§ 54. Pestalozzi was now working heart and soul at the engineering of this “new road.” His grand successes hitherto had been gained more by the heart than by the head; but the school course must draw out the faculties of the head as well as of the heart. Pestalozzi made all instruction start from what children observed for themselves. “I laid special stress,” he says, “on just what usually affected their senses. And as I dwelt much on elementary knowledge, I wanted to know when the child receives its first lesson, and I soon came to the conviction that the first hour of learning dates from birth. From the very moment that the child’s senses open to the impressions of nature, nature teaches it. Its new life is but the faculty, now come to maturity, of receiving impressions; it is the awakening of the germs now perfect which will go on using all their forces and energies to secure the development of their proper organisation; it is the awakening of the animal now complete which will and shall become a man. So the sole instruction given to the human being consists merely in the art of giving a helping hand to this natural tendency towards its proper development; and this art consists essentially in the means of putting the child’s impressions in connexion and harmony with the precise degree of development the child has reached. There must be then in the impressions to be given him by instruction, a regular gradation; and the beginning and the progress of his various knowledges must exactly correspond with the beginning and increase in his powers as they are developed. From this I soon saw that this gradation must be ascertained for all the branches of human knowledge, especially for those fundamental notions from which our thinking power takes its rise. On such principles and no others is it possible to construct real school books and books about teaching” (_Wie Gertrud_, &c., Letter I.).