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OUR CHILDREN 
 
 HINTS FROM PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE 
 FOR PARENTS AND TEACHERS 
 
 BY 
 
 PAUL CARUS 
 
 KOMMT, LASST UNS UNSEREN KiNDERN LEBEN ! " 
 
 — FROEBEL. 
 
 CHICAGO: 
 THE OPEN" COURT PUBLISHmG COMPANY 
 
 LONDON AGENTS 
 
 Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd. 
 1906 
 
I LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
 Twe Copies Received 
 JAN 2 1907 
 , C«pyrlet)t Entry , 
 
 CUSS ^ XXc, No. 
 
 COPY B. 
 
 ,r^. 
 
 COPYRIGHT BY 
 
 THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHIiSG CO. 
 
 190G 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Education and Progress 1 
 
 The First Steps 6 
 
 Parenthood 13 
 
 Imagination and Love of Truth 22 
 
 Worldly Prudence 28 
 
 The Use of Money 34 
 
 Square Dealing 40 
 
 Sympathy with Animals 46 
 
 Don't Say Don't 50 
 
 Treatment of a Naughty Child 58 
 
 Stimulate Self-Criticism 64 
 
 Do Not Punish 67 
 
 Direct and Divert, but do not Suppress ... 76 
 
 Sanitary Attention to Children 82 
 
 The Significance of Naming Things in the Nur- 
 sery 94 
 
 Counting 103 
 
 Mind-Reading and Arithmetic 109 
 
 Natural Science 120 
 
 Facts not Fancy 125 
 
 Foreign Languages 128 
 
 Mathematics 134 
 
 Music in Education 140 
 
 Playful Instruction, and Genius 147 
 
 Rationalism in the Nursery 160 
 
 Mutual Education of Children 171 
 
 Fear and Circumspection 178 
 
 Santa Claus 190 
 
 Index 205 
 
OUR CHILDREN 
 
 EDUCATION AND PROGRESS 
 
 How can we judge of a civilization, and 
 is there any standard at all by which we 
 may gage its power and significance? 
 
 This question should not be impossible to 
 answer and we believe that the replies given 
 by different thinkers will be characteristic 
 of their philosophy. It is a test question 
 that will reveal the true nature of a system 
 of thought. St. Francis of Assisi and his 
 followers find its answer in the supremacy 
 of the spiritual over the material, under- 
 standing by the spiritual the mode of 
 thought which is entertained by the priest. 
 The philosopher of matter and motion 
 measures the advance of society by the 
 complexity of its phenomena; to him evo- 
 lution is a progress from the homogeneous 
 to the heterogeneous. We agree with 
 
2 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 neither and would say that culture is at- 
 tained in the measure that truth has been 
 actualized in life. 
 
 We insist that the actualization of truth 
 is the only standard which can be used as 
 a criterion, but we will not deny that there 
 are many indicators of progress which like 
 straws in the wind are signs of the times, 
 and most of them will not be contradictory 
 with each other. Of these indicators there 
 are as many as there are diverse attitudes 
 in life, nay more than that, as many as there 
 are functions of life in which progress may 
 manifest itself ; and we will enumerate only 
 a few of them. 
 
 It has been claimed that the standing of 
 woman in the community, the respect shown 
 to her, the assurance that her rights will be 
 protected, may be regarded as an unfailing 
 evidence of civilized conditions. The finan- 
 cier is inclined to regard that nation as 
 leading the others in the march of progress 
 which controls the finances of the world. 
 The engineer takes his measure of value ac- 
 cording to the amount and efficiency of ma- 
 
EDUCATION AND PROGKEStS. 3 
 
 chinery used for tlie manufacture of goods. 
 In the domain of transportation most is 
 made of the proportion of railroad lines to 
 the area, or perhaps the population of a 
 country. So every one uses the measure to 
 which he is accustomed in his own home, 
 his trade, or his own vocation, and even the 
 soap-manufacturer gages the civilization of 
 a people according to the consumption (i. e., 
 the use, perhaps even the waste) of soap. 
 
 But if we attribute to the parent the senti- 
 ment that the rank of a community in the 
 scale of progress should range according to 
 the significance ascribed to the education of 
 children, we would perhaps have an indi- 
 cator that comes nearest to the real criterion 
 of true culture. 
 
 The higher an animal ranges in the scale 
 of life the more it stands in need of educa- 
 tion. The lowest organisms needno parental 
 cnr'e whatever for they merely vegetate, but 
 the more prominent becomes the part played 
 by the mind the less complete is a creature 
 at its birth, and the less prepared for the 
 struggle of existence. More than other 
 
4 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 creatures, man needs protection and instruc- 
 tion, so as to be preserved during the tender 
 age of infancy and fully equipped for the 
 heavy demands of life. 
 
 Our frontispiece, a picture by Georges La- 
 vergne, represents a child's first steps un- 
 der the mother's guiding love, symbolizing 
 the instinctive anxiety of mankind to lead 
 the growing generation in the right path 
 and develop its latent forces so that when 
 the present generation has passed away, it 
 will in its turn take up the torch which has 
 been handed down and carry it further on 
 in the advancement of the race. 
 
 The educational ideal does not merely 
 mean a preservation of the treasures of the 
 past, but includes future progress. It is 
 not sufficient that the children of to-day be 
 like their fathers. We understand the 
 meaning of the law of evolution better than 
 our ancestors did, and since we can give our 
 children better chances in their lives than 
 we ourselves possessed, we can expect of 
 them more than we have accomplished. 
 They should surpass us, and it is our duty 
 
EDUCATION AND PROGRESS. 5 
 
 to enable them to do so; for Goethe was 
 right when he urged that "the son be better 
 than his father!" 
 
 Our lives are limited, and the older we 
 grow the more will our personal interests 
 be narrowed and reduced; but we can keep 
 our hearts young if we live with, and for, 
 and in, our children. 
 
 They can attain what was unattainable to 
 us, and they can become w^hat w^e wished to 
 be, but the best of it for us is that we our- 
 selves can be instrumental in helping them 
 to actualize our ideals. 
 
THE FIRST STEPS 
 
 The first steps we take in life, especially 
 the first steps in our intellectual and emo- 
 tional development, are not so indifferent 
 as may at first sight appear. 
 
 Children are imitative, and their souls 
 are built up by the impressions which they 
 receive. Every single experience, every ob- 
 servation of older folks, of parents, of 
 nurses, but especially of elder brotliers and 
 sisters, and generally of all belonging to the 
 circle of their acquaintance, exercises a 
 powerful influence in the building up of the 
 character of the child. 
 
 The child inherits from its ancestors a 
 great many things which constitute the cap- 
 ital with which man starts in life. This 
 capital consists not only of the bodily or- 
 ganism with all its details, but also of the 
 mental as well as emotional dispositions and 
 aptitudes, the significance of which can 
 
THE FIRST STEPS. .7 
 
 never be overrated. But this endowment 
 is not definite either in quantity or quality, 
 because the application made of it, the use 
 to which it is put, and the moulding of this 
 raw material into concrete forms is not in- 
 herited. The formative work is done dur- 
 ing the life of the individual, first by edu- 
 cation, then by experience ; during childhood 
 in our homes, our schools, and social sur- 
 roundings, and when we have reached ma- 
 turity and become independent, by our- 
 selves. Hence the paramount importance of 
 education. 
 
 The babe's brain contains besides other 
 areas of importance, an undeveloped part 
 in the so-called Island of Reil, which is to 
 be the center of speech. The disposition to 
 develop language is absent in any animal 
 brain. But while the aptitude for speech is 
 inherited, language itself is not. Our 
 mother tongue is not born with us but must 
 be acquired. A talkative propensity may 
 be inherited, but the language which a man 
 is to speak in life depends on the influences 
 of his early childhood, which determine not 
 
8 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 only the nature of his cast of mind, his na- 
 tionality, etc., but also the character and 
 usage of his speech in after life, whether or 
 not his linguistic talent will make of him 
 an orator, a poet, an author, a philologist, 
 a linguist, or perhaps a mere gossip. 
 
 A child endowed with musical talent 
 might Avith proper surroundings become a 
 second Mozart, the model of a pure and clas- 
 sical taste, or a composer of rag time tunes ; 
 or, if he grows up among absolutely un- 
 musical people, his musical disposition may 
 remain latent and show itself only in a 
 freakish way, producing, like a fallow field, 
 an exuberance of tonal weeds. 
 
 The raw diamond is valuable in itself, but 
 its greatest worth consists of opportunity. 
 It becomes a valuable solitaire only by cut- 
 ting. 
 
 The soul of every babe that is born into 
 the world possesses a w^orth that needs de- 
 velopment if its opportunities shall be 
 changed into actual values. It is the duty 
 of parents to see to it that this is done, and 
 the right kind of parents will endeavor to 
 
THE FIRST STEPS. 9 
 
 have the better part of their own selves, with 
 an excision of their shortcomings, reared in 
 their children. 
 
 We all of us owe much, in fact our entire 
 being, to the past, for we actually are the 
 sum total of the soul-life of all of our an- 
 cestors; and here in our children,— or for 
 those who have no children of their own, 
 here in the growing generation, — is the place 
 to pay our debt. 
 
 And upon the whole, parents are well in- 
 clined to do their duty. Nature has her own 
 sly ways of doing her pleasure, and so she 
 makes people press on to the destined goal 
 that she proposes. She appeals to self-love, 
 and even to vanity, to make us work for her 
 great aim which is the procreation of an in- 
 creasingly improved mankind. We believe 
 in evolution, and the doctrine of evolution 
 promises that the future man shall range as 
 much higher than the present man, as the 
 present man ranges above the proto-savage, 
 the primitive homo in spe just emerging 
 from the state of brutehood. As yet we 
 have only imperfectly realized the human 
 
10 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 ideal. The man of the future shall be a 
 true man, higher and better and nobler than 
 the average man of to-day. We can all do 
 our share in reaching our aim. We are all 
 tending toward it and yearning for it ; some 
 do so consciously, some unconsciously, and 
 more or less intelligently. All our most 
 personal interests, our love of life, our in- 
 stinct of self-preservation, our interest in 
 our own character, our hankering after the 
 immortalization of our own particular per- 
 sonality, our determination to maintain oui*- 
 selves in the struggle for life, are intimately 
 interwoven with the great plan of nature, 
 with the realization of the highest type of 
 manhood, — ^the actualization of the human 
 ideal. This explains why parentage is re- 
 spected among all races and nations as the 
 noblest calling of man. 
 
 The first impressions made on a child's 
 mind are especially important as they form 
 the basis of man's whole future develop- 
 ment, and they remain for a long time, some- 
 times forever, the standard by which all 
 later impressions are measured. Should 
 
THE FIRST STEPS. 11 
 
 we not, therefore, exercise the gi'eatest care, 
 and instead of leaving the first mental im- 
 pressions of children to accident, see to it 
 that they are throughout correct? 
 
 The first education of babies is frequently 
 left to mieducated nurses, who sometimes 
 have not the slightest idea of the sacredness 
 of their trust and know very little of the 
 right treatment of infants. Nurses should 
 be chosen with great care and should always 
 remain under the personal supervision of 
 the mother. They should be mere assistants 
 of the mother, but never take her place. 
 How many of us are oblivious to the fact 
 that whatever we do and say, whatever error 
 we commit, whatever example we may set, 
 is impressed upon and perpetuated in the 
 little souls in our charge ! Let us keep this 
 in mind and let us look upon the child as a 
 sacred trust. 
 
 Let us give children the right start in life, 
 and let us begin at the very beginning. Let 
 us not wait until the children have grown 
 old enough to understand us and be capable 
 of entering into our plans and ideas. Let 
 
12 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 US begin the work of moulding their souls 
 while they are still plastic, and not wait un- 
 til character is already forming, for then 
 it may be too late. 
 
 Let all parents join in the sentiment ex- 
 pressed by the great apostle of education in 
 the words, Kommt, lasst uns unsern Kin- 
 dern lehen! "Come, let us live for our 
 children!'^ 
 
 And if, indeed, we do live for our children, 
 it will not be a sacrifice on our part, not a 
 waste or loss of energy, for the reward we 
 receive in return is much richer and by far 
 more valuable than all the gifts we have to 
 offer. Children are a fountain of youth in 
 which our hearts are rejuvenated. 
 
PARENTHOOD 
 
 Parents that cannot make up their minds 
 to live for their children have no business 
 to have children. Children are not dolls; 
 they should not become toys for our amuse- 
 ment and diversion. Children are pledges. 
 The possession of children implies duties, 
 and the fulfilment of these duties demands 
 not only a painstaking labor and watchful- 
 ness, but also great discretion and wisdom. 
 
 The obligation of educating children ex- 
 ercises a most beneficial influence upon par- 
 ents, and it is by no means untrue that the 
 most humanizing factor in the evolution of 
 mankind has been the presence of children, 
 implying the necessity of educating them. 
 The proposition to discuss ^'the education 
 of parents by their children" ^ is not as 
 paradoxical as it seems. We may say that 
 
 ^ This is the title of an article by Carus Sterne, which 
 appeared in The Open Court, Vol. I. Nos. 22-23. 
 
 13 
 
14 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 no one, neither man nor woman, has grown 
 to mental and moral maturity until he or 
 she has been confronted with this noblest of 
 all duties, the care of bringing up children. 
 Cams Sterne ^ says : 
 
 ''Every child requites much of the love be- 
 stowed upon it by the parents, by making them 
 better and more perfect beings than they were 
 before its advent into the family. In fact, the 
 highest polish, the finishing touches of educa- 
 tion, are given people neither by home, school, 
 nor church, but by their own children. Should 
 they be so unfortunate as not to have any, they 
 will experience difficulties in replacing this lack- 
 ing factor in the education of their affections." 
 
 Frequently sexual love is spoken of as the 
 factor that exercises a civilizing influence 
 upon man; but Cams Sterne, "at the peril 
 of exposing himself to heresy in poetical 
 matters," declares that on the contrary it 
 
 2 Carus Sterne is the now, de plume of Dr. Ernst 
 Krause, of Berlin, a well-known German author of scien- 
 tific and popular-scientific works, his most celebrated work 
 being Werden und Vergehen. He is counted among the 
 foremost evolutionists of Germany, and did not fail from 
 the very beginning to emphasize the moral significance of 
 the doctrine of evolution. 
 
' PARENTHOOD. 15 
 
 engenders cruelty, produces destructiveness 
 and brings about beneficent results only 
 when resulting in a firm union, demanding 
 reciprocal surrender and self-sacrifice. 
 
 The religious aspirations of mankind so 
 important in history, are of a secondary 
 growth, for they develop from the relation 
 between parents and children. Says the 
 same author: 
 
 ''Out of parental and filial love there devel- 
 ops, even in immature minds, a universal love 
 for humanity. The infant becomes the Saviour 
 — the earthly father becomes the prototype of 
 the all-wise, all-bountiful Father in heaven." 
 
 Protestants as a rule object to Mariolatry 
 as pagan. They are aware of the pagan 
 features of any image worship and are there- 
 fore disgusted with their Roman Catholic 
 brethren. But belief in the divinity of 
 motherhood contains no less truth than the 
 belief in the divinity of fatherhood. 
 Protestants, as a rule, believe in the latter, 
 and are therefore not aware of the Protes- 
 tant paganism that results from a sensual 
 and literal interpretation of the belief in 
 
16 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 God the Father. The family relation is not 
 dual, but trinitarian. It is not parent and 
 child, but father, mother, and child. 
 
 Carus Sterne, too, touches upon this point. 
 Though Protestant by birth and absolutely 
 independent in religious matters by his 
 scientific education, he says: 
 
 ''The early endeavor to elevate the mother 
 into the realm of the divine is a deeply felt and 
 psychologically well justified factor in the de- 
 velopment of Christian dogma. It was thus 
 that the mother with the infant on her lap was 
 made the chief picture at the shrines. The 
 "Holy Family," so typically portrayed by 
 Raphael, wins all hearts, even at this day, in 
 Protestant countries, for it justly makes the nur- 
 sery the sanctuary which produces and constant- 
 ly feeds the pure flame of love of man and of 
 God." 
 
 The possession of children is a blessing, 
 and the joy that parents may derive from 
 them is immeasurable. It would neverthe- 
 less be a grave mistake to think that such 
 happiness can be had simply through the 
 procreation of progeny and by indulging, 
 simian fashion, in a love of one's own off- 
 
PARENTHOOD. 17 
 
 spring. The bliss of parenthood has to be 
 bought with many cares, with sacrifices of 
 all kinds, and with far-seeing forethought. 
 
 It is a common observation that the char- 
 acter of people changes for the better, the 
 moment they become parents. The average 
 man is thoughtless and perhaps even frivo- 
 lous, but as soon as the duties of parenthood 
 approach him, he begins to reflect and be- 
 comes considerate. Now he weighs his 
 words and takes life more seriously. Many 
 who never before gave a thought to the prob- 
 lems of religion, because they are lukewarm 
 and do not care to have a settled opinion, 
 pause for the first time in their lives and 
 ask themselves whether they had better teach 
 belief in God or unbelief. The moral views 
 of people assume a decidedly more definite 
 form when they think of their children, and 
 our behavior is influenced by the idea that 
 in our habits we are setting an example to 
 our sons and daughters. 
 
 What a wonderful plan it is of nature to 
 split up the evolution of mankind (whose 
 life in its entirety forms one uninterruxDted 
 
18 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 line of progress) into innumerable sections 
 of individual lives! We could very well 
 imagine a different arrangement. The in- 
 dividual and the race might coincide, and we 
 should then have the growth and evolution 
 of one immortal personality, in the place 
 of an immortal race broken up into a pro- 
 gressive succession of mortal individuals. 
 There would be no death in the dispensation 
 of the unlimited life of such a race-individ- 
 ual ; nor would there be any birth, and man- 
 kind would not need to start life over again 
 with every new baby ; there would be no need 
 of education; no need of love. But where 
 would the interest in life remain, if this 
 mankind-individual lived through centuries 
 and millenniums without being obliged to 
 continue its existence through begetting and 
 educating children *? Life would be unpala- 
 table if it were not broken up into limited 
 pieces and constantly started over again. 
 What a monstrosity such an immortal man- 
 kind-individual would be! It would think 
 and feel as does Goethe's Mephistopheles, 
 who in Scene IV says to Faust : 
 
PARENTHOOD. 19 
 
 ''Trust me, who for millenniums, year by 
 year, 
 The same tough cud must masticate and 
 test : 
 No mortal from the cradle to the bier 
 Can ever this unsavory stuff digest. 
 Trust one of us to whom this life is known; 
 The whole can be endured by God alone." 
 
 The mutuality of life is the condition of 
 our moral ideals which naturally have a 
 tendency to break through the narrow range 
 of exclusively individual interests ; it points 
 beyond the sphere of individual life without 
 annihilating the importance of the individ- 
 ual. It makes the individual the represent- 
 ative of superindividual aspirations which, 
 through the inherited parental affections, 
 have become sufficiently deep-seated as to 
 well up spontaneously whenever needed, 
 sometimes even in criminal characters, in 
 spite of themselves. Egotism and altruism 
 are both useful and beneficent instincts. 
 They balance each other, and where either 
 is missing the other will run to seed and do 
 great harm. 
 
 Our ethics, our religion, nay, our whole 
 
20 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 interest in life, is simply an expression of 
 the natural constitution of mankind, viz., 
 of the system of mutuality. 
 
 It may be wrong to say that without the 
 mutuality of life there would be no ethics 
 at all, because another arrangement would 
 simply imply other rules of conduct than 
 those w^hich we now call moral. In other 
 worlds of a different constitution, with other 
 interrelations, there may be other needs, and 
 consequently its creatures w^ould aspire af- 
 ter other ideals. It is difficult to say what 
 might be; but this much is sure, that our 
 moral and religious conceptions are a prod- 
 uct of the conditions which have shaped 
 our lives. However much religious truths 
 have been represented as a contradiction to 
 nature, they are nature (though, of course, 
 nature transfigured) in its highest efflores- 
 cence; and wherever for a time, through 
 gross sensualism and childish immaturity, 
 by a literal conception of parables and an 
 unspiritual pagan interpretation of the na- 
 ture of dogmas, mankind has drifted into 
 a hostility to nature, religion lost its true 
 
PARENTHOOD. 21 
 
 significance, but showed always, even in the 
 darkest ages, a tendency to return to a 
 purer, more elevating, and more natural 
 morality. 
 
 It is mutuality that gives zest to life and 
 makes it worth living. The interest that 
 keeps us in the world and attaches us to ex- 
 istence is like the vault of a massive struc- 
 ture, where stones keep one another up by 
 inclining toward and pressing upon one an- 
 other. Mutuality holds up the lofty arch as 
 firmly and as solidly as the interrelation 
 that obtains among the various members of 
 human society naturally produces and sus- 
 tains ethics; and the most important, be- 
 cause fundamental, mutuality of human life 
 is the relation between parents and children. 
 It is apparent that mankind would never 
 have developed true humanit}^, had it never 
 witnessed a mother's love. The sublimest 
 and noblest sentiments would be still un- 
 known, had not generation after generation 
 been trained in the school of parental care 
 and self-sacrifice. Men have learned the 
 lessons of life by living for their children. 
 
IMAGINATION AND LOVE OF TRUTH 
 
 Love of knowledge is a good thing, but 
 love of truth is more important than any- 
 thing else, and should be impressed upon a 
 child's mind as early as possible; but we 
 must not be blind to the fact that the con- 
 ception of truth can scarcely develop be- 
 fore the fourth or fifth year. Although the 
 idea is very simple to an adult, it is, in its 
 full significance, quite complex, — indeed, too 
 complex to be appreciated in all its im- 
 portance by children. 
 
 The first condition for developing the love 
 of truth is never to let the punishment of a 
 small criminal follow his confession of a 
 trespass. For fear is the main, and in many 
 cases, the only, incentive to telling lies, — 
 lies in the sense of wilful misstatements of 
 facts, of deceptions, made for the purpose 
 of gaining advantages or escaping unpleas- 
 ant results. 
 
 22 
 
IMAGINATION. 23 
 
 We ought to know that sometimes a child 
 tells untruths which are not lies. Children 
 have a vivid imagination, and they are apt 
 to invent facts. A certain small boy who 
 was suspected of having broken a dish de- 
 nied the fact, while his little brother, who 
 could not have done the deed, positively as- 
 sured his parents that he had broken the 
 dish. He told an untruth simply because 
 he imagined how he might have broken it. 
 The case was interesting to him, and in his 
 vivid imagination he depicted all the details, 
 and told with great complacency a long story 
 describing how the accident had happened. 
 
 To many children the dreams of their 
 imagination at once become as real as the 
 reminiscences of actual events, and in our 
 fervor of impressing upon children a love 
 of truth, we must not be too quick to con- 
 demn a little sinner before we positively 
 know that he tells not a mere untruth but 
 an actual lie invented for the purpose of 
 shirking his responsibility. 
 
 Love of truth ought to be closely connected 
 with self-esteem, and what is commonly 
 
24 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 called the sense of honor. There ought to 
 be no worse opprobrium than the defa- 
 mation of being a liar. 
 
 When years ago I was a scientific instruc- 
 tor at the Royal Corps of Cadets at Dres- 
 den, I adopted the principle, whenever any 
 disturbance of a recitation occurred, of 
 simply asking the question, ''Who did it?" 
 On the first occasion, of course, there was 
 no response, whereupon I spoke contempt- 
 uously of the spirit of the whole class, in 
 which there was some one too cowardly to 
 stand up frankly and acknowledge the mis- 
 chief which he had committed. I argued 
 that all the members of the class were re- 
 sponsible for the esprit de corps; and that 
 so long as such cowardice was condoned and 
 encouraged, I could have no respect for the 
 class. When this happened for the first 
 time, the charge of cowardice stung the evil- 
 doer, but he did not rise to confess, although 
 the whole class grew more and more indig- 
 nant and urged him to do so. The duty of 
 the class, I continued, is so to influence its 
 members that none of them shall shirk the 
 
IMAGINATION. 25 
 
 responsibility and fail to acknowledge what- 
 ever he has done. In a society that tolerates 
 suspicious characters one must be on one's 
 guard ; and so a teacher cannot treat a class 
 in which some refuse to confess the truth 
 frankly and openly, as young friends, but 
 as inferiors, comparable to inmates of a 
 penitentiary who are always under the sus- 
 picion of wrong-doing. The result was that 
 somebody rose to expose the delinquent; 
 but I refused to listen to the denunciations, 
 and stigmatized, at the same time, in strong 
 terms, the practice of playing the informer, 
 saying that I did not care to know who did 
 it, but hoped that the guilty one would have 
 honor enough to tell the truth, if it w^ere 
 for no other motive than to avert suspicion 
 from an innocent comrade. The malefactor 
 appeared after the recitation and denounced 
 himself privately, but here again I refused 
 to listen to the confession, and told him the 
 proper thing would be to stand up before the 
 whole class and publicly acknowledge his 
 guilt. What he had done before the whole 
 class, he must confess to before the whole 
 
26 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 class. Without any further suggestion, at 
 the next recitation the malefactor jumped 
 up, and in a few clear words made the con- 
 fession required. 
 
