The Parents' Review

A Monthly Magazine of Home-Training and Culture

The Pot of Green Feathers.

[Thomas Godolphin Rooper, 1847-1903, was an inspector of schools and personal friend of Charlotte Mason; much of his writing was for her P.N.E.U. meetings. His essay "Lyonesse" describes his time as a student at the Harrow boarding school. After he died (of spinal tuberculosis at the age of 56), Mason wrote a chapter in his honor which appears in her book, "Formation of Character," vol 5 of her series. He never married.]

INTRODUCTION.

As the title of this paper seems a little strange, a few words are necessary to explain its meaning. Some years ago I was listening to an object lesson given to a class of very young children by a pupil teacher who chose for her subject a pot of beautiful fresh green ferns. She began by holding up the plant before the class and asking whether any child could say what it was. At first no child answered, but presently a little girl said, "It is a pot of green feathers." Thereupon the teacher turned to me and said, "Poor little thing! She knows no better." But I fell a-thinking on the matter. Did the child really suppose that the ferns were feathers? Or did she rather use the name of a familiar thing to describe what she knew to be different, and yet noticed to be in some respects like? This train of thought led me to put together what I knew of perception and the following is the result of my labours. The principal authority which I have closely followed is Dr. Karl Lange's Apperzeption (Neupert: Plauen); but I have derived much help from Herbart's "Psychology," Bernard Perez's "First Three Years of Childhood" (Sonnenschein), Romane's "Mental Evolution in Man," and the lectures of the late T. H. Green.

What do we know of the outer world? Of that which is not self? Of objects: How do we know anything of the outer world? We receive impressions from it; a table feels hard, a book looks brown in colour, oblong in shape, and we say it is thick or thin. Are we simply receivers of these impressions--hard, brown, oblong? Are our minds inactive in the process of getting to know these impressions? Or are they active? Are lumps of the outside somehow forced in upon our minds entire without corresponding action on the mind's part? No! Our minds are not passive, the opposite is true. Through the senses the mind receives impressions, but these contributions from the senses could not be objects of knowledge, would not be interpreted, would not be recognized, unless the mind itself worked upon them and assimilated them, converting the unknown stimulus from without into a sensation we can hold in our thoughts and compare with other sensations within us. The mind converts the unknown stimulus from without into the known sensations. The outer world then is no more wholly the outer world when we know it. In our knowledge of the outer world there is always something contributed by the mind itself. The truth that the mind adds to and changes the impressions which it receives through the senses is illustrated by the very different conceptions which exactly the same landscape gives rise to in different people. The geologist can tell you of the strata, the botanist of the vegetation, the landscape-painter of the light and shade, the various colouring, and the grouping of the objects, and yet, perhaps, no one of them notices exactly what the others notice. A plank of wood, again, seems a simple object, and able to tell one tale to all, but how much it tells to a joiner, concerning which it is dumb to a casual observer. Or, again, visit as a grown man the schoolroom or playground where you played as a child, especially if you have not visited the scene in the interval. How changed all seems! The rooms that used to look so large have become dwarfed. The tremendous long throw which you used to make with a ball from one end of the playground to the other, to what a narrow distance it has shrunk! Yet the room and the ground are what they were. It is your mind that has changed. The change in your mind has brought about for you a change in the thing. Two people, then, or even oneself at different times of one's life, may perceive the same object without obtaining the same perception. Yet if the external object stamped itself on the mind as a seal or die stamps itself on wax, if the mind were as passive as wax, how could one object give rise to such different impressions? The difference must be due to the mind. Neither is it difficult to understand that this is so if we think what is the nature of the process by which the mind interprets the impressions which it receives from outward objects. When the mind receives an impression it refers it to a previously received impression that happens to resemble it. Thus every new impression is interpreted by means of old ones, and consequently every new perception is affected, coloured as it were, by the already acquired contents of the mind, and nothing can be known or recognized at all until reference and comparison have been made to previous perception. My object to-day is to make this point, perception, which I admit is not easy, as clear as I can make it.

