Although memory and reason are two essentially different faculties, the one is never really developed without the other. Before the age of reason, the child receives not ideas, but images. There is this difference between the two, that images are only absolute representations of objects of sense, and ideas are notions of objects determined by their relations. An image may exist alone in the mind that represents it, but every idea supposes other ideas. When we imagine, we only see; when we conceive of things, we compare them. Our sensations are entirely passive, whereas all our perceptions or ideas spring from an active principle which judges. I say then that children, incapable of judging, really have no memory. They retain sounds, shapes, sensations; but rarely ideas, and still more rarely the relations of ideas to one another. If this statement is apparently refuted by the objection that they learn some elements of geometry, it is not really true; that very fact confirms my statement. It shows that, far from knowing how to reason themselves, they cannot even keep in mind the reasonings of others. For if you investigate the method of these little geometricians, you discover at once that they have retained only the exact impression of the diagram and the words of the demonstration. Upon the least new objection they are puzzled. Their knowledge is only of the sensation; nothing has become the property of their understanding. Even their memory is rarely more perfect than their other faculties: for when grown they have nearly always to learn again as realities things whose names they learned in childhood. However, I am far from thinking that children have no power of reasoning whatever.[10] I observe, on the contrary, that in things they understand, things relating to their present and manifest interests, they reason extremely well. We are, however, liable to be misled as to their knowledge, attributing to them what they do not have, and making them reason about what they do not understand. Again, we make the mistake of calling their attention to considerations by which they are in no wise affected, such as their future interests, the happiness of their coming manhood, the opinion people will have of them when they are grown up. Such speeches, addressed to minds entirely without foresight, are absolutely unmeaning. Now all the studies forced upon these poor unfortunates deal with things like this, utterly foreign to their minds. You may judge what attention such subjects are likely to receive. On the Study of Words.