It is a dangerous error to confound truth with matter-of-fact. Our life is governed not only by facts, but by hopes; the kind of truthfulness which sees nothing but facts is a prison for the human spirit. Dreams are only to be condemned when they are a lazy substitute for an effort to change reality; when they are an incentive, they are fulfilling a vital purpose in the incarnation of human ideals. To kill fancy in childhood is to make a slave to what exists, a creature tethered to earth and therefore unable to create heaven. This is all very well, you may say, but what has it to do with giants eating children, or Bluebeard cutting off his wives’ heads? Are these things to exist in your heaven? Must not imagination be purified and ennobled before it can serve any good purpose? How can you, a pacifist, allow your innocent boy to revel in the thought of destroying human life? How can you justify a pleasure derived from instincts of savagery which the human race must outgrow? All this I imagine the reader has been feeling. The matter is important, and I will try to state why I hold to a different point of view. Education consists in the cultivation of instincts, not in their suppression. Human instincts are very vague, and can be satisfied in a great variety of ways. Most of them require, for their gratification, some kind of skill. Cricket and baseball satisfy the same instinct, but a boy will play whichever he has learnt. Thus the secret of instruction, in so far as it bears upon character, is to give a man such kinds of skill as shall lead to his employing his instincts usefully. The instinct of power, which in the child is crudely satisfied by identification with Bluebeard, can find in later life a refined satisfaction by scientific discovery, or artistic creation, or the creation and education of splendid children, or any one of a thousand useful activities. If the only thing a man knows is how to fight, his will to power will make him delight in battle. But if he has other kinds of skill, he will find his satisfaction in other ways. If, however, his will to power has been nipped in the bud when he was a child, he will be listless and lazy, doing little good and little harm; he will be “_a Dio spiacente ed a’ nemici sui_.” This kind of milksop goodness is not what the world needs, or what we should try to produce in our children. While they are small and cannot do much harm, it is biologically natural that they should, in imagination, live through the life of remote savage ancestors. Do not be afraid that they will remain at that level, if you put in their way the knowledge and skill required for more refined satisfactions. When I was a child, I loved to turn head over heels. I never do so now, though I should not think it wicked to do so. Similarly the child who enjoys being Bluebeard will outgrow this taste, and learn to seek power in other ways. And if his imagination has been kept alive in childhood by the stimuli