Perception of an object is not so simple a matter as at first it seems to be. "Oh," some one will say, "simple enough! A dog runs by me: through my senses I receive sensations of the animal, and I know that I see a dog." But this is no perfect account, for suppose two strange animals, say a Tasmanian Devil and an Ornithorynchus come up the street together, my senses will make me aware of their presence, but if I have not learned anything about them previously, I shall not know, I do not say merely their names, but not even their exact shape and distinguishing marks. I shall say, "What in the name of wonder are they?" After a little looking at the strange pair, I should probably say, "One is a kind of bear, and the other is a kind of duck--a funny bear and a funny duck." Observe how the process of interpretation of my impressions goes on. Looking at the Tasmanian Devil, my impressions divide themselves into two classes: one set of impressions resembles impressions of bears, which I have previously received, while the other set finds nothing already existing in the mind to which it can attach itself. A kind of fight goes on between new and old. In the end the points of resemblance overpower the points of dissimilarity, and I judge the one animal, the (the Tasmanian Devil), in spite of much unlikeness, to be a kind of bear, in doing which I am wrong, as it is a kind of marsupial, and in judging, by a similar process the Ornithorynchus to be a sort of bird, because of its bill, the mind equally makes a mistake, or, as we say, receives a wrong impression. There are, then, at least two parts in the process of knowing any object. First of all there is the excitement of our nerves, the nervous stimulus which makes us feel that we have a feeling, but does not explain what the feeling is; and secondly, there is the interpretation of the feeling by a mental action through which the undetermined and as yet unknown sensations or gifts of the senses are referred to known impressions and explained. It is about this act of mental assimilation of the impressions which we receive from external objects that I am treating to-day. I am not dealing with the question of the origin of our impressions or the physiological basis of them, but with the growth of knowledge in the understanding by the working of the mind upon impressions. I think that modern psychologists have carried the analysis of the process sufficiently far for the results of their studies to be of practical value to teachers and parents. If we have to teach, is it not useful to know how the mind acquires knowledge? Take an object and set it before a child--say, a fern. If the child has never seen a fern before, he knows not what it is. Impressions of it, he receives, but he cannot interpret them adequately. The botanist looks at the same fern, and not only sees and knows that it is a fern, but also what kind it is, how it is distinguished from other ferns, where it grows, how it may be cultivated, and all about it. The difference between the knowledge which the sight of the fern gives to the child and to the botanist does not depend upon the fern, but upon the state of mind of the two observers. The mind adds infinitely more to the impression received when it is the botanist's mind which receives it, than when it is the comparatively empty and uninformed mind of the child. What you can know of an object depends upon what you already know both of it and of other things. Philosophers and poets like Kingsley, Carlisle, Herder, Goethe, as well as educationists and psychologists, impress on us this truth: "In regarding an object we can only see what we have been trained to see." *

* Carlisle--We can only see what we have been trained to see.
Goethe--We only hear what we know.
Herder--What we can see not we can neither know nor feel.
Rousseau--We can neither know nor touch, nor see except as we have learned. In other words, the present impression produces only such an effect on the mind as the past history of the mind renders possible.

