ctual development is related to _time_. The masses are so
much alive to this primitive characteristic, that the popular
expression "quick" is synonymous with intelligent. To be rapid in
reacting to a stimulus, in the association of ideas, in the capacity
of formulating a judgment--this is the most obvious external
manifestation of intelligence. This "quickness" is certainly related
to the capacity for receiving impressions from the environment,
elaborating images, and externalizing the internal results. All these
activities may be developed by means of an exercise comparable to a
system of mental "gymnastics" to collect numerous sensations, to put
them constantly in relation one with another, to deduce judgments
therefrom, to acquire the habit of manifesting these freely, all this
ought, as the psychologists would say, to render the conductive
channels and the associative channels more and more permeable, and the
"period of reaction" ever briefer. As in intelligent muscular
movement, the repetition of the act not only renders it more perfect
in itself, but more rapid in execution. An intelligent child at school
is not only one who understands, but one who understands quickly. On
the other hand, one who learns the same things, but who takes a longer
time in so doing, say two years instead of one, is _slow_. Of a
"quick" child, the people say that "nothing escapes him"; his
attention is always on the alert, and he is ready to receive every
kind of stimulus: as a sensitive scale will show the slightest
variation in weight, so the sensitive brain will respond to the
slightest appeal. It is Equally rapid in its associative processes:
"He understands in a flash" is a familiar saying to indicate accurate
conception.

Now an exercise which "puts in motion" the intellectual mechanisms
can only be an "auto-exercise." It is impossible that another person,
exercising himself in our stead, should make us acquire skill.

The sensory exercises arouse and intensify the central activities in
our children. When, sense and stimulus duly isolated, the child has
clear perceptions in his consciousness; when sensations of heat, cold,
roughness, smoothness, weight, and lightness, when a sound, an
isolated noise, are perceived by him, when, in almost complete
silence, he closes his eyes and waits for a voice to murmur a word, it
is as if the external world had knocked at the door of his soul,
awakening its activities. And further, when the mu