 An occurrence of this kind took place once 
 only in every new class and never again. 
 The class understood the principle, and 
 whenever anything out of the way happened, 
 whenever there was a noise which was diffi- 
 cult to trace, or whenever a disturbance of 
 any kind took place, the cause of which 
 could not be discovered, the question, "Who 
 did if?" was always followed by the prompt 
 self-surrender of the delinquent. He knew, 
 of course, that he would not be punished, 
 nor was it ever necessary, because the con- 
 fession ended the joke, if there was any joke 
 in it, for its repetition had become impos- 
 sible. 
 
 When I was a child attending school, the 
 investigation of criminal cases was a fa- 
 vorite pastime for several of my teachers. I 
 remember that many of our lessons were 
 idled away by cross-examinations. The 
 professor played the judge in court, and 
 
IMAGINATION. 27 
 
 every one of the boys deemed it his duty to 
 mislead him. It was almost impossible to 
 learn the truth, for the esprit de corps of 
 our classes resulted in a very strong notion 
 that belying the teacher was the proper 
 thing to do, and any one who had told the 
 truth plainly, either in self-confession or in 
 denunciation of others would have been re- 
 garded as an abject fellow who, without self- 
 respect, bowed his neck under the yoke of 
 our common oppressors. During my expe- 
 rience as a teacher at the Royal Corps of 
 Cadets, I was never obliged to undertake 
 any investigation, and I may add, I never 
 had reason to doubt the word of the boys. 
 Many of them are now officers in the Ger- 
 man army, or may do duty in the very insti- 
 tution at which they were educated, and I 
 hope they have learned to treat soldiers and 
 cadets in the same spirit. There is no rea- 
 son why the same method should not be 
 employed in schools and nurseries all over 
 the world. 
 
WORLDLY PRUDENCE 
 
 While love of truth must become part of 
 the foundation of a child's mind, we should 
 not one-sidedly press the importance of 
 truth to the utter neglect of discretion. 
 Common prudence teaches that we have to 
 tell the truth at the right moment and in the 
 right way. Love of truth should not be 
 identified with bluntness. We are by no 
 means requested to tell the truth, the whole 
 truth, and nothing but the truth, to every- 
 body. We should tell the truth above all 
 considerations where it is our duty to do so, 
 and that depends upon circumstances. 
 
 The phj^sician who shocks a sick man by 
 bluntly telling him, "Your disease is fatal," 
 may be guilty of a criminal offence in so far 
 as he hastens the dissolution of his patient. 
 He must be on his guard and break the truth 
 in an appropriate way, as the occasion re- 
 quires. Due reserve is not lying, and blunt- 
 
 28 
 
WORLDLY PRUDENCE. 29 
 
 ness is not love of truth. We must consider 
 the consequences of our words, and choose 
 such expressions as will bring about the re- 
 sult at which we truthfully aim. We must 
 tell the truth with discretion. 
 
 The main thing is to tell the truth to our- 
 selves. The old evening prayer has a very 
 good feature in its review of the day's work, 
 and its self-criticism, at any rate, should be 
 kept up. Whenever a child has done any- 
 thing wrong, let him consider it in a quiet 
 mood when he retires for the night, and 
 drive home to him the lesson that, the more 
 severe he is with himself, the more apt he 
 will be to make a success in life. Most fail- 
 ures in life are direct results of vanity, 
 which prevents us from seeing our own 
 faults. Truthfulness to ourselves must be 
 the basis of our truthfulness to others; as 
 Shakespeare says: 
 
 "This above all: to thine own self be true, 
 And it must follow as the night the day 
 Thou canst not then be false to any man. ' ' 
 
 As to cleverness and discretion, I know 
 no better way to cultivate them than by 
 
30 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 reading with the children ^^sop's Fables 
 and even Reynard the Fox. The former 
 have the advantage of being short, and most 
 of them need no explanation as to the les- 
 son involved. The moral of the latter, how- 
 ever, is almost dangerous, and can at any 
 rate be easily misinterpreted, because it 
 seems to teach that cunning is the most 
 valuable equipment in life, and that the 
 clever liar will win in the end. But I am 
 not willing to reject the story on such easy 
 terms, for many of the situations and many 
 of the delineations of character are too real- 
 istic and intrinsically true not to teach a 
 useful lesson. 
 
 Reynard the Fox is a story without a 
 hero ; it does not hold up an ideal to be imi- 
 tated, but teaches us the dangers of life. 
 A few words of explanation will prevent 
 children from drawing the wrong moral 
 from the story. First we must call their at- 
 tention to the fact that all the creatures so 
 ingeniously duped by the fox are caught by 
 their own faults — Bruin, the bear, by his 
 love of honey; Tibert, the cat, by his pro- 
 
WORLDLY PRUDENCE. 31 
 
 clivity for mousing ; Bellin, the ram, by his 
 ambition to appear as a clever councillor; 
 Kyward, the hare, by his stupidity, which in 
 a certain sense is a vice too, and which our 
 children must be taught to overcome as a 
 matter of duty. It is true that Reynard is 
 the personification of cunning, but Isegrim 
 the wolf, his enemy, has all the faults of the 
 fox with the sole exception that he is phys- 
 ically his superior, and is, in addition, vora- 
 cious, improvident, slovenly, and villainous. 
 While morally the wolf is no better than the 
 fox, the latter is at least clever; ingenuity 
 is his redeeming feature. And with what 
 a humor are all the other characters de- 
 scribed! Grimbart, the badger, the un- 
 critical admirer of Reynard; Baldwin, the 
 ass, the learned clerk; the she-ape, Ruck- 
 inaw^, an intriguing chambermaid. Noble, 
 the lion, is a very short-sighted sovereign 
 who becomes a mere puppet, a plaything, 
 and, without knowing it himself, is used by 
 Reynard as a tool. The fox comes out 
 victorious, because he is smarter than his 
 enemies, but for all that, he remains a ras- 
 
32 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 cal who constantly runs the risk of ending 
 on the gallows. 
 
 With some such hints, a reading of this 
 ancient animal epic will be very instructive, 
 especially if after its perusal the children 
 are told that the tale reflects the age in 
 which it was written — an age in which true 
 goodness was rare and the importance of a 
 genuine love of truth was not yet appreci- 
 ated. Civilization was then so low that 
 cleverness, even in the low form of cmming, 
 was uncommon, and whenever found it was 
 appreciated as a rare gift from heaven. It 
 takes quite a clever man to tell a lie with 
 approximate consistency, and the Odyssey, 
 written in an analogous period of culture in 
 the Greek nation, expatiates with great sat- 
 isfaction upon the virtue of lying and the 
 mendacious genius of its versatile and in- 
 ventive hero, whose usual epithet, ttoAvVt^ti? 
 (he of many counsels), sounds like a transla- 
 tion of Begin-hard} 
 
 There can be no doubt that the animal 
 
 ^ Reynard means " strong in council " ( regin = wisdom, 
 advice, council ; and hard = strong, firm ) . 
 
WORLDLY PRUDENCE. 33 
 
 fables, including the story of Reynard the 
 Fox, are among the best methods, if not the 
 very best, to teach in a playful way the first 
 elements of worldly wisdom. The fact that 
 yEsop's Fables can be traced back to In- 
 dia, that fables are mentioned in the Old 
 Testament and in the history of Rome as 
 early as the sixth century B. C. ; further, 
 that similar poetical productions of an in- 
 dependent growth have been discovered in 
 the tales of Uncle Remus among the ne- 
 groes of the United States, and in the an- 
 imal stories of the natives of America, Af- 
 rica, and Oceanica, is sufficient evidence not 
 only of the fact that they must be a very an- 
 cient and venerable heirloom of ancestral 
 wisdom, but also of their popularity and 
 usefulness as a means of instruction. 
 
 Carlyle speaks of the animal fable as ''a 
 true world's book which through centuries 
 was everywhere at home, the spirit of which 
 diffused itself into all languages and all 
 minds, . . . the universal household pos- 
 session and secular Bible." 
 
THE USE OF MONEY 
 
 Money is an important factor in the 
 world of the adult, and children, who are so 
 keen in their observation, will as a rule no- 
 tice the fact at a tender age. The time 
 comes when they introduce its use into their 
 play, and it is not an uncommon occurrence 
 that they manufacture a monetary system 
 of their own for shopping and bartering, 
 for banking and making investments to bear 
 interest or bring returns. I have seen chil- 
 dren do so on their own account without any 
 instruction, and it seems that such tenden- 
 cies deserve encouragement, for the notion 
 of money should not be left out in the nur- 
 sery. Children will instinctively anticipate 
 the conditions of the life that is in store for 
 them and their plays are and ought to be an 
 education. 
 
 Games are in the market which have been 
 invented to familiarize children with 
 
 34 
 
THE USE OF MONEY. 35 
 
 money, but I do not remember any one that 
 would deserve recommendation. Nor would 
 I advise the use of artificial money such as 
 accompanies these games for it is much bet- 
 ter if the children themselves manufacture 
 the money which they need for their own 
 games. They can easily limit the amount by 
 having every piece of currency .signed by all 
 members of their little community and they 
 may start with an equal amount allotted to 
 every one, and have them backed up by real 
 things that possess to them a value of ex- 
 change, such as marbles, beans, or other de- 
 sirable objects. Here, as in all other cases, 
 parents should allow their children to in- 
 vent their own methods. When the chil- 
 dren come more and more into contact with 
 the domain that lies beyond the pale of the 
 nursery they begin to feel the need of real 
 money and it will be wise to let them have 
 a definite allowance so as to accustom them 
 to the use of money and establish in their 
 minds at an early age habits of thrift and 
 order. 
 There are two opinions prevalent con- 
 
36 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 cerning money both of whidi are wrong, 
 and it is important for man to have the 
 right conception of the significance of money 
 before he starts in life. Some hold money 
 in contempt and look upon it as the thing 
 which defiles, while others worship it as the 
 golden calf, the measure of all values and 
 the power that governs the world. 
 
 William Matthews in his well known 
 book. Getting on in the World, says rightly : 
 
 "The philosophy which affects to teach 
 us a contempt of money does not run very 
 deep ; ' ' and 
 
 "The way in which a man spends his 
 money is often one of the surest tests of his 
 character. ' ' 
 
 Money is neither the sordid thing which it 
 is often believed to be, nor is it the omnipo- 
 tent ruler of all earthly affairs. Money be- 
 comes sordid only by the touch of sordid 
 hands; in itself, all money is honest, for it 
 represents a certain amount of human la- 
 bor, equal to the exertion of procuring it. 
 Nor is money the almighty power that rules 
 the world; the worth of money consists in 
 
THE USE OF MONEY. 37 
 
 what it may buy, but there are goods that 
 can not be bought with money, — health and 
 youth, beauty and energy, talents, genius, 
 ideals, and more than all, honesty and a 
 clear conscience. 
 
 Money has been compared to the blood 
 that circulates through our arteries. It 
 must circulate to be useful and it must serve 
 wholesome purposes. It is a means to an 
 end and as such it must be appreciated. 
 Money has no value in itself and for itself. 
 To earn money for the sake of hoarding it 
 may be useful for the community, for large 
 capitalists are as much needed in a social 
 aggregate as a living organism needs cen- 
 tral organs for its blood circulation, but the 
 man who hoards will find the work neither 
 profitable nor pleasant. 
 
 Between the two extremes of a wrong 
 usage of money lies the golden mean and 
 our children ought to know it. They ought 
 to know that it is the duty of every man to 
 earn a living, and a living that is merely 
 from hand to mouth is insufficient for a man 
 of providence, and Robert Burns is right in 
 
38 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 pointing out in one of his poems that the 
 proper use of money is 
 
 *'Not for to hide it in a hedge 
 
 Nor for a train attendant, 
 But for the glorious privilege, 
 
 Of being independent." 
 
 The best method of accustoming children 
 to the use of money is to put them in a 
 small scale in such a position as they will 
 occupy later on in life when confronted by 
 the cares of making a living. Allow them 
 to bear in a small degree the burden of life 
 by giving them an allowance for which they 
 have to procure certain necessities of their 
 life, their shoes, their ties, gloves, school 
 utensils, car fare or other things occasion- 
 ally needed ; and arrange it so that they can 
 freely cover their expenses, and, if they are 
 thrifty, save a little for themselves which 
 they may use as they see fit. This allowance 
 should not be irregularly increased but 
 should be paid out like a salary on regular 
 pay days, and it should be made on the 
 condition that a strict account of it is kept 
 which must from time to time be balanced. 
 
THE USE OF MONEY. 39 
 
 It will not be wise to interfere with chil- 
 dren for the unwise use they might make of 
 their savings, though it may be opportune 
 to point out to them the folly of unnecessary 
 expenses, and unless there are weighty rea- 
 sons to the contrary there ought to be no 
 prying supervision of their account books, 
 the main object in view being, that childi'en 
 learn to make both ends meet. 
 
 It will be good, too, if children begin 
 young to earn money, but this ought not to 
 be done at the expense of their education 
 nor in any way that would practically 
 amount to begging, but in actually accom- 
 plishing some useful work that possesses a 
 value to the party who pays for it. And 
 the money earned or saved, if not immedi- 
 ately used, should be deposited in a kind of 
 savings bank, which the parents will keep 
 for their children or as soon as it be large 
 enough may be deposited in a real bank. 
 
 No child is so poor and none so rich that 
 he does not stand in need of some practical 
 instruction in handling money, in saving it, 
 and in spending it in the right way. 
 
SQUARE DEALING 
 
 There is an innate desire among people to 
 get something for nothing, or to gain by a 
 reduction of prices. On this principle those 
 merchants base their business who announce 
 that they are enabled by bankruptcy or 
 otherwise to sell under the manufacturing 
 price. While I do not deny that this is 
 sometimes possible, there is no question that 
 some of the goods bought in this way rep- 
 resent a smaller return for the money paid 
 than the reduction promises. The man who 
 buys well-made goods at an exorbitant price 
 loses money, but he owns the goods. He 
 has what he wanted. But he who buys poor 
 goods at a reduced price loses both money 
 and goods, for he gave away the former, and 
 the latter are without value and will either 
 be useless or will not serve the purpose for 
 which they were bought. 
 
 The fact that cheap goods are ^'made to 
 
 40 
 
SQUARE DEALING. 41 
 
 sell" is admirably set forth in Dr. John 
 Wolcott 's humorous poem The Razor Seller, 
 which I quote: 
 
 A fellow in a market-town, 
 
 Most musical, cried razors up and down, 
 
 And offered twelve for eighteen pence; 
 Which certainly seemed wondrous cheap. 
 And, for the money, quite a heap. 
 
 As every man would buy, with cash and 
 sense. 
 
 A country bumpkin the great offer heard, — 
 Poor Hodge, who suffered by a broad black 
 beard, 
 That seemed a shoe-brush stuck beneath 
 his nose: 
 With cheerfulness the eighteen pence he paid. 
 And proudly to himself in whispers said, 
 ''This rascal stole the razors, I suppose. 
 
 ''No matter if the fellow he a knave, 
 Provided that the razors shave; 
 
 It certainly will be a monstrous prize." 
 So home the clown, with his good fortune, 
 
 went. 
 Smiling, in heart and soul content. 
 And quickly soaped himself to ears and 
 eyes. 
 
42 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 Being well lathered from a dish or tub, 
 Hodge now began with grinning pain to grub, 
 
 Just like a hedger cutting furze; 
 'Twas a vile razor ! — then the rest he tried, — 
 All were impostors. "Ah!" Hodge sighed, 
 
 "I wish my eighteen pence within my 
 purse." 
 
 In vain to chase his beard,, and bring the 
 graces. 
 He cut, and dug, and winced, and stamped, 
 and swore; 
 Brought blood, and danced, blasphemed, and 
 made wry faces. 
 And cursed each razor's body o'er and o'er: 
 
 His muzzle formed of opposition stuff. 
 Firm as a Foxite, would not lose its ruff; 
 
 So kept it, — laughing at the steel and suds. 
 Hodge, in a passion, stretched his angry jaws. 
 Vowing the direst vengeance with clenched 
 claws. 
 
 On the vile cheat that sold the goods. 
 ''Eazors! a mean, confounded dog. 
 Not fit to scrape a hog ! ' ' 
 
 Hodge sought the fellow, — found him, — and 
 
 begun : 
 ''Perhaps, Master Razor-rogue, to you 'tis 
 
 fun, 
 
SQUARE DEALING. 43 
 
 That people flay themselves out of their 
 lives. 
 You rascal ! for an hour have I been grubbing, 
 Giving my crying whiskers here a scrubbing, 
 
 With razors just like oyster knives. 
 Sirrah! I tell you you're a knave, 
 To cry up razors that can't shave!" 
 
 ''Friend," quoth the razor man, ''I'm not a 
 knave, 
 As for the razors you have bought, 
 Upon my soul, I never thought 
 That they would shave." 
 "Not think they'd shave!" quoth Hodge, with 
 wondering eyes, 
 And voice not much unlike an Indian yell ; 
 "What were they made for, then, you dog?" 
 he cries. 
 ''Made" quoth the fellow with a smile, — 
 "to sell" 
 
 It is sad, but nevertheless true, that most 
 people who are cheated in life are deceived 
 by their own desire to deceive. For in- 
 stance, there is a trick among gamblers, 
 which rarely fails among the uninitiated. 
 The gambler who plays puts down three 
 cards and requests those present to bet on 
 one of them. While jDutting down the cards, 
 
44 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 there is a disturbance somewhere behind the 
 gambler, and he indignantly turns round, 
 requesting the people to be quiet, and this 
 moment of his apparent inattention is 
 utilized by a bystander who lifts up one of 
 the cards, shows it to some others, and puts 
 it down again. It is done quickly enough 
 not to be noticeable to the gambler. But 
 woe to him who imagines that on the 
 strength of this deception he can risk his 
 money on the exposed card. For, when the 
 card is turned up it proves to be different 
 from the one he has seen. The man who 
 lifts up and shows the card belongs to the 
 gang; he is an adept in sleight of hand and 
 before he puts the card down again he re- 
 places it b}^ another one. There are always 
 plenty of people who, if they but have a 
 chance to deceive their fellowmen, venture 
 to do so, and thus they are gulled by their 
 own evil desires and have no reason to com- 
 plain about it. 
 
 The bait which will catch the unwary with 
 the greatest ease is flattery. Vain people 
 are most easily inveigled and defrauded by 
 
SQUARE DEALING. 45 
 
 praise, or by propositions that appeal to a 
 sense of their own importance, or fame, or 
 ability. The fable of the fox and the crow 
 repeats itself more frequently than any 
 other allegorical story, and it is worth while 
 to have our childi'en learn it by heart so 
 that they will remember the lesson. 
 
 Let us teach children at an early age and 
 as soon as they can comprehend it, not by 
 moralizing, but by practical instances such 
 as they observe in their surroundings, that 
 the employment of tricks never pays; and 
 that they should look with suspicion on 
 every one who invites them to gain by an- 
 other's loss or by deception. To gain by 
 cheating others is always a doubtful advan- 
 tage, and therefore, as a mere matter of 
 prudence, it should not be practised. In 
 fact, one must become a professional trick- 
 ster, or gambler, in order' to succeed in the 
 profession of cheating. A bird that is 
 caught tightens the noose by its own move- 
 ments. So a country clown, when victi- 
 mized by a gang of tricksters, as a rule him- 
 self closes the snare into which he falls. 
 
SYMPATHY WITH ANIMALS 
 
 It is well to impress children at an early 
 age with the truth that animals are sentient 
 creatures as we are. It is not necessary to 
 make children sentimental or to avoid tell- 
 ing them that^^nimals are used for meat; 
 but they should not witness such scenes as 
 the slaughter of chickens, or pigs, or other 
 creatures. Our Western civilization is in 
 many respects, and, indeed, in its most im- 
 portant features, superior to all other civili- 
 zations, but it is inferior to Hindu habits, in 
 so far as it has no proper sympathy with 
 animal life. I read, for instance, in an 
 otherwise good book, the title of which is 
 The American Boy's Handy Book, on page 
 386, the following passage: 
 
 *'Mr. Fred Holder, the celebrated naturalist 
 and writer of boys' books on natural history, is 
 responsible for 'the goose fisherman,' which is 
 nothing more nor less than a live goose, with 
 
 46 
 
SYMPATHY WITH ANIMALS. 47 
 
 a line and spoon-hook attached to one leg. Mr. 
 or Mrs. Goose is driven into the water and 
 forced to swim, which, owing to the nature of 
 the bird, is not a difficult or disagreeable task. 
 
 *'As the bird swims, using its feet as paddles 
 to propel itself, the spoon at the head of the line 
 is jerked along in a most interesting manner to 
 the fish, and if there are any pickerel, with their 
 voracious appetites to spur them on, they can- 
 not often restrain themselves, but needs must 
 seize what, to them, appears to be a fat, shiny, 
 young fish, but which they learn to their sorrow 
 to be a hard metal snare. 
 
 "Then the fun begins. The goose feels 
 something tugging at its leg, and becomes ex- 
 cited. The unfortunate fish plunges about, only 
 to drive the cruel barbs deeper into its car- 
 tilaginous mouth, and make escape impossible. 
 
 ** Finding, as it supposes, a hidden enemy in 
 the water, the bird, seeks refuge on the shore, 
 where its master gleefully unhooks the fish, and 
 starts the bird on another trip." 
 
 What a barbarous game! Can there be 
 any better mode of teaching boys cruelty? 
 And what will be the result of an education 
 in which the distress of a goose is thought 
 to be exciting fun? The game is not so 
 cruel as many other sports, but it is cer- 
 
48 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 tainly calculated to harden a boy's heart to 
 the sufferings of helpless animals. Hunt- 
 ing and fishing are good out-door exercises, 
 but they can be tolerated only on the con- 
 dition that the mind shall not dwell on the 
 havoc which is caused in animal life. The 
 sole inducement to hunting and fishing 
 ought to consist m the exercise it affords, 
 and perhaps also in the difficulties which the 
 pursuit of the game offers. 
 
 I, for one, cannot understand how a man 
 can shoot at a deer that does not run away 
 but confidently and boldly faces the hunter. 
 That hunting and fishing are sports is a 
 mark of barbarism. They ought to be 
 simply a business, engaged in on account 
 of the necessity of killing a certain num- 
 ber of animals either for food, or because 
 of the danger of their becoming a plague to 
 the country, as in the case of the rabbits in 
 California, which have to be killed because 
 they destroy the harvest, and because their 
 rapid increase makes it a question whether 
 they or man shall inhabit the country. 
 
 A disinclination to regard hunting as a 
 
SYMPATHY WITH ANIMALS. 49 
 
 noble sport may appear sentimental; but I 
 am happy to say tliat a man who, if he 
 lacked any virtue, lacked in sentimentality, 
 cherished the same opinion. Frederick the 
 Great, who is unexcelled in the history of 
 mankind, as a warrior and general, had a 
 great contempt for hunting, and declared 
 that there was as little enjojnuent in killing 
 deer as there was in butchering calves. But 
 Frederick was an exception on the throne, 
 for hunting has always been, and is still, a 
 royal sport, and the slaughter of game by 
 many sovereigns is looked upon as a very 
 important practice in their lives. 
 
 The only hunting worthy of man is the 
 lion or tiger hunt, which is heroic and means 
 salvation of life by the destruction of those 
 creatures that are destructive to it. But 
 most of the hunting that is actually done is 
 little better than mere slaughter, the worst 
 sport being coursing, for which the animals 
 are first caught and are then let loose for 
 the purpose of being hunted to death. 
 
DON'T SAY DON'T 
 
 There are two interpretations of the 
 doctrine of the Fall and the scheme of sal- 
 vation that was held among the school men 
 of mediaeval Christianity. One regards the 
 fall of man as a break in God's plan, while 
 the other one represents the view that it was 
 God's intention to let man pass through sin 
 to salvation; for without sin man would 
 never have acquired the knowledge of good 
 and evil, which forms the climax of his simi- 
 larity to God. Adherents of the former 
 view belonged to the school of Nominalists 
 while the latter showed an inclination 
 toward Realism. The former regarded our 
 present world as one particular anomalous 
 accident, and would at the same time insist 
 on the dogma of the cosmocentricity of the 
 earth, which means that the earth is the 
 stage on which alone God became flesh and 
 revealed himself in Christ. All the other 
 
 50 
 
DON'T SAY "DON'T." 51 
 
 planets, the sun and the moon, and all the 
 fixed stars, exist simply for the sake of the 
 earth as lights that might serve to make 
 time-measurements for human purposes. 
 On earth man was created to be tempted, 
 and when he had fallen God would set all 
 the armies of angels in motion and come 
 down upon earth himself to redeem him 
 from perdition. This is the view of those 
 who regard every experience of theirs as a 
 particular case, and who see in universals 
 no truly universal features but mere 
 ''names" (in Latin nomina), a definition 
 from which the name "nominalism" has 
 been derived. Their adversaries, the Keal- 
 ists, were inclined to look upon every par- 
 ticular case as an instance of universal law, 
 and thus they were inclined to regard man's 
 fall not as an accident, but as a necessity. 
 They argued that man fell because God 
 wanted him to fall. And how could the 
 good tidings of the God-man have been pos- 
 sible if man had not to rise from a lower 
 state to a higher, if he had been and re- 
 mained from the beginning perfect and 
 
52 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 without sin? How could there have been 
 any worth in his character if he simply were 
 good because he was created good? No, 
 man had to work out his salvation for him- 
 self, he had to establish his own good char- 
 acter, and that feature in man which ac- 
 complished his salvation is God himself! 
 Thus, according to the philosophy of the 
 Realists, the earth would be a typical case 
 for any possible world on which life de- 
 velops, and the consistent conclusion would 
 be to say that the same events naturally and 
 necessarily take place in other worlds. On 
 all of them we should find sinners, on all 
 of them error and evil, yet at the same time 
 on all of them God would appear in the 
 flesh and would teach men that self-sacri- 
 ficing love is the way of salvation. And 
 further, what would Christ or Saviour mean 
 but an actualization of this self-sacrificing 
 love? 
 
