Let the child take nothing for granted because some one says it is so. Nothing is good to him but what he feels to be good. You think it far sighted to push him beyond his understanding of things, but you are mistaken. For the sake of arming him with weapons he does not know how to use, you take from him one universal among men, common sense: you teach him to allow himself always to be led, never to be more than a machine in the hands of others. If you will have him docile while he is young, you will make him a credulous dupe when he is a man. You are continually saying to him, "All I require of you is for your own good, but you cannot understand it yet. What does it matter to me whether you do what I require or not? You are doing it entirely for your own sake." With such fine speeches you are paving the way for some kind of trickster or fool,--some visionary babbler or charlatan,--who will entrap him or persuade him to adopt his own folly. A man may be well acquainted with things whose utility a child cannot comprehend; but is it right, or even possible, for a child to learn what a man ought to know? Try to teach the child all that is useful to him now, and you will keep him busy all the time. Why would you injure the studies suitable to him at his age by giving him those of an age he may never attain? "But," you say, "will there be time for learning what he ought to know when the time to use it has already come?" I do not know; but I am sure that he cannot learn it sooner. For experience and feeling are our real teachers, and we never understand thoroughly what is best for us except from the circumstances of our case. A child knows that he will one day be a man. All the ideas of manhood that he can understand give us opportunities of teaching him; but of those he cannot understand he should remain in absolute ignorance. This entire book is only a continued demonstration of this principle of education. Finding out the East. The Forest of Montmorency. I do not like explanatory lectures; young people pay very little attention to them, and seldom remember them. Things! things! I cannot repeat often enough that we attach too much importance to words. Our babbling education produces nothing but babblers.