Children in their natural experience or learning gather only a crude mass of facts, resulting often in a chaotic apprehension. These facts, therefore, must be worked over and rearranged in their minds in order to become true knowledge. The instruction which aims at this is called “Analytic” instruction. It is “awakening attention and reflection through instruction, or exercise in thinking”; it is a sort of mental cud of the whole stock of children’s direct and reproduced experience. It consists in pointing out the main facts of a given whole, their relations, the size, form, weight, number, attributes, uses of things, in comparing, discriminating, generalizing, and classifying them; and it may further involve the consideration of natural or artificial origin and development of things. “Analytic instruction” must depend on the materials already existing in the pupil’s mind, and is thus limited by them. These are, of course, insufficient for the rearing of his mental structure which may serve his varied life-purposes. Something new and strange must be brought in from outside his immediate environment. This is the function of “synthetic instruction.” The quarry from which the materials come is coextensive with the cultural history of the human race, including the whole stock of literature and science. Synthetic instruction is thus cultural instruction _per se_. It “builds with its own stones,” the teacher himself determining directly the sequence and grouping of parts of the lesson. Although interest partly depends on the native capacity and inclination of the pupils, yet the choice of the subject-matter and the manner of its presentation can to a large extent determine it. “Synthetic instruction must offer subjects capable of arousing lasting and spontaneously radiating interest.... The first place belongs rather to those studies which appeal to the mind in a variety of ways and are capable of stimulating each pupil according to his individuality. For such subjects ample time must be allowed; they must be made the object of prolonged diligent effort” (8: p. 127). For the treatment of the subject the general order is, of course, “the easy before the difficult, or, more specifically, that which prepares the way, before that which cannot be firmly grasped without preliminary knowledge”; things naturally must be brought down within the reach of the pupils’ understanding, yet not made so easy as to exclude effort on his part. But Herbart shows his genuine pedagogic insight in warning against a too strict adherence to logical sequence, or a too exacting insistence upon perfect mastery in preliminary knowledge, as “equivalent to scaring away interest.” He says: “To make the road so level as to do away entirely with the necessity for occasional leaps, means to provide for the convenience of the teacher rather than for that of the pupils. The young love to climb and jump; they do not take kindly to an absolutely level path” (8: p. 128).