evelopment of the internal activity of the child.

Hence there is no direct correspondence between teacher and child;
instruction is certainly not a cause of the effects observed. It is
the objects of the method which, as "re-agents," provoke special
psychical reactions; these may be summed up as an awakening, as an
organization of the personality. Discipline, as the first result of an
order establishing itself within, is the principal phenomenon to be
looked for as the "external sign" of an internal process that has been
initiated.

During the first days when a new school is opened, we may consider a
certain initial disorder as characteristic, especially if the teacher
is making her first experiment, and consequently is handicapped by her
over-sanguine expectations. The immediate response of the child to the
material does not take place; the teacher is perhaps discomfited by
the fact that the children do not throw themselves, as she had hoped,
upon the objects, choosing them according to their individual taste.
If, indeed, the pupils are very poor children, this phenomenon does
nearly always happen at once; but if they are well-to-do children,
already sated by the variety of their possessions, and by the most
costly toys, they are very rarely attracted at first by the stimuli
presented to them. This naturally leads to disorder when the mistress
makes a kind of chain of that "liberty" she is to respect, and a dogma
of the correlation existing between the stimulus and the childish
soul. Experienced teachers, on the other hand, understand better that
_liberty_ begins when the _life_ that must be developed in the child
is initiated, and they possess a tact which greatly facilitates
orientation in the initial period.

However, an experience under the most difficult conditions, as between
a teacher making her first experiment, and a class of wealthy
children, is more instructive, and gives us a clearer picture of the
fundamental psychical phenomenon, which may be compared to the order
which springs up out of chaos.

I quote, in this connection, various descriptions, some of which
already have been published, among them that given by Miss George, of
her first school in the United States, and that of Mlle. Dufresne in
England.

The initial disorder is eloquently set forth by Miss George: "They
(the children) at first snatched the objects out of each other's
hands; if I tried to show an object to any particular pupil, the