emocracy receives into its civilizing schools, that the heavens are
obedient to him, darkening the sun at his command; for eclipses are
phenomena as well known to them as to the white races.

Is this illusory imagination, based upon credulity, a thing we ought
to "develop" in children? We certainly have no wish to see it persist;
in fact, where we are told that a child "no longer believes in
fairy-tales," we rejoice. We say then: "He is no longer a baby." This
is what _should_ happen and we await it: the day will come when he
will no longer believe these stories. But if this maturation takes
place, we ought to ask ourselves: "What have _we_ done to help it?
What support did we offer to this frail mind to enable it to grow
straight and strong?" The child overcomes his difficulties _in spite_
of our endeavor to keep him in ignorance and illusion. The child
overcomes himself and us. He goes where his internal force of
development and maturation lead him. He might, however, say to us:
"How much you have made us suffer! The work of raising ourselves was
hard enough already, and you oppressed us." Would not such conduct be
much as if we compressed the gums to prevent the teeth from coming,
because it is characteristic of babies to be toothless, or prevented
the little body from standing erect, because at first the
characteristic of the infant is that it does not rise to its feet?
Indeed, we do something of the same sort when we deliberately prolong
the poverty and inaccuracy of childish speech; instead of helping the
child by making him listen intently to the distinct enunciation of
speech sounds, and watch the movements of the mouth, we adopt _his_
rudimentary language, and repeat the primordial sounds he utters,
lisping and perverting the consonants in the manner habitual to those
making first efforts to articulate words. Thus we prolong a formative
period full of difficulty and exertion for the child, thrusting him
back into the fatiguing infant state.

And we are behaving in exactly the same manner to-day with regard to
the so-called education of the imagination.

We are amused by the illusions, the ignorance, and the errors of the
immature mind, just as at no very remote date we were amused to see an
infant _laugh_ when it was tossed up and down, a proceeding now
condemned by infantile hygiene as wrong and dangerous in the extreme.
In short, it is _we_ who are amused by the Christmas festivities and
the credulity of t