveal.

Now our children, after the manner of the connoisseur of art and the
man of science, recognize objects in the external world by means of
their attributes and classify them; hence they are sensitive to all
objects; everything possesses a value for them. Uncultured children,
on the other hand, pass blind and deaf close to things, just as an
ignorant man passes by a work of art or listens to a performance of
classical music without recognition or enjoyment.

The educational methods now in use proceed on lines exactly the
reverse of ours; having first abolished spontaneous activity, they
present objects with their accumulation of attributes directly to the
child, calling attention to each attribute, and hoping that from all
this mass the mind of the child will be able to abstract the
attributes themselves, without any guidance or order. Thus they create
in a passive being an artificial chaos, more limited than that which
the natural world would offer.

The "objective" method now in use, which consists in presenting an
object and noting all its attributes--that is, describing it, is
nothing but a "sensory" variation on the customary mnemonic method;
instead of describing an absent object, a present object is described;
instead of the imagination alone working to effect its reconstruction,
the senses intervene; this is done so that the distinctive qualities
of the object itself should be better remembered. The passive mind
receives images, which are limited to the objects presented; and which
are "stored up" without any order. As a fact, every object may have
infinite attributes; and if, as often happens in object-lessons, the
origins and ultimate ends of the object itself are included among
these attributes, the mind has literally to range throughout the
universe. If, for instance, in an object lesson on coffee, which I
heard given in a Kindergarten school, the object is described and the
attention of the children directed to its size, its color, its shape,
its aroma, its flavor, its temperature; and then if the teacher goes
on to describe the plant and the manner in which the substance was
brought to Europe across the ocean, and, finally, lighting a
spirit-lamp, boils the water, grinds the berries and prepares the
beverage, the mind has been led to wander in infinite spaces, but the
subject has not been exhausted. For it would be possible to go on to
describe the exciting effects of coffee, caffeine, which is extracted
from the berry, and many other things. Such an analysis would spread
like spilt oil until finally dispersed, and the outcome would be of no
use in any way. If, indeed, we should ask a child so instructed: "What
is coffee, then?" he might well reply: "It is such a long story that I
cannot remember it." A notion so vague (I cannot certainly say so
complete!) fatigues and encumbers the mind and can never transform
itself into a dynamic excitation of similar associations. The efforts
the child makes will be, at the most, efforts of memory to recall the
history of coffee. If associations are formed in his mind, they will
be inferior associations of contiguity: his mind will wander from the
teacher who is speaking to the ocean that was traversed, to the
dining-table at home on which coffee appears in cups every day; in
other words, it will stray aimlessly as does the idle mind when it
"allows itself" to wander from the continuity of its passive
associations.

In this kind of _reverie_ to which the minds of children give
themselves up, there is no sign of internal activity, far less of any
individual difference. Children subjected to the object-lesson system
always remain purely receptive beings; or, if we prefer to put it so,
storehouses in which new objects are continually deposited.

No activity is thus aroused and directed towards the object, in order
to recognize its qualities in such a manner that the child himself
forms an idea of it; nor can the possibility of connecting other
objects with the first by their common characteristics arise in his
mind. For in what particular does any object resemble the others? In
its use?

When we associate the images of different objects by similarity, we
should extract from the whole the qualities which the objects
themselves have in common. If, for instance, we say that two
rectangular tablets are alike, we have first extracted from the
numerous qualities of these tablets such facts as that they are of
wood, that they are polished, smooth, colored, of the same
temperature, etc., the quality relating to their _shape_. They are
alike in _shape_. This may suggest a long series of objects: the top
of the table, the window, etc.; but before such a result as this can
be achieved, it is necessary that the mind should first be capable of
abstracting from the numerous attributes of these objects the quality
of _rectangular shape_. The work of the mind in this quest must
necessarily be _active_; it analyzes the object, extracts a determined
attribute therefrom, and under the guidance of this determined
attribute makes a synthesis associating many objects by the same
medium of connection. If this capacity for the selecting of single
attributes among all those proper to the object be not acquired,
association by means of similarity, synthesis, and all the higher work
of the intelligence becomes impossible. Moreover, this is intellectual
work in reality, because the essential quality of the intelligence is
not to "photograph" objects, and "keep them one upon the other" like
the pages of an album, or juxtaposed like the stones in a pavement.
Such a labor of mere "deposit" is an outrage on the intellectual
nature. The intelligence, with its characteristic orderliness and
power of discrimination, is capable of distinguishing and extracting
the dominant characteristics of objects, and it is upon these that it
proceeds to build up its internal structures.

