Pestalozzi, in his advocacy of the natural, psychological method, seems to be echoing the voice of one who said: “Return to Nature, to human nature, to child nature!” But he goes deeper than Rousseau in his insight into child nature. While Rousseau pictured the natural growth of the child in an imaginary life, isolated from every human institution, Pestalozzi placed the child in his natural environment--namely, in the home under the loving care of parents. In the eyes of both, the course of Nature was divine and inviolable. But while Rousseau sought Nature’s work in the wilderness, Pestalozzi saw it in the home life. It is not physical nature, but a well-ordered home that can become the true cradle and workshop of human nature. Indeed, there has probably never been a thinker who emphasized the divine significance of home and mother so strongly as did Pestalozzi. His method of elementary instruction came from the study of child life in the home, and was first intended for home education. He was never tired of repeating that “a man’s domestic relations are the first and most important of his nature” (4: p. 77). He earnestly endeavored to convince the world that “it is the domestic virtues which determine the happiness of a nation,” and that “the home is the true basis of the education of humanity.” According to him, it is only to supplement the absence of proper home education that schools are needed; home ought to have been the educational institution for children. So he speaks in “Christopher and Alice” through the mouth of the good servant, Josiah: “It is well that there are schools; and God forbid that I should be ungrateful for any good that they have done to us. But with all this I think that he must be a fool who, having plenty at home, runs about begging; and that is the very thing which our village folk do, by forgetting all the good lessons which they might teach their children at home, and instead thereof sending them every day to gather up the dry crumbs which are to be got in our miserable schools” (1: pp. 665-666). Again he says in his address on his seventy-third birthday: