§ 47. Education has necessarily a definite _subjective limit_ in the individuality of the youth, for it can develop in him only that which exists in him as a possibility. It can lead and assist, but it has no power to create. What nature has denied to a man education cannot give him, any more than it can on the other hand annihilate his original gifts, though it may suppress, distort, and measurably destroy them. And yet it is impossible to decide what is the real essence of a man's individuality until he has left behind him the years of growth, because it is not till then that he fully attains conscious possession of himself. Moreover, at this critical time many traits which were supposed to be characteristic may prove themselves not to be so by disappearing, while long-slumbering and unsuspected talents may crop out. Whatever has been forced upon a child, though not in harmony with his individuality, whatever has been driven into him without having been actively accepted by him, or having had a definite relation to his culture——will remain perhaps, but only as an external foreign ornament, only as a parasitic growth which weakens the force of his real nature. But we must distinguish from these little affectations which arise from a misconception of the limits of individuality that effort of imitation which children and young people often exhibit in trying to copy in their own actions those peculiarities which they observe and admire in perfectly-developed persons with whom they may come in contact. They see a reality which corresponds to their own possibility, and the presentiment of a like or a similar attainment stirs them to imitation, although this external imitation may be sometimes disagreeable or ridiculous to the lookers-on. We ought not to censure it too severely, remembering that it springs from a positive striving towards true culture, and needs only to be properly directed, and never to be roughly put down.