succession,
saying: "This is the bread, this is the meat." The child was quite
content. But no mother would deprive her child of food in order to
develop his imagination in this way.

And yet I was once seriously asked by some one if it would be
injurious to give a piano to a child who was continually practising
with his fingers upon the table, as if he were playing the piano.
"And why should it be injurious?" I asked. "Because, if I do so, he
will learn music, it is true, but his imagination will no longer be
exercised, and I do not know which would be best for him."

Some of Froebel's games are based upon similar beliefs. A wooden brick
is given to a child with the words: "This is a horse." Bricks are then
arranged in a certain order, and he is told: "This is the stable; now
let us put the horse into the stable." Then the bricks are differently
arranged: "This is a tower, this is the village church, etc." In such
exercises the objects (bricks) lend themselves to illusion less
readily than a stick used as a horse, which the child can at least
bestride and beat, moving along the while. The building of towers and
churches with horses brings the mental confusion of the child to its
culmination. Moreover, in this case it is not the child who "imagines
spontaneously" and works with his brains, for at the moment he is
required to see that which the teacher suggests. And it is impossible
to know whether the child really thinks that the stable has become a
church, or whether his attention has wandered elsewhere. He would, of
course, like to move, but he cannot, because he is obliged to
contemplate the kind of cinematograph of which the teacher speaks in
the series of images she suggests, though they exist only in the shape
of pieces of wood all of the same size.

What is it that is thus being cultivated in these immature minds? What
do we find akin to this in the adult world which will enable us to
understand for what definitive forms we prepare the mind by such a
method of education? There are, indeed, men who really take a tree for
a throne, and issue royal commands: some believe themselves to be God,
for "false perceptions," or the graver form, "illusions," are the
beginning of false reasoning, and the concomitants of delirium. The
insane produce nothing, nor can those children, condemned to the
immobility of an education which tends to _develop_ their innocent
manifestations of unsatisfied desires into mania, produce a