 Whatever these two schools may pretend, 
 this much is sure: when, according to the 
 legend told in the first chapter of Genesis, 
 the Lord put the man he had created in the 
 
DON'T SAY "DON'T." 53 
 
 Garden of Eden, and said to him with re- 
 gard to the tree of the knowledge of good 
 and evil, "Thou shalt not eat of it," the 
 man, as soon as left at liberty to do as he 
 pleased, would not and could not fail to 
 disobey the command. 
 
 As the story stands God must have had 
 the intention to make man fall. Otherwise 
 the Ophites, the Syrian Gnostics who be- 
 lieved in the divinity of the serpent, would 
 have been right when they declared that 
 Yahveh was an inferior God, who, himself 
 a slave of passions, like wrath, jealousy, 
 vengeance, etc., wanted to keep man igno- 
 rant. The highest God, however, the God of 
 love, mercy, and wisdom, sent the serpent as 
 the first messenger of the gnosis to aspire 
 for knowledge and prepare mankind for the 
 arrival of Christ. 
 
 If you wish a child to perform a certain 
 act on its own accord, and not at your re- 
 quest, you need only tell him "Do not do 
 it, ' ' and he will be sure to do it. You may 
 by force or by fear prevent a boy from be- 
 ing disobedient, but you cannot prevent him 
 
54 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 from feeling the itching in his fingers to do 
 what is forbidden. All the various injunc- 
 tions so freely given to children are so many 
 temptations to become disobedient. 
 
 A little party of children had thrown sev- 
 eral boxes of blocks down stairs, which 
 would have given the nurse a good deal of 
 trouble to pick up. They enjoyed the joke 
 greatly, but when a w^aggish uncle told them 
 that for a punishment the blocks should re- 
 main down stairs and that no one should be 
 allowed to bring them up again, the little 
 urchins started at once to carry every block 
 up, and the joy of being disobedient beamed 
 in their eyes. 
 
 Hence the lesson. Don't say ''don't" to 
 your children. Do not forbid. Do not 
 lead them into the temptation to become dis- 
 obedient; in other words, respect their lib- 
 erty and allow them to act foolishly, if they 
 prefer to do so at their own risk. 
 
 But the objection may be made: "Chil- 
 dren must be educated, and education con- 
 sists precisely in teaching them what not 
 to do." That is quite true. But the 
 
DON'T SAY "DON'T." 55 
 
 method of teaching them what they should 
 not do ought not to consist in prohibitions. 
 
 If you do not want the baby to walk down 
 stairs because he will hurt himself and is 
 liable to fall, let him try, and let him by 
 his own experience find that he runs a risk 
 when going down. Tell him he will fall, 
 but do not forbid him: Don't say "don't." 
 When approaching the stairs for the first 
 time, watch over him so that he does not 
 do himself serious harm, but let him experi- 
 ence the fear of falling, and warn him that 
 he will hurt himself. If he disregards the 
 warning, it is better for him to be suffi- 
 ciently frightened by a fall to remember it. 
 
 If a child approaches the stove or the fire- 
 place, warn him in the same way; tell him 
 "hot," "hot," and if the child does not 
 mind, let him burn himself a little. The 
 nurse's business is simply to see to it that 
 he does not meet with a serious accident, 
 not to hinder him from making unpleasant 
 but valuable experiences. You will find 
 that children who are informed about the 
 evil consequences of certain actions will 
 
56 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 mind the warning much better than the chil- 
 dren who are forbidden to eat an apple for 
 no reason whatever. That apple will ap- 
 pear "jDleasant to the sight and good for 
 food," more so than any other fruit that 
 may be around. 
 
 When children want more sweetmeats, 
 more strawberry shortcake, or more ice 
 cream than is good for them, give them a 
 fair warning. Tell them, ''I should like to 
 eat more of it myself, but I believe I shall 
 ruin my stomach and be sick if I do ; there- 
 fore I don't." If the children are strong 
 enough and can stand a disordered stomach, 
 it may be advisable to let them once or twice 
 take more and let them find out themselves 
 what an abused stomach means. But when 
 a child falls sick and when its stomach re- 
 volts, the best plan is to sit by his bedside 
 and help him pass in review all the things 
 he has eaten on the previous day, and then 
 to say to him without reproach: ''I believe 
 you ate too much ice cream," or whatever 
 it may have been, ''and I would not eat so 
 much again. It is mipleasant to be sick, 
 
DON'T SAY "DON'T." 57 
 
 and it is after all the same taste whether 
 you eat one or two dishes." 
 
 Sickness is a good teacher of self-control 
 in eating, but parents must improve the oc- 
 casion and help the child to discover the 
 cause of its indisposition. 
 
 You cannot educate children by pun- 
 ishments. You must make them, so far as 
 possible, feel the evil results of their actions, 
 and the insight into the causation of good 
 and evil will exercise a better and more edu- 
 cational influence than the fear of the rod 
 or the sting of bitter reproaches. 
 
 The child wdll be an echo of your own 
 behavior. Scolding makes him a scold and 
 severity renders him resentful. 
 
TREATMENT OF A NAUGHTY CHILD 
 
 There is a peculiar difficulty in treating 
 children when they become naughty. They 
 scream, they howl, and become obstinate to 
 all moralizing. Their bad temper becomes 
 part of themselves, and to relent naturally 
 appears to them a self -surrender. 
 
 What is to be done in such a case 1 Shall 
 educators break the will of the child as is 
 often proposed, or shall they yield and let 
 him have his will? Neither seems to be 
 practical, for, on the one hand, instead of 
 breaking the will we ought to strengthen it, 
 and, on the other hand, instead of yielding 
 to his will, we ought to lead it and direct it 
 in its tendencies. Will in itself is neither 
 good nor bad ; and strength of will is rather 
 a virtue than a vice, but the goodness of a 
 will depends on the aim toward which it 
 tends. 
 
 A child's soul, accordingly, should be 
 
 58 
 
A NAUGHTY CHILD. 59 
 
 treated as what it naturally is, a living com- 
 monwealth of various and frequently con- 
 tradictory tendencies. And in doing so, it 
 is advisable to identify those tendencies 
 that are to be cherished and strengthened 
 with the child's self, but to brand those 
 which we wish to remove as foreign ele- 
 ments that are to be discarded. They are 
 like the injurious offshoots of fruit trees 
 which have to be pruned. If the naughti- 
 ness of the child be treated as something 
 that he is possessed of, as a mental poison 
 that he has to expel from his mental system, 
 as demons and devils such as Jesus cast out 
 according to the Gospel stories, — educators 
 will far more easily regain the good-will 
 of their little rebel if they allow him to 
 capitulate without suffering a humiliation. 
 Here a combination of two principles ap- 
 pears to be of advantage: first, the divert- 
 ing of the attention of the child from the 
 cause that produced his ill behavior, and 
 secondly, the personifying his rudeness with 
 a bad boy that has entered his little self. 
 Address the child, saying: " There is a bad 
 
60 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 little boy in you, come quick, let us cast 
 him out," and then begin a chase after the 
 imagined bad boy. The pursuit will give 
 joy to the child who will soon understand 
 the joke and with shining eyes delightedly 
 help to expel the little devil whom he learns 
 to consider as the cause of his bad behavior. 
 
 Afterwards he will learn no longer to ad- 
 mit the bad boy, but to expel him before he 
 is able to do any mischief. At any rate he 
 will be able to distinguish between himself 
 and the evil that might originate in him, 
 and will thus preserve his self-esteem and 
 there will be no need of breaking his will 
 in the interest of good behavior. 
 
 The methods of casting out bad boys may 
 be changed as physicians may employ vari- 
 ous medicines for attaining the same eif ect. 
 Sometimes it is advisable to pull out the 
 bad boy as the dentist might pull a tooth, 
 which may be done with a corkscrew after 
 the manner of uncorking a bottle. Another 
 practical method which can be highly rec- 
 ommended is the employment of pincers. 
 The little fellow must open his mouth for 
 
A NAUGHTY CHILD. 61 
 
 inspection, for the bad boy is supposed to 
 sit inside, in the place whence the shrieks 
 proceed. The opening of the mouth will of 
 course stop further crying, and now you 
 can give some information about the little 
 shrieking imp inside who must be caught 
 with the pincers. " Keep still," you tell 
 the child, " I'll catch him with the pincers 
 and take him out ; and then you will be our 
 good boy again ! ' ' From a quite varied ex- 
 perience in these experiments, I found that 
 the method works well and the child enters 
 into this theatrical performance of a mod- 
 ernized exorcism with great readiness. He 
 accustoms himself to speak of the prior 
 naughtiness as something foreign to his bet- 
 ter self and will easily understand the de- 
 sirability of ridding himself of bad and un- 
 worthy qualities, of anger, malevolence, 
 envy, and other passions or vices. 
 
 A similar method is applicable when chil- 
 di^en, as they frequently will do, hurt them- 
 selves and begin to cry. If the pain is not 
 serious and will pass away as soon as their 
 attention is called to something else, a good 
 
62 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 plan is to post them at one end of the hall, 
 or at one corner of the table, fasten the pain 
 with fictitious nails to the spot where they 
 stand and then bid them run away. In 
 speeding along the hall or running round 
 the table, they will quickly overcome their 
 trouble. The activity of running works up 
 an increased circulation and it will not be 
 long before they forget their pain. 
 
 Under no circumstances does it seem ad- 
 visable to pity children or to join in their 
 complaints, even though they may be justi- 
 fied. Commiseration makes a child dissat- 
 isfied and you can bring the happiest child 
 to tears simply by pitying it for anything, 
 however ridiculous your compassion may be. 
 
 Do not show anxiety, for thereby you 
 make the child anxious. Do not show any 
 worry about his bad habits, for thus he will 
 be worried himself and you weaken his char- 
 acter. Show a simple and straightforward 
 determination to help the child to discard 
 what is undesirable in the makeup of his 
 soul, and he will naturally acquire the habit 
 of ridding himself of the petty vices of 
 
A NAUGHTY CHILD. 63 
 
 childhood before they can harden into 
 habits. 
 
 All these methods can be intensified by a 
 review of the past in calm hours. The fath- 
 er and the mother must be the child's most 
 intimate friends and counselors. They 
 ought to tell him when they are alone with 
 him, what they themselves think of this or 
 that naughtiness; what other people think 
 of it; what will be the consequences; ask 
 him how he would like the same behavior in 
 others ; and finally tell him how to mend the 
 fault and how to avoid it in the future. 
 There should be no scolding at such a mo- 
 ment, for that would disturb the calmness 
 of the child's mind. In order to render 
 this instruction effective, not for the mo- 
 ment only, but for the child's whole life, it 
 should be a lesson of self-contemplation and 
 a calm self-criticism. 
 
 When the child grows older, he should 
 gradually acquire the habit of exercising 
 this self-criticism for himself ; and here it is 
 advisable to call the child's early attention 
 to the dangers of vanity. 
 
STIMULATE SELF-CRITICISM 
 
 While strength of will is a virtue, vanity 
 is a vice. Vanity is the most dangerous 
 demon that can take hold of us, for vanity 
 renders self-criticism impossible. 
 
 Every child will be able to grasp the im- 
 portance and paramount usefulness of self- 
 criticism. Only tell him the story of a man 
 who always blamed others when he did some 
 foolish thing, and who, adhering to the be- 
 lief in his own perfection, remained a fool 
 all his lifetime. He gathered a rich store 
 of bad experiences and came finally to the 
 conclusion that the whole world was wrong, 
 — but the world thought all the while there 
 was something wrong with him. On the 
 other hand, illustrate by the examples of 
 great men, that great successes are never 
 gained without a stern self-criticism. Self- 
 complacency may create a very happy dis- 
 position, but this happiness will not be aus- 
 
 64 
 
STIMULATE SELF-CRITICISM. 65 
 
 picious; it will be the happiness of lucky 
 Hans who joyfully exchanges his gold for 
 a horse, his horse for a cow, his cow for a 
 pig, his pig for a goose, his goose for a 
 grindstone, and when the grindstone drops 
 into a well, glories in his having so fortu- 
 nately got rid of his burden. The way to 
 success in life is the very opposite to self- 
 complacency and is incompatible with van- 
 ity. When the foolish man complains about 
 the wrongs of others, the wise man, when- 
 ever ill fate befalls him, inquires first into 
 the origin of his own mistakes. So, for in- 
 stance, when he is cheated, he does not glory 
 in his own honesty and blame only the ras- 
 cal who cheated him. He blames instead, 
 his own credulity and his lack of experience 
 not to have seen through the schemes by 
 which he has been caught. 
 
 Remember that the net in which most peo- 
 ple are caught is their own vanity. La 
 Fontaine tells the instructive fable of the 
 raven and the fox and adds that the raven, 
 seeing his own foolishness, vowed that he 
 would never be caught again. But the 
 
66 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 probability is that a vain fellow would not 
 have blamed himself ; he would have scolded 
 about the untrustworthiness of people and 
 the frauds of foxes, but would have again 
 fallen an easy prey to the next flatterer who 
 approached him in the same or a similar 
 manner. None of the animals in Reynard 
 the Fox blames himself, but all denounce 
 the fox's villainy. 
 
 What appears to us a misfortune is fre- 
 quently the result of a bad quality in our 
 character. Gamblers are in the habit of 
 catching their victims by first giving them 
 a chance to cheat; tricky agents make you 
 believe that they sell under price; dishon- 
 est lawyers give you a chance to make a con- 
 tract in which you believe that you cheat 
 some one else, while in fact you are being 
 cheated. 
 
 Considering the truth that our own petty 
 vices are the greatest dangers of our life, 
 we must early teach children to regard them 
 as foreign elements which they should cast 
 off, through self-criticism and a rigorous 
 self -discipline. 
 
DO NOT PUNISH 
 
 Since the days of barbarism a constant 
 change in the treatment of punishment has 
 been going on in civilized countries. The 
 old method was a system of retaliation. 
 Punishment is revenge. The new method 
 which replaces punishment by correction 
 may be called, briefly, a system of education. 
 The turning point in the evolutionary curve 
 of mankind is of a religious nature. It ap- 
 pears first as goodwill toward all, the good 
 and the bad alike, and in the history of the 
 East in Buddha's teaching, it is based on the 
 consideration that all creatures, both good 
 and evil, are the product of circumstances, 
 and that therefore the bad deserve compas- 
 sion, not hatred. If a man's character is 
 conditioned by his past, by the circumstances 
 under which he was developed, there is no 
 longer any sense in expecting that he should 
 act differently from what he does according 
 
 67 
 
68 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 to his nature. Every creature is as its own 
 life history, since the beginning of life on 
 earth, has formed it; and as it is, so it will 
 act. There is no cause for becoming excited 
 about criminal actions. We must imder- 
 stand them, we must above all investigate 
 their motives, and must treat them in the 
 same way as a physician treats a disease. 
 That society, or the government, or the 
 judge, should commit a crime on the crim- 
 inal because the criminal has committed a 
 crime on society, is as ridiculous as it would 
 be to inflict upon the stomach a stomach- 
 ache because by its indigestion it has pro- 
 duced a head-ache or otherwise injured the 
 fellow-limbs of its organism. Retaliation is 
 a continuation of moral disease, not a cure, 
 and what we need is a cure. Taking this 
 ground, Buddha abolished in the realm of 
 religion the idea of hatred and revenge by 
 saying that hatred is not appeased by ha- 
 tred. Hatred ceases by non-hatred only. 
 And in the same spirit Christ taught in the 
 Sermon on the Mount (Matt. v. 38-39), say- 
 ing: 
 
DO NOT PUNISH. 69 
 
 "Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye 
 for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth : But I say 
 unto you, That ye resist not evil." 
 
 We need not discuss theology in this place, 
 and do not care in this connection whether 
 Christ 's doctrine was really an absolute non- 
 resistance of evil, as is maintained in this 
 and the following sentences. We only point 
 out the truth of the sentiment which 
 prompted these sayings and which should 
 be expressed in the sentence: "Resist not 
 evil with evil." Evil must be resisted; but 
 we must not retaliate. Instead of demand- 
 ing a tooth for a tooth, and giving a lie for 
 a lie, we must overcome a lie by truth, wrong 
 by right, and violence by patience. This 
 ideal of Buddhism and of Christianity has 
 not been introduced into our law books, but 
 is an ideal which mankind in its further 
 progress of evolution is endeavoring to 
 actualize. Justice during the Middle Ages 
 was to a great extent an administration of 
 retaliating punishments. Criminals con- 
 demned to die were pinched with red hot 
 tongs, their limbs were broken on the wheel, 
 
70 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 they were burned alive, and all kinds of 
 cruel tortures were cunningly invented to 
 make the death of the criminal as painful 
 as possible. 
 
 All this has changed. Capital punish- 
 ment, above all, has ceased to be a retali- 
 ation, and has become more and more a mere 
 protection against the repetition of a crime. 
 As it w^ould be wrong to leave a tiger abroad, 
 so a man, who by his very nature is a mur- 
 derer, should not be allowed to remain at 
 liberty, and since imprisonment is on the one 
 hand not a sufficient guarantee for the safety 
 of society, and on the other hand a more 
 cruel treatment than death, capital punish- 
 ment is, so far as our civilization goes, still 
 a necessity of our penal law. Yet the at- 
 tempt is no longer made to retaliate on the 
 murderer the cruelties which he has commit- 
 ted. It is a maxim which has never been 
 explicitly introduced by law, but which is 
 nevertheless firmly established in all civil- 
 ized countries, that the death punishment 
 should be inflicted with as little pain as pos- 
 sible. The criminal is simply no longer al- 
 
DO NOT PUNISH. 71 
 
 lowed to live, and capital punishment has 
 ceased to be a revenge or retaliation. It 
 has become a cure based upon the experience 
 that the man who commits a murder is liable 
 to commit another murder. Hence a mur- 
 derer who has killed a man not on account 
 of his murderous inclination, but through 
 an unhappy complication of circumstances, 
 be it in defence of his honor, or for some 
 other reason which is regarded as a sufficient 
 explanation of an unusual and justifiable 
 wrath, will not be treated as a habitual mur- 
 derer, and according to the laws of all civil- 
 ized countries, is not punishable by death. 
 
 Our penal laws are not as yet fully 
 adapted to the new view. All the minor 
 punishments are still based upon the plan 
 of retaliation which makes our prisons and 
 penitentiaries breeding-places of crime in- 
 stead of what they ought to be, moral hos- 
 pitals. There is no question, however, that 
 the more rational treatment of the criminal 
 will in time be brought about. The result 
 will as surely take place as the religious con- 
 siderations of justice towards our fallen fel- 
 
72 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 lowmen and a scientific consideration of 
 crime as a moral disease will in the long run 
 change our methods in education as well as 
 in the administration of justice. 
 
 I do not wish to be misunderstood. My 
 advocacy of an abolition of punishment as 
 punishment should not be interpreted as due 
 to that maudlin sympathy with criminals 
 which is often met with among sentimental 
 people. The criminal behind the bars ought 
 not to be pampered, but should receive 
 prison diet and prison treatment as in ac- 
 cordance with the regulations of the place 
 where his own deeds have landed him. It is 
 part of the cure. The execution of a mur- 
 derer is merely the removal of a dangerous 
 member of society, for the same reason that 
 a limb of the body infected by blood poison- 
 ing must be amputated. 
 
 What our courts of justice ought to be 
 and ought to become, parents must realize 
 on a smaller scale in the education of their 
 children. There ought to be no punishment 
 of children in the old and proper sense of 
 punishment. Punishment, if we are per- 
 
DO NOT PUNISH. 73 
 
 mitted to use the old word in a more general 
 sense, ought to become a method of educa- 
 tion, an^ ought to cease inflicting pain with- 
 out any ulterior purpose. Punishment 
 ought to be nothing but the consequences 
 of a wrong act which is brought home to the 
 knowledge and sentiments of the child. As 
 a rule, parents do just the reverse. They 
 make the children escape the evil conse- 
 quences of wrong doing, and let them feel a 
 punislunent, the reason of which must nat- 
 urally appear as the expression of wrath or 
 ill-will. If a child breaks things, it ought, 
 if possible, be made to feel the loss of the 
 broken thing. Suppose he has broken his 
 own glass, then it should not be replaced at 
 once by a new one. If it is the glass of his 
 brother or sister, he ought to give up his 
 own to replace the loss, and if possible some 
 arrangement should be made to let the harm 
 that he has caused fall, at least in part, upon 
 himself. 
 
 There is perhaps no harm for parents to 
 show anger if children become very mis- 
 chievous, but the anger should be felt by 
 
74 OUK CHILDREN. 
 
 the child to be the direct result of his ac- 
 tion. 
 
 There is a rule propounded by educators 
 never to punish in a state of anger, and the 
 rule is good. But it is insufficient, in so far 
 as the child ought to feel the anger of his 
 parents as the result of his own deeds more 
 than the punishment itself. It may be ad- 
 visable even to simulate anger so as to im- 
 press the child's mind with the danger of 
 losing his parents' affection. The child 
 ought to learn what deeds are productive 
 of wrath, and this should be made a means 
 (one of the means only) of learning to 
 avoid them. Otherwise, if parents would 
 not resent mischievous acts, when the child 
 later on becomes acquainted with other peo- 
 ple, he would be very much disappointed in 
 the world, for no one else would exhibit the 
 same patience. 
 
 The proper punishment would be to let a 
 child feel the full result of wrong and un- 
 wise deeds. If once in a while you allow a 
 child to eat his fill of sweets and become sick, 
 and remind him when sick that his sickness 
 
DO NOT PUNISH. 75 
 
 is of his own doing, you apply a natural 
 punishment, which without makmg him ob- 
 stinate wall cure him of a bad habit. 
 
 It is sometimes a risk to give too much 
 liberty to children, but it is better to take 
 the risk and watch the results than to make 
 them fear the rod which can only produce a 
 sneaking and hypocritical character. 
 
 When our children have grown up we can 
 punish them no longer and must then, at 
 any rate, leave them to themselves. If they 
 have not become inured to the bracing air 
 of liberty while young, they will never ac- 
 quire the independence needed at an adult 
 age. 
 
 To educate children simply by punishment 
 is not the right way of securing manly in- 
 dependence. There ought to be as much lib- 
 erty as possible, for by liberty alone the 
 sentiment of responsibility can be insured. 
 
DIEECT AND DIVERT, BUT DO 
 NOT SUPPRESS 
 
 Man is by nature a creature that yearns 
 for activity. All his nerves and muscles are 
 storehouses freighted with energy which are 
 eager to perform work. The main duty of 
 education consists in directing the work, but 
 not in suppressing it. Every function per- 
 formed establishes a case of precedence, and 
 however easy, as a rule, it may be to dig the 
 first channel for the rivers of the soul, it 
 is very difficult to change them as soon as 
 they are firmly established in habits. 
 
 Children that are taught to busy them- 
 selves will be more manageable when they 
 grow older, than children who in their ear- 
 lier years are left to themselves. The age 
 of early babyhood so much neglected now, 
 is in fact the most important period of a 
 man's whole life, and this is not less true 
 because the evil consequences that result 
 
 76 
 
DIRECT AND DIVERT. 77 
 
 from mistakes made at the beginning of life, 
 are the most difficult to trace. 
 
 The child has a right to be active, and par- 
 ents and nurses should see to it that when 
 the little one is in good health he should al- 
 ways be busy. 
 
 Now it sometimes happens that a child 
 does something that it should not do, that 
 it touches things which it might break, that 
 it begins to busy itself with things which 
 it would better leave alone. In such cases 
 it is not advisable to interfere violently by 
 tearing away the thing which it should not 
 handle. Educators will find it easy to divert 
 the child's attention by giving it some other 
 toy which for the sake of newness, or for 
 some other reason, it will at once prefer. 
 
 The policy for all cases ought to be to 
 divert the attention of a child instead of rob- 
 bing it by violence of any object which it 
 may happen to take hold of. 
 
 When things are taken away from the 
 child, the child will naturally cry, and no 
 one can blame the little fellow for it, but 
 if his attention be diverted he will drop the 
 
78 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 forbidden thing voluntarily and there will 
 be no crying and no naughtiness. 
 
 Therefore, nurses should make it a rule 
 never to snatch away anything from a child 
 before substituting for it some other toy 
 which would appear at the moment prefer- 
 able to the child's mind. 
 
