It is easy to say, as the social reformers and the vice commissioners and the sex instructors and many others have repeated in ever new forms, that “all children's questions should be answered truthfully,” and to work up the whole sermon to the final trumpet call, “The truth shall make you free.” Yet this is entirely useless as long as we have not defined what we mean by freedom, and above all what we mean by truth. If the child enjoys the beautiful softness of the butterfly's coloured wing, it is surely a truth, if we teach him that seen under the microscope in reality there is no softness there, but large ugly bumps and hollows and that the beautiful impression is nothing but an illusion. But is this truth of the microscope the only truth, and is science the only truth, and is there ever only one truth about the concrete facts of reality? Does truth in this sense not simply mean a certain order into which we bring our experience in the service of certain purposes of thought? We may approach the chaos of life experience with different purposes, and led by any one of them we may reach that consistent unity of ideas for the limited outlook which we call truth. The chemist has a right to consider everything in the world as chemical substances, and the mathematician may take the same things as geometric objects. And yet he who seeks a meaning in these things and a value and an inner development may come to another kind of truth. Only a general philosophy of life can ultimately grade and organize those various relative truths and combine them in an all-embracing unity. No doubt the physician's scientific discoveries and observations are perfectly true. Man is an animal, and anatomical and physiological conditions control his existence, and if we want to understand this animal's life and want to keep it healthy, we have to ask for the truth of the physician. But shame upon him who wants to educate youth toward the view that man as an animal is the true man! If we educate at all, we educate in the service of culture and civilization. All building up of the youthful mind is itself service to human progress. But this human progress is not a mere growth of the animal race. It has its total meaning in the understanding of man as a soul, determined by purposes and ideals. Not the laws of physiology, but the demands of logic, ethics, æsthetics, and religion control the man who makes history and who serves civilization. He who says that the child's questions ought to be answered truthfully means in this connection that lowest truth of all, the truth of physiology, and forgets that when he opens too early the mind of the boy and the girl to this materialistic truth he at the same time closes it, and closes it perhaps forever, to that richer truth in which man is understood as historic being, as agent for the good and true and beautiful and eternal.