Now our children, whose minds are thus ordered in relation to the
classification of attributes by the pedagogic aid they have received,
are led, not only to observe objects according to all the attributes
they have analyzed, but also to distinguish identities, differences,
and resemblances; and this work renders the extraction of one of the
qualities corresponding to one of the sensory groups which have been
considered apart, easy and spontaneous. That is to say, it will be
easy for the child thus to recognize the various qualities of an
object, to note, for instance, that certain objects are alike in form,
or alike in color; because "forms" and "colors" have already been
grouped into very distinctive categories, and they therefore recall
series of objects by similarity. This classification of attributes is
a kind of loadstone; it is an attractive force of a determined group
of qualities; and the objects which have this quality are attracted
thereto and united one with another; this is association by
similitude, almost of a mechanical kind. Books are of the shape of
prisms, one of our children might say; and such a pronouncement would
be the conclusion arrived at by a very complex mental process, were it
not that prismatic forms already existed as a well-defined series in
his mind, attracting to itself all the surrounding objects which
possess the same character. Thus the whiteness of sheets of paper,
interrupted by dark signs, may be attracted, by the colors
systematized in the mind, into a synthetic whole, which might make
the child say: Books are sheets of white printed paper.

It is in this _active_ work that individual differences may manifest
themselves. What will be the group of attributes which will attract
similar objects? And what will be the prevailing characteristic chosen
for the purpose of association by similarity? One child will note that
a curtain is light green; another that the same curtain is light in
weight; one will be struck by the whiteness of a hand, another by the
smoothness of its skin. For one child the window will be a rectangle;
to another it is something through which the blue of the sky may be
seen. The choice of prevailing characteristics made by children
becomes a "natural selection" harmonizing with their own innate
tendencies.

In like manner, a scientist will choose the characters _most useful_
to his associations. An anthropologist may choose the shape of the
head to distinguish the human races, and another might choose the
cutaneous pigment--either will serve the purpose. Each anthropologist
may have the most accurate knowledge of the external characteristics
of men; but the important matter consists in finding a characteristic
which will serve as a basis for classification: that is to say, a
characteristic on which it will be possible to group numerous
characteristics in the order of similitude. Purely practical persons
would consider man from the utilitarian rather than from the
scientific point of view; a maker of hats would single out the
dimensions of the head from among other human characteristics; an
orator would consider man from the point of view of his susceptibility
to the spoken word. But _selection_ is the fundamental necessity which
enables us to realize things; to emerge from the vague into the
practical, from aimless contemplation into the sphere of action.

Every created thing in existence is characterized by the fact that it
has _limitations_. Our own psycho-sensory organization is founded upon
a selection. What are the functions of the senses, but to respond to a
determined series of vibrations and to no others? Thus the eye limits
light and the ear sounds. In forming the contents of the mind the
first step is, therefore, a selection, necessarily and materially
limited. Nevertheless, the mind imposes still further limits on the
selection possible to the senses, fashioning it upon the activity of
internal choice. Thus attention is fixed upon determined objects and
not upon all objects; and the volition _chooses_ the actions which are
really to be performed from among a multitude of possible actions.

It is in like fashion that the lofty work of the intelligence is
accomplished; by an analogous action of attention and internal will,
it abstracts the dominant characteristics of things, and thus succeeds
in associating their images, and keeping them in the foreground of
consciousness. It ceases to consider an immense amount of ballast
which would render its context formless and confused. Every superior
mind distinguishes the essential form from the superfluous, rejecting
the latter, and thus it is enabled to achieve its characteristic,
clear, delicate, and vital activities. It is capable of extracting
that which is useful to its creative life, and thus finds in the
cosmos the means of salvation. Without this characteristic activity,
the intelligence cannot construct itself; it would be like an
attention that wanders from thing to thing without ever fixing upon
any one of them, and like a will that can never decide upon any
definite action.

"It is possible to suppose," says James, "that a God could, without
impairing his activity, simultaneously behold all the minutest
portions of the world. But if our human attention should be thus
dissipated, we should merely contemplate all things vacuously, without
ever finding occasion to do any particular act."

It is one of the marvelous phenomena of life that it is impossible to
realize anything, without determining limits; that mysterious law
which ordains that every living being has its "form" and "stature,"
unlike the minerals, which are indefinite in form and dimensions, is
repeated in the psychical life. Its development, its auto-creation, is
nothing but a determination even more precise, a progressive
"concentration"; it is thus that from the primitive chaos our internal
characteristic form is gradually shaped and chiselled.

