is an inescapable and necessary possession of the heir of
civilization.

Children do not object to these stories in the least, if the stories
are good ones. They accept them with the relish which nature seems to
maintain for all truly nourishing material. And the little tales are
one of the media through which we elders may transmit some very slight
share of the benefit received by us, in turn, from actual or
transmitted experience.

The second kind has no preconceived moral to offer, makes no attempt to
affect judgment or to pass on a standard. It simply presents a picture
of life, usually in fable or poetic image, and says to the hearer,
"These things are." The hearer, then, consciously or otherwise, passes
judgment on the facts. His mind says, "These things are good;" or,
"This was good, and that, bad;" or, "This thing is desirable," or the
contrary.

The story of "The Little Jackal and the Alligator" is a good
illustration of this type. It is a character-story. In the naive form
of a folk tale, it doubtless embodies the observations of a seeing eye,
in a country and time when the little jackal and the great alligator
were even more vivid images of certain human characters than they now
are. Again and again, surely, the author or authors of the tales must
have seen the weak, small, clever being triumph over the bulky,
well-accoutred, stupid adversary. Again and again they had laughed at
the discomfiture of the latter, perhaps rejoicing in it the more
because it removed fear from their own houses. And probably never had
they concerned themselves particularly with the basic ethics of the
struggle. It was simply one of the things they saw. It was life. So
they made a picture of it.

The folk tale so made, and of such character, comes to the child
somewhat as an unprejudiced newspaper account of to-day's happenings
comes to us. It pleads no cause, except through its contents; it
exercises no intentioned influence on our moral judgment; it is there,
as life is there, to be seen and judged. And only through such seeing
and judging can the individual perception attain to anything of power
or originality. Just as a certain amount of received ideas is
necessary to sane development, so is a definite opportunity for
first-hand judgments essential to power.

In this epoch of well-trained minds we run some risk of an inundation
of accepted ethics. The mind which can make independent judgments, can
look at ne