=A Definite Aim.=—The Parents’ Union, having devoted, as I have said, ten years of its existence to learning how to use the three instruments of education (circumstances, habits, and ideas), took a new departure some few years ago, and asked what should be the end in view as the result of a wise use of due means. What is education? The answer we accept is that _Education is the Science of Relations_. We do not use this phrase in the Herbartian sense, that things or thoughts are related to each other and that teachers must be careful to pack the right things, in together, so that, having got into the pupil’s brain, each may fasten on its kind, and, together, make a strong clique or apperception mass. What concerns us personally is the fact that we have relations with what there is in the present and with what there has been in the past, with what is above us, and about us; and that fulness of living and serviceableness depend for each of us upon how far we apprehend these relationships and how many of them we lay hold of. Every child is heir to an enormous patrimony. The question is, what are the formalities necessary to put him in possession of that which is his? =Education Objective, not Subjective.=—The point of view is shifted; it is no longer _subjective_ as regards the child, but _objective_. We do not talk about developing his faculties, training his moral nature, guiding his religious feelings, educating him with a view to his social standing or his future calling. We take the child as we find him, a person with many healthy affinities and embryonic attachments, and we try to give him a chance to make the largest possible number of these attachments valid. An infant comes into the world with a thousand feelers which he at once begins to fix with great energy; and out of everything about him he gets— “That calm delight which, if I err not, surely must belong, To those first-born affinities that fit Our new existence to existing things, And in our dawn of being, constitute The bond of union between life and joy.”[19] He gets also when left to himself that real knowledge about each thing he comes across which establishes his relations with that thing. Later, we step in to educate him. In proportion to the range of living relationships we put in his way will he have wide and vital interests and joy in living. His life will be dutiful and serviceable if he is made aware of the laws which rule each relationship; he will learn the laws of work and the joys of work as he perceives that no relation with persons or with things can be kept up without effort. Our part is to remove obstructions, to give stimulus and guidance to the child who is trying to get into touch with the universe of things and thoughts. Our error is to suppose that we must act as his showman to the universe, and that there is no community between child and universe except such as we choose to set up.