 The same is true of bad as well as dan- 
 gerous habits to which a child should be dis- 
 accustomed. Children generally love pen- 
 cils and will put them into their mouths. 
 Of course they may fall and knock the point 
 of the pencil right into their throat. If 
 children are forbidden to put pencils into 
 their mouths, they will be all the more 
 anxious to do so and may develop a habit 
 of doing it when unobserved, whereby an ac- 
 cident is almost sure to happen. But if you 
 teach the child to take the pencil lengthwise 
 in the mouth, he will more readily discon- 
 tinue putting in the point foremost and you 
 will forestall in this way the formation of 
 a dangerous habit. 
 
 What is true of children is true generally. 
 Any one who has to deal with obstinate peo- 
 
DIRECT AND DIVERT. 79 
 
 pie, especially the warden of an asylum for 
 the insane, will be wise never to antagonize 
 passionate outbursts unless compelled to do 
 so by the direst necessity. Diversion is 
 easier and more effective than suppression. 
 There is a story about a warden of an in- 
 sane asylum who visited the institution 
 of a colleague. He was admitted to the 
 grounds by the janitor who knew him 
 personally, and while walking in the park, 
 met a gentleman who introduced himself as 
 a doctor and inspector of the wards. The 
 two gentlemen shook hands as colleagues 
 and enjoyed a pleasant walk and talk and at 
 last the visitor was shown up to a wooden 
 tower which commanded a general view of 
 the park and its vicinity. When the two 
 reached the top, the inspector at once pro- 
 posed to his guest to jump down, as that 
 was his fashion with all the people whom 
 he showed round through the institution. 
 Now at once the visitor, to his dismay, be- 
 comes aware of the fact that he is face to 
 face with one of the patients, who by some 
 mishap must have escaped from his keeper, 
 
80 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 and as insane people frequently do, had up 
 to that time behaved in a quite sensible way. 
 But now the pretended inspector began to 
 show all the symptoms of an approaching at- 
 tack, and the visitor looked round for a 
 means of defending himself in case of ag- 
 gression. Had they come to a fight on the 
 narrow platform of the tower, they would 
 both have fallen a considerable depth. The 
 visitor, being accustomed to insane persons, 
 remained calm and said quietly to his com- 
 panion: ''You want me to jump down from 
 this tower ? That is nothing, every one can 
 do that ; but it is much more difficult to jump 
 up from below. I'll show you how to do it, 
 come down. ' ' The patient was startled, and 
 asked, "Can you do that really?" ''Of 
 course I can," was the reply, "come down 
 and I '11 show you. ' ' Thus the expert alien- 
 ist diverted the wild imagination of the pa- 
 tient aijd led him down to a place in which 
 he was no longer in danger. They had 
 scarcely reached the ground when the keeper 
 arrived and took charge of the fugitive. 
 The lesson is obvious and the policy of the 
 
DIRECT AND DIVERT. 81 
 
 clever warden can be profitably imitated in 
 practical life whether in dealing with iras- 
 cible adults, with mobs, or with children. 
 
 Children should be forced to a thing as 
 little as possible ; the will should be directed 
 and guided, not broken. We insist that a 
 broken will is a weak will, and a weak will 
 more than a strong will is given to obstinacy 
 — the disease to be cured by breaking the 
 will. We speak of obstinate people as head- 
 strong, while in fact they are weaklings in 
 intellect, and educators who deem it neces- 
 sary to break the wills of their charges will 
 unfailingly produce the result which they 
 propose to avoid. 
 
SANITARY ATTENTION TO 
 CHILDREN 
 
 Care for the bodily health of a child is of 
 paramount importance ; but it deserves a de- 
 tailed treatment and does not lie within the 
 pale of the present investigation. However 
 without pretending to do justice to the sub- 
 ject, the author believes that he can suggest 
 some advice which he has learned by ex- 
 perience in his own home. 
 
 It is a matter of course and needs scarcely 
 any mention, that mothers and nurses should 
 always think of their children, that they 
 should attend to their physical wants at reg- 
 ular hours and whenever special occasions 
 may demand it — on retiring in the even- 
 ing, immediately at their awakening in the 
 morning, when they are restless at night, 
 before and after walks. They should not 
 allow the little folk to become over hungry 
 nor over thirsty, and must patiently con- 
 
 82 
 
SANITARY ATTENTION. 83 
 
 tinue to remind them of attending to their 
 various necessities until definite habits have 
 been established. If something is wrong in 
 the child's deportment, parents should be 
 inclined, first of all, to blame themselves for 
 lack of attention. 
 
 As soon as children begin to eat flesh diet, 
 they should become accustomed to cleaning 
 their teeth, and this must be done in the 
 evening, not in the morning. It is during 
 the night that the teeth are affected by the 
 impurities of the remnants of food which 
 form a thin layer on the teeth just as a 
 fatty coat will cover a plate after use at 
 table. 
 
 In olden times when man's diet was 
 simple, no tooth brushes were needed; for 
 the best method of keeping the teeth clean, 
 more thorough and gentle than a toothbrush, 
 is eating mibuttered bread of moderate dry- 
 ness. It is more serviceable than the bris- 
 tles of the brush. 
 
 If the teeth have been cleaned in the even- 
 ing, more than rinsing with pure water will 
 not be required in the morning. To brush 
 
84 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 the teeth once a day may ordinarily be suffi- 
 cient, since bristles, especially if too harsh, 
 are liable to cut or wear awa}^ the enamel 
 of the teeth, which is the best protection of 
 the bony substance, and the slightest crack 
 opens the door to the inroads of decay. 
 
 Children that grow up under the condi- 
 tions of our overcivilization are apt to suf- 
 fer from bad teeth at a very early age, and 
 it is wise to let a considerate dentist fill the 
 cavities. In order to render this feasible, 
 make it a rule never to speak of the pains 
 that you yourself have suffered in a den- 
 tist's chair, although you may mention the 
 fact that it sometimes hurts incidentally, 
 and add that no wise man cares for that, 
 because a little pain saves from worse suf- 
 ferings. Should you happen to go to the 
 dentist, inform your children of the fact as 
 if you were telling them a story that may 
 interest them, and as soon as it is necessary 
 for them to have their teeth attended to, 
 you will find them more willing to do so, 
 and they will mount the dentist 's chair with 
 a good deal of satisfaction. They will even 
 
SANITARY ATTENTION. 85 
 
 ask (as I know by experience) to be taken 
 to the dentist, as a favor, for children love 
 to imitate the doings of older folks, and I 
 went so far as to threaten one of my little 
 boys that I would not take him to the den- 
 tist if he were not very good. I did it, of 
 course, and I did it as a special favor by 
 way of recompense and in recognition of 
 his creditable behavior. The dentist treat- 
 ed him as tenderly as possible, only once 
 causing him pain, and then probably not 
 much. The little fellow sat in the chair as 
 proud as a man who is attending to an im- 
 portant business, and he will go again if 
 any one of his teeth should need treatment. 
 Children are apt to have dirty hands, for 
 they creep on the floor, poke in all corners, 
 handle almost everything without hesita- 
 tion, and gather the dust and the dirt that 
 can be found anywhere. It is impossible to 
 prevent it, and therefore it is necessary to 
 teach them to wash their hands whenever 
 they eat, not for general cleanliness only 
 but for sanitary reasons, which latter the 
 child will appreciate more readily. 
 
86 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 Further, children must learn not to stick 
 their dirty fingers into their eyes, noses, 
 mouths, and wherever the mucous mem- 
 branes are accessible. The mucous mem- 
 branes are not so well protected as the other 
 skin of the body, and the most terrible in- 
 fections can thus be introduced into the sys- 
 tem, causing painful diseases, loss of eye- 
 sight, and other misfortunes. It is very 
 important to beware of public water closets 
 and to let children know that there are 
 dangers of infection. 
 
 Before the children go to bed their hands 
 must be washed. If they have clean fin- 
 gers, they can rub their eyes in the morning 
 without danger. 
 
 Speaking of the eyes, I may incidentally 
 mention that at birth they should be care- 
 fully cleaned with a soft rag soaked in warm 
 water that has been mildly disinfected. 
 Perhaps more than fifty per cent, of all the 
 blindness on earth is due to a neglect of this 
 important measure. 
 
 In the days of health, think of sickness, 
 and the most insidious cases are diseases of 
 
SANITARY ATTENTION. 87 
 
 the throat. It is therefore specially impor- 
 tant to prepare children for the occasion so 
 as to render a constant supervision possible. 
 Take them to the window when they are 
 well and make them put out their tongue 
 and say Ah ! so as to show their larynx. Do 
 it in a joke or play doctor, and tell them you 
 will see whether their little throats are in 
 good condition. If you understand at all 
 how to deal with children, you will easily 
 succeed, and if one child sets the example, 
 the others will follow suit without giving 
 any trouble. Children so trained will at 
 once open their mouths and allow you to ex- 
 amine their throats, which should be done 
 at once whenever there is the slightest sus- 
 picion of any kind of throat disease, above 
 all the most terrible of them, diphtheria. 
 
 It is a common experience of physicians 
 that children do not allow their throats to 
 be examined when sick and no coaxing will 
 prevail upon them to change theii* mind. 
 The little patient's mouth has sometimes to 
 be forced open, which is very hard on a 
 child, but it must be done when its life is 
 
88 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 at stake. Yet there are cases when chil- 
 di'en die through being untractable. 
 
 The dangers of throat diseases are suffi- 
 ciently great to justify the prescribed meth- 
 od of preparing children for such an occa- 
 sion. 
 
 As a rule throat diseases begin with colds ; 
 and where the membranes are affected, in- 
 fectious germs find an easy entrance. Stop 
 therefore the malady in the very beginning 
 and let the children use the spray of some 
 mild disinfectant, for which purpose there 
 are probably no better drugs than liquid 
 vaseline or listerine. The latter should be 
 weak enough not to be too stringent for a 
 child. 
 
 When children have a sore throat, you 
 may be sure that they will refuse to take the 
 spray and you must therefore train them 
 for taking it readily when needed. You 
 can do that simply by using sometimes the 
 spray in the presence of your children, your- 
 self, and it is as harmless to a healthy 
 throat as it is salutary for a sore one. 
 Wait till the children ask you. What are 
 
SANITARY ATTENTION. 89 
 
 you doing, papa? If they should not ask 
 you, announce to them that you are going 
 to take a spray to-night, and they are sure 
 to be anxious why you do it. Then is the 
 time to explain to them that you feel a little 
 sore in your throat and the spray will do 
 you good. They will soon ask you to en- 
 joy the spray themselves. Be careful not 
 to give them too much ; that would frighten 
 them and make the experiment futile. Just 
 let them enjoy it so long as it is mere exer- 
 cise until they get accustomed to "the 
 throat-machme. ' ' 
 
 Should a spray be needed by children be- 
 fore you have accustomed them to it, you 
 might carefully apply it in their sleep, 
 watching the breathing and pressing the 
 India rubber ball at a few successive in- 
 halations. But this is a mere makeshift 
 and will not be so effective as when the child 
 voluntarily gives his consent to the perfor- 
 mance. 
 
 One word more about the treatment of 
 the stomach of children. Here, as in many 
 other cases, the best method is the golden 
 
90 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 way of leaving the children at liberty to eat 
 what they please. The two extremes which 
 trespass against this rule, viz., compelling 
 children to eat and coaxing them, are equal- 
 ly obnoxious. If children should eat a cer- 
 tain kind of food, set them the example 
 yourself and they will imitate you. If you 
 force them to eat something that is good for 
 them, the food becomes disgusting to the 
 child and thereby loses some of those quali- 
 ties on account of which it seems recom- 
 mendable. Only in cases of extreme danger 
 when a sick child objects to the food while 
 on the point of starvation is there any justi- 
 fication in employing force. 
 
 By far the more common mistake is coax- 
 ing, the results of which are very injurious. 
 When you find a child that has no appetite 
 and would never eat heartily, but merely 
 nibble at this and that tidbit, and even then 
 only on repeated serious entreaties of his 
 mamma, you may be assured that the little 
 fellow is one of the many victims of coax- 
 ing. The anxious mamma will tell you that 
 the child is as thin as a ghost, you can 
 
SANITARY ATTENTION. 91 
 
 count his ribs, and if you do not coax him 
 he will starve. The truth is, his food has 
 become disgusting to him by coaxing. He 
 is overfed, not underfed. 
 
 What is to be done under this trying and 
 exceptional condition 1 
 
 The best appetizer is hunger. Try the 
 starvation cure. Do not make any fuss 
 with a boy of that kind, but tell him, "Very 
 well ! If you do not want to eat you need not. 
 I will not force you. You are at perfect 
 liberty to do as you please." Take him out 
 for a walk ; either do it yourself, if you are 
 his father or mother, or let the nurse do it, 
 or an uncle, or a friend, and when you re- 
 turn, tell him that you have grown hungry 
 and have a good appetite for a piece of 
 bread or a roll and milk, for milk rice, for 
 soup, or whatever may be on hand. Sit 
 down and eat, and invite him to join you 
 without, however, coaxing him. The prob- 
 ability is that the child will show a better 
 appetite after the first doses of the starva- 
 tion cure and he will ever after like the 
 food which once satisfied his hunger; for 
 
92 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 the stomach too has a memory, and appetite 
 for a special dish means the stomach 's recol- 
 lection that it has given it satisfaction on a 
 similar occasion. 
 
 Never give children sweets when they are 
 hungry, but always substantial solid food, 
 and set them whenever possible the exam- 
 ple yourself by partaking of the same dish. 
 
 Make it a rule not to show them sweets 
 when they should not have them; it un- 
 necessarily leads them into temptation ; and 
 too many sweets will spoil the stomach. 
 Nor are sweets indispensable in life. Even 
 Christmas can be celebrated without them. 
 
 Festive seasons are dangerous solely on 
 account of sweets, and if statistics show an 
 increase of children's diseases or even mor- 
 tality after Christmas, it is to be attributed 
 to the exaggerated consumption of sweets. 
 
 But because sweets are dangerous, you 
 should not forbid your children to eat them ; 
 on the contrary, whenever they come within 
 the reach of the little ones, let them have of 
 them as much as they demand and as the 
 stock which you expose to sight will allow. 
 
SANITARY ATTENTION. 93 
 
 it is better children have once or twice a 
 spoiled stomach than that they hanker after 
 forbidden fruit. Let them acquire them- 
 selves the strength of refusing what is not 
 good for them. Do not act the part of the 
 police or of a paternal government, that 
 forces on the people what in the opinion of 
 the authorities, is good for them. Let the 
 children have all they want, even though it 
 be all there is in sight, and tell them they 
 will have to bear the consequences. 
 
 There may be exceptional conditions when 
 the rule of liberty must be suspended, as it 
 may sometimes be necessary to declare mar- 
 tial law, but under ordinary circumstances 
 let the rule remain in force, that children 
 must be reared in liberty. 
 
 The method of rearing children in liberty 
 must not lead to unrestrained license, but 
 to self-control, and educators must never 
 lose sight of their ultimate aim. 
 
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NAMING 
 THINGS IN THE NURSERY. 
 
 The aim of all education is to enable the 
 child when it attains to manhood to exercise 
 dominion over the world of realities, and 
 this is done by establishing in our children's 
 minds clear representations of things and 
 happenings. 
 
 In the book of Genesis we read that God 
 gave man dominion over all the animals and 
 things of creation (i. 26) ; and he brought 
 them unto Adam to see how he would call 
 them (ii. 19). The connection between 
 man's language and his superiority over all 
 other creatures is not fortuitous, for by 
 naming things man gains dominion over 
 them. In language man mirrors the w^orld 
 and classifies its phenomena. Through 
 language alone can he acquire exact knowl- 
 edge and learn to foredetermine the course 
 of events. 
 
 94 
 
NAMING THINGS. 95 
 
 I had occasion to observe the truth of this 
 broad statement when showing to an infant 
 boy the movements of the machinery in- a 
 factory. The child was at first frightened 
 by the noise and naturally did not take kind- 
 ly to the formidable din of the rolling-mill. 
 But it is easy enough to accustom even a 
 baby to any monotonous noise by imitating 
 its sound. The rollers produce two peculiar 
 clangs, — one sharp, the other muffled. 
 When the little fellow was frightened we re- 
 treated from the rolling-mill, but I con- 
 tinued to remind him of the noise by telling 
 him of the clang and the thump that were 
 heard in rapid succession. He seemed to 
 regain his self-possession, and the banging 
 of the mill ceased to be formidable, for he 
 grew rather curious and turned his head to 
 look. Then he was slowly carried back to 
 the rolling-mill, where he began to anticipate 
 the noise as accompanied by the words clang, 
 thump. The constant repetition of these 
 words imitating the noise, kept the child pre- 
 pared for what was coming, and he now soon 
 became accustomed to the sight of the roll- 
 
96 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 ers which he began to contemplate, not 
 without awe yet without terror. 
 
 I had occasion to make similar observa- 
 tions at the dump of a coal shaft. As soon 
 as a child is prepared for the deafening 
 noise of the falling coal by some adequate 
 imitation of the sound, something like hoom 
 hoom hoom, he will instead of fear show a 
 desire to watch the process from a place of 
 safety. 
 
 In performing such experiments . care 
 should be taken that he who carries the baby 
 should never approach either nearer or more 
 quickl}^ than the child desires to go, and chil- 
 dren are never at a loss to indicate their 
 wishes unequivocally. 
 
 The naming of any happening is the first 
 step towards mastering it. The image of 
 the process, instead of being a bewildering 
 sense-impression, becomes a mental act and 
 is now clearly subsumed under, and repre- 
 sented by, a somid symbol. Thus, to the 
 memory of the event itself a new and higher 
 soul-structure, a name representing the 
 event, is added which becomes connected 
 
• NAMING THINGS. 97 
 
 with, and will always at once awaken, a rec- 
 ollection of the original sense-impression. 
 The recollection is comparatively faint, and 
 being not as overwhelming as the immediate 
 presence of the reality itself will allow a 
 calm contemplation of the process. With 
 such preparation a repeated approach will 
 not disturb the child's self-possession. He 
 will now begin to observe, and the former 
 feeling of fear will yield to an eagerness to 
 witness the scene. 
 
 There are in the bustle of a factory so 
 many details which should be clearly ap- 
 prehended, that it will be a great help to the 
 growing intellect of the child if here again 
 the most striking of them are named. 
 While the coal car is being pushed to the 
 verge of the dump, the process may be ac- 
 companied by some such words as rolly- 
 rolly-roUy. The turning of wheels may be 
 accompanied by rotatory movements of the 
 baby's arm, and you can almost see how 
 thereby the child is enabled the better to 
 watch the rolling. In an analogous way the 
 movement of hammers, the backward and 
 
98 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 forward motions of pistons, the rotation of 
 cranks, etc., etc., can be imitated, which will 
 help the child to grasp quickly and clearly 
 the elementary features of sense-impres- 
 sions. 
 
 The fires are best imitated by sounding 
 the aspirate, h^h^hli\ bells by ding-dong, 
 the puffing of engines by tch'-tch', animals in 
 the traditional way, how-wow, moo-moo, etc. 
 
 Adopting this method of naming events 
 in baby language, I succeeded in teaching 
 a very small child the mystery of the re- 
 versing lever with its accompanying ma- 
 chinery. When the reverse turned the drum 
 of the coal-shaft-elevator in one direction, 
 say to the right, I called the oscillations of 
 the reversing gear vicU vack, vick vack, and 
 when the lever was reversed and the drum 
 turned in the opposite direction I called it 
 vack vick, vack vick. The reversion of the 
 name suggests the reversion of the move- 
 ment and helps to fix in a child's mind the 
 sense-impression in its essential features. 
 A little steam-engine model was an ad- 
 ditional help, giving an inside view of the 
 
NAMING THINGS. 99 
 
 piston and side valves in their connection 
 with the reverse lever. 
 
 The child must have the most essential 
 features of processes and events delineated 
 in his mind in strong outlines and it will 
 then be easy to add the more complicated 
 details without causing mystification or con- 
 fusion. 
 
 That the chicken-yard, farms, sheep-folds, 
 and other places where living animals can 
 be observed should be visited, that birds, 
 dogs, horses, should be watched and their 
 behavior noted, goes without saying, and 
 evierywhere the same method should be ap- 
 plied to render the sense-impressions more 
 distinct by gestures as well as names. 
 
 If in the imagination of the child sense- 
 pictures are thus connected with definite 
 sounds, it will be easy to revive the memories 
 of former experiences; and one is enabled 
 to tell to babies when they are restless either 
 in the evening or at night, stories which 
 draw upon their little stock of memories, 
 and it will quickly quiet them because they 
 are greatly interested in hearing the tales 
 
 LOFC, 
 
100 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 of their own experiences which will be the 
 more interesting to them the greater the ter- 
 rors that had originally to be overcome. 
 
 The application of baby language is of 
 manifold use especially at night, when for 
 some reason a child is restless and the usual 
 methods fail to quiet his imagination. 
 
 The usual lullaby songs are upon the 
 whole very good ; longdrawn notes, words of 
 soothing sound, with prevailing o and espe- 
 cially u tones are most soporific; but it is 
 sometimes difficult to put babies to sleep, 
 and then you may in a hushed voice which 
 will raise expectancy sing a story consisting 
 simply of the repetition of familiar sounds. 
 The child will listen to the song, nonsensical 
 though it may appear to outsiders and to all 
 people not initiated into the mysteries of 
 baby language. It will quiet down, and give 
 the nurse a chance gradually to change her 
 song to more monotonous lullaby tunes, such 
 as "the rolling-mill goes clang-thump!'' or 
 *'the choo-choo says ding-dong/' or "the lit- 
 tle lamb says haa, haa/' etc. The baby will 
 listen with as much interest as older children 
 
NAMING THINGS. 101 
 
 manifest when a fairy tale is told, and the 
 interesting images will by and by be trans- 
 formed into dream visions. 
 
 It is easy enough for a nurse to watch and 
 to influence the growing intellect of an in- 
 fant, and every nurse ought to be able to ac- 
 count for and understand her charge's vo- 
 cabulary of those sense-impressions which 
 in the beginning of life play a prominent 
 
 part. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Special attention should be paid to such 
 events and natural phenomena as are apt to 
 frighten children. When thunderstorms 
 come up, the father or mother should take 
 the baby without any excitement. Show it 
 the lightning with signs of an appreciation 
 of its beauty and prepare the baby's ear for 
 the rumbling thunder. The least evidence 
 of fear on the part of the parents will affect 
 the child and may make him a coward for 
 life. Of course, you must avoid coming 
 near the iron pipes and electric wires, and 
 must remain in such places as are compara- 
 tively safe. Moving about is upon the whole 
 
102 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 better than staying in one place, because it 
 diverts the child's attention from the 
 formidable impression. It must be remem- 
 bered that troops under fire who remain in- 
 active break down and lose courage sooner 
 than troops who are advancing or are other- 
 wise kept busy. 
 
 These hints, if observed, help to establish 
 in the child a self-possession which in later 
 years will be so much needed. 
 
 Which impressions should be the first 
 stratum of the child 's soul, depends of course 
 on surroundings and other conditions. 
 However, we must expect that the compre- 
 hension of facts will be followed by a de- 
 termination to handle the realities which 
 have been watched in early childhood. 
 Therefore when machinery is shown, the 
 child should at once learn with what care 
 and precautions it must be handled. 
 
COUNTING 
 
 A little boy of about five years was in the 
 habit of counting 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and he stuck 
 to this habit. He was told that he omitted 
 4 and 6, and he probably understood the cor- 
 rection, but whenever he began to count he 
 fell back for a long time into his old habit 
 of counting the numbers wrongly. The 
 reason was that by accident he had learned 
 the numbers in the wrong way and it stuck 
 to him. 
 
 Another little child always called a sea- 
 gull in his picture-book a swallow, for he 
 had been told so by his nurse, and got ir- 
 ritated when contradicted, insisting even to 
 tears again and again on its being a swallow. 
 By and by, however, he relented, but even 
 then he continued to say, "This is not a 
 swallow, but a seagull," and only in time did 
 he drop the negative expression and knew 
 and declared without any irritation that it 
 
 103 
 
104 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 was a seagull. Such trouble originates by a 
 little mistake, and shall we not be careful 
 in laying the foundation of a human soul ? 
 
 As to counting, I would say the easiest 
 way to teach it is to count the steps by walk- 
 ing up or down stairs. If this be done pa- 
 tiently again and again, the child begins to 
 listen to the numbers and will very soon be- 
 gin to accompany each step with its proper 
 number. The first mistake should be 
 avoided, and my experience is that children 
 will, without the slightest trouble, learn to 
 count first to 12, then to 20. When they 
 have learned to count to 20, they are pre- 
 pared to count to any number up to 100 or 
 more. The third step is an intellectual step, 
 by learning to understand the function of 
 the decades 30, 40, 50, etc., which are, how- 
 ever, clearly grasped as running parallel 
 with 3, 4, 5, and so forth. 
 
 Before an attempt can be made to count 
 the steps, a preliminary exercise might be 
 the frequent repetition of 1, 2, 3, which can 
 be practised on various occasions; for in- 
 stance, when turning oif or on the electric 
 
COUNTING. 105 
 
 light, or by playing peekaboo, etc., whereby 
 the order of the three numbers impresses 
 itself mechanically upon the memory of a 
 child. Then proceed to counting fingers 
 and toes, and only when the first five num- 
 bers can be repeated without difficulty, pro- 
 ceed with counting other objects. 
 
