place in a sound
system of education. _Feed_ the growing human being, feed him with the
sort of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural
craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental
tissue, even though he may seem to be 'wasting' a great deal of his
growing time, in the eyes of those for whom the only channels of
learning are books and verbally communicated information.

It is not till adolescence is reached that the mind grows able to take
in the more abstract aspects of experience, the hidden similarities and
distinctions between things, and especially their causal sequences.
Rational knowledge of such things as mathematics, mechanics, chemistry,
and biology, is now possible; and the acquisition of conceptions of this
order form the next phase of education. Later still, not till
adolescence is well advanced, does the mind awaken to a systematic
interest in abstract human relations--moral relations, properly so
called,--to sociological ideas and to metaphysical abstractions.

This general order of sequence is followed traditionally of course in
the schoolroom. It is foreign to my purpose to do more than indicate
that general psychological principle of the successive order of
awakening of the faculties on which the whole thing rests. I have spoken
of it already, apropos of the transitoriness of instincts. Just as many
a youth has to go permanently without an adequate stock of conceptions
of a certain order, because experiences of that order were not yielded
at the time when new curiosity was most acute, so it will conversely
happen that many another youth is spoiled for a certain subject of study
(although he would have enjoyed it well if led into it at a later age)
through having had it thrust upon him so prematurely that disgust was
created, and the bloom quite taken off from future trials. I think I
have seen college students unfitted forever for 'philosophy' from having
taken that study up a year too soon.

In all these later studies, verbal material is the vehicle by which the
mind thinks. The abstract conceptions of physics and sociology may, it
is true, be embodied in visual or other images of phenomena, but they
need not be so; and the truth remains that, after adolescence has begun,
"words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always
larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn. This
is so even in the natural sciences, so far as the