Now if you are going to discover genius in the bud you must above all things handle your material, at the outset at least, with tender care. You must not overflow with prohibitions, or indulge yourself too much in the luxury of punishments. “Mother and father and nurse and tutor set to quarrelling about the improvement of the child as soon as ever he is able to understand them: he cannot say or do anything without their setting forth to him that this is just and that unjust, this honorable and that dishonorable, this holy and that unholy, do this and don’t do that. And if he obeys, well and good; if not he is straightened by threats and blows, like a piece of warped wood.”[26] Suppress here, and you get expression there;--often enough, abnormal expression. Better have no hard mould of uniformity and conformity wherein to crush and deform each differently aspiring soul. Think twice before forcing your _’isms_ and _’ologies_ upon the child; his own desires will be your best curriculum. “The elements of instruction,” writes Plato, in a too-little-noticed passage, “should be presented to the mind in childhood, but without any notion of forcing them. For a freeman ought to be a freeman in the acquisition of knowledge. Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; that will better enable you to find out the natural bent.”[27] There is a stroke of Plato’s genius here: it is a point which we laggards are coming to after some two thousand three hundred years. “To find out the natural bent,” to catch the spark of divine fire before conformity can put it out; that is the beginning and yet the summit of the educator’s task,--the _initium dimidium facti_.