 One peculiar j^hase in learning how to 
 count is marked by the child's ability to 
 stop at the right time. Childi'en first 
 acquire the mechanical memory of saying 1, 
 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. When they are shown five 
 spoons or five chips or other things of any 
 description and are requested to count them, 
 they begin to count mechanically without be- 
 ing able to stop at the right time. It indi- 
 cates a more advanced degree of mentality 
 when the child possesses a perfect parallel- 
 ism between the names of the numbers and 
 the things which, by being pointed at, are to 
 be counted. The process of counting has 
 reached its maturity when a child learns to 
 stop at the proper time. In the beginning 
 the tendency will predominate that when- 
 ever the child begins to count, it will count 
 
106 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 the whole series of numbers as far as it 
 knows them ; but the relation between things 
 and the series of word-images of the nu- 
 merals is easily established by stopping the 
 child and summing up the situation by say- 
 ing: There are five spoons, there are five 
 chips, or whatever it may be. 
 
 In the case of practising counting, as in 
 all other instances of memorizing, we must 
 consider that a great number of mechan- 
 ically impressed memories will subsequently 
 render the conscious and intelligent manip- 
 ulation of the ideas connected therewith 
 easier. The subconscious memories which 
 have been early acquired, form a very valu- 
 able capital which will never fail to be most 
 serviceable. As children now are commonly 
 educated, they have either no such mechan- 
 ically impressed memories in their minds, 
 or their impressions, be they numbers, im- 
 ages of things, or other conceptions, form 
 an irregular conglomeration which will 
 rather serve to bewilder than to help them 
 when the years of school-life begin. A 
 healthy development of mind is possible only 
 
COUNTING. 107 
 
 when our subconscious notions are distinct 
 and clear. This can be accomplished by 
 rendering as definite as possible the first 
 sense-impressions, which precede the form- 
 ation of more conscious and more intel- 
 lectual operations. 
 
 Before concluding this chapter it seems 
 advisable to forestall an objection which 
 might be raised to the proposition that our 
 subconscious notions should be distinct and 
 clear. The terms clear and subconscious do 
 not exclude one another. An idea or a 
 sense-impression may be quite distinct and 
 correct in its details without fully rising 
 into the field of conscious attention, and it 
 is one of the most important duties of the 
 educator to devote much care to the province 
 of the subconscious which in our intellectual 
 as well as our emotional life is of greater 
 significance than at first sight it might ap- 
 pear. 
 
 The first simple examples of the multipli- 
 cation table should be done with concrete 
 objects, at the very start with the child's 
 fingers, then with the beads of an abacus 
 
108 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 or counters. The abacus should consist of 
 ten rows of ten beads each, and if counters 
 are used they should when counted in large 
 numbers, be piled up in heaps of ten, so as 
 to represent the decimal system which to us 
 is and will remain the basis of number-lore. 
 
 Multiplication tables should be worked 
 out by the children themselves, and they 
 should be helped to find out for themselves 
 the relations of numbers to geometrical fig- 
 ures such as the areas of quadrangles and 
 their purely arithmetical proportions. 
 
 For one of my little boys who found it 
 very hard to remember the multiplication 
 table of 9, 1 invented an easy method, which 
 I will here communicate for the benefit of 
 other children. 
 
 Put both hands on the table and let every 
 finger successively stand for one number. 
 When you are asked to multiply by nine you 
 lift the finger representing the multiplier 
 and read off the product from the remaining 
 fingers. The number of fingers on the left 
 represents the tens, and that on the right 
 the units of the product. 
 
MIND-READING AND 
 ARITHMETIC 
 
 A good method of keeping up the interest 
 of boys and girls in mathematics is to ex- 
 plain to them easy arithmetical tricks which 
 they can readily perform for themselves. A 
 very simple card-trick, which appears quite 
 wonderful to the uninitiated, is as follows: 
 
 Ten cards from ace to ten are laid in or- 
 der in a row, beginning at the right and 
 with their faces down. The performer of 
 the trick anounces that he will tell the 
 number of cards which may be moved by 
 one of the company from the right to the 
 left and in addition pick up the card bear- 
 ing this number. As we wish to explain 
 the trick, we will play with the faces of 
 the cards upwards; and the original order 
 (when uncovered) will be this: 
 
 T* • ^ *'* *'' *^ >.* V.T* TV VT* VT* 
 
 4. 4. 4.*4. *^+ •!• + •!• * + 
 
 •{»«|» i|»«{a al**!* «|*^ J^ J^ af*^ •{»«}• 
 
 
 109 
 
no 
 
 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 The magician then leaves the room, and 
 some one who wishes to test the extraordi- 
 nary accomplishment of his young friend 
 transfers a few cards in their regular order 
 from the right side to the left. Let four 
 cards be moved, then the new order will be 
 this: 
 
 
 You will at once see that the four-spot 
 has become the first card of the row. The 
 first card tells the number of the cards 
 moved. Accordingly the young performer 
 lifts up the first card, and seeing that it is 
 a four-spot declares, "Four cards have been 
 moved." The art of the magician consists 
 in giving the impression that he knows the 
 card before he picks it up, and that the dis- 
 covery of the position of the four-spot is 
 only an additional proof of his omniscience. 
 He goes out again, knowing beforehand that 
 whatever number of cards may be moved 
 from the right side to the left, the card 
 which bears that number will alwavs be 
 
MIND-READING. 
 
 Ill 
 
 found in the last position of the ten-spot, 
 which at present is the next place after the 
 four cards transposed in the first move ; i. e., 
 in the fifth place. If no card is moved, the 
 ten-spot will remain in its place and will be 
 picked up as a sign that all ten cards, or 
 none at all, which means the same thing, 
 have been moved. But suppose that three 
 cards have been moved, then the three will 
 be in the fifth place : 
 
 4. 4. 
 4. 4. 
 
 
 4. 4. 
 4. 4. 
 4. 4* 
 
 
 4. 4. 
 4. 4. 
 
 
 4. 4. 
 4. 4. 
 
 
 4- 
 
 
 
 
 + 
 
 4.* + 
 
 *4.* 
 4.*4. 
 
 
 4. 4. 
 4. 4. 
 
 
 4. 4. 
 4.*+ 
 
 The place of the card showing the num- 
 ber of cards moved will always be ' ' one plus 
 the total number of moves, ' ' and it is a mat- 
 ter of course that only units count. 
 
 After the' second move the card to be 
 taken up will be 1 + 4 + 3 = 8, and sup- 
 posing that five cards are now moved the 
 five will appear in the eighth place. Thus 
 we may continue, and the uninitiated will 
 wonder what trick is at the bottom of the 
 performance, which is nothing but a very 
 simple example in addition. 
 
112 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 Another trick, wliich may be called "mind- 
 reading," is also the work of simple arith- 
 metic. 
 
 Suppose you request a person to think of 
 any number from 1 to 15 and to point out to 
 you the rows in which his number occurs 
 in the following scheme : 
 
 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 
 
 2 3 6 7 10 11 14 15 
 4 5 6 7 12 13 14 15 
 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 
 
 You will at once know the number which the 
 person has in mind when he tells you in 
 which horizontal rows it occurs, for all you 
 have to do is to add together the first num- 
 bers of these rows. A close inspection will 
 tell you that 3 occurs in the two lines be- 
 ginning with 1 and 2; the number 5 in the 
 lines beginning with 1 and 4, etc., and 15 in 
 all four lines beginning with 1, 2, 4 and 8. 
 
 If we now replace the numbers with pic- 
 tures, the arithmetical clue will be concealed, 
 and the audience will be thoroughly mysti- 
 fied. In order to assist the little magician, 
 
MINDREADING. 113 
 
 whose memory is not as yet well trained, we 
 propose to replace the nmnbers with pictures 
 which will readily suggest the numbers that 
 they represent. This may be done by rep- 
 resenting the four numbers 1, 2, 4, and 8 by 
 wheels; 1 by a wheelbarrow, which has one 
 wheel ; 2 by a bicycle or a cannon, which has 
 two wheels; 4 by a wagon, which has four 
 wheels ; and 8 by an engine which has eight 
 wheels. Another method of representing 
 these four numbers would be by feet: 1 as 
 a top or as a stork standing on one foot; 2 
 as a man; 4 as any quadruped; and 8 as a 
 spider or an octopus. 
 
 The other figures may be rejDresented by 
 other objects suggesting the several num- 
 bers. Clover may represent 3 ; a hand or a 
 starfish, 5; an insect having six feet, 6; a 
 rainbow, 7; the Union Jack, which can be 
 made with 9 strokes, or a school-house, will 
 represent 9 (nine o'clock being the hour for 
 beginning the recitations) ; the decalogue of 
 Moses, 10; or if this be too weighty a sub- 
 ject or too difficult to draw, take a tent, the 
 sound of whose name will remind you of 
 
114 
 
 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 (T^ 
 
MINDREADING. 
 
 115 
 
 
 1 
 ^ 
 ^ 
 
 /I 
 
 
116 
 
 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 i^^^'^-i 
 
 j,<P 
 
 n 
 
 ^ 
 ^ 
 ^ 
 
 i^lrt-ja3«S^^3 
 
MIND-READING. 
 
 117 
 
118 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 ten ; 11 would be well represented by a foot- 
 ball; 12 by the meridian sun, or by a clock 
 or watch whose small hand points to twelve ; 
 the American flag with its thirteen stripes 
 will represent 13 ; another representation of 
 13 would be Christ with the twelve Apostles, 
 or a cross : for the idea that 13 is an unlucky 
 number originated through the thought of 
 the crucifixion, Christ having been the thir- 
 teenth at the Last Supper ; fourteen may be 
 the crown of Louis XIV., or his coat-of- 
 arms, or a valentine, since St. Valentine's 
 day falls on the fourteenth of February, or 
 the two constellations, the Dipper and the 
 Pleiades, each one consisting of seven bril- 
 liant stars visible to the naked eye; while 
 15, finally, may be represented by a die show- 
 ing the faces 4, 5, and 6. 
 
 All these things can be easily drawn by 
 children and should be so arranged on four 
 cards as to reproduce the number-arrange- 
 ment given above. Each card will cor- 
 respond to a row, and in our illustrations the 
 first number of each row is represented by 
 the picture in the upper left-hand corner. 
 
MIND-READINa. 119 
 
 It is not necessary to preserve the same or- 
 der, if our youngster only remembers the 
 place of the pictures which represent the 
 numbers that must be added. Having 
 drawn his four cards, he presents them to 
 some one with the request that he think of 
 some of the objects and hand him back those 
 cards on which this object appears. Each 
 card that is handed back represents a num- 
 ber, and their sum indicates the object 
 thought of. Thus if a person thinks of the 
 flag (number 13), he will hand back the 
 cards bearing the pictures wheelbarrow, 
 wagon, and engine, as being those on which 
 the flag occurs, representing the numbers 1, 
 4, and 8, the sum of which makes 13. 
 
 The underlying theory of the trick is of 
 course old .and pretty well known, but the 
 idea of expressing it in pictures that repre- 
 sent the numbers and that can be easily 
 drawn by the children themselves, is new 
 and may be welcome to educators and par- 
 ents. 
 
NATURAL SCIENCE 
 
 Use every opportunity in life to teach 
 children the elementary facts and truths of 
 the sciences which in later life will be of 
 use to them. Familiarize them as much as 
 possible with instructive observations. 
 Teach them through the eye a knowledge of 
 facts that will serve as examples of impor- 
 tant scientific truths. Convey your first in- 
 struction by merely showing something, by 
 making experiments, etc., but beware of su- 
 peradding too quickly the theories invented 
 to explain the facts, and if you mention them 
 characterize them at once as hypothetical. 
 Let the exjDcriment speak for itself and re- 
 mind the child of similar or analogous ex- 
 periments and experiences. 
 
 Some of the simplest experiments in 
 physics can be repeated in the nursery. Let 
 the children lift an inverted glass from the 
 bottom of the bathtub above the surface of 
 
 120 
 
NATURAL SCIENCE. 121 
 
 the water ; let them dip the inverted glass to- 
 gether with the air into the water ; or take a 
 toothbrush stand, with a hole in its lower 
 edge and let the water run forth, whereby 
 you can point out that the parabola of the 
 outflowing streamlet is proportionate to the 
 pressure of the water inside the vessel. 
 Then close tightly with your hand the top 
 of the toothbrush stand filled with water, 
 in which case no water will come out, or per- 
 haps only a few drops will drip down. 
 
 Make the children see the depth which 
 blocks of w^ood require to float, let them coiti- 
 pare blocks of different densities, and you 
 will soon help them to discover for them- 
 selves the law that the weight of a floating 
 body is equal to the weight of the water 
 which it displaces. 
 
 Set the children to thinking why empty 
 vessels, although made of porcelain or iron, 
 will float, while they will go down when 
 filled with water. 
 
 Further, the children who know that steel 
 is heavy will take delight in seeing a needle 
 float that has carefully been placed upon the 
 
122 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 surface of the water. The experiment will 
 succeed more easily if the needle is dipped 
 in butter. The cohesion of the particles of 
 water among themselves is strong enough 
 to carry little bodies such as needles, if they 
 are smooth enough not to break the connec- 
 tion of the surface which acts like a thin 
 film. Small pieces of wire netting (such as 
 is used for window screens), especially if 
 lightly coated with paraffin, will also float, 
 but a pin goes down, for its head will tear 
 the film. 
 
 Again, on some occasion or other place a 
 coin into a tub, or perhaps better into a 
 dish or a mug, and let the children look at 
 it from a given place where the coin is hid- 
 den behind the rim. Then fill the tub with 
 water and the coin becomes visible on ac- 
 count of the refraction of the rays of light 
 which produce the picture. Then put a 
 spoon into the water and call their attention 
 to the deflection of the image. 
 
 A piece of the wire netting of window- 
 screens is also useful to show the children 
 the inside and whole make-up of a flame, by 
 
NATURAL SCIENCE. 123 
 
 repeating all the simple experiments wMch 
 are made in a lesson on physics. 
 
 When you take a walk with the children 
 after a rain, show them the little streamlets, 
 which are typical of rivers and their tribu- 
 taries in their work of excavating river-beds 
 and valleys. 
 
 Make electrical experiments with the silk 
 samples for mamma's dresses, by rubbing 
 them with the bottom of a glass, and watch 
 the threads when approached twice succes- 
 sively by various objects, as by steel knives, 
 silver spoons, the hand, celluloid or gutta 
 percha, and glass. Comb their hair or your 
 own beard in the dark when the air is dry, 
 and let them see the sparks, and listen to the 
 cracking noise of this baby-thunderstorm in 
 papa 's whiskers. 
 
 Show them the so-called illusions of the 
 senses in which our psychologists take so 
 much interest, and let them measure the dis- 
 tances which, though they are equal, appear 
 different.' It will interest the children, and 
 
 iSee The Monist, Vol. III., p. 153, and Scripture's 
 Thinking, Feeling, and Doing, p. 187. 
 
124 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 they will wonder how their judgment is mis- 
 guided. If you have a color-wheel repeat 
 now and then for mere amusement color ex- 
 periments and show the effects of contrast. 
 Whenever you buy presents for children 
 bear always in mind the instructive feature 
 of games and toys. Children are by nature 
 anxious to learn, and they will themselves 
 prefer playthings which serve to educate 
 them and teach a lesson. A toy through 
 which a child becomes familiar with a phys- 
 ical law of some kind is the best investment 
 you can make and will, if properly used, 
 amply repay the cost. Little steam engines, 
 dynamos, motors and mechanical machinery 
 of all kinds, pumps, fountains, etc., are now 
 cheap enough to be the toys of the poor as 
 well as of the rich. Of course parents must 
 let their children work steam engines only 
 with all necessary precaution; they should 
 call attention to the danger of explosions 
 and after a few practical trials should sim- 
 ply use these dangerous toys as models for 
 instruction. 
 
FACTS NOT FANCY 
 
 There is a vicious habit now in vogue in 
 the kindergarten which superadds to the 
 facts of nature the imagination of fairy 
 tales. If you wish your children to acquire 
 a sound conception of reality and a sense 
 for genuine poetry, you had better avoid 
 this pseudo-fiction of the nursery which only 
 distorts nature and detracts from her intrin- 
 sic beauty. Facts as they are, are in them- 
 selves sufficiently poetical and need not the 
 false glitter of a fairy-tale imitation. This 
 idea of carrying the romance of the fairy- 
 tale into the realm of science only revives 
 and strengthens the old metaphysicism 
 which personifies abstractions and is apt 
 later on to mystify the young mind. Thus 
 we read in Arabella B. Buckle)^ 's Fairy-land 
 of Science, a book which otherwise contains 
 many good things, such sentences as these 
 pp. 12-13) : 
 
 125 
 
126 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 *^Can you see in your imagination fairy Co- 
 hesion ever ready to lock atoms together when 
 they draw very near to each other: or fairy 
 Gravitation dragging rain-drops down to the 
 earth: or the fairy of Crystallisation building 
 up the snow-flakes in the clouds? ... Do you 
 care to know how another strange fairy, 'Elec- 
 tricity/ flings the lightning across the sky and 
 causes the rmubling thunder? . . . And have 
 you any curiosity about 'Chemical action,' 
 which works such wonders in air, and land, and 
 sea? If you have any wish to know and make 
 friends of these invisible forces, the next ques- 
 tion is, 
 
 ^'How are you to enter the fairy-land of 
 science ? 
 
 ''There is but one way. Like the knight or 
 peasant in the fairy tales, you must open your 
 eyes. There is no lack of objects, everything 
 around you will tell some history if touched 
 with the fairy wand of imagination. . . . The 
 fire in the grate, the lamp by the bedside, the 
 water in the tumbler, the fly on the ceiling 
 above, the flower in the vase on the table, any- 
 thing, everything, has its history, and can re- 
 veal to us nature's invisible fairies." 
 
 This is not the right way of making sci- 
 ence poetical. The facts of nature are in 
 themselves beautiful and need not the 
 
FACTS NOT FANCY. 127 
 
 mythology of fairies created by a personifi- 
 cation of scientific abstractions, the errone- 
 ously so-called forces of nature. The meta- 
 physical assumption of forces which are 
 supposed to work all the miracles of natural 
 phenomena is the source of much confusion 
 and should be carefully guarded against. 
 If any personification be needed for the sake 
 of imparting an additional interest to the 
 stories of nature, speak of the actual things 
 as living creatures. Speak of the water 
 droi3 as expanding into vapor, as condens- 
 ing in the cold air into a snow crystal, as 
 falling upon the ground, as melting in the 
 warm sun and running down hill, but do 
 not people the child's mind with the fairies 
 of crystalization, gravitation, cohesion, elec- 
 tricity, and chemism. Teach children to see 
 truth and beauty in the facts themselves, not 
 in imaginary goblins and fairies. Make 
 them watch the phenomena of nature and 
 point out to them that all things are astir 
 with activity and aglow with an eager dis- 
 position to do one thing or another accord- 
 ing to circumstances. 
 
FOREIGN LANGUAGES 
 
 Acquaintance with foreign languages 
 should be cultivated at an early age, by in- 
 teresting the children in other nations. 
 Teach children little German and French 
 verses and phrases, only be careful that the 
 pronunciation is perfect. Children catch 
 the accent of strange sounds better than 
 adults, and will reproduce them to perfec- 
 tion. According to the author's own ex- 
 perience, children take delight in listening 
 again and again to little ditties and poems, 
 and will soon begin to repeat them. It is 
 advisable to practise such linguistic exer- 
 cises before going to sleep and to rehearse 
 on the next morning the recitations of the 
 previous evening. 
 
 We recommend such poems as Lafon- 
 taine's fables in French, some of Goethe's, 
 Schiller's, Burger's, and Heine's poems in 
 German, ^sop 's fables in Latin, the Lord 's 
 Prayer in Greek, etc., etc. 
 
 128 
 
FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 129 
 
 It is also advisable to introduce now and 
 then counting in other tongues, which may 
 be practised in the gymnasium where the 
 number of jumps or other actions can be 
 counted, or in any other place with similar 
 opportunities. 
 
 Children will pick up foreign sounds 
 without difficulty, if parents or teachers 
 limit their instruction to the sounds only and 
 do not tax the minds of their little pupils 
 with grammatical explanations. The sound 
 must come first, and the sound alone; the 
 sense of the sound should be understood, but 
 an exact grammatical analysis of its mean- 
 ing must not be given at the beginning, for 
 grammar bores children and is apt to de- 
 stroy the pleasure they naturally take in 
 learning something about other languages. 
 If children have learned by rote a number 
 of pieces in a foreign tongue, when they 
 have grown older and maturer they will be 
 glad to know something about the construc- 
 tion of sentences, and a grammar lesson, 
 otherwise so tedious, will then be welcome to 
 them. Later on, a long time after they have 
 
136 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 learned to read and to write in their mother 
 tongue, children may in school be taught to 
 read and write the foreign poems which 
 they have learned by rote in their younger 
 years, and they will attend their French and 
 German lessons in school with greater zeal 
 than if they knew nothing of these lan- 
 guages. 
 
 It may be permitted to add here a few 
 words concerning the dead languages which 
 in Europe as well as in America are still 
 taught in the old-fashioned way. The au- 
 thor of these articles has had experience in 
 teaching Latin according to a more modern 
 method, and, while engaged as scientific 
 teacher at the Royal Corps of Cadets in 
 Dresden, Germany, he succeeded within the 
 space of one school year in making the pu- 
 pils of his class (Quarta) as proficient in 
 speaking and in writing Latin as were the 
 best scholars of the highest class (Prima) 
 after a four years ' course. 
 
 And how was this accomplished? 
 
 Simply by making the boys learn by heart 
 every week a few lines of Latin prose or 
 
FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 131 
 
 verse. First simple stories sliould be se- 
 lected for the purpose, in the style of 
 ^sop's fables, then passages fi'om histo- 
 rians and orations of famous men. There is 
 plenty of material in Livy, Caesar, Cicero, 
 and also in Seneca, and the verses of Ovid 
 are as simple as the occasion requires. The 
 scholars had first to render these pieces into 
 Latin from an oral dictation which was 
 given them in their mother-tongue. Their 
 translations were corrected and their mis- 
 takes discussed. Copies of the passage had 
 to be made until the whole piece was per- 
 fect, and finally it was recited before the 
 class. This method of teaching Latin was 
 in the beginning hard on some of the boys, 
 but it grew easier with every new piece that 
 was taught and learned. The old pieces 
 were constantly repeated, and all grammat- 
 ical rules were discussed in connection with 
 the sentences which had thus been com- 
 mitted to memory. At the end of the school 
 year the boys knew about forty Latin stories 
 by heart and were thoroughly familiar with 
 them. In this way they had a direct com- 
 
132 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 mand over a number of phrases and had ac- 
 quired an unusual readiness in their prac- 
 tical use of the language, a result which 
 within so short a time had never before been 
 accomplished in the school. 
 
 While the best scholars educated in the 
 old method were able to tell the rule and 
 follow it, these boys built their sentences 
 correctly without thinking of the rule and 
 deduced grammatical rules from the in- 
 stances which they knew by heart. 
 
 A teacher of languages must be very exact 
 in the beginning, — slow but painstakingly 
 correct in every particular; he must choose 
 the best passages for committing them to 
 memory; he must insist on a clear pronun- 
 ciation and leave no doubt about the details 
 of grammar and construction. There is no 
 use in rushing the boys, or overburdening 
 them with home-work. On the contrary, the 
 teacher should render the labor of commit- 
 ting these pieces of memory easy by discuss- 
 ing their difficulties, which will aif ord ample 
 opportunity to make the scholars read the 
 sentences and repeat them as pronounced by 
 
FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 133 
 
 the teacher. The facility which pupils 
 gradually acquire in learning a language 
 serves to keep their enthusiasm alive, until 
 they know enough to allow a cursive read- 
 ing of literature which will involve a more 
 rapid progress in acquiring a general pro- 
 ficiency. 
 
 I would make bold to say that to acquire 
 the command of at least one living tongue 
 in addition to our own is an indispensable 
 condition of a higher education. It not only 
 broadens the mind but also our sympathies, 
 for thereby we learn to appreciate other 
 views of life, the beauties of foreign litera- 
 tures, and the accomplishments of other na- 
 tions. It will act as a check on that nar- 
 rowness of national prejudices, often mis- 
 styled patriotism, and will contribute much 
 toward an establishment of international 
 good will, so highly desirable in the life of 
 a civilized people. 
 
MATHEMATICS 
 
 Mathematical instruction should begin 
 very early, but do not begin with axioms, 
 theorems, and long-winded arguments with 
 their monotonous refrain, quod erat 
 demonstrandum. That is death to the spirit 
 of mathematics. Not only is the doctrine, 
 that all mathmatics rest upon axioms an 
 error,^ but to begin the first lesson with ex- 
 planations of axioms is a blunder. Let 
 children begin to learn geometry by doing, 
 not by reasoning. Let the reasoning come 
 in as an incidental aid to construction. Let 
 the purpose be that of achieving something, 
 but never do any reflecting or arguing for 
 the mere sake of thinking. 
 
