apes from our strongly marked
and restricted limits, and loves to wander in the fascinating worlds
of unreality, a tendency which is also characteristic of savage
peoples.

This childish characteristic, however, gave rise to the generalization
of a materialistic idea now discredited: "Ontogenesis sums up
philogenesis": that is, the life of the individual reproduces the life
of the species; just as the life of man reproduces the life of
civilization, so in young children we find the psychical
characteristics of savages. Hence the child, like the savage, is
attracted by the fantastic, the supernatural, and the unreal.

Instead of indulging in such flights of scientific fancy as these, it
would be much simpler to declare that an organism as yet immature,
like that of the child, has remote affinities with mentalities less
mature than our own, like those of savages. But even if we refrain
from interfering with the belief of those who interpret childish
mentality as "a savage state," we may point out that as, in any case,
this savage state is transient, and must be superseded, education
_should help the child_ to overcome it; it should not _develop the
savage state_, nor _keep_ the child therein.

All the forms of imperfect development we encounter in the child have
some resemblance to corresponding characteristics in the savage; for
instance, in language, poverty of expression, the existence only of
concrete terms, and the generalization of words, by means of which a
single word serves several purposes and indicates several objects, the
absence of inflections in verbs, causing the child to use only the
infinitive. But no one would maintain that "for this reason" we ought
to restrict the child artificially to such primitive language, to
enable him to pass through his prehistoric period easily.

And if some peoples remain permanently in a state of imagination in
which unrealities predominate, our child, on the contrary, belongs to
a people for whom the delights of the mind are to be found in the
great works of art, and the civilizing constructions of science, and
in those products of the higher imagination which represent the
environment in which the intelligence of our child is destined to form
itself. It is natural that in the hazy period of his mental
development the child should be attracted by fantastic ideas; but this
must not make us forget that he is to be our continuator, and for that
reason should be superior to