of the sectarian and the secularist.
In a discussion of this question we are almost certain to be invited to
take part in an unedifying wrangle between Church and Chapel, between
religion and secularism. That is the strange part of it, that it should
seem impossible to get away from this sectarian dispute as to the
abstract claims of varying religious bodies. The unfortunate part of it
is that in this quarrel the interests of the community, the interests of
the child, even the interests of religion are alike disregarded.

If we really desire to reach a sound conclusion on a matter which is
unquestionably of great moment, both for the child and for the community
of which he will one day become a citizen, we must resolutely put into
the background, as of secondary importance, the cries of contending
sects, religious or irreligious. The first place here belongs to the
psychologist, who is building up the already extensive edifice of
knowledge concerning the real nature of the child and the contents and
growth of the youthful mind, and to the practical teacher who is in
touch with that knowledge and can bring it to the test of actual
experience. Before considering what drugs are to be administered we must
consider the nature of the organism they are to be thrust into.

The mind of the child is at once logical and extravagant, matter-of-fact
and poetic or rather mytho-poeic. This combination of apparent
opposites, though it often seems almost incomprehensible to the adult,
is the inevitable outcome of the fact that the child's dawning
intelligence is working, as it were, in a vacuum. In other words, the
child has not acquired the two endowments which chiefly give character
to the whole body of the adult's beliefs and feelings. He is without the
pubertal expansion which fills out the mind with new personal and
altruistic impulses and transforms it with emotion that is often
dazzling and sometimes distorting; and he has not yet absorbed, or even
gained the power of absorbing, all those beliefs, opinions, and mental
attitudes which the race has slowly acquired and transmitted as the
traditional outcome of its experiences.

The intellectual processes of children, the attitude and contents of the
child's mind, have been explored during recent years with a care and
detail that have never been brought to that study before. This is not a
matter of which the adult can be said to possess any instinctive or
matter-of-course knowledge