While fine words are spoken about individual development, children are treated as if their personality had no purpose of its own, as if they were made only for the pleasure, pride, and comfort of their parents; and as these aims are best advanced when children become like every one else, people usually begin by attempting to make them respectable and useful members of society. But the only correct starting point, so far as a child's education in becoming a social human being is concerned, is to treat him as such, while strengthening his natural disposition to become an individual human being. The new educator will, by regularly ordered experience, teach the child by degrees his place in the great orderly system of existence; teach him his responsibility towards his environment. But in other respects, none of the individual characteristics of the child expressive of his life will be suppressed, so long as they do not injure the child himself, or others. The right balance must be kept between Spencer's definition of life as an adaptation to surrounding conditions, and Nietzsche's definition of it as the will to secure power. In adaptation, imitation certainly plays a great role, but individual exercise of power is just as important. Through adaptation life attains a fixed form; through exercise of power, new factors. Thoughtful people, as I have already stated, talk a good deal about personality. But they are, nevertheless, filled with doubts when their children are not just like all other children; when they cannot show in their offspring all the ready-made virtues required by society. And so they drill their children, repressing in childhood the natural instincts which will have freedom when they are grown. People still hardly realise how new human beings are formed; therefore the old types constantly repeat themselves in the same circle,--the fine young men, the sweet girls, the respectable officials, and so on. And new types with higher ideals,--travellers on unknown paths, thinkers of yet unthought thoughts, people capable of the crime of inaugurating new ways,--such types rarely come into existence among those who are well brought up.