 Action is the mainspring of life. No in- 
 terest can be taken in anything, except there 
 is a certain aim to be reached. Thought 
 must step in as the assistant to work. 
 
 ^ For further details on the redundancy of axioms see 
 the writer's Primer of Philosophy, pp 51 et seq. 
 
 134 
 
MATHEMATICS. 135 
 
 Thought that does not serve a purpose 
 known to the child, will be felt as an op- 
 pressive tyranny. Arguments will bore the 
 child that is induced to reason about things 
 before it feels the need of reasoning. Par- 
 ents and teachers must not presuppose but 
 create in the child the desire for knowledge. 
 
 In order to lay a foundation in mathe- 
 matics, parents and teachers should give the 
 child paper and a pencil. Then let them 
 make a ruler of the paper by folding it. 
 The fold in the paper is called a straight 
 line, and, if folded again so that one end of 
 the straight line covers the other end, the 
 new fold will cut the old fold at right 
 angles. These definitions of straight lines 
 and right angles should be introduced, not 
 argument atively, but simply by naming the 
 products of the child's operations. 
 
 After this brief introduction, hand the 
 child a pair of compasses, giving him due 
 warning to be careful with the points. Let 
 the child become familiar with this new in- 
 strument by drawing a circle and dividing 
 the circumference with the radius into six 
 
13G OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 equal parts ; which will serve to make a num- 
 ber of figures of various forms and combina- 
 tions, stars with curved rays, hexagons, 
 equilateral triangles, and six-cornered stars. 
 
 Another time ask your little friend to 
 draw a straight line and name one end for 
 himself, the other end for his brother, sister, 
 cousin, or friend. Then tell him to divide 
 the line with the assistance of the compasses, 
 and construct a boundary line at right 
 angles. 
 
 Our pair of compasses is a good fellow. 
 He has no head, no body, but two long legs 
 and can pace off the way for us. By sweep- 
 ing with the same span of somewhat more 
 than half of the line from both its ends, we 
 draw two intersecting circles, and there will 
 be few children who will not at once jump 
 at the conclusion that when a straight line 
 is drawn through the points of intersection, 
 the problem will be solved. 
 
 Thereupon let your little pupil draw an 
 angle for himself and one or several parallel 
 angles for his brothers and friends. This 
 would be an appropriate occasion to reveal 
 
MATHEMATICS. 137 
 
 to liim the secrets of parallel lines with their 
 vertical, alternating, and correspondent an- 
 gles. His mathematical comprehension will 
 now be mature enough to understand that an 
 angle is not the surface between its sides, 
 but their inclination, and that angles of the 
 same inclination are equal. 
 
 Having divided a line into two equal 
 parts, let the young mathematician divide 
 an angle, which he will now easily accom- 
 plish. 
 
 All further work can begin to bear a more 
 definite mathematical character. Let the 
 child construct triangles from three sides, 
 from two sides and one angle, from two an- 
 gles and one side. Call his attention, with- 
 out entering into details, to the fact that 
 from three given pieces the other three not- 
 given pieces are determined, bearing in 
 mind an exception which leaves the choice 
 between two possibilities; and also that tri- 
 angles may be turned around. 
 
 The method of calculating areas can be 
 taught to beginners by telling them the story 
 of a farmer who exchanged his farm, which 
 
138 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 was in the shape of a square, for another 
 one of exactly the same sides but with 
 slanting angles. The farmer soon found out 
 that there was less work in plowing and less 
 seed-corn was needed, but that the crop too 
 was greatly reduced. The man was no 
 mathematician; he had allowed himself to 
 be cheated. The solution of the problem 
 will now be followed up with great interest 
 and can easily be accomplished. 
 
 In a similar way let the childi'en operate 
 with circles for determining the nature and 
 interrelations of tangents, sectors, central, 
 and peripheral angles, etc., etc., and let them 
 find the inscribed and circumscribed circles 
 of triangles, the Pythagorean proposition, 
 etc., etc. And all this can be taught in a 
 kindergarten way, without ever resorting to 
 arguments and demonstrations, but simply 
 by setting the child to work and giving him 
 a task to accomplish. When he has come 
 into possession of a fair stock of mathemat- 
 ical knowledge, he will now and then go 
 astray and become the dupe of some miscon- 
 ception. He will then be glad to become ac- 
 
MATHEMATICS. 139 
 
 quainted with methods of proof which will 
 enable him to argue about his operations 
 and to become sure that his constructions 
 are right. 
 
 Arithmetic should in the same way be 
 taught by setting children to work, i. e., by 
 making them do something, by weighing, by 
 measuring, and by comparing different 
 lengths, areas, and volumes, as well as dif- 
 ferent weights. 
 
 In spite if its importance, mathematics is 
 still one of the neglected branches in the 
 education of the child, while much progress 
 has been made in the primary instruction of 
 drawing, painting, music, and physics, where 
 better methods suggest themselves more 
 readily. Mathematicians of high standing 
 devote their energies to a furtherance of the 
 most abstruse problems of their craft and 
 have so far not as yet shown any ambition 
 to come to the assistance of the kindergarten 
 and primary schools. 
 
MUSIC IN EDUCATION 
 
 Music is not indispensable to life. There 
 are many people in civilized countries and 
 among primitive races who are absolutely 
 unmusical, and j^et they do not seem to be 
 the worse off among their fellow beings. 
 For this reason, it might be considered that 
 music is redundant and could be omitted in 
 our plan of education. Nevertheless, it has 
 been retained and perhaps not without good 
 reason; for though man can live without it 
 he is greatl}^ benefited by it, and those in 
 whose life music is a blank miss much of 
 the broadening and refining influences which 
 this wonderful art affords. 
 
 Music is a world of its own. After the 
 analogy of mathematics it builds up a uni- 
 verse in the realm of imagination, the laws 
 of which may be considered purely a priori. 
 Music is not a mere mimicry of bird-song, 
 or of any noises in the surrounding world, 
 
 140 
 
MUSIC IN EDUCATION. 141 
 
 as has been suggested by those aestheticians 
 who believe that all art is an imitation of 
 nature. Music is an independent construc- 
 tion of motives, motions, tonal and rhyth- 
 mic progressions, which take place in the 
 domain of sound- vibrations. Musical 
 themes may present analogous phases to the 
 world of human sentiment and action, they 
 may accompany outbursts of poetry; they 
 may help to characterize dramatic action on 
 the stage; they may depict pastoral, mar- 
 tial, or other events of human life; but 
 we must remember that music remains 
 purely tonal and never changes into real 
 imitation of the occasions for which it has 
 been invented. It is the most abstract art, 
 and yet in spite of all its abstractness it is 
 the most direct in its effects. Animals are 
 attracted by music and there are few people 
 even among the musically untrained who 
 would not be stirred by the strains of an im- 
 pressive melody. 
 
 For all these reasons it seems desirable 
 that music should form part of our educa- 
 tion. By its means we learn to appreciate 
 
142 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 that a representation of the world in words 
 is not the only possible aspect of life, and 
 so it will prevent the onesidedness of those 
 who think that they have exhausted the 
 comprehension of reality after they have 
 weighed and measured its materials and 
 have reduced its phenomena to exact for- 
 mulas. Life is too rich to be limited to one 
 mode of interpretation, and even the meth- 
 ods of science, important though they are, 
 touch only the hem of life's garment. 
 Music is an instance only of the wealth of 
 mental capabilities, and it is well fitted to 
 the purpose of illustrating how deep is the 
 realm of sentiment in which life finds its 
 echo and reflection. 
 
 The usual method of teaching music in 
 the schools is by singing which is indeed the 
 natural beginning of developing an interest 
 in the tonal world ; for in singing we create 
 the tones ourselves and utilize the musical 
 instrument which nature herself has given 
 us — an instrument which is part of our- 
 selves and echoes in most direct reflection 
 the sentiments of our inmost souls. Sec- 
 
MUSIC IN EDUCATION. 143 
 
 ond to singing, the piano is commonly intro- 
 duced, but here I venture to disagree with 
 the common practice. It is true that the 
 l)iano contains the most complete arrange- 
 ment for practical use and is the instru- 
 ment on which our typical conception of 
 music has been developed. A knowledge of 
 the piano is therefore indispensable to a mu- 
 sical education, but it does not recommend 
 itself for educational purposes because the 
 notes on the piano are ready made and the 
 pupil has simply to touch the keys to pro- 
 duce the tone, while the correctness of the 
 note depends on the instrument and not on 
 the player. For educational purposes the 
 violm would be by far preferable because on 
 the violin the player produces his own notes, 
 and if his notes are incorrect he has no right 
 to complain, for he has to tune the violin 
 and every note he plays is of his own mak- 
 ing. For this reason I would consider it 
 desirable for any musical education, that a 
 pupil should at least for some time be taught 
 the violin and learn to handle that instru- 
 ment with some degree of skill. 
 
144 OUIl CHILDREN. 
 
 Of late the musical world has been bene- 
 fited by a new invention which seems to me 
 to promise great success. The invention of 
 the pianola, or by whatever name the piano- 
 playing instrument may go, has made acces- 
 sible to large multitudes the knowledge of 
 musical composition. Until its introduc- 
 tion, acquaintance with good music was re- 
 served only for specialists and concert- 
 goers, and the difficulty of the technique 
 rendered it impossible for common mortals 
 to familiarize themselves with a great vari- 
 ety of music. Concert-goers hear a sonata 
 once and perhaps a second or third time, but 
 not often enough to become truly familiar 
 with the intentions of the composer. The 
 result is that they will be bored the first 
 time, and that the meaning of the beauty 
 of classical music will rarely dawn upon 
 them and only after a long time. It is for 
 these reasons that truly good music is not 
 sufficiently appreciated while rag-time melo- 
 dies which catch the ear with impressive 
 syncopation receive the plaudits of the 
 masses. Now the piano-player will tend to 
 
MUSIC IN EDUCATION. 145 
 
 do away with these difficulties. It will en- 
 able people of musical disposition who have 
 not the time to acquire the necessary tech- 
 nique for enjoying truly good music to study 
 the works of composers before they have a 
 chance of hearing them in a concert, and 
 they will find that a sonata which otherwise 
 would have been tedious to them will prove 
 not only interesting but also instructive and 
 helpful. They will be able to follow the 
 music knowing the succession of the dif- 
 ferent motives and in place of ennui will ex- 
 perience satisfaction. 
 
 Ai'tists as a rule are opposed to the piano 
 player, and their dislike is easily accounted 
 for and to some extent justified. It changes 
 an artistic performance into a mechanical 
 reproduction, and thus threatens to take 
 from music its most essential and truly ar- 
 tistic featui'e, — individual conception and 
 interpretation. But this is no reason why 
 the use of the piano player should not be 
 encouraged. The same objection was of- 
 fered against the introduction of the photo- 
 graph, which threatened to subvert the ar- 
 
146 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 tistic work of the painter, and in this case 
 too, we see a mechanical performance dis- 
 place artistic reproduction. It is true that 
 the photograph has crowded a great num- 
 ber of portrait painters out of business and 
 has made picture making a common posses- 
 sion, even among those who do not possess 
 skill in drawing. Nevertheless, it has not 
 only benefited mankind as a whole, but the 
 professional artist also; for the mediocre 
 limners have disappeared, and the standard 
 of pictorial art has been raised, rendering 
 paintings much more valuable than photo- 
 graphs, and portraits in oil even more de- 
 sirable than before the days of the profes- 
 sional gallery and amateur camera. 
 
 After these comments it goes without say- 
 ing that the piano-player will become help- 
 ful and valuable in musical education of any 
 kind. It brings within reach the knowledge 
 of our best masterpieces and will enable 
 every one to familiarize himself without 
 much effort with studies which may be col- 
 lateral to his own specialty. 
 
PLAYFUL INSTRUCTION, AND 
 GENIUS 
 
 An old friend of mine asked me some time 
 ago whether it was advisable to begin teach- 
 ing children at a tender age, not of course 
 by systematic lessons, but by playful in- 
 struction. One of the professors of a school 
 had advised him not to impart any playful 
 instruction, " because, '^ he said, "instruc- 
 tion is a serious thing, and if it were taught 
 playfully it would demoralize the boy's na- 
 ture. He would never learn to apply him- 
 self with seriousness in later life." 
 
 The reason of this advice is good, but the 
 advice itself is bad. The spirit of the old 
 schoolmaster's advice can be recommended, 
 for the acquisition of knowledge is indeed a 
 serious thing and should be taken seriously, 
 but the professor's logic is perverse. It is 
 true enough that the time will come when 
 children must learn to apply themselves 
 
 147 
 
148 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 seriously, but that is no reason why children 
 should not acquire playfully as much knowl- 
 edge as they possibly can. Would it be 
 right to prevent mental growth? Certainly 
 not! On the contrary, mental growth 
 should be fostered by all means in our 
 power. Our aim, however, must not be to 
 change the acquisition of knowledge into 
 sport, but to utilize the plays of the child for 
 the higher ends of education. 
 
 It is a design of nature to let the life of 
 adult creatures be foreshadowed in the 
 games of the young; and educators are 
 bound to take the hint. 
 
 The plays of children should not be 
 simply a waste of time, but ought to be util- 
 ized for furthering their intellectual life. 
 They should serve higher purposes than 
 merely to keep the little folk out of mis- 
 chief. The old schoolmaster's maxim, 
 therefore, is wrong, although his intentions 
 may be appreciated; and we must let the 
 child learn playfully as much as possible. 
 
 Let the letters of the alphabet appear on 
 the child 's toys ; let him become familiar with 
 
PLAYFUL INSTRUCTION. 149 
 
 the various pursuits of life in his games; 
 let his little hands become accustomed to the 
 shovel, the pick-ax, the drill, the plane, and, 
 if certain precautions are taken, also the 
 knife, the scissors, and the compasses. Let 
 him hear in great outlines and in the 
 simplest words the stories of invention, the 
 deeds of heroes, and the feats of discoverers. 
 When the time comes for him to apply him- 
 self with greater concentration upon school 
 work he will be better prepared for it. The 
 exertion will be easier for him, his labors 
 will be lessened, and he will pass through 
 his studies more joyfully than the boys to 
 whom, for the mere purpose of teaching 
 them the seriousness of learning, the ac- 
 quisition of useful knowledge is made irk- 
 some. 
 
 Seriousness in the performance of duties 
 is of great importance in life, but serious- 
 ness is nothing if it is not guided by intel- 
 ligence and accompanied by zeal. Our 
 young folk, in order to leam to apply them- 
 selves, must be taught to love work and be 
 anxious to do something. Their enthu- 
 
150 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 siasm must be roused and their endeavors 
 must be guided at an early age. 
 
 For this purpose the kindergarten has 
 been invented and is doing splendid work. 
 
 No doubt that there are kindergartens 
 which are not conducted in the right spirit. 
 Instead of lifting the children up to a high- 
 er level and helping them to understand the 
 significance of life, some of the teachers 
 stoop to them and let childishness have full 
 sway. Instead of teaching the little folk 
 playfully how to work, giving them glimpses 
 of truth and the elements of right conduct, 
 they dissipate them by idle plays and foster 
 the spirit of sport. But in all innovations 
 it is natural that mistakes will be made, and 
 we need not for that reason reject the whole 
 system. 
 
 The kindergarten is a great advance in 
 our educational methods; and when public 
 kindergartens shall be instituted all over the 
 country we may expect a decided and notice- 
 able improvement of the race accompanied 
 by an increase of intelligence and a decrease 
 of crime. 
 
PLAYFUL INSTRUCTION. 151 
 
 In a former number of one of our best 
 magazines/ an educational writer, appar- 
 ently a grammar-school teacher who took a 
 dislike to the pupils, and perhaps also to 
 the principal, of a special kindergarten, 
 condemns the whole system for its lack of 
 seriousness. She claims that the kindergar- 
 ten children expect interesting stories and 
 not instruction, they want amusement, and 
 refuse to pay attention; they go to school 
 to play, not to work. 
 
 Granting that there are kindergartens 
 which are not yet conducted with the neces- 
 sary seriousness and that mistakes are made, 
 we must also know that seeds sometimes 
 fall by the wayside or on rock. If there 
 are some kindergartens that fail to produce 
 the right results, this is no reason for doing 
 away with the method altogether. 
 
 The kindergarten is not for play, but for 
 playfully imparting lessons, and the main 
 thing to be taught must be method; method 
 in small things, in games, in behavior, and 
 in human activity generally. Far from 
 
 1 The Atlantic Monthly, March, 1899, pp. 358-366. 
 
152 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 abolishing the kindergarten, we would advo- 
 cate its extension and the introduction of 
 certain of its methods into the high schools 
 and universities. 
 
 The gist of the educational problem is 
 this: Teach the methods of work and the 
 elements of any science or art, not in a dry 
 and abstract manner, but by infusing enthu- 
 siasm into the pupils. Lessons can be made 
 interesting by pointing out the connection 
 which the object of instruction has with 
 life by showing its value in the economy of 
 human society, and indicating the wants 
 which it serves. Pupils must feel the thrill 
 which the inventors and scholars feel in 
 their attempts at making discoveries and 
 solving the various riddles of life. 
 
 The kindergarten method will accomplish 
 miracles in the field of education. It is a 
 new dispensation, a dispensation of love, of 
 voluntary good will, stimulating the springs 
 that work from within, which must replace 
 the old dispensation of the rod, the law that 
 enforces virtue by punishments and makes 
 noble and good aspirations a burden. 
 
PLAYFUL INSTRUCTION. 153 
 
 A spiritual sunshine should spread over 
 all exercises of the kindergarten, but for 
 that reason there need be no dillydallying 
 with toys. The teacher must never lose 
 sight of the ultimate aim, which is the build- 
 ing up of character. She herself must 
 therefore at once be earnest and cheerful, 
 qualities which it is by no means impossible 
 to combine, and while she keeps her chil- 
 dren buoyant and joyful, she must not fail 
 to impress them with the importance of 
 duty, of application, of seriousness. 
 
 It might be an improvement in the sys- 
 tem of the kindergarten if it were not ex- 
 clusively in the hands of women, and if at 
 least from time to time the influence of male 
 teachers could be brought to bear upon 
 children. 
 
 Old-fashioned teachers who still cling to 
 the method of rendering lessomi tedious, 
 must, from sheer prejudice, have become 
 blind to the results that can be obtained in 
 this way ; for it is remarkable how persever- 
 ing and patient children can be when they 
 are interested in a certain kind of work. 
 
154 OUK CHILDREN. 
 
 The difference between a genius and a 
 pedant consists exactly in this, that the gen- 
 ius performs his work playfully, while the 
 pedant groans under the drudgery of his 
 task. No doubt the pedant 's work would be 
 preferable, if its worth were to be measured 
 by the resistance overcome, but the fact is 
 that the work of the genius always increases 
 in excellence according to the ease with 
 which it is accomplished. 
 
 Genius is sometimes looked upon as a 
 mystery, but there is no mystery about it. 
 While it is difficult and often impossible to 
 account for the appearance of genius in spe- 
 cial cases, because it crops out where we least 
 expect it, its nature in and of itself is no 
 mystery. The soul of a genius consists of 
 motor ideas which are correct representa- 
 tions of things in the objective world and of 
 the work to be performed. They interact 
 without the laborious effort of conscious 
 concentration. They act with machine-like 
 accuracy, so as to allow all attention to be 
 concentrated upon the main purpose of the 
 work and not uj^on its details. A genius 
 
PLAYFUL INSTRUCTION. 155 
 
 originates partly by inheriting a disposition 
 for easily acquiring certain functions, or 
 generally by possessing the knack of view- 
 ing the world correctly. Whatever may be 
 the cause of genius, it certainly shows itself 
 in the playful ease with which work of 
 great importance is performed. It would 
 be wrong to think that a genius need not 
 work, for a genius as a rule is a great 
 worker, but he enjoys his work and can 
 therefore accomplish more than those who 
 constantly remain conscious of the serious- 
 ness of their labors. 
 
 Genius is instinct on a higher plane. 
 Certain inherited dispositions are probably 
 indispensable for producing a genius of a 
 certain kind and it may be that an educator 
 can do nothing when they are absolutely ab- 
 sent. Nevertheless much can be done by a 
 careful education. The impressions of 
 children who, in a certain line of activity, 
 see nothing but the right methods from their 
 very babyhood, will be so organized that 
 from their unconscious depths up to the con- 
 scious surface of their soul, they will be pre- 
 
156 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 determined to hit naturally the right mode 
 of action. The child of a musician, for in- 
 stance, who has never heard anything but 
 good music, and has playfully acquired since 
 his very babyhood the various experiences 
 of touch by contact with the keys of a piano, 
 will naturally become a virtuoso. He will 
 naturally find the right harmony, and the 
 great wealth of melody that unconsciously 
 slumbers in his early recollections will form 
 a source of living tone-images, which upon 
 the least provocation will well up automat- 
 ically and engender new combinations of 
 harmonious melodies that, through the in- 
 fluence of other conditions, may possess a 
 character of their own. 
 
 What is true of music is true of poetry, 
 oratory, all arts, the sciences, handicrafts, 
 and industrial pursuits. The condition of 
 genius is a ready and automatic interaction 
 of a sufficient number of clear and correct 
 thought images, or representative pictures, 
 which must be brought under the control of 
 a guiding purpose. 
 
PLAYFUL INSTRUCTION. 157 
 
 Mr. Nicola Tesla's lecture before the 
 Commercial Club of Chicago (May 14, 1899) 
 was of special interest to the psychologist. 
 He dwelt at length on the vividness of his 
 visual conceptions which appeared before 
 his eye like real things. Thus he would, 
 when speaking of a cat, see a real cat; or 
 when thinking of a machine, see a machine 
 in all its details and in accurate proportions 
 so plainly as to enable him to make meas- 
 urements. This condition was oppressive 
 to him in childhood and early youth, so long 
 as he could not control it; and he felt re- 
 lieved as if ridding himself of a nightmare 
 when with increasing strength in his riper 
 youth he succeeded in gaining control over 
 the appearance and disappearance of these 
 images. 
 
 The whole method of making education 
 irksome is wrong. It reminds one of the 
 Gothamites who, according to the principle 
 that we should do the disagreeable part of 
 the task first, unloaded the wood from their 
 wagons by pulling out the lowest trunks 
 first, which they did with great difficulty; 
 
158 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 and they were delighted that by and by the 
 work grew easier. They rejoiced when the 
 last pieces could be simply taken off with- 
 out trouble. 
 
 Why not begin to teach children without 
 causing them trouble from the beginning? 
 All learning is a pleasure, and our teachers 
 will find that it is unnecessary to make in- 
 struction irksome to children during their 
 school years. Acquisition of knowledge is 
 a growth of soul, and our children ought to 
 feel the joy of mental growth. There need 
 be no fear that their minds will be dwarfed 
 thereby. On the contrary, they will devel- 
 op all the better, as plants that are trans- 
 planted from a barren land to fertile soil, 
 or from the shade to the sun, and when the 
 time arrives in which some great purpose 
 will demand special concentration, the grow- 
 ing boy will apply himself with all the vigor 
 of his youthful ambition. 
 
 A youth will be more confident of success 
 in life if he has been playfully made accus- 
 tomed to its serious duties and to their diffi- 
 culties, and he will thereby acquire a buoy- 
 
PLAYFUL INSTRUCTION. 15^ 
 
 ancy which under the present conditions of 
 education is rare. We must, however, see 
 to it that the seriousness of work, far from 
 suffering from playful instruction, shall be 
 intensified and strengthened by it. 
 
 There is another method of imparting a 
 serious spirit to our children than by en- 
 countering them with frowns or making wry 
 faces at them when they do not sufficiently 
 appreciate the gravity of their duties and 
 school lessons : it is to show them the grav- 
 ity and the purpose of their work. Gravity 
 of purpose can very well be combined with 
 a playful enthusiasm in which the purpose 
 is accomplished. Let us not destroy the 
 buoyancy of youth by installing gravity in 
 the wrong place. It is remarkable how 
 playfully and how joyously, and with what 
 intense endurance a boy will work, if he has 
 a purpose. 
 
RATIONALISM IN THE NURSERY 
 
 When rationalism, as a religious move- 
 ment, first dawned on the world, it was ex- 
 aggerated to such an extent and carried into 
 such improper fields, that it became ridicu- 
 lous as a theory and a religion. Reason, 
 however, we must remember, is the most es- 
 sential feature of the human soul, and the 
 proper training of reason is indispensable. 
 It is of such importance that it ought to be- 
 gin at an early date, and the application of 
 reason should extend to all the questions of 
 life, secular and religious. 
 
 As to the use of reason in religion we 
 must distinguish between what is rational 
 and rationalistic. The rational ought to be 
 welcome, while the rationalistic is a misap- 
 plication of the rational. 
 
