on, if possible, to their causes. In
response to the pressure of this instinct, the child breaks his toys
in order that he may find out how they work, and asks innumerable
questions which make him the terror and despair of his parents and
the other "Olympians." No instinct is more insistent in the early
days of the child's life. No instinct is more ruthlessly repressed by
those to whom the education of the child is entrusted. No instinct
dies out so completely (except so far as it is kept alive by purely
utilitarian considerations) when education of the conventional type
has done its deadly work. It has been said that children go to school
ignorant but curious, and leave school ignorant and incurious. This
gibe is the plain statement of a patent truth.

We will call this the _inquisitive instinct_.

(6) After analysis comes synthesis. The child pulls his toys to
pieces in order that he may, if possible, reconstruct them, and so be
the better able to control the working of them. The ends that he sets
before himself are those which Comte set before the human
race,--"savoir pour prevoir, afin de pouvoir: induire pour deduire,
afin de construire." The desire to make things, to build things up,
to control ways and means, to master the resources of Nature, to put
his knowledge of her laws and facts to a practical use, is strong in
his soul. Give him a box of bricks, and he will spend hours in
building and rebuilding houses, churches, towers, and the like. Set
him on a sandy shore, with a spade and a pail, and he will spend
hours in constructing fortified castles with deep, encircling moats
into which the sea may be duly admitted. Or he will make harness and
whips of plaited rushes, armour of tea-paper, swords of tin-plate,
boxes and other articles of cardboard, waggons, engines, and other
implements of wood.

We will call this the _constructive instinct_.

In both these instincts the child is struggling to grow, to expand
his being, by going out of himself, through the correlated channels
of theory and practice, into what I may call the machinery of
Nature's life,--an aspect of that life which reveals its mysteries to
reason rather than to emotion, or (to use the language of Eastern
philosophy) to the faculties that try to find order in the Many,
rather than to those which try to hold intercourse with the One.[16]
Whichever channel he may use,--and indeed they are not so much two
channels as one, for each in turn is for