tion into Thinking, but that
Thinking goes back into Conception, and this again into Perception. In
the development of the young, the Perceptive faculty is most active in
the infant, the Conceptive in the child, and the Thinking in the youth;
and thus we may distinguish an intuitive, an imaginative, and a logical
epoch.

--Great errors arise from the misapprehension of these different phases
and of their dialectic, since the different forms which are suitable to
the different grades of youth are mingled. The infant certainly thinks
while he perceives, but this thinking is to him unconscious. Or, if he
has acquired perceptions, he makes them into conceptions, and
demonstrates his freedom in playing with them. This play must not be
taken as mere amusement; it also signifies that he takes care to
preserve his self-determination, and his power of idealizing, in
opposition to the pleasant filling of his consciousness with material.
Herein the delight of the child for fairy tales finds its reason. The
fairy tale constantly destroys the limits of common actuality. The
abstract understanding cannot endure this arbitrariness and want of
fixed conditions, and thus would prefer that children should read,
instead, home-made stories of the "Charitable Ann," of the "Heedless
Frederick," of the "Inquisitive Wilhelmine," &c. Above all, it praises
"Robinson Crusoe," which contains much heterogeneous matter, but nothing
improbable. When the youth and maiden of necessity pass over into the
earnestness of real life, the drying up of the imagination and the
domination of the understanding presses in.--

I. _The Intuitive Epoch._

Sec. 85. Perception, as the beginning of intellectual culture, is the free
grasping of a content immediately present to the spirit. Education can
do nothing directly toward the performance of this act; it can only
assist in making it easy:--(1) it can isolate the subject of
consideration; (2) it can give facility in the transition to another;
(3) it can promote the many-sidedness of the interest, by which means
the return to a perception already obtained has always a fresh charm.

Sec. 86. The immediate perception of many things is impossible, and yet
the necessity for it is obvious. We must then have recourse to a
mediated perception, and supply the lack of actual seeing by
representations. But here the difficulty presents itself, that there are
many objects which we are not able to represent of the same siz