 There are some great religious teachers, 
 such as St. Augustine and Luther, who un- 
 qualifiedly declare that religion must from 
 
 160 
 
RATIONALISM. 161 
 
 its very nature appear irrational to us. 
 They claim that reason has no place in re- 
 ligion, and must not be allowed to have any- 
 thing to do with it. The ultimate basis of 
 a religious conviction, they urge, is not 
 knowledge but belief, — a view which in its 
 utmost extreme is tersely expressed in the 
 famous sentence, Credo quia absiirdum, — 
 * ' I believe it because it is absurd. ' ' In op- 
 position to this one-sided conception of the 
 nature of religion, rationalists arose who at- 
 tempted to cleanse religion of all irrational 
 elements, and their endeavors have been 
 crowned with great results. We owe to 
 their efforts the higher development of re- 
 ligion, and must acknowledge that they were 
 among the heroes who liberated us from the 
 bondage of superstition. 
 
 Nevertheless, the rationalistic movement, 
 or that movement in history which goes by 
 the name of Rationalism, is as one-sided as 
 its adversary. Without any soul for po- 
 etry, its apostles removed from the holy leg- 
 ends the miraculous as well as the supernat- 
 ural, and were scarcely aware of how pro- 
 
1C2 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 saic, flat, and insipid religion became under 
 this treatment. On the one hand they re- 
 ceived the accounts of the Bible in sober 
 earnestness like historical documents; on 
 the other hand they did not recognize that 
 the main ideas presented in religious writ- 
 ings were of such a nature as to need the 
 dress of myth. We know now that the 
 worth and value of our religious books does 
 not depend upon their historical accuracy, 
 but upon the moral truths which they con- 
 vey. We do not banish fairy-tales from the 
 nursery because we have ceased to believe 
 in fairies and ogres. These stories are in 
 their literal sense absurd and impossible, 
 yet many of them contain gems of deep 
 thought; many of them contain truths of 
 great importance. The rationalistic move- 
 ment started from wrong premises and pur- 
 sued its investigations on erroneous princi- 
 ples. Our rationalists tried to correct the 
 letter and expected to thus purify the spirit. 
 But they soon found it beyond their power 
 to restore the historical truth, and in the 
 meantime lost sight of the spirit. They 
 
RATIONALISM. 103 
 
 were like tlie dissector who seeks to dis- 
 cover tlie secret of life by cutting a living 
 organism into pieces ; or like a chemist, who 
 with the purpose of investigating the nature 
 of a clock, analyses the chemical elements of 
 its wheels in his alembic. The meaning of 
 religious truth cannot be found simply by 
 rationalizing the miraculous element in the 
 holy legends of our religious traditions. 
 
 Rationalism is a natural phase of the evo- 
 lution of religious thought, but it yields no 
 final solution of the problem. In a similar 
 way our classical historians attempted in a 
 certain phase of the development of criti- 
 cism to analyse Homer and the classical leg- 
 ends. They rationalized them by removing 
 the miracles and other irrational elements, 
 and naively accepted the rest as history. 
 The historian of to-day has given up this 
 method and simply presents the classical 
 legends in the shape in which they were cur- 
 rent in old Greece. Legends may be unhis- 
 torical, what they tell may never have hap- 
 pened, yet they are powerful realities in the 
 development of a nation. They may be even 
 
1G4 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 more powerful than historical events, for 
 they depict ideals, and ideals possess a form- 
 ative faculty. They arouse the enthusiasm 
 of youth and shape man's actions, and must 
 therefore be regarded as among the most po- 
 tent factors in practical life. 
 
 We regard the rationalistic treatment of 
 Bible stories as a mistake, yet for that rea- 
 son we do not accept the opposite view of 
 the intrinsic irrationality of religion. We 
 do not renounce reason; we do not banish 
 rational thought from the domain of reli- 
 gion. Although we regard any attempt at 
 rationalizing religious legends as a grave 
 blunder, we are nevertheless far from con- 
 sidering reason as anti-religious. On the 
 contrary, we look upon reason as the spark 
 of divinity in man. Reason is that faculty 
 by virtue of which we can say that man has 
 been created in the image of God. Without 
 reason man would be no higher than the 
 beast of the field. Without rational criti- 
 cism religion would be superstition pure and 
 simple, and we demand that religion shall 
 never come in conflict with reason. Reli- 
 
RATIONALISM. 165 
 
 gion must be in perfect accord with science ; 
 it must never come into collision with ra- 
 tional thought. Reason after all remains 
 the guiding-star of our life. Without rea- 
 son our existence would be shrouded in dark- 
 ness. 
 
 If children hear stories that are irrational 
 there is no need of telling them flatly that 
 the story is not true, but it will be wise to 
 ask the question, Is that possible? Chil- 
 di'en are sure to take certain things as facts 
 without thinking of applying criticism. 
 Their little souls are as yet blanks. 
 How is it possible to expect in them the crit- 
 ical attitude of a scholar? If children see 
 pictures of angels, or devils, or fairies, they 
 will believe them to be as they see them, 
 without questioning the possibility of such 
 beings. 
 
 It was characteristic of a child's mind 
 when a little three year old boy once asked 
 one of his aunties, '' Have you ever seen an 
 angel? " and she replied, '' No, have you? " 
 " Yes," he said confidently, '' in my picture 
 book." That things can be pictured which 
 
166 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 are not realities, is an idea that has not as 
 yet entered the mind of a young child. And 
 it will be wise not to tell him directly that 
 certain pictures are unrealities, but to guide 
 his opinion and help him to form his own 
 judgment. 
 
 Children are liable to lose the moral of a 
 fairy tale if they are told at once that fairies 
 and ogres are unrealities. It will for a time 
 be sufficient to tell them it is a story and 
 never mind whether it actually happened or 
 not. And if the moral of the story now and 
 then finds application in their experiences 
 they will learn to appreciate it, and yet dis- 
 tinguish between poetry and reality. They 
 will acquire a taste for poetry without fall- 
 ing a prey to romanticism. 
 
 There is a difference between true and 
 real. A thing is real that is concrete and ac- 
 tual ; history is real, and all things real are 
 instances of general laws. A truth is the 
 recognition and correct knowledge of a gen- 
 eral law ; and the lesson of a general law in 
 the moral world may sometimes be better 
 set forth in an invented story than in inci- 
 
RATIONALISM. 167 
 
 dents that have actually happened. In this 
 sense a story, a myth, a legend, may be un- 
 historical, unreal, and even absurdly impos- 
 sible, and yet be true in its significance. 
 Children do not, of course, at once appreci- 
 ate this distinction between truth and histor- 
 ical actuality, and one of my little boys for 
 a long time refused to listen to '' stories that 
 were not true," as he said. He objected to 
 fairy tales as not being based upon facts, 
 preferring to hear the account of the inven- 
 tion of steam engines or of the landing of 
 the Pilgrims. It almost seemed for a long 
 time as though he had no sense for poetry; 
 but by and by he learned to like certain fairy 
 tales whose spirit he appreciated — for in- 
 stance, of the boy who knew no fear and 
 who, when he went abroad to learn what 
 fear was, gained a kingdom. 
 
 Parents must develop the critical sense 
 of their children without destroying poetry 
 and the enjoyment of fiction. If children 
 prefer the one or the other extreme, let them 
 freely develop it and fear not that they will 
 become over-credulous or over-critical, that 
 
168 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 tliey will become superstitious through a be- 
 lief in fairy tales, or prosaic on account of 
 their objection to stories that are not true. 
 Every child passes through successive 
 phases in its mental development, and it will 
 only assimilate the impressions and informa- 
 tion for which its budding mind is ready. 
 If these phases show an occasional onesided- 
 ness, parents need not worry, for mankind, 
 at large, also had its phases, and the reli- 
 gious evolution of the race necessarily 
 passed through the mythological and dog- 
 matic period. 
 
 The same rule that applies to fairy tales 
 holds good in the realm of religious legends 
 and stories. The parents' rule might be: 
 Give the children every chance of forming 
 their own opinion, and let them acquire in- 
 formation of all kinds in whatever way life 
 may offer it to them. Let children go to 
 churches, witness religious processions, at- 
 tend Sunday-school, but preserve under all 
 conditions their independence of judgment 
 without directly forestalling the decision to 
 which they are ultimately liable to come. 
 
RATIONALISM. 1C9 
 
 Parents who wish to insist on a rational 
 comi^rehension of religious truths need not 
 be in a hurry to influence the souls of their 
 little ones. If they give them outright the 
 results of free investigation instead of 
 merely stimulating their critical powers by 
 questions and suggestions, they are liable 
 to make them shallow, and instead of mak- 
 ing them rational will make them rational- 
 istic. 
 
 One of my little boys, now eight years old, 
 recently learned to skate on the ice. He 
 could do it so long as he remained uncon- 
 scious of himself, but he gave up at once af- 
 ter his first accident, because the thought of 
 falling frightened him. When I told him 
 that he could do it if he only had confidence 
 in himself, he answered, '* Isn't there a truth 
 in the story of St. Peter's walking on the 
 Sea of Galilee ? He sank when he lost faith, 
 and he walked on the water when he had 
 the confidence that he could do it." He 
 added at once, " I do not believe that he 
 walked on the water, but the story is good, 
 isn't iti " 
 
170 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 As to credulity in the common walks of 
 life, it will always be wise to distinguish be- 
 tween what actually is true and what a per- 
 son has stated to be true, or what he may 
 believe to be true. The distinction is sub- 
 tle to a child's mind in the beginning, but 
 as soon as he understands it, he will utilize 
 it and it will become a trait of character that 
 in future life may be of great importance. 
 He will learn to respect the right of others 
 to believe as they please, although he may 
 come to the conclusion that the belief itself 
 has no foundation and is unacceptable to 
 himself. 
 
MUTUAL EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 
 
 An only child is apt to be spoiled, and 
 why? Because lie does not have the benefit 
 of the mutual education that brothers and 
 sisters in their common plays as well as in 
 their quarrels naturally bestow upon one an- 
 other. If he is not self-willed, and if his 
 peculiarities do not manifest themselves in 
 naughtiness, he will as a rule be over-sensi- 
 li^.e^__ which in later life may prove almost 
 more disastrous; for he will be liable to fret 
 without any cause when others unwillingly 
 or unwittingly offend him. 
 
 Parents that have several children should 
 not be grieved if their boys, or even their 
 girls, sometimes quarrel among themselves. 
 There are few brothers who would not now 
 and then come to blows, and there is no 
 harm done in their childish quarrels, so long 
 as they are kept within proper limits, and 
 parents should interfere as little as possible, 
 
172 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 except to counterbalance the greater strength 
 of the elder ones, to prevent their having 
 toys which might turn out to be dangerous 
 weapons, and in general to see to it that no 
 serious harm be done. There is no better 
 system of education than that which springs 
 from the conflict of interests that originates 
 within the sphere of the children's own ex- 
 periences. 
 
 No teachings in words can better explain 
 to a child that the rights of others must be 
 respected, than the practical experiences, be 
 they ever so trivial, which give meaning to 
 the moral exhortations of the golden rule and 
 of practising justice. The child must feel 
 the resistance of others, in order to learn 
 that there are limits imposed upon us in so- 
 ciety by the rights of our fellows. There- 
 fore, if parents see their children quarrelling 
 they should not be anxious about them. 
 Every blow that one little brother gives or 
 receives is a moral lesson which will bear 
 fruit in time. 
 
 While the quarrels of children are not to 
 be regarded as an evil, they should not be 
 
MUTUAL EDUCATION. 173 
 
 fostered or produced. They should only be 
 suffered, and parents should not be alarmed 
 at occasional outbreaks of anger. Far from 
 fostering quarrels, parents should see to it 
 that their children love and respect one an- 
 other, and it is easy enough for them to do 
 so. They should never in the presence of 
 one child speak slightingly of their other 
 children, but always in respectful and lov- 
 ing terms. Every word of contempt or ill- 
 will, even of deserved reproach, if listened 
 to by a brother or sister, sinks much more 
 deeply into their hearts than adult people 
 as a rule are apt to believe. It is remem- 
 bered, and though it may remain unnoticed 
 for a long time, it will finally come out in 
 one shape or another when least expected. 
 It may be true that most of the grudges and 
 ill-will that brothers sometimes show one 
 another are due to the carelessness of pa- 
 rents who reprove the little fellows in the 
 presence of their brothers. Parents, there- 
 fore, ought to make it a rule to treat child- 
 ren throughout in the presence of their 
 brothers and sisters, and also of strangers. 
 
174 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 not very differently from adult people. 
 Whatever reproaches have to be made ought 
 to be done, at least as far as possible, in pri- 
 vate, and not for the purpose of humiliating 
 the child. 
 
 Children are apt to scold one another, but 
 their words have not the same weight that 
 those of parents and nurses have. Their 
 revilings, therefore, cannot do the same 
 harm. On the contrary, if parents or 
 nurses show their disapproval of using 
 names, bickerings in the nursery will be re- 
 membered as deterring examples. 
 
 When little children interfere with the 
 plays of their older brothers and sisters, 
 taking away their toys and running off with 
 them, the older children naturally grow in- 
 dignant and are apt at once to beat their 
 weaker playmates. Then of course it is 
 time to interfere and give them a lesson in 
 patience. And the best method to keep 
 older cnildren in good humor, is to teach 
 them to look upon their smaller companions 
 with the eyes of grown up people. When 
 a baby of two years runs away with her four 
 
MUTUAL EDUCATION. 175 
 
 year old sister's doll, it is better to let lier 
 carry off lier sj)oils, and taking the elder 
 child in your arms, to say: " Now let us 
 watch baby and see what she is doing with 
 dolly. I'll see to it that she does not break 
 it. Now look how she carries the doll. 
 Would any mamma carry her baby by the 
 leg? She does not yet know how to treat 
 babies, but we will teach her. You are the 
 elder, you must tell her how." 
 
 Possibl}^ for the first time children may 
 not prove amenable, but by and by they will 
 learn to take fatherly or motherly interest 
 in the queer ways of their younger sisters 
 and brothers, and that will help them to bear 
 with their smaller companions if they un- 
 duly interfere with the rights of their eld- 
 ers and provoke their anger. 
 
 Of course, children should always be 
 watched, especially if they have dangerous 
 toys in their hands, such as iron tools 
 which may easily become weapons, but at 
 the same time they ought to enjoy their lib- 
 erty as much as possible, and parents should 
 give them a chance to educate one another 
 
17G OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 by mutual assistance and interest — as well 
 as by friction. 
 
 I remember a children's j^arty given in 
 the days of my own childhood in celebration 
 of the birthday of one of my little friends. 
 Our host had received a game called "Rey- 
 nard the Fox," and he had invited all his 
 little comrades to play the new game. But 
 he had cleverly arranged it so that none of 
 his guests had the least chance of winning, 
 and he alone bore off all the honors and 
 prizes of the day. He was an only child, 
 and that, too, without a mother who might 
 have checked his ambitious plans, and the 
 outcome of the children 's party was general 
 dissatisfaction and finally an actual rebel- 
 lion against the host who tried to usurp all 
 the power. At last his father interfered to 
 restore order, and settled the dispute in a 
 manner which was not to the taste of the 
 spoiled child. When I recounted the story 
 at home and informed my parents about the 
 little tricks which my friend had used to in- 
 sure his victories, they pointed out to me 
 the lesson that the host should always look 
 
MUTUAL EDUCATION. 177 
 
 to the interests of his guests, and that it was 
 a matter of honor on his part to let them be 
 satistied and go home with the pleasant 
 feeling of having been well entertained. 
 The vanity of gaining all the honors of the 
 day spoiled the birthday party of my little 
 friend for himself and others. Had he been 
 wise enough to suffer his guests to gain all 
 the prizes, he would have increased their 
 friendship and would probably have en- 
 joyed the day much more than he hoped to 
 do and might have done by winning all the 
 prizes, even if his guests had not demurred. 
 I do not remember whether as the host of 
 a children's party I was better than my 
 spoiled friend, but I am sure that it was an 
 experience which made a deep impression 
 on my mind, and it seems to me that par- 
 ents should improve all the opportunities 
 they have of guiding children's inclinations 
 in the right way by utilizing their own ex- 
 periences. 
 
FEAR AND CIRCUMSPECTION 
 
 It happens that children sometimes are 
 frightened by phantoms of their own ima- 
 gination, and being naturally weak and 
 feeling that they are unable to protect them- 
 selves, may at the idea of a fancied danger 
 fall into hysterics. What is to be done if 
 such a state supervenes, or if symptoms ap- 
 pear which indicate its approach, — a state 
 in which the child is overpowered by all 
 kinds of presentiments and would be imper- 
 vious to argument *? 
 
 The best plan is not to deny at once the 
 reality of the imagination which is the im- 
 mediate cause of the sudden fright for that 
 fancied fearful object is a reality to the 
 child, and to deny it would be to cut of£ all 
 means of curing it. The best way is to con- 
 sider it temporarily as being real, or at 
 least possible, and accept the state of things 
 
 imagined. Place yourself in the child's po- 
 ns 
 
FEAR AND CIRCUMSPECTION. 179 
 
 sition, and thence start for further o^oera- 
 tions. That is the first condition which in- 
 sures the child's confidence, so that it will 
 be willing to follow you, and you will then 
 have easy play to examine the state of af- 
 fairs, which will of course result in the dis- 
 covery that there was no cause for fear. 
 
 A few examples will illustrate the case. 
 
 A little girl frequently fancied she saw 
 bears and tigers whenever she ha]3pened to 
 awake in the night. Presumably she 
 dreamed of some danger, may be on account 
 of having eaten too much for supper or hav- 
 ing eaten the wrong kind of food. At any 
 rate, she frequently awoke crying in the 
 night, and in her fear interpreted the dim 
 outlines of a dress or a curtain as a fearful 
 beast that was about to attack her. The 
 best thing to do is to deal tenderly with such 
 fancies and remove the child as far as pos- 
 sible from the object that has caused her 
 excitement. Then, if you can do so with- 
 out disturbing the other children, light the 
 lamp and let it fall full on the thing that 
 has given rise to her fear. Be slow, and 
 
180 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 express your opinion first as a kind of pre- 
 liminary assiunption that the bear may 
 after all be mamma's skirt or the curtain 
 moving in the draft; and when this com- 
 forting probability is understood, follow up 
 your advantage and declare it to be a good 
 joke that a harmless piece of cloth should 
 look like a fearful animal. Make the child 
 smile at the incongruity of her fancy, and 
 her laugh will cure the horror of the dream 
 and dispel the nightmare as sunshine dis- 
 solves the mist. 
 
 One day I walked with one of my little 
 boys along a wooded creek. It was winter, 
 and the trees were leafless and dry. Now 
 it happened that a trunk of a tree which 
 had lost its crown and was encircled by 
 strong vines, looked, from a certain posi- 
 tion, like a man, or rather like a tramp (for 
 he looked very ragged) bending over a bro- 
 ken bicycle. The vines were so queerly 
 shaped that the illusion was almost perfect. 
 My little boy stood aghast for a moment. 
 *' There is a bad man," he said, "with a bi- 
 cycle," and he pointed to the strange sight. 
 
FEAR AND CIRCUMSPECTION. 181 
 
 I could not help at once tracing the figure 
 to which he referred, but I knew at the same 
 time that it was a tree and not a real man, 
 for a man would not have stood so motion- 
 less as did that weird, ragged looking figure 
 in the valley. The fear of the little boy was 
 great, and he did not know what to do, — 
 whether to run away or to hide, and as his 
 imagination was easily worked up I felt 
 that there was danger of an hysterical out- 
 break. The first thing to be done was to 
 remain very calm myself. Calmness pro- 
 duces calmness, as irritation will produce 
 irritation. Mental states by imitation are 
 as contagious as diseases. Now I told the 
 little fellow to stand perfectly still and 
 watch that tramp in the valley. At the 
 same time I took him in my arms, which of 
 course alleviated his immediate fears, and 
 while he watched that tramp-like figure I 
 called his attention to the fact that he stood 
 perfectly still and did not move, except as 
 a tree will in a gentle breeze. When he had 
 grown calmer, I proposed to walk towards 
 the man and see what he did. But the lit- 
 
182 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 tie fellow was still too much afraid and 
 said, ''Let us go away as quickly as we 
 can." But that seemed to me very unde- 
 sirable. Although we were on our way 
 home, I saw clearly that I had first to dis- 
 illusion him as to the cause of his fear. As 
 he would not walk towards the strange fig- 
 ure directly, I thought it wisest to approach 
 it indirectly, and while we moved some 
 steps to the side, the tree ceased to look 
 like a man and appeared more like a tree. 
 At the same time the figure remained mo- 
 tionless as before. This increased the cour- 
 age of the boy and I at once took advantage 
 of it. "I don't believe it is a man," said I, 
 *'let us go and see." He still objected. I 
 again changed our position to a place which 
 presented another view of that queer tree, 
 and the confidence of the boy grew more and 
 more. The hysterical condition disap- 
 peared completely and there remained only 
 a certain awe of the weird appearance ; but 
 it seemed to me advisable to dispel that awe 
 too and leave no trace of it. Even now it 
 seemed to me advisable not to approach the 
 
FEAR AND CIRCUMSPECTION. 183 
 
 tree directly and quickly, but slowly, as 
 Indians would do when deer-stalking or 
 stealing upon an enemy. The approach 
 made in this careful way increased his con- 
 fidence, for we stopped whenever new 
 doubts arose which manifested themselves 
 in renewed hesitation; and at last I said ''it 
 would be fun if the wild man would turn 
 out to be merely a tree stump. Really, I 
 believe it is only a tree. What do you 
 think?" And he thought that it was really 
 a tree and his fright changed slowly into 
 fear, then into awe, then into circumspec- 
 tion, then into a strong suspicion of the 
 causelessness of his fear, and at last into 
 good humor at the situation. When we 
 came to the place and stood before the leaf- 
 less tree, which had no longer any resem- 
 blance to a man or a bicycle, we had a hearty 
 laugh and I did not fail to impress on the 
 boy the ridiculousness of the situation. 
 Lest the experience should vanish from his 
 memory, I sometimes reminded him of the 
 incident, recommending him in all similar 
 cases first to look closely at the frightful 
 
184 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 apparition. Perhaps then it will dissolve 
 into nothing, just as an imagined highway- 
 man changed into a rotten stump. 
 
 Another instance of fear that I found 
 necessary to allay in the same little boy, 
 happened on the farm to which w^e were ac- 
 customed to go. When he first encountered 
 a pig, he was so frightened at its grunt that 
 he could not be induced to walk into the 
 yards in which the swine were kept with 
 the cows and sheep. As it did not seem to 
 me advisable to yield to his fear, I carried 
 him to the fence on my arm, where he felt 
 safe, and explained to him that pigs are 
 very much afraid of men and even of little 
 boys if they only courageously hunted them. 
 So when a pig approached the fence I drove 
 it away, which gave the little boy a great 
 deal of pleasure to see his old enemy put to 
 flight. I at once made use of his elated 
 state of mind and pursued the pig. When 
 he saw that the pigs were really cowards, I 
 put him on the ground and gave him a stick 
 and let him give chase himself. First he 
 would not go to the ground; but having re- 
 
FEAR AND CIRCUMSPECTION. 185 
 
 peatedly witnessed the wild flight of chased 
 pigs, he ventured the feat, stick in hand, 
 still clinging, however, to his papa's hand. 
 Of course, I took care that the first pigs he 
 met with were not too large and that they 
 would quickly retire at our approach. The 
 little boy's courage grew with his success, 
 and after a few repeated pig hunts he lost 
 all the fear he had entertained, and I now 
 found it necessary to give the boys, him as 
 well as his little brother, a warning not to 
 be too bold with pigs when they were alone, 
 because the big ones might not be quite so 
 cowardly as they thought, and might turn 
 out to be ugly. 
 
 Make it a rule never to excite fear in 
 children, and never show fear yourself in 
 their presence. On the contrary, set chil- 
 dren an example of calm behavior in in- 
 stances where either you yourself become 
 involved in an actually perilous situation or 
 where the child's imagination sees a mere 
 show of danger. 
 
 Unfortunately most of the help employed 
 in a house, especially the servants in the 
 
186 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 kitchen, show an extraordinary fear of 
 mice, which is transferred to the children. 
 If a child observes but once a scene of ex- 
 citement, because a little mouse happens to 
 be heard, parents will have a great deal of 
 trouble to eradicate the evil effect. This 
 impression will probably last forever, and 
 can only be counteracted by carefully super- 
 adding the ridiculousness of such fear. 
 
 The elimination of fear in education 
 should not, however, promote audacity and 
 f oolhardiness ; on the contrary we must be- 
 gin at an early age to caution children and 
 make them look out for and anticipate dan- 
 gers. 
 
 When taking a walk with children, it is 
 advisable to think aloud, and to tell them 
 why we walk here and there, why we look 
 out when crossing the tracks, or crossing 
 streets; and to point out to them the dan- 
 gers that must be avoided. Circumspection 
 must be one of the fundamental ideas in a 
 child's mind, especially in our days when 
 civilization begins to grow more and more 
 complex. 
 
