“Now when a child’s sense impressions have resulted in clear and settled ideas, when he can express these ideas in speech, he feels the need of examining, separating, and comparing them; this is a pleasure to which life itself invites him, and in which he finds the surest aid for the development of his judgment and power of thinking.” Education at all times has aimed to encourage, facilitate, and strengthen this development. Yet it has failed miserably, because “it has paid little heed to the laws of Nature and of life.” Pestalozzi condemns the usual method of “putting before the child a mass of ready-made judgments that his memory alone has been able to grasp, and which, instead of strengthening his thought, have allowed it to wither in inactivity.” He also makes light of logic, which, to his conception, is “a system, more subtle than clear, of the eternal rules which regulate human thought; rules, however, which are but a closed book for the child who does not yet possess the power of thinking” (4: p. 379). What he himself proposes as the best gymnastics for the child’s thinking power is what he calls exercises in number and form. As singing is introduced for the training of the speech faculty, arithmetic, geometry, drawing, writing are introduced for the training of the power of thought. “But,” he says, “if the study of number and form is to have any real educational value, it must consist not in shortened, mechanical methods, but in a series of exercises so well graduated that the child may take pleasure in the study, and succeed in it; that his thinking powers may be always active; that his judgments may be really his own, and that all he does must be closely connected with his real life” (4: pp. 379-380). Thus, to summarize, language (including sounds, words, connected ideas), number, and form are to be the three essential means of intellectual culture, or the three fundamental elements of mental upbuilding, and “it is the business of education to present these elements to the child’s mind in the simplest possible manner, and in psychological and progressive order.”