one great cycle of human experience, and urged by his genius its author has portrayed the cycle both in its earliest and its latest form. In the story of Margaret he draws with firm but tender hand the circle which sweeps from innocence, through sin and repentance, to holiness. In the career of Faust he paints with words that flame and burn the cycle of doubt, denial, aspiration, insight.

Shall we try to understand why men forever repeat the fact and the story of fall and rise? Shall we ask what power generates the spiritual curve, always sweeping away from, always returning to itself? We hold in ourselves the clew to the mystery, and we shall find hereafter that it is the clew not only to this mystery but to all mysteries. The mark of man is reason; the mark of reason is selfconsciousness; the nature of self-consciousness is to be subject-object, or, in other words, the subject knowing is the object known; the eternal history of consciousness is the oscillation from subject to object, and from object back to subject. "This," says Hegel, is the soul of the world, the universal blood," which "pulsates within itself without moving itself, and which vibrates within itself without ruffling its repose." Source of all conflicts, it is

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forever at peace; author of all discords, it is the master musician by whom alone all discords are resolved.

Do you remember the description of infancy in Tennyson's In Memoriam?

The baby new to earth and sky,
What time his tender palm is prest
Against the circle of the breast,
Has never thought that "This is I."

But as he grows he gathers much,

And learns the use of "I," and "me,"
And finds "I am not what I see,
And other than the things I touch."

So rounds he to a separate mind

From whence clear memory may begin,
As thro' the frame that binds him in
His isolation grows defined.

I have quoted these stanzas because they portray beautifully that incipient phase of life which Froebel calls the slumber period. It is the slumber of spirit because as yet the child lacks self-consciousness. He is one with all things because he has not learned to distinguish himself from them. As all physical life begins with a germ alike in texture and in chemical composition, so spiritual life begins in an unconscious unity with self and the world. Physical growth is a process of continuous

differentiation and integration; spiritual life is a process of self-diremption and the re-integration of these self-produced differences into the unity of consciousness. In other words, the movement of spiritual life is from a unity which excludes distinctions to a unity which includes and harmonizes all distinctions. Between these extremes is the storm and stress of life when distinctions are perceived but not harmonized, and when the self whose ideal nature is to be a unity in manifoldness wages with itself perpetual war. Within the heart are colliding impulses, within the intellect colliding ideas, within the will colliding aims and motives. Prototype of heroes, this self knows no peace not won by fighting, neither may it ever lay down its arms, for each new victory is but the prelude to a more strenuous conflict. Scientists tell us of a struggle for life and a survival of the fittest. Verily Nature is but the visible spectacle of the soul, and the keen and never-ending battle of life a masquerade of the eternal conflict of spirit.

As man reveals and beholds himself in literature and art, the child reveals and beholds himself in play. Strange, therefore, would it be, if in infantile games we should not find the short and

feeble oscillations of that pendulum of consciousness which sweeps at last beyond the infinite reaches of space and time. If our insight be a true one, children should play the fall and rise, the estrangement and return, nor should mother love fail to outrun the children and begin the revelation of the great human experience with the beginning of life. Conversely, if mothers and children fulfill this anticipation we should accept the fact as a fresh confirmation of our thesis. Therefore once again search your own experience, and see if the Falling Game be not the first of a series of plays which sweep through infinitesimal circles of separation and reunion.* Remember how the baby loves to hide

The following note from Miss Blanche Boardman suggests that in the thought underlying the Falling Game, we may find the explanation of a curious tendency often observed in children to inflict pain on some especially loved person or object :

"Of all the many children in little Mary S.'s family 'Annie Rooney,' a most dilapidated specimen of rag doll, is the most beloved.

"The others, more respectable and dainty, are enjoyed as dolls, but upon Annie the little three-year-old mother pours out a wealth of love.

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However, after a few moments of fondling and protestations of 'mother's love,' the doll is often thrown violently on the floor, and apparently only to furnish an opportunity for renewed expressions and more earnest devotion on the child's part, as she takes the fallen baby in her arms again.

and to hear his mother wonder over and lament his absence, how, when somewhat older, he delights in the Cuckoo Game, which through the voice unites the hiding child with the seeking mother, and how

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"A family friend who is much interested in child-study' has repeatedly watched this play and questioned its meaning. “For a student of the Mother-Play has it not a connection with the instinctive play of the mother, which gave rise to the Falling Game?"

I know a little boy, between two and three years of age, who treats his favorite doll precisely as Annie Rooney was treated by her child-mother. When I myself was a little girl, I used to enjoy keenly plays in which a younger child, to whom I was greatly attracted, was subjected to all kinds of ill treatment, and in which my rôle was that of deliverer and comforter. Even then I wondered why these plays gave me pleasure, but not until long afterward did I understand that I was enjoying both my own quickened sense of sympathy and protection and the faith with which the little sufferer turned to me as her deliverer. As I grew older I ceased inflicting pain or permitting its infliction for the sake of the pleasure felt in relieving it, but I was continually imagining those I loved as attacked by all kinds of dangers and sorrows, and myself as saving them from the former and comforting them in the latter. I refer to these experiences because they illustrate one of the many perversions of an impulse which in its normal exercise is essential to our life as social beings. Do they not also in a measure explain why healthy happy children love to read, and sometimes to write, those morbid stories in which the youthful hero or heroine is conducted through illness, orphanage, and cruel treatment to final joy? When we have learned to make a wise appeal to the feelings which such stories arouse, we shall have done much to solve the problem of good literature for children.