lso ordered the inner world of their minds.

The didactic material, in fact, does not offer to the child the
"content" of the mind, but the _order_ for that "content." It causes
him to distinguish identities from differences, extreme differences
from fine gradations, and to classify, under conceptions of quality
and of quantity, the most varying sensations appertaining to surfaces,
colors, dimensions, forms and sounds. The mind has formed itself by a
special exercise of attention, observing, comparing, and classifying.

The mental attitude acquired by such an exercise leads the child to
make ordered observations in his environment, observations which prove
as interesting to him as discoveries, and so stimulate him to multiply
them indefinitely and to form in his mind a rich "content" of clear
ideas.

Language now comes to _fix_ by means of _exact words_ the ideas which
the mind has acquired. These words are few in number and have
reference, not to separate objects, but rather to the _order of the
ideas_ which have been formed in the mind. In this way the children
are able to "find themselves," alike in the world of natural things
and in the world of objects and of words which surround them, for they
have an inner guide which leads them to become _active and
intelligent explorers_ instead of wandering wayfarers in an unknown
land.

These are the children who, in a short space of time, sometimes in a
few days, learn to write and to perform the first operations of
arithmetic. It is not a fact that children in general can do it, as
many have believed. It is not a case of giving my material for writing
to unprepared children and of awaiting the "miracle."

The fact is that the minds and hands of our children are already
_prepared_ for writing, and ideas of quantity, of identity, of
differences, and of gradation, which form the bases of all calculation,
have been maturing for a long time in them.

One might say that all their previous education is a preparation for
the first stages of essential culture--_writing_, _reading_, _and
number_, and that knowledge comes as an easy, spontaneous, and logical
consequence of the preparation--that it is in fact its natural
_conclusion_.

We have already seen that the purpose of the _word_ is to fix
ideas and to facilitate the elementary comprehension of _things_.
In the same way writing and arithmetic now fix the complex inner
acquisitions of the mind, which proceeds henceforwar