The capacity for forming a conception of a thing, for judging and
reasoning, has always this foundation. When, after having noted the
usual qualities of a column, we abstract the general truth that the
column is a support, this synthetic idea is based upon a selected
quality. Thus in the judgment we may pronounce: columns are
cylindrical, we have abstracted one quality from among the many others
we could have adduced, as, columns are cold, they are hard, they are a
composition of carbonate of lime, etc. It is only the capacity for
such a selection which makes reasoning possible. When, for example, in
the demonstration of the theorem of Pythagoras, children handle the
various pieces of the metal insets, they should start from the point
at which they become aware that a rectangle is equal to the rhomb, and
a square is equal to the same rhomb. It is the perception of this
truth which makes it possible to go on to the following reasoning:
therefore the square and the rectangle are equal to each other. If it
had not been possible to determine this attribute, the mind could not
have arrived at any conclusion. The mind has succeeded in discovering
an attribute common to two dissimilar figures; and it is this
discovery which may lead to a series of conclusions by means of which
the theorem of Pythagoras will be finally demonstrated.

    *    *    *    *    *

Now, as in the case of will, decision presupposes a methodical
exercise of the impulsive and inhibitory forces, only to be performed
by the individual himself, until habits have been established, so in
case of the intelligence, the individual must exercise himself in his
activities of association and selection, guided and aided by external
means, until he has developed, by the definitive elimination of
certain ideas and the choice of others, "mental habits" characteristic
of the individual, characteristic of the "type." Because, underlying
all the internal activities the mind can construct, there is, as the
phenomena of attention show us, the individual tendency, the "nature."

There is, undoubtedly, a fundamental difference between understanding
and learning the reasoning of others, and being able "to reason,"
between learning how an artist may see the external world according to
his prevailing interest in color, harmony, and form, and actually
seeing the external world about a fulcrum which sustains one's own
æsthetical creation. In the mind of one who "learns the things of
others" we may find, as in a sack of old clothes hanging over the
shoulders of a hawker, solutions of the problems of Euclid, together
with the images of Raphael's works, ideas of history and geography,
and rules of style, huddled together with a like indifference and a
like sensation of "weight." While, on the other hand, he who uses all
these things for his own life, is like the person who is assisted in
attaining his own welfare, his own relief, his own comfort by those
same objects which are merely burdens when in the sack of the hawker.
Such objects are, however, no longer huddled together without order
and without purpose in a closed bag, but set out in the spacious rooms
of a well-ordered house. The mind which constructs may contain a great
deal more than that mind in which pieces of knowledge are heaped up as
in the bag; and in that mind, as in the house, the objects are clearly
divided one from another, harmoniously arranged, and distinctive in
their uses.

Between "understanding" because another person seeks to impress upon
us the explanation of a thing by speech, and "understanding" the thing
of ourselves, there is an immeasurable distance; the two are
comparable to the impression made in soft wax, which will subsequently
be effaced and replaced by other impressions, and the form chiselled
in the marble by an artist, as his creation. He who understands of
himself has an unforeseen impression; he feels that his consciousness
has been liberated, and something luminous shines forth within him.
Understanding, then, is not a matter of indifference; it is the
beginning of _something_; sometimes it is the beginning of a life
which renews itself within us. Perhaps no emotion is more fruitful for
man than the intellectual emotion. He who makes a discovery rich in
results certainly enjoys the greatest of human felicities; but even he
who merely "understands" gets a lofty enjoyment which will rise
superior to and overcome the most acute suffering. Indeed, he who is
oppressed by a misfortune, if he can be brought to differentiate his
own case from that of another, or to see a reason for his affliction,
experiences relief, and a "sense of salvation." Amidst the confused
darkness in which he was plunged, a consoling ray of intellectual
light has reached him. The difficult matter, indeed, is to find the
way of escape in the hour of darkness. When we reflect that a dog may
die of grief on the grave of his master, and that a mother can survive
on the grave of her only son, we see at once that it is the light of
_reason_ which makes the difference between the two. The dog _cannot
reason on the matter_; it may die because no light can penetrate the
darkness of its intelligence to overcome the depression of its grief.

But the thought of a universal justice, the living memory of the lost
one which remains to us, saves the human being. And by degrees, not
forgetfulness, which alone can save the animal, but the connection
which the intelligence establishes with the universe, restores calm to
the suffering soul. Such comfort could never be derived from the dry
lesson of a professor, from memorizing the theory of a savant who is
not in sympathy with the state of our soul. When we say, "to give
ourselves a reason," "to derive strength from a principle," we imply
that the ever-inquiring intelligence should be left at liberty to
perform its work of reconstruction and salvation.

Now if intelligence in "comprehending" may actually prove our
salvation when in danger of death, what a source of enjoyment it
should prove to man!

When we talk of "the opening of the mind," we mean a creative
phenomenon, which is not the weak result of an impression violently
made from without. The opening of the mind is the _active
comprehension_ which accompanies great emotions, and which is
therefore felt as a spiritual event.

