In moral as in intellectual habits, the most perilous interval in human life is that between birth and the age of twelve.  The great secret is to make the early education purely negative; a process of keeping the heart, naturally so good, clear of vice, and the intelligence, naturally so true, clear of error.  Take for first, second, and third precept, to follow nature and leave her free to the performance of her own tasks.  Until the age of reason, there can be no idea of moral beings or social relations.  Therefore, says Rousseau, no moral discussion.  Locke’s maxim in favour of constantly reasoning with children was a mistake.  Of all the faculties of man, reason, which is only a compound of the rest, is that which is latest in development, and yet it is this which we are to use to develop those which come earliest of all.  Such a course is to begin at the end, and to turn the finished work into an instrument.  “In speaking to children in these early years a language which they do not comprehend, we accustom them to cheat themselves with words, to criticise what is said to them, to think themselves as wise as their masters, to become disputatious and mutinous.”  If you forget that nature meant children to be children before growing into men, you only force a fruit that has neither ripeness nor savour, and must soon go bad; you will have youthful doctors and old infants.

To all this, however, there is certainly another side which Rousseau was too impetuous to see.  Perfected reason is truly the tardiest of human endowments, but it can never be perfected at all unless the process be begun, and, within limits, the sooner the beginning is made, the earlier will be the ripening.  To know the grounds of right conduct is, we admit, a different thing from feeling a disposition to practise it.  But nobody will deny the expediency of an intelligent acquaintance with the reasons why one sort of conduct is bad, and its opposite good, even if such an acquaintance can never become a substitute for the spontaneous action of thoroughly formed habit.  For one thing, cases are constantly arising in a man’s life that demand the exercise of reason, to settle the special application of principles which may have been acquired without knowledge of their rational foundation.  In such cases, which are the critical and testing points of character, all depends upon the possession of a more or less justly trained intelligence, and the habit of using it.  Now, as we have said, it is one of the great merits of the Emilius that it calls such attention to the early age at which mental influences begin to operate.  Why should the gradual formation of the master habit of using the mind be any exception?