14 



After the desire for information has in this natural 

 way been encouraged and fostered, and the child has ob- 

 tained sufficient store of knowledge to work upon, he may 

 be helped to think out the answers to his own questions, 

 and when this has been practised, and the child's mind 

 begins to rejoice in its strength, working material may 

 have to be supplied in the shape of problems for solution. 

 The delighted enthusiasm with which even very young children 

 wield a " scientific imagination," and plunge into the mysteries 

 of cause and effect, is but the younger brother of the motive 

 that led Newton to the secrets of the planetary system and sent 

 Columbus across the wide Atlantic. 



Children ought to be allowed to see everything possible, 

 not merely for amusement, but for the educational value 

 of wealth of impressions, also to do everything possible 

 for the sake of wealth of activities. The child's first re- 

 quest for a pocket-knife, hammer and nails, or other simple 

 tool, is Nature's hint that dexterity is now anxious to 

 evolve itself. We disregard it only at the risk of losing much 

 healthy growth of this quality. Children ought also, as far as 

 possible, to be allowed to take the natural consequences of their 

 own acts, of course under supervision sufficient to prevent dan- 

 gerous results, in order to evolve through the teachings of 

 actual experience that ability to adapt means to ultimate ends, 

 the increase of which, as pointed out by Spencer in his Data of 

 Ethics is a concomitant of the passage from lower to higher orders 

 of life. Never mind dirtied clothes or cut fingers, or even the 

 chance of a broken bone or two. Children's bones are less liable 

 to breakage than those of the awkward adults that repressed 

 children grow into, and the wash-tub should be subordinate 

 to the activities that lead them into fresh embraces with 

 mother earth. 



It will, perhaps, be thought all this involves great 

 trouble. Nothing worth having is obtained without 

 trouble. The trouble of their production is a measure of the 

 worth of most things. The Germans conquered France, it is 

 said, simply by taking infinite trouble beforehand ; and it is this 





