h coffee appears in cups every day; in
other words, it will stray aimlessly as does the idle mind when it
"allows itself" to wander from the continuity of its passive
associations.

In this kind of _reverie_ to which the minds of children give
themselves up, there is no sign of internal activity, far less of any
individual difference. Children subjected to the object-lesson system
always remain purely receptive beings; or, if we prefer to put it so,
storehouses in which new objects are continually deposited.

No activity is thus aroused and directed towards the object, in order
to recognize its qualities in such a manner that the child himself
forms an idea of it; nor can the possibility of connecting other
objects with the first by their common characteristics arise in his
mind. For in what particular does any object resemble the others? In
its use?

When we associate the images of different objects by similarity, we
should extract from the whole the qualities which the objects
themselves have in common. If, for instance, we say that two
rectangular tablets are alike, we have first extracted from the
numerous qualities of these tablets such facts as that they are of
wood, that they are polished, smooth, colored, of the same
temperature, etc., the quality relating to their _shape_. They are
alike in _shape_. This may suggest a long series of objects: the top
of the table, the window, etc.; but before such a result as this can
be achieved, it is necessary that the mind should first be capable of
abstracting from the numerous attributes of these objects the quality
of _rectangular shape_. The work of the mind in this quest must
necessarily be _active_; it analyzes the object, extracts a determined
attribute therefrom, and under the guidance of this determined
attribute makes a synthesis associating many objects by the same
medium of connection. If this capacity for the selecting of single
attributes among all those proper to the object be not acquired,
association by means of similarity, synthesis, and all the higher work
of the intelligence becomes impossible. Moreover, this is intellectual
work in reality, because the essential quality of the intelligence is
not to "photograph" objects, and "keep them one upon the other" like
the pages of an album, or juxtaposed like the stones in a pavement.
Such a labor of mere "deposit" is an outrage on the intellectual
nature. The intelligence, with its characteristic orderlines