§ 23. If it be objected that, according to Rousseau’s plan, there would be a neglect of memory, he replies: “Without the study of books the kind of memory that a child should have will not remain inactive; all he sees, all he hears, strikes him, and he remembers it; he keeps a record in himself of people’s actions and people’s talk; and all around him makes the book by which without thinking of it he is constantly enriching his memory against the time that his judgment may benefit by it: Sans étudier dans les livres, l’espèce de mémoire que peut avoir un enfant ne reste pas pour cela oisive; tout ce qu’il voit, tout ce qu’il entend le frappe, et il s’en souvient; il tient registre en lui-même des actions, des discours des hommes; et tout ce qui l’environne est le livre, dans lequel, sans y songer, il enrichit continuellement sa mémoire, en attendant que son jugement puisse en profiter.” (_Ém._ ij., 106.) We should be most careful not to commit to our memory anything we do not understand, for if we do, we can never tell what part of our stores really belong to us. (_Ém._ iij., 236.) § 24. On the positive side the most striking part of Rousseau’s advice relates to the training of the senses. “The first faculties which become strong in us,” says he, “are our senses. These then are the first that should be cultivated; they are in fact the only faculties we forget or at least those which we neglect most completely.” We find that the young child “wants to touch and handle everything. By no means check this restlessness; it points to a very necessary apprenticeship. Thus it is that the child gets to be conscious of the hotness or coldness, the hardness or softness, the heaviness or lightness of bodies, to judge of their size and shape and all their sensible properties by looking, feeling, listening, especially by comparing sight and touch, and combining the sensations of the eye with those of the fingers.”[140] “See a cat enter a room for the first time; she examines round and stares and sniffs about without a moment’s rest, she is satisfied with nothing before she has tried it and made it out. This is just what a child does when he begins to walk, and enters, so to say, the chamber of the world. The only difference is that to the sight which is common to the child and the cat the first joins in his observations the hands which nature has given him, and the other animal that subtle sense of smell which has been bestowed upon her. It is this tendency, according as it is well cultivated or the reverse, that makes children either sharp or dull, active or slow, giddy or thoughtful.