tively constructed by the child himself during a series
of psychical processes, representing in themselves an internal
_formation_, a psychical growth.

To bring about such a progress we must offer the child a systematic,
complex material, corresponding to his natural instincts. Thus, for
instance, by means of our sensory apparatus we offer the child a
series of objects capable of drawing his instinctive attention to
colors, forms, and sounds, to tactile and baric qualities, etc., and
the child, by means of the characteristically prolonged exercises with
each object, begins to organize his psychical personality, but at the
same time acquires a clear and orderly knowledge of things.

Thenceforth all external objects, for the reason that they have forms,
dimensions, colors, qualities of smoothness, weight, hardness, etc.,
are no longer foreign to the mind. There is something in the
consciousness of the child which prepares him to _expect_ these
things, and invites him to receive them with interest.

When the child has added a cognition to the primitive impulse which
directs his attention to external things, he has acquired other
relations with the world, other forms of interest; these are no longer
merely those primitive ones which are bound up with a species of
primordial instinct, but have become a discerning interest, based upon
the conquests of the intelligence.

It is true that all these new conquests are fundamentally and
profoundly based upon the _psychical needs_ of the individual; but the
intellectual element has now been added, transforming an impulse into
a conscious and voluntary quest.

The old pedagogic conception, which assumed that to call the attention
of the child to the unknown it is necessary to connect it with the
known, because it is thus that his interest may be won for the new
knowledge to be imparted, grasped but a single detail of the complex
phenomenon we now witness after our experiments.

If the _known_ is to represent a new source of interest directed
towards the unknown, it is essential that it should itself have been
acquired in accordance with the tendency of nature; then preceding
knowledge will lend interest to objects of ever-increasing complexity
and of lofty significance. The culture thus created ensures the
possibility of an indefinite _continuation_ in the successive
evolution of such formative phenomena.

Moreover, this culture itself creates _order_ in the mind: when the