Weathervane, which is an initial attempt to influence the activity of imitation.

Coeval with the nascent consciousness of his own causal power is the child's recognition of causal energy as the source of the movements he repeats. Mr. Howells relates that when his little daughter was puzzled by the attitudes of certain figures in the great pictures which she ambitiously attempted to copy, she took the poses herself and explained that "she then saw how they felt." This little girl had become conscious of the latent motive which incites to imitation and which is nothing else than an attempt to interpret alien activity by reproducing it. As Froebel explains: "What the child imitates he is trying to understand," and his act implies an unconscious process of introspection through which he comes to the conclusion that just as he originates his movements, so the movements he perceives are originated by causal energies analogous to his own.

If you have followed this analysis of the act of imitation you will understand the delight with which you greeted Harold's first attempt to repeat the activities of persons and things about him. In my last letter I tried to show you that man is a

self-making being and hence a free being. My chief aim in this correspondence will be to call your attention to those phenomena of child life which mark ascending degrees in the concrete realization of freedom. Imitation is interesting and important because it is one of the crises in the battle for liberty. The child who imitates has formed an ideal and energizes to realize it. This is the beginning of moral freedom. He has inferred a causal energy as the begetter of a perceptible effect. This is the beginning of intellectual freedom. All higher degrees of moral freedom will be attained by the generation of loftier ideals and through the self-discipline involved in their realization. All higher degrees of intellectual freedom will be achieved through wider applications of the idea of causality. A cause," says Dr. Harris, "is worth a whole series of effects. The hen in the nursery tale that laid the golden eggs was a living causal process, while the eggs were mere dead results or effects." Looking back of phenomena to the energies which produce them the mind throws off the tyranny of

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sense.

It is important to add that while imitation reveals the first stirring of cause, the impulsion of this

idea is presupposed by all experience. Lacking the thought of cause we could not recognize something objectively existent as the source of a sense impression, and lacking such recognition we could never lift sensation into perception.* This insight forces us to startling conclusions. For if the idea of cause is the necessary condition of experience it can of course not be furnished by experience, and those psychologists who attempt to derive it from experience are engaged in the impossible task of proving that an ancestor can be begotten of its own offspring. Again, if it be not derived from experience it must be given in the constitution of the mind, or, differently stated, its source must be the mind's own self-activity. Since, as we have already seen, the ascending degrees of thought are marked by the rise first from things to causes, and next from narrower to wider circles of causal energy, it is evident that mental progress consists in getting farther and farther away from the data of sense, and in more and more consciously directing attention to the energy of mind. Strangest of all is the fact that it is precisely by this withdrawal from sense that

* See Psychologic Foundations of Education, vol. xxxvi, International Education Series, p. 53.

we arrive at the underlying reality of the sensible world, or, in other words, that we learn to know the material cosmos not by an influx of things but by an efflux of the soul.

Being a lover of Browning, you may remember a passage in his Paracelsus which states this pivotal psychologic truth. I always find poetic statements of great help. They illuminate my mind, and the association of a spiritual truth with a visible image seems to give it added authority. A symbol is Nature's vote in favor of an idea. I wonder if Nature could clothe a falsehood, and if the very fact that she consents to weave for a thought its visible garment is not a proof of its substantial truth. However this may be, here is my passage from Browning:

"Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise

From outward things, whate'er you may believe.
There is an inmost center in us all

Where truth abides in fullness; and around,
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in.
This perfect, clear perception which is truth
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh

Blinds it and makes all error; and to 'know'
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape
Than in effecting entry for a light
Supposed to be without."

If imitation means all that I have said it means why do we feel such a contempt for formalists and pedants? Simply because imitation is interesting as a rudimentary but unsatisfying as a vestigial form of thought and will. It is a mark of progressive development in the infant, but of arrested development in the man. Still, it is important that our impatience with the imitators should not go too far. Strong individuals, especially in youth, are often insurgents against social forms, and despisers of the stored-up heritage of wisdom. Duller natures are a kind of balance wheel in the complex machinery of life and should be duly appreciated.

Since education is a series of responses to indicated needs, how shall the mother meet the new demand imposed by the arrival of her child at the imitative stage of development? I answer: First, by protecting him so far as possible from seeing or hearing what she would not wish him to reproduce. For since each activity in its recoil contributes its quota to the shaping of character it is obvious that what the child imitates he will tend to become. Next, each mother should notice what special actions attract her child, and inspire him to most frequent repetition. In this way