ntly
made from without. The opening of the mind is the _active
comprehension_ which accompanies great emotions, and which is
therefore felt as a spiritual event.

I once knew a motherless girl, who was so much depressed by the arid
teaching of her school, that she had become almost incapable of study
and even of understanding the things which were taught her. Her life
of solitude, lacking in natural affection, was a further aggravation
of her mental fatigue. Her father decided that she should live for a
year or two in the open country like a little savage; he then brought
her back to town, and placed her under the private direction of a
number of "professors." The girl studied and learned, but remained
passive and weary. Every now and then her father would say: "Is your
mind opening again?" and the girl always replied: "I do not know. What
do you mean?" Owing to a curious coincidence in my life, this girl was
confided to my sole care; and it was thus that I, when I was still a
medical student, made my first pedagogic experiment, upon which I
cannot linger now, though it would be worthy of interest. One day we
were together and when she was at work on organic chemistry, she broke
off, and looking at me with beaming eyes, said: "Here it is now! I
_do_ understand!" She then got up and went away, calling out aloud:
"Father, father! My mind has opened!" I, not then knowing the girl's
history, was astonished and agitated. She had taken her father's hand,
and was saying: "Now I can tell you, yes, yes; I did not know what it
meant before; my mind has opened." The joy of father and daughter and
their union at that moment made me think of the joys and wellsprings
of life which we destroy by enslaving the intelligence.

Indeed, every intellectual conquest is a wellspring of joy to our free
children. This is the "pleasure" to which they are now most
susceptible, and which makes them scorn lower pleasures; it is after
having tasted of this that; our little ones despise sweetmeats, toys,
and vanities.

It is this which makes them sublime to the eyes of those who
contemplate them.

Their pleasure is that lofty pleasure which distinguish man from the
brute, and can save us even from the desolation of grief and darkness.

When it is made a reproach to our method that it seeks to promote the
"pleasure" of the child, and that this is immoral, it is the child and
not the method which is insulted. For the essence of this reproach is