his earlier pieces as the gulf of all the loftiest energies of
the adult life. Every child ought to be born and nursed in the
country, and it would be all the better if it remained in the country
to the last day of its existence. You must accustom it little by
little to the sight of disagreeable objects, such as toads and snakes;
also in the same gradual manner to the sound of alarming noises,
beginning with snapping a cap in a pistol. If the infant cries from
pain which you cannot remove, make no attempt to soothe it; your
caresses will not lessen the anguish of its colic, while the child
will remember what it has to do in order to be coaxed and to get its
own way. The nurse may amuse it by songs and lively cries, but she is
not to din useless words into its ears; the first articulations that
come to it should be few, easy, distinct, frequently repeated, and
only referring to objects which may be shown to the child. "Our
unlucky facility in cheating ourselves with words that we do not
understand, begins earlier than we suppose." Let there be no haste in
inducing the child to speak articulately. The evil of precipitation in
this respect is not that children use and hear words without sense,
but that they use and hear them in a different sense from our own,
without our perceiving it. Mistakes of this sort, committed thus
early, have an influence, even after they are cured, over the turn of
the mind for the rest of the creature's life. Hence it is a good thing
to keep a child's vocabulary as limited as possible, lest it should
have more words than ideas, and should say more than it can possibly
realise in thought.[281]

In moral as in intellectual habits, the most perilous interval in
human life is that between birth and the age of twelve. The great
secret is to make the early education purely negative; a process of
keeping the heart, naturally so good, clear of vice, and the
intelligence, naturally so true, clear of error. Take for first,
second, and third precept, to follow nature and leave her free to the
performance of her own tasks. Until the age of reason, there can be no
idea of moral beings or social relations. Therefore, says Rousseau, no
moral discussion. Locke's maxim in favour of constantly reasoning with
children was a mistake. Of all the faculties of man, reason, which is
only a compound of the rest, is that which is latest in development,
and yet it is this which we are to use to develop those which come