others are their law.  Servants, dependent on them, and therefore anxious to please them, flatter them at the expense of their morals; giggling governesses say things to the four-year-old child which the most shameless woman would not dare to say to them at fifteen.  They soon forget what they said, but the child has not forgotten what he heard.  Loose conversation prepares the way for licentious conduct; the child is debauched by the cunning lacquey, and the secret of the one guarantees the secret of the other.

The child brought up in accordance with his age is alone.  He knows no attachment but that of habit, he loves his sister like his watch, and his friend like his dog.  He is unconscious of his sex and his species; men and women are alike unknown; he does not connect their sayings and doings with himself, he neither sees nor hears, or he pays no heed to them; he is no more concerned with their talk than their actions; he has nothing to do with it.  This is no artificial error induced by our method, it is the ignorance of nature.  The time is at hand when that same nature will take care to enlighten her pupil, and then only does she make him capable of profiting by the lessons without danger.  This is our principle; the details of its rules are outside my subject; and the means I suggest with regard to other matters will still serve to illustrate this.

Do you wish to establish law and order among the rising passions, prolong the period of their development, so that they may have time to find their proper place as they arise.  Then they are controlled by nature herself, not by man; your task is merely to leave it in her hands.  If your pupil were alone, you would have nothing to do; but everything about him enflames his imagination.  He is swept along on the torrent of conventional ideas; to rescue him you must urge him in the opposite direction.  Imagination must be curbed by feeling and reason must silence the voice of conventionality.  Sensibility is the source of all the passions, imagination determines their course.  Every creature who is aware of his relations must be disturbed by changes in these relations and when he imagines or fancies he imagines others better adapted to his nature.  It is the errors of the imagination which transmute into vices the passions of finite beings, of angels even, if indeed they have passions; for they must needs know the nature of every creature to realise what relations are best adapted to themselves.

This is the sum of human wisdom with regard to the use of the passions.  First, to be conscious of the true relations of man both in the species and the individual; second, to control all the affections in accordance with these relations.

But is man in a position to control his affections according to such and such relations?  No doubt he is, if he is able to fix his imagination on this or that object, or to form this or that habit.  Moreover, we are not so much concerned with what a man can do for himself, as with what we can do for our pupil through our choice of the circumstances in which he shall be placed.  To show the means by which he may be kept in the path of nature is to show plainly enough how he might stray from that path.