Impressions, then, have to be interpreted before they are clear to us. What is the easiest case of our interpreting impressions? Perhaps some such as the following. I see a man a little way off, and say to myself, "Here comes my brother." I have so often recognized my brother that the whole process of recognition goes on in my mind without any check or hindrance. The existing mental conception of my brother masters completely and promptly the fresh impressions which his present appearance makes upon me. The identification of the new and the old is uninterrupted, prompt, and immediate. The same speed and accuracy of interpretation is observable in his prompt and correct recognition by a good reader of the words and sentences in his book. Now take an opposite case when it is hard instead of easy to interpret impressions. Suppose that we see something which is quite new to us. Suppose that the new impressions do not connect themselves with any previously assimilated impressions, and that, try as we may to refer them to something known, all is in vain. Then we feel puzzled: a hindrance, or check, or obstruction occurs in our minds. If the impression be very strong it may cause us to "lose our heads," as we say, or it may even overwhelm us. It is narrated that one of the natives of the interior of Africa, who was accompanying Livingstone to Europe, no sooner found himself on the great Indian Ocean, with nothing but heaving waters far and near in his view, than he became overpowered by the immense impression which this new experience made upon his mind, and flung himself overboard into the waves, never to rise again. Similarly at the Paris Exhibition, every evening when the gun is fired at the Eiffel Tower for the last time at ten o'clock it is not unusual to see a sort of frenzy among the visitors. Under the already strong impression produced by the electric illuminations, the luminous fountains, and the varied magnificence of the great show, some people seem to be seized with a veritable panic. Cries of admiration escape from some, and terror from others, followed by fainting, attacks of hysteria and prostration. Similar shocks occasionally prove fatal. Only in September last a little girl, four years old, was standing on the platform near Sittingbourne, with her parents, who were on their way to Kent for the hop-picking season, when an express train dashed through the station. The little one was terror-stricken, and on the journey down, screamed every time an engine came within sight or hearing. She dropped dead. The doctor ascribed death to the shock. To assimilate, then, a wholly new impression is necessarily a task of some difficulty, but the results are luckily not always so sensational as those which I have just described, and the following is an account of what more usually takes place.

If the new impression is not of a nature to make us feel strongly, and if it is isolated and unconnected with any other knowledge present to our minds, it probably passes away quickly and sinks into oblivion, just as a little child may take notice of a shooting star on a summer night, and after wondering for a moment, thinks of it no more; if, however, our feelings are excited and the subject which gives the impression remains before us long enough to make the impression strong, then the impression becomes associated with the feelings and the will comes into play, in consequence of which we determine to remember the new impression, and to seek an explanation of it. With this object the mind searches its previous stock of ideas more particularly, comparing the new with the old, rejecting the totally unlike and retaining the like or most like, and in the end it overcomes the obstacle to assimilation, and finds a place for the new along with the old mental stores, thereby, enriching itself, consciously or unconsciously--unconsciously in earlier years, and consciously afterwards. As an instance, I will suppose a child who has only seen blue violets finds a white one. Of his impressions of the white flower, some are new and some are old. The greater part are old, and lead him to infer that he sees a violet; but the impression of whiteness is new, and leads him to say, "this is not a violet." Let us represent the characteristics by which he recognizes a blue violet by the letters A B C D, the D standing for the colour blue and A B C for all the rest of the flower. When now he finds a white violet he again notes A B C as before, but instead of D, the colour blue, he receives E, the colour white. Had the colour been the same, the impression of the flower would have coincided with previous impressions of violets, but the difference between D and E causes an obstruction or hindrance to this inference. The mind is not at ease with itself; the agreement of new and old only reaches a certain way. The old mental image and the newly acquired one don't exactly tally. What happens? In the two mental images now present and side by side in the mind, the new and the old (the new being more vivid, the old being more firmly established), the like elements, namely, A B C, strengthen each other, and unite to make a clear image, while the unlike elements, D and E, the blue and the white, obstruct each other, become dim, and at last obscured. The like elements in the end overcome the obstruction caused by the unlike, and beat them out of the field of mental vision, so that the two partly resembling impressions become blended or fused, as by mental smelting, into one. The two are recognized as one by the mind. The old appropriates or assimilates the new. The child finds an old Expression for the new Impression, and says to itself, "There is a violet."

