ough his weakness and incapacity cannot make any contribution
useful either to himself or to others.

Our assertion, therefore, is not absolute; the child in reality is
not resting, he is performing the mysterious inner work of his
autoformation. He is working to make a man, and to accomplish this it
is not enough that the child's body should grow in actual size; the
most intimate functions of the motor and nervous systems must also
be established and the intelligence developed.

The functions to be established by the child fall into two groups:
(1) the motor functions by which he is to secure his balance and
learn to walk, and to coordinate his movements; (2) the sensory
functions through which, receiving sensations from his environment,
he lays the foundations of his intelligence by a continual exercise
of observation, comparison and judgment. In this way he gradually
comes to be acquainted with his environment and to develop his
intelligence.

At the same time he is learning a _language_, and he is faced not only
with the motor difficulties of articulation, sounds and words, but
also with the difficulty of gaining an intelligent understanding of
names and of the syntactical composition of the language.

If we think of an emigrant who goes to a new country ignorant of its
products, ignorant of its natural appearance and social order,
entirely ignorant of its language, we realize that there is an immense
work of adaptation which he must perform before he can associate
himself with the active life of the unknown people. No one will be
able to do for him that work of adaptation. He himself must observe,
understand, remember, form judgments, and learn the new language by
laborious exercise and long experience.

What is to be said then of the child? What of this emigrant who comes
into a new world, who, weak as he is and before his organism is
completely developed, _must_ in a short time adapt himself to a world
so complex?

Up to the present day the little child has not received rational aid
in the accomplishment of this laborious task. As regards the psychical
development of the child we find ourselves in a period parallel to
that in which the physical life was left to the mercy of chance and
instinct--the period in which infant mortality was a scourge.

It is by scientific and rational means also that we must facilitate
that inner work of psychical adaptation to be accomplished within the
child, a work which is