As for me, I received him somewhat gravely, but without blame and without mockery, and for fear he should find out we had been playing with him, I declined to take him out walking that day.  Next day I was well pleased to find that he passed in triumph with me through the very same people who had mocked him the previous day, when they met him out by himself.  You may be sure he never threatened to go out without me again.

By these means and other like them I succeeded during the short time I was with him in getting him to do everything I wanted without bidding him or forbidding him to do anything, without preaching or exhortation, without wearying him with unnecessary lessons.  So he was pleased when I spoke to him, but when I was silent he was frightened, for he knew there was something amiss, and he always got his lesson from the thing itself.  But let us return to our subject.

The body is strengthened by this constant exercise under the guidance of nature herself, and far from brutalising the mind, this exercise develops in it the only kind of reason of which young children are capable, the kind of reason most necessary at every age.  It teaches us how to use our strength, to perceive the relations between our own and neighbouring bodies, to use the natural tools, which are within our reach and adapted to our senses.  Is there anything sillier than a child brought up indoors under his mother’s eye, who, in his ignorance of weight and resistance, tries to uproot a tall tree or pick up a rock.  The first time I found myself outside Geneva I tried to catch a galloping horse, and I threw stones at Mont Saleve, two leagues away; I was the laughing stock of the whole village, and was supposed to be a regular idiot.  At eighteen we are taught in our natural philosophy the use of the lever; every village boy of twelve knows how to use a lever better than the cleverest mechanician in the academy.  The lessons the scholars learn from one another in the playground are worth a hundredfold more than what they learn in the class-room.

Watch a cat when she comes into a room for the first time; she goes from place to place, she sniffs about and examines everything, she is never still for a moment; she is suspicious of everything till she has examined it and found out what it is.  It is the same with the child when he begins to walk, and enters, so to speak, the room of the world around him.  The only difference is that, while both use sight, the child uses his hands and the cat that subtle sense of smell which nature has bestowed upon it.  It is this instinct, rightly or wrongly educated, which makes children skilful or clumsy, quick or slow, wise or foolish.