lly excited through playing tennis with a girl-companion, and
many a boy has been sexually excited through rowing with another. Still,
the fact that here and there a child may have been sexually excited in
such a way, is no reason for condemning what is invaluable to the
enormous majority of children.

This is all that need be said regarding the manner in which general
influences may counteract the efforts of the educationalist. But
experience shows that the good effects of education are also seriously
impaired by individual factors, especially by congenital
predisposition, or by a tendency acquired very early in life. Although
we no longer assume that human impulses, emotions, and sentiments take
their course quite independently of the influence of other psychical
powers, such as the reason and the will, still, unprejudiced observation
shows that the power of the reason and the will is less than many
persons imagine. In very many cases we are able to see how difficult it
is, in a child of ten or less, to exert any notable influence upon the
impulses, the emotions, and the sentiments. This is no less true in the
positive than it is in the negative aspect. In one child it may be just
as difficult to induce a fondness for music or reading, as it is in
another to break it of an inclination for romping or other games. The
same is true of the emotions--fear, for instance. In many cases,
logically planned efforts may be altogether out of relationship to the
result. Above all, great weight must be laid upon the consideration that
there is a tendency to overrate the effect of education in the form of
precept as compared with the effect of example. A child may receive the
best of instruction without result, if in its own environment it is
continually seeing something precisely the opposite of that which it is
being told. _This applies with equal force to the sexual life, which can
be influenced far more readily by example than by good teaching, if the
latter, though daily repeated, conflicts with what the child sees every
day in the conduct of its relatives and companions._

Although, for this reason, we must avoid forming an exaggerated idea of
the utility of individual sexual education, this is not meant to imply
that we should assume a perfectly passive attitude, and leave everything
to the uncontrolled course of development, in order to allow the child,
as the modern phrase goes, "to live its own life."

Before passing to