tive force or ability,--the pouter to grow. We do not have to draw
out or educe positive activities from a child, as some educational
doctrines would have it. Where there is life, there are already eager
and impassioned activities. Growth is not something done to them; it is
something they do. The positive and constructive aspect of possibility
gives the key to understanding the two chief traits of immaturity,
dependence and plasticity.

(1) It sounds absurd to hear dependence spoken of as something positive,
still more absurd as a power. Yet if helplessness were all there were
in dependence, no development could ever take place. A merely impotent
being has to be carried, forever, by others. The fact that dependence is
accompanied by growth in ability, not by an ever increasing lapse into
parasitism, suggests that it is already something constructive. Being
merely sheltered by others would not promote growth. For

(2) it would only build a wall around impotence. With reference to the
physical world, the child is helpless. He lacks at birth and for a
long time thereafter power to make his way physically, to make his own
living. If he had to do that by himself, he would hardly survive an
hour. On this side his helplessness is almost complete. The young of
the brutes are immeasurably his superiors. He is physically weak and not
able to turn the strength which he possesses to coping with the physical
environment.

1. The thoroughgoing character of this helplessness suggests, however,
some compensating power. The relative ability of the young of brute
animals to adapt themselves fairly well to physical conditions from an
early period suggests the fact that their life is not intimately bound
up with the life of those about them. They are compelled, so to speak,
to have physical gifts because they are lacking in social gifts. Human
infants, on the other hand, can get along with physical incapacity just
because of their social capacity. We sometimes talk and think as if they
simply happened to be physically in a social environment; as if social
forces exclusively existed in the adults who take care of them, they
being passive recipients. If it were said that children are themselves
marvelously endowed with power to enlist the cooperative attention of
others, this would be thought to be a backhanded way of saying
that others are marvelously attentive to the needs of children. But
observation shows that children are gifted with