to classify all such acquired ideas and to trace certain laws of relationship among them.  The forms of relation between them, becoming themselves in turn noticed by the mind, are treated as conceptions of a higher and more abstract order, as when we speak of a syllogistic relation’ between propositions, or of four quantities making a ‘proportion,’ or of the ‘inconsistency’ of two conceptions, or the ‘implication’ of one in the other.

So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life.  The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be ‘floored’ and ‘rattled’ in the vicissitudes of experience.

In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed.  There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age.  During the first seven or eight years of childhood the mind is most interested in the sensible properties of material things. Constructiveness is the instinct most active; and by the incessant hammering and sawing, and dressing and undressing dolls, putting of things together and taking them apart, the child not only trains the muscles to co-ordinate action, but accumulates a store of physical conceptions which are the basis of his knowledge of the material world through life.  Object-teaching and manual training wisely extend the sphere of this order of acquisition.  Clay, wood, metals, and the various kinds of tools are made to contribute to the store.  A youth brought up with a sufficiently broad basis of this kind is always at home in the world.  He stands within the pale.  He is acquainted with Nature, and Nature in a certain sense is acquainted with him.  Whereas the youth brought up alone at home, with no acquaintance with anything but the printed page, is always afflicted with a certain remoteness from the material facts of life, and a correlative insecurity of consciousness which make of him a kind of alien on the earth in which he ought to feel himself perfectly at home.

I already said something of this in speaking of the constructive impulse, and I must not repeat myself.  Moreover, you fully realize, I am sure, how important for life,—­for the moral tone of life, quite apart from definite practical pursuits,—­is this sense of readiness for emergencies which a man gains through early familiarity and acquaintance with the world of material things.  To have grown up on a farm, to have haunted a carpenter’s and blacksmith’s shop, to have handled horses and cows and boats and guns, and to have ideas and abilities connected with such objects are an inestimable part of youthful acquisition.  After adolescence it is rare to be able to get into familiar touch with any of these primitive things.  The instinctive propensions have faded, and the habits are hard to acquire.