Children who are forced to speak too soon have no time to learn either to pronounce correctly or to understand what they are made to say; while left to themselves they first practise the easiest syllables, and then, adding to them little by little some meaning which their gestures explain, they teach you their own words before they learn yours.  By this means they do not acquire your words till they have understood them.  Being in no hurry to use them, they begin by carefully observing the sense in which you use them, and when they are sure of them they adopt them.

The worst evil resulting from the precocious use of speech by young children is that we not only fail to understand the first words they use, we misunderstand them without knowing it; so that while they seem to answer us correctly, they fail to understand us and we them.  This is the most frequent cause of our surprise at children’s sayings; we attribute to them ideas which they did not attach to their words.  This lack of attention on our part to the real meaning which words have for children seems to me the cause of their earliest misconceptions; and these misconceptions, even when corrected, colour their whole course of thought for the rest of their life.  I shall have several opportunities of illustrating these by examples later on.

Let the child’s vocabulary, therefore, be limited; it is very undesirable that he should have more words than ideas, that he should be able to say more than he thinks.  One of the reasons why peasants are generally shrewder than townsfolk is, I think, that their vocabulary is smaller.  They have few ideas, but those few are thoroughly grasped.

The infant is progressing in several ways at once; he is learning to talk, eat, and walk about the same time.  This is really the first phase of his life.  Up till now, he was little more than he was before birth; he had neither feeling nor thought, he was barely capable of sensation; he was unconscious of his own existence.

“Vivit, et est vitae nescius ipse suae.”—­Ovid.

BOOK II

We have now reached the second phase of life; infancy, strictly so-called, is over; for the words infans and puer are not synonymous.  The latter includes the former, which means literally “one who cannot speak;” thus Valerius speaks of puerum infantem.  But I shall continue to use the word child (French enfant) according to the custom of our language till an age for which there is another term.

When children begin to talk they cry less.  This progress is quite natural; one language supplants another.  As soon as they can say “It hurts me,” why should they cry, unless the pain is too sharp for words?  If they still cry, those about them are to blame.  When once Emile has said, “It hurts me,” it will take a very sharp pain to make him cry.