Now we come to what he calls the age of puerility, extending from the advent of speech to the dawn of puberty. “His memory extends the sense of his identity to every moment of his existence; he becomes always one and the same person, and of course already susceptible of happiness or misery. From this time therefore he must be considered as a moral being” (17: i, p. 85). If the preceding stage was the period of education by natural growth, this one is the period of training, but without instruction. His sensory-motor being is at its greatest activity, with the least activity in the thinking self. It is, therefore, preëminently the age for habit formation. Our principle still should be “to lose time,” so far as the inculcation of knowledge or ideas is concerned. “Teach nothing if you can help it” is to be the motto. Action is the monitor of the child at this age; our business is simply to guide it without the air of restraint. To those who are alarmed at this idea Rousseau says: “Is it nothing, then, to spend his time in freedom and happiness? Dancing, playing, and running about all day, is this doing nothing? Depend on it, he will never be so fully employed again during life” (17: i, p. 142). He compares the child whose undeveloped intellect is taxed in order to make the most of its time to one who, in his eagerness for work, determines never to go to sleep. “Infancy is the sleep of Reason” (17: i, p. 143); by depriving her of it, you thrust her into the arms of death. “The apparent facility with which children seem to learn, operates greatly to their prejudice and, though we do not observe it, is a plain proof that they learn nothing.... A child retains the words, but the ideas accompanying them are reflected back again; those who hear him repeat, may understand what he means; but he himself knows nothing of the matter” (17: i, p. 143). “What, then, does it signify to imprint on their minds a catalogue of signs which to them represent nothing?... In the very first unintelligible sentence with which a child sits down satisfied, in the very first thing he takes upon trust, or learns from others, without being himself convinced of its utility, he loses part of his understanding; and he may figure long in the eyes of fools before he will be able to repair a considerable loss” (17: i, p. 152).