facts. It represents rather the
careful and loving induction of the growing human creature into the rich
world of experience; the help we give it in the great business of
adjusting itself to reality. It operates by means of the moulding
influences of environment, the creation of habit. Suggestion, not
statement, is its most potent instrument; and such suggestion begins for
good or ill at the very dawn of consciousness. Therefore the child whose
infancy is not surrounded by persons of true outlook is handicapped from
the start; and the training in this respect of the parents of the future
is one of the greatest services we can render to the race.

We are beginning to learn the overwhelming importance of infantile
impressions: how a forgotten babyish fear or grief may develop
underground, and produce at last an unrecognizable growth poisoning the
body and the mind of the adult. But here good is at least as potent as
ill. What terror, a hideous sight, an unloving nurture may do for evil;
a happy impression, a beautiful sight, a loving nurture will do for
good. Moreover, we can bury good seed in the unconscious minds of
children and reasonably look forward to the fruit. Babyish prayers,
simple hymns, trace whilst the mind is ductile the paths in which
feelings shall afterwards tend to flow; and it is only in maturity that
we realize our psychological debt to these early and perhaps afterwards
abandoned beliefs and deeds. So the veritable education of the Spirit
begins at once, in the cradle, and its chief means will be the
surroundings within which that childish spirit first develops its little
awareness of the universe; the appeals which are made to its instincts,
the stimulations of its life of sense. The first factor of this
education is the family: the second the society within which that family
is formed.

Though we no longer suppose it to possess innate ideas, the baby has
most surely innate powers, inclinations and curiosities, and is reaching
out in every direction towards life. It is brimming with will power,
ready to push hard into experience. The environment in which it is
placed and the responses which the outer world makes to it--and these
surroundings and responses in the long run are largely of our choosing
and making--represent either the helping or thwarting of its tendencies,
and the sum total of the directions in which its powers can be exercised
and its demands satisfied: the possibilities, in fact, wh