——Great errors arise from the misapprehension of these different phases and of their dialectic, since the different forms which are suitable to the different grades of youth are mingled. The infant certainly thinks while he perceives, but this thinking is to him unconscious. Or, if he has acquired perceptions, he makes them into conceptions, and demonstrates his freedom in playing with them. This play must not be taken as mere amusement; it also signifies that he takes care to preserve his self-determination, and his power of idealizing, in opposition to the pleasant filling of his consciousness with material. Herein the delight of the child for fairy tales finds its reason. The fairy tale constantly destroys the limits of common actuality. The abstract understanding cannot endure this arbitrariness and want of fixed conditions, and thus would prefer that children should read, instead, home-made stories of the "Charitable Ann," of the "Heedless Frederick," of the "Inquisitive Wilhelmine," &c. Above all, it praises "Robinson Crusoe," which contains much heterogeneous matter, but nothing improbable. When the youth and maiden of necessity pass over into the earnestness of real life, the drying up of the imagination and the domination of the understanding presses in.—— I. _The Intuitive Epoch._ § 85. Perception, as the beginning of intellectual culture, is the free grasping of a content immediately present to the spirit. Education can do nothing directly toward the performance of this act; it can only assist in making it easy:——(1) it can isolate the subject of consideration; (2) it can give facility in the transition to another; (3) it can promote the many-sidedness of the interest, by which means the return to a perception already obtained has always a fresh charm. § 86. The immediate perception of many things is impossible, and yet the necessity for it is obvious. We must then have recourse to a mediated perception, and supply the lack of actual seeing by representations. But here the difficulty presents itself, that there are many objects which we are not able to represent of the same size as they really are, and we must have a reduced scale; and there follows a difficulty in making the representation, as neither too large nor too small. An explanation is then also necessary as a judicious supplement to the picture. § 87. Pictures are extremely valuable aids to instruction when they are correct and characteristic. Correctness must be demanded in these substitutes for natural objects, historical persons and scenes. Without this correctness, the picture, if not an impediment, is, to say the least, useless.