I once knew a motherless girl, who was so much depressed by the arid
teaching of her school, that she had become almost incapable of study
and even of understanding the things which were taught her. Her life
of solitude, lacking in natural affection, was a further aggravation
of her mental fatigue. Her father decided that she should live for a
year or two in the open country like a little savage; he then brought
her back to town, and placed her under the private direction of a
number of "professors." The girl studied and learned, but remained
passive and weary. Every now and then her father would say: "Is your
mind opening again?" and the girl always replied: "I do not know. What
do you mean?" Owing to a curious coincidence in my life, this girl was
confided to my sole care; and it was thus that I, when I was still a
medical student, made my first pedagogic experiment, upon which I
cannot linger now, though it would be worthy of interest. One day we
were together and when she was at work on organic chemistry, she broke
off, and looking at me with beaming eyes, said: "Here it is now! I
_do_ understand!" She then got up and went away, calling out aloud:
"Father, father! My mind has opened!" I, not then knowing the girl's
history, was astonished and agitated. She had taken her father's hand,
and was saying: "Now I can tell you, yes, yes; I did not know what it
meant before; my mind has opened." The joy of father and daughter and
their union at that moment made me think of the joys and wellsprings
of life which we destroy by enslaving the intelligence.

Indeed, every intellectual conquest is a wellspring of joy to our free
children. This is the "pleasure" to which they are now most
susceptible, and which makes them scorn lower pleasures; it is after
having tasted of this that; our little ones despise sweetmeats, toys,
and vanities.

It is this which makes them sublime to the eyes of those who
contemplate them.

Their pleasure is that lofty pleasure which distinguish man from the
brute, and can save us even from the desolation of grief and darkness.

When it is made a reproach to our method that it seeks to promote the
"pleasure" of the child, and that this is immoral, it is the child and
not the method which is insulted. For the essence of this reproach is
the calumny against the child, who is considered by all as on a level
with the beasts, and whose "pleasure" is supposed to lie solely in
gluttony and idleness, and worse. But none of these could keep the
child's "pleasure" alive for hours and days and years. It is only when
he has laid hold on "humane pleasure" that he persists in it, and
lives with a joy which is comparable to that of the young girl who ran
to her father to proclaim the end of the darkness in which she had
languished for years.

May it not perhaps be that those "crises," which are to-day but the
intellectual illuminations of genius when it discovers a truth,
represent a natural phenomenon of psychical life? May not the
manifestation of the genius be but the manifestation of a "vigorous
life," saved from perils by its exceptional individuality, and
therefore itself alone capable of revealing the true nature of man?
His type would then be the common one, and all men, in a greater or
less degree, would seem to be of the same "species." The paths the
child follows in the active "construction" of his individuality are
indeed identical with those followed by the genius. His
characteristics are absorbed attention, a profound concentration which
isolates him from all the stimuli of his environment, and corresponds
in intensity and duration to the development of spiritual activities.
As in genius, this concentration is not without results, but is the
source of intellectual crises, of rapid internal developments, and,
above all, of an "external activity" which expresses itself in work.

We may say, then, that the genius is the man who has burst his bonds
asunder, who has maintained his liberty, and who has upheld before the
eyes of the multitude the standard of the humanity conquered by him.

Nearly all the manifestations of those men who liberated themselves
from the external bondage of their times are to be noted in our
children. Such, for instance, is that sublime "spiritual obedience,"
at present still unknown to the majority of mankind, with the
exception of monks, who, however, often recognize it only in theory,
and contemplate it only in the examples given by the saints; such
again are those means necessary to the construction of a strong
internal life which form part of the preparation for the cloistered
life in the methodical "meditations" of those about to enter upon it.
No persons, with the exception of monks, practise meditation. We can
hardly distinguish meditation from methods for "learning"
intellectually. We know, for example, that to read a great number of
books consecutively, dissipates our powers and our capacity for
thought; and that to learn a piece of poetry by heart means to repeat
it until it is engraven on our minds: and that all this is not
"meditation."

He who commits a verse of Dante to memory and he who meditates upon a
verse of the gospel, performs a totally different task. The canto
will "adorn" the mind on which it is impressed for a certain time,
without leaving any lasting trace upon it. The verse which has been
the subject of meditation will have a transforming and edifying
effect. He who meditates clears his mind as far as possible of every
other image, and tries to concentrate upon the subject of meditation
in such a manner that all the internal activities will be polarised
thereby: or, as the monks say, "all the powers of the mind."

The expected result of the meditation is "an internal fruit of
strength"; the soul is strengthened and unified, it becomes active; it
can then act upon the seed around which it has concentrated and cause
it to become fruitful.

Now the method chosen by our children in following their natural
development is "meditation," for in no other way would they be led to
linger so long over each individual task, and so to derive a gradual
internal maturation therefrom. The aim of the children who persevere
in their work with an object, is certainly not to "learn"; they are
drawn to it by the needs of their inner life, which must be organized
and developed by its means. In this manner they imitate and carry on
their "growth." This is the habit by which they gradually coordinate