70 Juvenile Literature in the Farm Home 



voted to silent reflection with a suitable form of 

 thought culture. Proverbially, the farmer and his 

 wife and their children are hurried along with the 

 work-a-day affairs and tend gradually to acquire the 

 non-reading habit. This is bad for the parents in 

 that it keeps their minds running around upon a 

 little cycle of hard, industrial facts. It is worse for 

 the children in that it fails to supply the proper 

 nourishment for the dream period through which 

 their lives are necessarily passing. What can be 

 done, therefore, to nourish and build up the best 

 possible thought activities, especially in case of the 

 rural boys and girls ? 



HOW GOOD THINKING GROWS UP AND FLOURISHES 



It may not be out of place to show here somewhat 

 more definitely how attractive forms of literature 

 gradually work themselves into the lives of the 

 young. In the first place, the young person cannot 

 invent his own ideas. He does not manufacture his 

 thoughts out of something latent within his organism. 

 The latent situation consists merely of a nervous 

 system prepared to receive manifold impressions and 

 to retain them and give them back through the pro- 

 cess of ideation. That is, the young person thinks 

 only about things that have actually happened in 

 his life. All he knows has come to him through the 

 avenue of his senses ; what he has seen and heard and 

 felt, and so on, constitutes the "stuff" out of which 



