e to have acquired
them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the
vicissitudes of experience.

In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive
order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain
kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later
age. During the first seven or eight years of childhood the mind is most
interested in the sensible properties of material things.
_Constructiveness_ is the instinct most active; and by the incessant
hammering and sawing, and dressing and undressing dolls, putting of
things together and taking them apart, the child not only trains the
muscles to co-ordinate action, but accumulates a store of physical
conceptions which are the basis of his knowledge of the material world
through life. Object-teaching and manual training wisely extend the
sphere of this order of acquisition. Clay, wood, metals, and the various
kinds of tools are made to contribute to the store. A youth brought up
with a sufficiently broad basis of this kind is always at home in the
world. He stands within the pale. He is acquainted with Nature, and
Nature in a certain sense is acquainted with him. Whereas the youth
brought up alone at home, with no acquaintance with anything but the
printed page, is always afflicted with a certain remoteness from the
material facts of life, and a correlative insecurity of consciousness
which make of him a kind of alien on the earth in which he ought to feel
himself perfectly at home.

I already said something of this in speaking of the constructive
impulse, and I must not repeat myself. Moreover, you fully realize, I am
sure, how important for life,--for the moral tone of life, quite apart
from definite practical pursuits,--is this sense of readiness for
emergencies which a man gains through early familiarity and acquaintance
with the world of material things. To have grown up on a farm, to have
haunted a carpenter's and blacksmith's shop, to have handled horses and
cows and boats and guns, and to have ideas and abilities connected with
such objects are an inestimable part of youthful acquisition. After
adolescence it is rare to be able to get into familiar touch with any of
these primitive things. The instinctive propensions have faded, and the
habits are hard to acquire.

Accordingly, one of the best fruits of the 'child-study' movement has
been to reinstate all these activities to their proper