are rightly regarded as
unnatural phenomena. But genius of a less high order is far more common
than is generally supposed. People are simply blind to it. Although it
surrounds them on all sides, they fail to recognise it. And nearly
everybody is busily engaged in helping to destroy it, with a perversity
that is as unconscious as it is criminal.

Those who have had the opportunity of observing the mental development
of an intelligent child that has not been subjected to the ordinary
processes of teaching, must have been struck with the originality of its
mind. If children are left to themselves, they will breed ideas at an
astonishing rate. Give an imaginative child of five or six some simple
object, such as a button or a piece of tape, and it will weave round it
a web of romance that would put many a poet or author to shame.

Naturally brought up children will chatter fascinating nonsense to the
very motes that float in a sunbeam; they will spin an Odyssey out of the
most trivial incident that has chanced to impress them. Every
commonplace object will be invested by them with mysterious and
fantastic attributes. When left to observe facts for themselves, they
will develop powers of reasoning and logic which no amount of cramming
and caning would ever succeed in driving into them.

There are probably few parents who have not been startled, at some
period or another, by hearing from the lips of a child an original
reflection that exhibited an unexpected degree of mental development.
Did it ever occur to them that some intellectual process must have been
going on in the child's mind to produce such powers of observation or
thought? There is a fallacious notion, founded upon pure want of
observation, that human beings are unable to form ideas or to think for
themselves until they have been put through an elaborate course of
mental gymnastics. A great deal of the process misnamed education is
directed towards this end, with the result that in nine cases out of ten
the brain is simply paralyzed and rendered incapable of performing its
proper functions.

The fact is, that people, whether young or old, cannot be forced to
think. It is a habit that must come of its own accord, and that can only
be stimulated by the most delicately-applied influences. Observant and
reflective parents, who have not chosen to leave the entire development
and upbringing of their children in the hands of nurses, will have
noticed that there is a