rain, which attains its full size in the seventh
year,[2] is developed early, though it takes time to mature; and it
explores the whole world of its surroundings in its constant search
for nutriment: it is then that existence is in itself an ever fresh
delight, and all things sparkle with the charm of novelty.

[Footnote 1: _Translator's Note_.--Schopenhauer refers to _Die Welt
als Wille und Vorstellung_, Bk. II. c, 31, p. 451 (4th edit.), where
he explains that this is due to the fact that at that period of life
the brain and nervous system are much more developed than any other
part of the organism.]

[Footnote 2: _Translator's Note_.--This statement is not quite
correct. The weight of the brain increases rapidly up to the seventh
year, more slowly between the sixteenth and the twentieth year, still
more slowly till between thirty and forty years of age, when it
attains its maximum. At each decennial period after this, it is
supposed to decrease in weight on the average, an ounce for every ten
years.]

This is why the years of childhood are like a long poem. For the
function of poetry, as of all art, is to grasp the _Idea_--in the
Platonic sense; in other words, to apprehend a particular object in
such a way as to perceive its essential nature, the characteristics
it has in common with all other objects of the same kind; so that
a single object appears as the representative of a class, and the
results of one experience hold good for a thousand.

It may be thought that my remarks are opposed to fact, and that the
child is never occupied with anything beyond the individual objects or
events which are presented to it from time to time, and then only in
so far as they interest and excite its will for the moment; but this
is not really the case. In those early years, life--in the full
meaning of the word, is something so new and fresh, and its sensations
are so keen and unblunted by repetition, that, in the midst of all its
pursuits and without any clear consciousness of what it is doing,
the child is always silently occupied in grasping the nature of life
itself,--in arriving at its fundamental character and general outline
by means of separate scenes and experiences; or, to use Spinoza's
phraseology, the child is learning to see the things and persons
about it _sub specie aeternitatis_,--as particular manifestations of
universal law.

The younger we are, then, the more does every individual object
represent for us