I return to practical matters.  I have already said your child must not get what he asks, but what he needs; [Footnote:  We must recognise that pain is often necessary, pleasure is sometimes needed.  So there is only one of the child’s desires which should never be complied with, the desire for power.  Hence, whenever they ask for anything we must pay special attention to their motive in asking.  As far as possible give them everything they ask for, provided it can really give them pleasure; refuse everything they demand from mere caprice or love of power.] he must never act from obedience, but from necessity.

The very words obey and command will be excluded from his vocabulary, still more those of duty and obligation; but the words strength, necessity, weakness, and constraint must have a large place in it.  Before the age of reason it is impossible to form any idea of moral beings or social relations; so avoid, as far as may be, the use of words which express these ideas, lest the child at an early age should attach wrong ideas to them, ideas which you cannot or will not destroy when he is older.  The first mistaken idea he gets into his head is the germ of error and vice; it is the first step that needs watching.  Act in such a way that while he only notices external objects his ideas are confined to sensations; let him only see the physical world around him.  If not, you may be sure that either he will pay no heed to you at all, or he will form fantastic ideas of the moral world of which you prate, ideas which you will never efface as long as he lives.

“Reason with children” was Locke’s chief maxim; it is in the height of fashion at present, and I hardly think it is justified by its results; those children who have been constantly reasoned with strike me as exceedingly silly.  Of all man’s faculties, reason, which is, so to speak, compounded of all the rest, is the last and choicest growth, and it is this you would use for the child’s early training.  To make a man reasonable is the coping stone of a good education, and yet you profess to train a child through his reason!  You begin at the wrong end, you make the end the means.  If children understood reason they would not need education, but by talking to them from their earliest age in a language they do not understand you accustom them to be satisfied with words, to question all that is said to them, to think themselves as wise as their teachers; you train them to be argumentative and rebellious; and whatever you think you gain from motives of reason, you really gain from greediness, fear, or vanity with which you are obliged to reinforce your reasoning.

Most of the moral lessons which are and can be given to children may be reduced to this formula; Master.  You must not do that.

Child.  Why not?

Master.  Because it is wrong.

Child.  Wrong!  What is wrong?

Master.  What is forbidden you.