Of course an impression need not belong to only one previously acquired impression or group of impressions; it may be connected with other groups. In this case it will be recalled to consciousness on more frequent occasions than if it belonged to one other mental state only. Hence a new impression, if you give it time, may find for itself many more points of attachment with previous impressions and ideas than it found just at first. For instance, I may visit Amiens Cathedral. Presently, when I have admired the building, I recall to mind various historic events that took place at the capital of Picardy. I remember that Julius Caesar started thence to conquer Britain, that Peter the Hermit was born there, and that not far off Edward the III. won the battle of Crecy, and that its name often comes up in the long hundred years' war. I think of the Peace of Amiens of 1802, the visit of Buonaparte to Amiens when he prepared to invade England, lastly of the German army in 1870. One impression calls up another, and the whole mass together strengthen and confirm and amplify the original impression. Isolated, these separate events are of less interest than grouped together with my actual inspection of the ancient building. A wise man, therefore (if I may draw a passing moral), does not, if he can help it, decide or act in a hurry, under the influence of new impressions, but he will give them time to find points of connections with old impressions. What may to-day seem irreconcilable with truth, or honour, or happiness, may prove, when time has been allowed for assimilating, inconsistent neither with sincerity, nor good name, nor good fortune. Educationists, like Mr. [Matthew] Arnold, also, will continue to implore the public to simplify the studies of children, being convinced that unless the mind has leisure to work by itself on the stuff or matter which is prescribed to it by the teacher, the thinking faculty, on which all progress depends, will be paralyzed, and dead knowledge will be a substitute for living. The mind will have no power of expanding from within, for it will become a passive recipient of knowledge, only able to discharge again what has been stuffed into it and quite powerless to make fresh combinations and discoveries. Cram is the rapid acquisition of a great deal of knowledge. Learning so acquired, though useful for barrister, has less educational value than the public believe, for it does not promote, but rather tends to destroy, the active and constructive powers of the mind.

When the mind has much difficulty to overcome in assimilating a new impression, and hence, has to spend time in so doing, it is benefited by the process, for in the first place, the necessity of care, caution, and accurate observation, and much rummaging (if I may venture on the expression) among the ideas in the mind, tend to sharpen the senses, the sight, the touch, the hearing, and the rest, by making them sensitive to fine shades which might otherwise escape us, and, in the second, to amplify and enlarge meager impressions. The eye, by itself, for example, only reveals to us surfaces. How then do we seem to see solid bodies? A baby stretches out its hand for the moon; how is it that what seems so near to him looks so far off from us? Because in our case the impressions conveyed by the eye are supplemented by the impressions received through the touch, and the two distinct sets of impressions combined together in the mind furnish us with the conception of a third dimension, besides length and breadth--viz., depth. The child who has not yet got so far as to have sufficiently often united the impressions derived from looking with those derived from touching and moving cannot rightly interpret the impressions which he receives. The moon seems quite close to him. Impressions, on the other hand, which pass easily into their place in the mind do not always tend to clearness of ideas. People may look at an object hundreds of times for a special purpose, and, beyond serving that purpose, get no permanent impression at all. Many people who look at a clock or a watch many times a day cannot at once, when asked, draw from memory a dial with the hours correctly placed upon it. The process of assimilation may even mislead just as familiarity with an object may hinder accurate observation. Goethe says there is a moment in his life when a young man can see no blemish in the lady he loves, and no fault in the author he admires. A man in love may think his Angelina sings divinely sweet though her voice is like a crow's. He interprets the impressions which he receives according to previously formed impressions. This leads us to see that it is not right to say, as we sometimes do say, "My senses play me false." The senses do not lie. The ear does not in the instance in question convey sweet sounds. The sense of hearing does not judge all. The ear conveys the sound truly enough. The judgment concerning the sound is made in the mind of the listener. This judgment it is which is falsified by prejudice, the lover being naturally prepossessed in favour of his mistress. So the wanderer in the graveyard by night in the uncertain light of the misty moon judges a tall gravestone to be a "sheeted ghost." His eye is not at fault. His judgment is. He receives the impression from the object truly, but he refers his impression to the wrong group or store of previous knowledge. He should refer it to optical phenomena, diffraction of light, and the rest. He actually does think of pictures and stories of vague appearances, of human shapes without human substance, and all the superstitious imaginings of poor frail human nature. His senses are not under control of his reason.

(To be continued.)

The Pot of Green Feathers.
By T. G. Rooper, ESQ., M.A., H.M.I.
Parents' Review, Vol. 4, pgs. 110-117

PART II.

