Accordingly, one of the best fruits of the ‘child-study’ movement has been to reinstate all these activities to their proper place in a sound system of education. Feed the growing human being, feed him with the sort of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental tissue, even though he may seem to be ‘wasting’ a great deal of his growing time, in the eyes of those for whom the only channels of learning are books and verbally communicated information.

It is not till adolescence is reached that the mind grows able to take in the more abstract aspects of experience, the hidden similarities and distinctions between things, and especially their causal sequences.  Rational knowledge of such things as mathematics, mechanics, chemistry, and biology, is now possible; and the acquisition of conceptions of this order form the next phase of education.  Later still, not till adolescence is well advanced, does the mind awaken to a systematic interest in abstract human relations—­moral relations, properly so called,—­to sociological ideas and to metaphysical abstractions.

This general order of sequence is followed traditionally of course in the schoolroom.  It is foreign to my purpose to do more than indicate that general psychological principle of the successive order of awakening of the faculties on which the whole thing rests.  I have spoken of it already, apropos of the transitoriness of instincts.  Just as many a youth has to go permanently without an adequate stock of conceptions of a certain order, because experiences of that order were not yielded at the time when new curiosity was most acute, so it will conversely happen that many another youth is spoiled for a certain subject of study (although he would have enjoyed it well if led into it at a later age) through having had it thrust upon him so prematurely that disgust was created, and the bloom quite taken off from future trials.  I think I have seen college students unfitted forever for ‘philosophy’ from having taken that study up a year too soon.

In all these later studies, verbal material is the vehicle by which the mind thinks.  The abstract conceptions of physics and sociology may, it is true, be embodied in visual or other images of phenomena, but they need not be so; and the truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, “words, words, words,” must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.  This is so even in the natural sciences, so far as these are causal and rational, and not merely confined to description.  So I go back to what I said awhile ago apropos of verbal memorizing.  The more accurately words are learned, the better, if only the teacher make sure that what they signify is also understood.  It is the failure of this latter condition, in so much of the old-fashioned recitation, that has caused that reaction against