FEAR AND CIKCUMSPECTION. 187 
 
 If you have electric wires in the house, 
 either for lighting or for bells, it is advisa- 
 ble to improve the occasion whenever a re- 
 pair is made, or whenever an opportunity 
 may offer itself, to show to children the 
 sparks that appear when wires touch. If 
 the current is too weak to do any harm, it 
 is even advisable to let children touch wires 
 and receive a shock. At any rate, they 
 ought to be informed of the dangers to 
 which they expose themselves in touching 
 wires. They ought to know that as the 
 electricity in the wires of a bell are weak, so 
 the electricity in the wires of a street rail- 
 way are very powerful and would, if 
 touched, unfailingly kill a man. It is not 
 exactly necessary to tell children the terri- 
 ble accidents that frequently happen, but 
 it is necessary to give them full information 
 about what might happen. When they 
 grow older, attaining an age at which the 
 imagination is no longer apt to be over- 
 strung, they should also be told of the ac- 
 cidents and how they happen, so that they 
 will learn to avoid them. 
 
188 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 It will be useful under all circumstances 
 to impress short rules upon the minds of 
 the children, never to touch a wire that 
 might happen to dangle from a pole, and 
 never to step on a wire that might touch 
 the ground, and the connection of which 
 cannot be traced. It might be harmless, 
 but it might be a live wire. 
 
 The same rules, mutatis mutandis, apply 
 to innumerable other situations. If par- 
 ents visit factories or machine shops with 
 their children, as in my opinion they ought 
 to do from time to time, they should give 
 due warning not to touch any running ma- 
 chinery and especially to be on the lookout 
 with regard to belts. Before they approach 
 the machinery they should watch it for a 
 moment so as to know how far its sphere of 
 danger reaches. In smithies and near fire- 
 places of any kind, children must be taught 
 never to step on iron, because even the 
 dark-looking irons may still be hot, and it 
 will be instructive to touch with a piece of 
 wood some hot iron which, having lost its 
 reddish blaze, appears to the uninitiated eye 
 
FEAR AND CIRCUMSPECTION. 1B9 
 
 quite harmless. The wood will quickly 
 catch fire, and the child should learn that 
 if it stepped on that same iron the heat 
 would soon burn through the shoe into the 
 flesh, and perhaps to the bone. 
 
 Of course, these little lessons in caution 
 should not be given so as to make the chil- 
 dren timid ; and, as a rule, it will be time to 
 devote special attention to them as soon as 
 the child has lost its natural fear. First 
 teach children courage, then show them the 
 need of circumspection. 
 
SANTA GLAUS 
 
 There seems to be a period in the evolu- 
 tion of the child in which it is given to be- 
 lieving in the personification of ideas. I 
 know a little boy to whom Santa Glaus, 
 during a certain period of his life, was, and 
 remained, in spite of all explanations, a 
 real person whom he knew as well as his 
 papa and his mamma. I tried to explain 
 to him the meaning of Santa Glaus. I 
 took occasion to tell him that all the various 
 Ghristmas presents were given him by his 
 parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and 
 friends, and that they had to buy them in 
 the stores. In this connection I saw fit to 
 mention that the idea of Santa Glaus was 
 simply an allegorical expression of the love 
 of parents and grandparents who wished to 
 give Ghristmas joy to good little children. 
 
 The Ghristmas gifts are here; they are 
 the realities which the children see, and on 
 
 190 
 
SANTA CLAUS. 191 
 
 these concrete things hangs their conviction 
 of the reality of Santa Clans. 
 
 Children are right from their standpoint, 
 which views the reality back of an abstrac- 
 tion in the allegory of personification. 
 
 When I explained to the little fellow 
 that Santa Claus was such love of par- 
 ents and others as prompts them to give to 
 children Christmas presents, the child un- 
 derstood every word, and even appreciated 
 the fact that every present must be paid for 
 by somebody. Nevertheless, Santa Claus 
 remained a real figure in his imagination 
 and continued to play a most important part 
 not only in his games, but also generally in 
 his whole world-conception, so much so that 
 his highest ambition was to become Santa 
 Claus himself as soon as he grew up. 
 
 A little incident will serve as an instance 
 of how mature thoughts for a long time lie 
 side by side with childlike conceptions. 
 Once when the little boy asked me about de- 
 tails of Santa Claus 's habitation and ma- 
 chine shops, I again gave him the explana- 
 tion of Santa Claus 's ideal nature, where- 
 
102 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 •apon the child said: "Yes, I know that 
 Santa Clans means love of papas and 
 mammas for their children, bnt I do not 
 mean that kind of Santa Claus ; I now mean 
 the real Santa Claus." 
 
 The reply of the little fellow reminded 
 me of the views of many adult children who 
 do not as yet understand that all abstrac- 
 tions are real. Thus they are still in need 
 of the method of personification to make 
 them appear real to their mind. 
 
 There is among a certain class of educa- 
 tors the notion prevalent that we ought to 
 abolish in child education all the fairy tales 
 and with them the dear old figure of Santa 
 Claus. But I have observed that in the ab- 
 sence of the traditional characters which by 
 the experience of centuries have become 
 typical representations of certain spiritual 
 realities of life, children are apt to form 
 their own personifications, which of course 
 will be cruder, less poetical, and less defined 
 than the old ones. While I gladly allow 
 that the rationalizing influence should 
 watch over the development of a child by 
 
SANTA CLAUS. ^^^ 
 
 constantly keeping before his mind rational 
 explanations of the various fairy tale fig- 
 ures, I should not regard it as advisable to 
 crush or cripple the child's imagination. 
 We need not fear that it will not be cor- 
 rected in time. I have the confidence that 
 a child will naturally overcome the child- 
 ishness of fairy-tale personifications, and 
 we need not shock his mind by suddenly dis- 
 niusioning him. The child mil overcome 
 in later years the superstition of a literal 
 acceptance of fairy tales and will preserve 
 the poetry of the story. 
 
 It is neither necessary nor advisable to 
 pull out the first teeth because they have no 
 roots and will not endure. According to 
 the laws of nature the development of the 
 second teeth begins before the first teeth 
 fall out. In the realm of the spiritual de- 
 velopment, therefore, we ought not to be 
 zealotical iconoclasts; we need not pull out 
 and violently remove that which is mmia- 
 ture and temporary, but care ought to be 
 taken that the germs of a higher concep- 
 tion be planted and that at the disappear- 
 
194 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 ance of the old the new and more purified 
 thought be ready to take its place. 
 
 The little boy of whom I speak under- 
 stood only in part what I told him about 
 Santa Claus. He believed that he under- 
 stood it all. He acquired an idea that pa- 
 rental love, and children's joys, and the 
 family reunion at the Christmas festival 
 were great realities in life, but he did not 
 see that in their presence the figure of what 
 he called the real Santa Claus as a bodily 
 being living in the Rocky Mountains and 
 traveling over the country in his reindeer 
 sleigh had become redundant — without how- 
 ever having lost its significance. 
 
 Is not the same true of mankind as a 
 whole? The evolution of human civiliza- 
 tion has also its fairy-tale period, and we 
 are only now emerging from its fanciful 
 visions. There are still many among us 
 who believe that unless the letter of a myth 
 be true there can be neither beauty nor 
 truth in religion. They think, like genuine 
 adult children, that if Santa Claus were not 
 a real definite individual there could be no 
 
SANTA CLAUS. 195 
 
 Christmas presents nor any true Christmas 
 joy. Their belief in a God and Heaven is 
 more like the children's belief in Santa 
 Claus than a genuine faith in the grand 
 realities that are symbolized in these names. 
 Heaven and hell to many are not spiritual, 
 but material; they are conceived, not as 
 conditions, Ijut as places. 
 
 Thinking men among the church people 
 of the old stamp are often struck with the 
 truth that God and immortality are part 
 and parcel of our life and that they are 
 traceable everywhere in reality itself. But 
 then, like the little boy of whom I spoke 
 before, they understand and accept the new 
 light, and yet stick at the same time to the 
 materialistic view. All the Christmas 
 presents are due to the love of parents and 
 friends, yet in addition to it there is an in- 
 dividual person who provides for them, and 
 he is the real Santa Claus. They grant 
 that God is the eternal in the transient ; the 
 immutable law in the changes of the phe- 
 nomenal world; yet in addition claim that 
 he may be an individual being. 
 
196 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 The conception of God is ultimately 
 based on fact, but the notion that God is an 
 individual being is an illusion ; and if think- 
 ing people still cling to this error, it is as if a 
 naturalist, traveling in the desert, explained 
 to his fellow travelers the causes of a mir- 
 age, yet they, having understood the whole 
 explanation, would add : ' ' That may all be 
 very true; the mirage as we see it is due to 
 all these causes which we can plainly trace 
 in diagrams and calculate according to the 
 laws of the refraction of light in the differ- 
 ent strata of the heated air, but that does 
 not disprove the theory that there might be 
 some real haven of peace, full of beauty and 
 bliss, in that very same place where the mir- 
 age appears. The cosmic order may be un- 
 create and the condition of the wonderful 
 harmony of the world, it may be God: yet 
 this God might at the same time be a con- 
 crete being and as much an individual 
 ego-consciousness as we are. Further, 
 heaven and hell may be conditions of the 
 soul, but there may be also a heaven that is 
 as real and concretely material a place as 
 
SANTA CLAUS. 197 
 
 this earth is;" and then they believe that 
 the spiritual reality of heaven and hell, as 
 it exists in us, would be of no avail unless 
 there were some material reality in addi- 
 tion, unless they were geographical locali- 
 ties on our own planet or somewhere else in 
 space. Such people have not yet outgrown 
 the mythological phase of their develop- 
 ment, and, after a careful consideration of 
 their state of mind, I have come to the con- 
 clusion that they are still in need of a sen- 
 sual conception of religious truths, and, as 
 a rule, if they lost the belief in the letter, 
 they would also lose the belief in the spirit, 
 for their comprehension of things spiritual 
 is as yet imdeveloped. 
 
 The most important religious idea is the 
 God-idea, and it is natural that this deep 
 and intricate conception should cause great 
 difficulties to the educator. 
 
 The question arises, Would it be right to 
 teach the child those childlike conceptions 
 of the Deity wliich we ourselves no longer 
 believe ; or shall we, with agnostics, tell them 
 we do not know whether God exists or not; 
 
198 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 or, finally, shall we with freethinkers ridi- 
 cule the belief as unworthy of credence ? 
 
 Perhaps all these methods are somewhat 
 faulty, and the best principle would be to 
 let the children watch the performance of 
 religious worship of various denominations, 
 and when they ask about the significance of 
 prayer, sermons, hymn-singing, thanksgiv- 
 ings, and benedictions, give them at first an 
 ex23lanation of the ideas which induce some 
 people to go through these ceremonies and 
 sometimes through strange rituals. If the 
 children's interest in religious problems is 
 aroused, tell them of other beliefs, includ- 
 ing idolatrous practices and superstitions, 
 which can easily be illustrated by pictures. 
 But while imparting your information, be 
 always careful not to present your own 
 views ready made, but let the children work 
 out the question for themselves. Give them 
 such help as will render the solution of the 
 various problems easier to them, but see to 
 it that they do the thinking themselves. 
 
 The question will soon be asked, "Does 
 God exist I" and of course the children's 
 
SANTA CLAUS. 199 
 
 God is an invisible individual who hovers in 
 the air as he is pictured in Bible illustra- 
 tions. A God such as the children believe 
 in, of course, does not exist, but for that rea- 
 son it would be very wrong to tell the child, 
 *'No, God does not exist;" for while the 
 child's idea of God is wrong, there are no- 
 tions connected with it which are true. The 
 child asks also whether or not there is an in- 
 visible presence that watches him, whether 
 or not his acts when he is alone remain con- 
 cealed from the world, and here the difficulty 
 appears to lay the foundation for a higher 
 conception of God than is the popular view 
 of the traditional personification. 
 
 Meet the question, ''Does God exist?" by 
 the counter question, "What do you under- 
 stand by God?" and thus lead the child to a 
 description of its childlike views, which will 
 give you a chance to point out the true and 
 to discard the false. 
 
 A little chap of scarcely three years was 
 once quite shocked when he heard that the 
 air above us grew thinner and thiimer and 
 that at last there was no air left. No one 
 
200 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 can breathe there and we should, if carried 
 up, immediately die. The source of his 
 anxiety became apparent when with sup- 
 pressed tears he exclaimed in a state of ten- 
 sion, "But, then the Good Lord must die?" 
 "No, my boy," I said, "the Good Lord can- 
 not die ; He has not a body as we have ; He 
 has no Imigs ; He need not breathe in order 
 to exist. His existence does not depend on 
 a body like ours. He is not an individual 
 as you are and as I am. If He were, He 
 w^ould not be God. He is not a man. He is 
 God." The child felt greatly relieved and 
 it helped him to come a step nearer to the 
 truth. 
 
 Such occasional explanations should as a 
 rule come only in response to questions, for 
 then, and then alone, will they be appreci- 
 ated. Eeligious instruction should consist 
 mainly in setting the child's mind to think- 
 ing and solving the problems that the child 
 j^erceives himself. He will ask, "What does 
 God want us to do?" which means for adult 
 people, "What significance does the God- 
 idea possess in human life ? ' ' And when the 
 
SANTA CLAUS. 201 
 
 child answers this question in the child's 
 language, that '*God wants us to be good," 
 he will naturally come to the definition that 
 ''God is all that prompts to goodness." 
 
 We can fairly abstain here from entering 
 into further details because the individu- 
 ality of the child will require much individu- 
 alizing on this most important subject. All 
 I would claim, however, is this, that a child 
 — especially if his other education has been 
 in lines analogous to those pointed out here 
 — can be made to see (1) that God is present 
 in everything that is good, (2) that God is 
 the principle of goodness, (3) that this God 
 is not an individual being but an eternal and 
 ubiquitous presence; (4) that this God is 
 everywhere, and not nowhere, that although 
 He is not a material body. He is a most effec- 
 tive reality and not a nonentity ; that He is 
 not only good, but that His Goodness in- 
 cludes that He is also formidable, as His 
 goodness implies that badness leads to bad- 
 ness and the sequence of sin is sin's curse. 
 And lastly, that, be we ever so much alone, 
 we yet always remain in the j)resence of 
 
202 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 God. All our actions persist in their effects, 
 and we can nowhere and under no circum- 
 stances escape the results of our acts. 
 
 Children can be led up to these results and 
 easily made to understand them without our 
 entering into deep philosophical discussions. 
 At the same time the corollaries of these 
 views can be pointed out. Children that 
 grow up under these impressions will remain 
 reverent without being superstitious. They 
 will naturally understand the right use of 
 prayer. They will not pray for a change of 
 weather, but for strength of heart; and al- 
 though they may have been brought up to 
 say grace before dinner, they will not pray 
 with any expectation of changing the will of 
 God. Their prayer will be a realization of 
 self-control; it will be self-criticism exer- 
 cised by suffering their acts to pass by in the 
 review of a searching self-examination and 
 will result in self-discipline, rendering them 
 determined to pursue the right way of ac- 
 tion. 
 
 It will be advisable on general principles 
 to let children know at an early age that, as 
 
SANTA CLAUS. 203 
 
 there are different nations, so there are dif- 
 ferent religions; and we must always be 
 careful not to misrepresent others. We 
 may say why we do not share other people 's 
 views, but do not pronounce any condemna- 
 tion without good and sufficient reasons. A 
 comparison between religions will be very 
 serviceable in educating the child's inde- 
 pendent judgment. 
 
 The right God-conception renders us more 
 efficient in life ; it makes us independent and 
 energetic. The wrong God-conception makes 
 us superstitious and dependent. It is said 
 that during the naval engagement of the 
 Chinese-Japanese war the commander of 
 one of the great Chinese vessels went down 
 into his cabin to pray for help to his Joss, 
 when he ought to have been on the captain 's 
 bridge looking out for the enemy and com- 
 manding his men. There is no use in pray- 
 ing when we ought to act. He who believes 
 that prayer can work miracles, and trusts 
 that God will at his special request change 
 the course of nature, deserves to go to the 
 wall; for the highest prayer, nay, the only 
 
204 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 true prayer, is to attend to the right thing at 
 the right time — in a word, to do one 's duty. 
 You need not make atheists of your chil- 
 dren nor creed-duped believers. Teach them 
 the facts of life, point out the path of right 
 conduct ; make them critical and thoughtful 
 without treating the errors of others in a 
 cynical spirit, and you can safely leave the 
 rest of their religious development to their 
 own judgment. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Abstractions are real, 192. 
 yEsop's Fables, 30. 
 Alienists divert, 80. 
 Allowance in money, 35, 38. 
 Altruism and egotism, 19. 
 Anger of parents, 74-75. 
 Animals, Need of education in 
 
 higher, 3; Sympathy with, 46 ff. 
 Antagonize, Do not, 79. 
 Anxiety makes anxious, 62. 
 Arithmetic, how to be taught, 139. 
 Atlantic Monthly, The, 151 n. 
 Audacity and fear, 186. 
 Augustine, St., 160 ff. 
 
 Barbarism of hunting, 48. 
 
 Bible, Rationalistic treatment of, 
 
 a mistake, 164. 
 Blindness, Frequent cause of, 86. 
 Bluntness and truth, 28. 
 Buckley, Arabella B., 125. 
 Buddha, 67, 68. 
 Burns, Robert, 37 ff. 
 
 Capital punishment, a necessity, 
 70. 
 
 Card-tricks, 109. 
 
 Carlyle, 33. 
 
 Carus, Primer of Philosophy, I34n. 
 
 Caution, Lessons in, 189. 
 
 Cheating and being cheated, 66. 
 
 Child has a right to be active, yj. 
 
 Children and their smaller com- 
 panions, 174 ff.; imitative, 6. 
 
 Christ, 68. 
 
 Circumspection, 186; and fear, 
 178 ff. 
 
 Classical music, 144. 
 
 Cleaning teeth, S3. 
 
 Clear and subconscious; terms do 
 not exclude each other, 107. 
 
 Coaxing, Victims of, go ff. 
 
 Counting in other tongues, 129. 
 
 Credulity, 170. 
 
 Criterion of culture. Truth, 2. 
 
 Critical attitude, 165; sense, De- 
 velop the, 167. 
 
 Culture, Truth criterion of, 2. 
 
 Dead languages, 130. 
 Demons to be cast out, 59. 
 Dentist, Treatment by the, 85-86. 
 Development, Onesidedness of, 
 
 168. 
 Discretion, 28. 
 
 Dispositions, Child inherits, 6. 
 Doing, Learn by, 134. 
 Dominion, by naming things, 94. 
 Don't say don't, 50 ff. 
 Duties of parenthood, 17. 
 
 Eden, Garden of, 53. 
 Education, Need of, in higher ani- 
 mals, 3; of parents, 13. 
 Egotism and altruism, 19. 
 Esprit dc corps, 24, 27. 
 Evil consequences, Teach by, 55. 
 Exorcism, Modernized, 61. 
 Experiments in physics, 120 ff. 
 
 I'acts not fancy, 125 ff. 
 
 Fairy-tale period of mankind, 194. 
 
 Fairy-tales, Do not banish, 162; 
 
 need not be abolished, 192 f.; 
 
 Wrong use of, 125 ff. 
 
206 
 
 OUR CHILDREN. 
 
 Family relation, trinitarian, i6. 
 
 Faust, 18. 
 
 Fear, and audacity, 186; and cir- 
 cumspection, 178 ff; Instance of, 
 180 ff.; Never excite, 185; of 
 mice, 186. 
 
 First, impressions important, 10; 
 mistake, 104; steps, 4, 6 ff. 
 
 I'oreign languages, 128 ff. 
 
 Francis of Assisi, St., i. 
 
 Frederick the Great, 49. 
 
 Gambler's trick, 43. 
 
 Games should not be waste of 
 time, 148. 
 
 Genius, Condition of, 156; no mys- 
 tery, 154; Playful ease of, 155. 
 
 God, and Santa Claus, 195 ff. ; 
 Definition of, 201; has not a 
 body, 200; What to teach the 
 child about, 197 ff. 
 
 God-conception, renders us more 
 efficient. The right, 203; most 
 important, 197. 
 
 Goethe, s, 18. 
 
 Golden rule, 172. 
 
 Goose fisherman. The, 46. 
 
 Grammar, 129. 
 
 Higher animals. Need of educa 
 
 tion in, 3. 
 Holder, Fred., 46. 
 Home-work, No use in, 132. 
 Homer, 163. 
 Hosts, Children as, 176. 
 Hunting, Barbarism of, 48. 
 Hysterics, 178. 
 
 Ideal, only imperfectly realized, 
 
 9-10. 
 Imagination and truth, 22. 
 Individuals and the race, 18. 
 Infant, the Saviour, 15. 
 Infection, Dangers of, 86. 
 Insane asylum, Incident in an, 
 
 80-81. 
 Instruction by showing, 120. 
 Ins'ructive features of toys, 124. 
 
 Kindergarten, 150; not for play, 
 151; A vicious habit of, 125. 
 
 Krause, Ernst (Carus Sterne), 13, 
 14, 16. 
 
 La Fontaine, 65. 
 Latin, Teaching of, 130. 
 Lavergne, Georges, 4. 
 Legends are realities, 163. 
 Liberty, and responsibility, 75; 
 Children to be reared in, 93. 
 Lullaby songs, 100. 
 Luther, 160 ff. 
 
 Mariolatry, 15. 
 
 Mathematical instruction, 134 ff. 
 
 Matthews, William, on money, 36. 
 
 Mephistopheles, 18 f. 
 
 Mice, fear of, 186. 
 
 Money, 34 iT. ; William Matthews 
 on, 36; Wrong vise of, 36-37. 
 
 Monist, The, 123 n. 
 
 Mozart, 8. 
 
 Multiplication made easy, 107 f. 
 
 Music, in education, 140 ff. ; pre- 
 vents onesidedness, 142. 
 
 Mutuality, 19-21. 
 
 Naming, Significance of, 94 ff. ; 
 the products of operations, 135. 
 Night-mare, 179. 
 Numerals and things, 106. 
 Nurses to be chosen with care, 11. 
 
 Onesidedness, Music prevents, 142; 
 
 of development, 168. 
 Only child, 176; often spoiled, 
 
 172. 
 Ophites, The, 53. 
 
 Pain expelled, 61-62. 
 
 Parenthood, 13 ff. ; Duties of, 17. 
 
 Parents, Anger of, 74-75; Educa- 
 tion of, 13. 
 
 Penitentiaries, breeding-places of 
 crime, 71. 
 
 Personification of actual things, 
 127; of ideas, 190. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 207 
 
 Peter, St., walking on the water, 
 169. 
 
 Photograph, Introduction of, Msf. 
 
 Physics, Experiments in, 120 ff. 
 
 Piano, Knowledge of, indispen- 
 sable, 143. 
 
 Piano-playing instrument, 144. 
 
 Playful instruction, 147 ff. 
 
 Plays to be utilized, 148. 
 
 Poetry and romanticism, 166. 
 
 Prayer, self-control, 202; True, 
 204 f. 
 
 Prisons, 71. 
 
 Punish, Do not, 67 ff. 
 
 Punishment, Capital, a necessity, 
 70; consequences of a wrong 
 act, 73 ; in anger, 74. 
 
 Quarrels not an evil, 172-174. 
 
 Race, Individuals and the, 18. 
 Rational and rationalistic, 160. 169. 
 Rationalism, in the nursery, 160 ff; 
 
 onesided, 161. 
 Rationalistic and rational, 160,169. 
 Razor-Seller, The, 41. 
 Real and true, 166. 
 Reason not anti-religious, 164. 
 Reil, Island of, 7. 
 Religions, Comparison between, 
 
 203; Nature of, 161. 
 Reproach in private, 174. 
 Responsibility and liberty, 75. 
 Retaliation not a cure, 68 f. 
 Reverent not superstitious, 202. 
 Rolling-mill, 95. 
 Romanticism and poetry, 166. 
 
 Sanitary attention to children, 
 
 82 ff. 
 Santa Claus, igo ff. ; and God, 
 
 195 ff- 
 
 Scolding makes a scold, 57; There 
 
 should be no, 63. 
 Scripture, 123 n. 
 Self-control, prayer, 202; ultimate 
 
 aim, 93. 
 Self-criticism, 29; Stimulate, 64 ff. 
 Shakespeare, 29. 
 Singing, 142 f. 
 Slightingly of other children. Do 
 
 not speak, 173. 
 Spray, Use of the, 88. 
 Standard of civilization, 1. 
 Starvation cure, 91. 
 Sterne, Carus, pseud. See Krause, 
 
 Ernst. 
 Stomach has a memory, 92. 
 Subconscious and clear; terms do 
 
 not exclude each other, 107. 
 Suppress, Do not, 76. 
 Sweets, Do not forbid, 92. 
 Sympathy with animals, 46 ff. 
 
 Teeth, Allegory of, 193 ff; Clean- 
 ing, 83. 
 
 Tesla, Nicola, 157. 
 
 Things and numerals, 106. 
 
 Throat, Diseases of the, 86-87. 
 
 Thunderstorms, loi. 
 
 Toys, Instructive features of, 
 124 ff. 
 
 Trick, Gambler's, 43. 
 
 Trinitarian, Family relation, 16. 
 
 "i rue and real, 166. 
 
 Truth, and imagination, 22 ; cri- 
 terion of culture, 2. 
 
 Untruths not always lies, 23. 
 
 \'anity, 177; dangerous, 64. 
 \'iolin, educational, 143. 
 
 Zeal, Need of, 149. 
 
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