THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE CYCLE 175 



many thousands of times, but it remains in great part 

 an unrealised ideal. Moreover, there is rarely any recog- 

 nition of the fact that, the organism being a imity (we 

 do not thoroughly understand how), the child's finding 

 of himself or herself along any one Hne — even if it be 

 only swimming, or planing, or sewing, or drawing, or 

 cooking, or golfing — with reasonable efficiency reacts 

 through the whole being with encouragement and stimu- 

 lus. One has heard an adolescent confess : " Yes, I 

 should Hke to go back to the school for a day, just 

 to let the teacher know what I can do." 



A profoundly important fact about childhood is that 

 living creatures are much more in the grip of ' nur- 

 ture ' when they are young than later on. Children 

 are impressionable and modifiable extraordinarily — 

 often by influences which neither we nor they know 

 much about. " There was a child went forth every 

 day and what that child saw became part of him for 

 a day or for a year or for stretching cycles of years." 



Some of these modifications require careful watch- 

 ing. It is our duty to notice recent work which shows 

 that in very young children there are often dim expe- 

 riences more or less connected with sex, and that care 

 should be taken to avoid exaggerating these by careless 

 caressing and exuberant fondling, or by thoughtless 

 ways of soothing, or by the common assumption that 

 what a child does not understand has no eJSect on it. 

 In normal cases, happily, the very early deviations pass 

 into oblivion, and until puberty approaches there is a 

 joyous period of latent sex. 