We have seen, then, how each impression that we receive from external objects is consciously or unconsciously interpreted and made known to us by a kind of internal classification through which it is referred to that part of our store of knowledge to which its resemblance connects it. We have now to see that in this process of interpretation of a new impression by that which is old, the previously existing mass of knowledge which interprets the new is itself modified and made clearer. Suppose a child lives in the flat of the fen near Cambridge, and that by going to Gogmagog Hills he learns to form an idea of what a hill is. Then suppose him to be transported to Birmingham, where he goes out to the Lickey Hills. There he will recognize as hills by aid of the previous conception of a hill which he has formed in his mind, but at the same time he enlarges his ideas of a hill, and if he travels further west and climbs the Malvern Hills and the Welsh Hills he will still further amplify his conception. Now let him study the element of geology and physical geography, and learn to trace the connection between the shape of hills and the rock or soil composing them, together with the action of wind and water, heat, and frost, and the word hills will still have yet an extended meaning. Every time you refer an object to a class, as when you say, "Yonder mass--it may be Ingleborough--is a hill," you not only explain the thing about which you are talking (Ingleboro'), but you also add to your idea of the class to which you refer it (hill). The new thing is explained by old or already existing ideas, but for the service which the old does the new in interpreting it, the old idea receives payment or recompense in being made itself more clear. Suppose you have a dozen pictures--apes, bears, foxes, lions, tigers, &c. Then every time you show one of these to a child, and the child learns to say, "that tiger is an animal," "that lion is an animal," he not only learns something about the tiger, the lion, and the rest, but also extends his conception of what an animal is. Hence we can see when it is that learning a name is instructive, it is when the name is a record of something actually witnessed. If, however, you tell a child who does not know what a ship is, or what wind is, or what the sea is, that a sail is the canvas on which the wind blows to move the ship across the sea, the names are only names and do not add to his knowledge of objects.

So far as we have chiefly considered the case where impressions from the outside world or from outward objects are being interpreted by the mind, as in the case of violets, the pot of ferns, and the like; but a similar process goes on wholly in the mind between ideas which exist there after external objects have been removed. Consider how weak fugitive impressions may be strengthened and held fast by this process. Alongside the feeble, and therefore fugitive, impression arises a mass of previously acquired and nearly connected impressions and ideas, dominating the former, and by means of connections with other stores of knowledge, setting up a movement in the mind which lights up the obscure impression, defines it and fixes it in the mind ineradicably. For example: I find a little white flower on the top of Great Whernside, Rubus Chamoemorus. I might notice it for a moment and pass on oblivious. Suppose, however, that it occurs to me next day to think of the so-called roses of vegetation, and how the Pennine Hills were once covered with the ice-sheet like Greenland now is, and how England then had an arctic flora, and how it may be that this flower, which in England only grows 2000 feet above the sea, being killed by the warmth of lower levels, may perhaps be a botanical relic of that surprising geological epoch, and then what interests attaches to that flower. Why, the very spot on which it stands seems stamped in the mind indelibly.

Nothing new, then, can be a subject of knowledge until it is not merely mechanically associated (as a passing breeze with the story which I read under a tree), but associated by a psychological process with something in the mind which is already stored up there, the new seeking among the old for something resembling itself, and not allowing the mind peace until such has been found, or until the new impression has passed out of consciousness. This process of interpreting impressions and ideas by reference to previous impressions and ideas must not be confounded with the reference of such interpreted impressions to self. When you refer this process to self, when you recognize yourself as going through and being the subject of the assimilating process, this is self-observation. You may have this self-consciousness either along with the interpreting process, or after it, or not at all. Dogs, parrots, and many animals clearly interpret impressions and objects as one of a class, as a kitten did who after eating a piece of raw meat, afterwards chewed a ball of red blotting-paper, inferring it to be meat from its colour; but they do not do this with recognition of self as the subject of the process. Children do not appear to be conscious in their thoughts and actions much before they are three years old, and their minds seem at first much to resemble the minds of animals. We may now further apply this principle of the growth of the mind to practical work in the class-room.

