se may die out before a habit is formed; and later it may be hard
to teach the creature to react appropriately in those directions. The
sucking instincts in mammals, the following instinct in certain birds
and quadrupeds, are examples of this: they fade away shortly after
birth.

In children we observe a ripening of impulses and interests in a certain
determinate order. Creeping, walking, climbing, imitating vocal sounds,
constructing, drawing, calculating, possess the child in succession; and
in some children the possession, while it lasts, may be of a
semi-frantic and exclusive sort. Later, the interest in any one of these
things may wholly fade away. Of course, the proper pedagogic moment to
work skill in, and to clench the useful habit, is when the native
impulse is most acutely present. Crowd on the athletic opportunities,
the mental arithmetic, the verse-learning, the drawing, the botany, or
what not, the moment you have reason to think the hour is ripe. The hour
may not last long, and while it continues you may safely let all the
child's other occupations take a second place. In this way you economize
time and deepen skill; for many an infant prodigy, artistic or
mathematical, has a flowering epoch of but a few months.

One can draw no specific rules for all this. It depends on close
observation in the particular case, and parents here have a great
advantage over teachers. In fact, the law of transitoriness has little
chance of individualized application in the schools.

Such is the little interested and impulsive psychophysical organism
whose springs of action the teacher must divine, and to whose ways he
must become accustomed. He must start with the native tendencies, and
enlarge the pupil's entire passive and active experience. He must ply
him with new objects and stimuli, and make him taste the fruits of his
behavior, so that now that whole context of remembered experience is
what shall determine his conduct when he gets the stimulus, and not the
bare immediate impression. As the pupil's life thus enlarges, it gets
fuller and fuller of all sorts of memories and associations and
substitutions; but the eye accustomed to psychological analysis will
discern, underneath it all, the outlines of our simple psychophysical
scheme.

Respect then, I beg you, always the original reactions, even when you
are seeking to overcome their connection with certain objects, and to
supplant them with others that you wish to m