mitted, and that consequently throughout the animal world heredity is dominant and education impossible. Finally, you know that the intellectual chasm which separates the lowest man from the highest animal is marked physically by increase of cerebral surface and by prolongation of the period of infancy, or, in other words, that increasing intelligence, increasing brain surface, and a lengthening infancy always go hand in hand. The reciprocal relation of these facts is obvious. With increase of cerebral surface comes increase in the amount of cerebral organization to be completed after birth, and hence an extension of the period of infancy. The extension of infancy in turn brings about increased versatility and plasticity, and produces a further enlargement of the cerebral area. Hence the lengthened and still lengthening period of human adolescence is the guaranty of a boundless capacity for progress.

Another and not less important outcome of a long and feeble infancy is the birth of the moral sentiments. The helplessness of childhood calls forth in father and mother protective and selfdenying impulses, while conversely the love and care of parents wakens in the heart of the child

responsive feelings of dependence and affection. Out of the rudimentary sympathies of infancy are developed later the sense of obligation and the idea. of duty. The significance of this genetic evolution becomes apparent when we reflect that the ascent of humanity from the savage to the civilized state is marked on the one hand by increasing complexity of social organization, and on the other by a progressive extension of the sense of moral obligation until it finally includes the whole brotherhood of

man.

The accounts of children who have become imbruted by growing up among animals and apart from human beings illustrate the fact that the isolated individual does not become man. These children are said to have possessed great acuteness of sense, and to have shown cunning, skill, and endurance in their search for food, but they ran on all fours, and were entirely without speech. One bleated like a sheep; another had a voice like a bear's; a third acted in all respects like a beast of prey. In all of them the brain was not only undeveloped, but had so far lost its plasticity as to make any high grade of development impossible. The narratives of such forest and mountain children

help us to realize that the infant achieves humanity through his recoil against and assimilation of his spiritual environment.

Pondering the facts to which I have briefly referred, we begin to understand what deep meaning lurks in the contrast between the young animal and the young child. It means that the former is a made being, the latter a self-making being. It means that the animal is an isolated being, the child a social being. It means that the animal is imprisoned in hereditary tendencies and aptitudes, and that his whole life consists of reflex and instinctive actions monotonously repeated. It means that the infant is plastic and versatile, and hence that he is not the prisoner of the past, but the prophet of the future. It means that man is a teachable and improvable being, that evolution is apotheosized into education, that each individual must learn from all other individuals, and must in turn contribute his quota to the common store of human experience. Finally, it means that while the brute is irresponsible and mortal, man is responsible and immortal, for all perishable beings perish through defect, and the characteristic quality of humanity is pre

cisely the ability to overcome defect. Hence the helplessness of the infant is the pledge of his dignity and the promise of his unlimited development.*

Now for the relationship of these facts to nursery education. Since man is a social being he demands from the beginning of life the nurture of his sympathies. Since he is a self-making being he demands from the beginning of life the discipline of his energies.

In our study of the Falling Song we traced the genesis of faith, which is one of the primitive expressions of sympathy. In the Play with the Limbs, which is to be the subject of this letter, we shall find a disclosure of the process by which energy is incited and disciplined. The former play suggests the general type of all efforts to nurture sympathy, the latter, the general type of all efforts to foster activity. These two games are, therefore, prototypes of all the Mother-Plays whose general aim is to set in balanced motion the centripetal and

* Readers interested in the Meaning of Infancy are referred for fuller statement to Professor John Fiske's books, Cosmic Philosophy, The Destiny of Man, and the Excursions of an Evolutionist, to Mr. Drummond's Ascent of Man, and to the Meaning of Education, by Prof. Nicholas Murray Butler.

centrifugal forces of the soul, and thus to determine its circular orbit.

Scene second in the drama of infancy shows us the baby striking out vigorously with arms and legs, while in response to the indicated need the mother offers her opposing hands as an incentive to effort and a guide to force. The clew to the game is given clearly in Froebel's Commentary, wherein he explains that nothing gives the mother such joy as her child's overflowing life, and that her deepest longing is to nurture life. This statement puzzled me for many years because I was not able to decide just what meaning Froebel attached to the word life. Gradually, however, as I studied his different books I became aware of a number of verbal triads through which he seemed to be struggling to express kindred thoughts. Among them were life, love, light; act, feeling, thought; presentiment, perception, recognition; identity, contrast, mediation of contrast; child of Nature, child of man, child of God; whole, member, member-whole; universality, particularity, singularity; unity, manifoldness, individuality. Collecting and comparing these several triads I began to understand them and to recognize that their common key was that in