When something new presents itself to us, it does not as a rule, except when it affects the emotions in some way, arrest our attention, unless it is connected with some thing already known to us. A young child visited the British Museum, and was next day asked what he had noticed. He remarked upon the enormous size of the door-mats. Most other impressions were fugitive, being isolated in his mind. The mats he knew about, because he compared them with the door-mat at home. Among all the birds the only one he remembered was the hen, and passing by the bears and tigers with indifference he was pleased to recognize a stuffed specimen of the domestic cat. The child only remembered what he was already familiar with, for the many impressions from other objects neutralized each other and passed into oblivion. One great art in teaching is the art of finding links and connections between isolated facts, and of making the child see that what seems quite new is an extension of what is already in his mind. Few people would long remember the name and date of a Chinese king picked by chance from a list extending back thousands of years. Facts of English history are not much easier to remember than this for children who are not gifted with strong mechanical memories. Hence the value of presenting names, dates, and events in connection with external memorials, such as monuments, buildings, battlefields, or with poems and current events, and the like. Story, object, and poem illustrate and strengthen each other. It ought not to be hard to teach English history in the town of York, where there is a continuous series of objects illustrating the course of affairs from pre-historic time to the present date. Our object in teaching should be to present facts in organic relation to each other, instead of getting them learnt by heart as a list of disconnected names.

If, then, all the growth of the mind takes place from earliest to latest years, through the apprehension of new knowledge by old, then the first business of the young child in the world is to learn to interpret rightly the impressions that he receives from objects. To receive and master the gift of his senses is his first duty. But this task cannot in the early stages be fulfilled in a strictly systematic way. You cannot present all the world piecemeal to the child, object after object, in strictly logical order. One educationist objected to little children visiting a wood or forest because the different sorts of trees were there all jumbled together instead of all being scientifically classified and arranged as they would be in a botanical garden. The child, however, must take the world as he finds it. Impressions come crowding in upon his mind in such numbers that he has no time at first to paying minute attention to any one. In truth, so massed and grouped are his impressions, that one may almost say that the outer world presents itself to him as a whole--and that it is a matter of difficulty to isolate one perception clearly from its concomitant perceptions. The whole must be analyzed into parts bit by bit. Out of the mass of obscure and ill-defined impressions, educationists should study which are they which stand out and arrest attention more readily, and in what order they do this? We do not find that those impressions are most striking which are logically most important, but rather those to which the practical needs of daily life give prominence--food, clothing, parents, sisters, other children and their experiences. Such are the things that children are most taken up with in the world. But each impression once grasped is the basis or starting-point for understanding another, and thus the manifold variety of objects is simplified and brought within the compass of memory by a sort of unconscious reasoning. A child, for instance, who kept a chicken, but never saw chicken at table, being limited in its meat diet to beef, when at last the chicken came to the table roasted, called it "hen-beef," clearly interpreting by an elementary process the new by the old. Take a child to a wild beast show and observe how he names the animals by aid of a very general resemblance to those he may previously know. The elephant is a donkey because he has four legs, the otter is a fish; and so on. These comparisons are not jests, nor even mere play of fancy, but the result of an effort of an inexperienced mind to assimilate new impressions. The child is only following the mental process which we all have to follow in becoming masters of our impressions and extending our knowledge. Clearly the limited stock of ideas of the child renders it easier for him to make mistakes than for us to do so, but in some matters it is well to remember that we are no further advanced than children, and consequently often behave as such. A little French child, a year old, who had traveled much, named an engine Fafer (its way of saying Chemin de fer); afterwards it named steamboat, coffee-pot and spirit-lamp, anything, in short, that hissed and smoked, "fafer"--the obvious points of resemblance spontaneously fusing together in the child's mind and becoming classified not quite incorrectly. Another child, who learnt to call a star by its right name, applied star to candle, gas, and other bright objects, clearly interpreting the new by the old, by use of an unconscious elementary classification or reasoning. Thus we see the value and helpfulness of language in the process of acquiring and interpreting impressions. Having once separated out from the indistinct masses of impressions borne in upon him from the outside world some one distinct impression, and having marked that impression with a name, the child is thenceforth readily able to recognize the same impression, in this instance, that of brightness, when mixed up with quite other masses of impressions, and to fix its attention on that one alone. Thus the word helps the mind to grow and expand. The use of the word is a real help to the knowledge of things. The name when learnt in connection with the observation and handling of an object is not merely a name--a barren symbol for nothing signified--but it is a means of acquiring fresh knowledge as occasion serves. A name thus learnt--i.e., in presence of the object--when applied by the learner to a new impression exactly resembling the former is really an expression of, and an addition to, the mental stores. It is then as the filling in of a sketch, or as the further completion of an unfinished circle. How different is such naming than learning by heart the names of objects without handling the things signified. How often have text-books of science, geography, and history been prescribed to be got up for examination! and how often have the results been disappointing! The student thus taught sees only the difference of a letter in the alphabet between CarboNic Acid and CarboLic Acid, JacobiN and JacobiTe, and a mere transposition of a figure in expressing an incline as 8 inches in 1 mile, instead of 1 inch in 8 miles. The words call up no mental image. The figure 8 is a symbol only, as it does not call up the image of 8 things. A name given in the presence of the object serves afterwards to recall the image or picture of that object, and it does this the more perfectly the more accurately the object is studied in the first instance. Children, for want of language, signify many of their impressions by gestures before they can describe them in words; and gesture language, especially if encouraged, precedes spoken language, besides accompanying it. Children are imitative: they love to act over again what they have seen, especially when much impressed, as in George Eliot's pathetic description of the baby-boy attending his mother's funeral in puzzled wonder, and thinking how "he would play at this with his sister when he got home." With children this "acting," or "playing at being," more resembles talking over, giving expression to, and describing what has been seen, noted, and assimilated, than aimless exercise of the muscles and the intelligence. How profoundly right, therefore, Froebel was in making so much of action-songs in his Kindergarten, and how excellent his games are, in which every action of the child corresponds to some observed impressions with which the child is familiar. Froebel's actions correspond to realities, and are not mere physical movements. They are forms of expression of things. They correspond to facts, and advance the observation and knowledge with things which ought to be familiar with every one, such as sowing, reaping, and the like.

Now to go back to my pot of ferns. The child sees ferns for the first time, and cannot tell what they are. He receives impressions which are new, and these seek interpretation in the manner in which I have described. They hunt about in the mind for similar impressions previously received; at last the impression of the fern attaches itself to the impression of feathers; the crisp curl of the frond and its delicate branches much resemble feathers; it is true there is a hindrance to the judgment; the fern is not quite like the feather; some points are like and some are not; in the end, however, those which are alike overpower those which are unalike and the child says, "these are feathers." The child has not got false impressions; he interprets them wrongly; further study, fresh observation and comparison, will soon rectify the error. Hence the need for taking careful note of children's mistakes, distinguishing between thoughtless answers and those which, although very wrong, arise from mental effort misdirected. Careless answers should be checked, but well-meant thought, even if unsuccessful, should be encouraged. Therefore, an answer like that of the green feathers should be dealt with in the way of praise rather than censure.

Sometimes it is not merely an object that is incorrectly interpreted, and subsequently better understood. It occasionally happens to us that a whole group of thoughts is thus modified by the acquisition of some new knowledge, and instead of the new merely forming an addition to the old it wholly changes it. Such was the result of the teaching of Copernicus and Galileo, and in our own day of Darwin. The discoveries of these men caused such wide-reaching alteration of such preconceived ideas that the new knowledge was at first received with discomfort and mental uneasiness, which caused the discoverer to be looked upon with suspicion, regarded as an enemy, and persecuted. When in the case of an individual, some new conception changes the character in this way by some powerful influence, as in the case of St. Paul, we call it a conversion. Well, then, it may be said, in these cases your position is given up. The new should be regarded by the means by which the old is known, instead of the old as interpreting the new. But this is not the case, for however overpowering the new conception may be for a period of time, yet in the end, the whole store of knowledge in the mind proves too strong for it, overpowers it, and finds some place for it, after which the mind is at peace with itself, and appears to have been enlarged and not diminished or divided by the fresh experience, however strange and unusual it may have been.