You must understand that we really possess nothing by ourselves. Veil, if you wish, the faces of your women and visit every day the gold in the depths of your vaults. Exclusiveness yields you no wealth save that which is dead and unproductive. But he is truly rich for whom life is a perpetual discovery. III Discovery! It seems as if this word were one of a cluster of magic keys, one of those keys that make all doors open before our feet. We know that to possess is to understand, to comprehend. That, in a supreme sense, is what discovery means. To understand the world can well be compared to the peaceful, enduring wealth of the great landowner; to make discoveries is, in addition to this, to come into sudden, overflowing riches, to have one of those sudden strokes of fortune which double a man’s capital by a windfall that seems like an inspiration. The life of a child who grows up unconstrainedly is a chain of discoveries, an enriching of each moment, a succession of dazzling surprises. I cannot go on without thinking of the beautiful letter I received today about my little boy; it said: “Your son knows how to find extraordinary riches, inexhaustible treasures, even in the barrenest fields, and when I set him on the grass, I cannot guess the things he is going to bring out of it. He has an admirable appreciation of the different kinds of soil; if he finds sand he rolls in it, buries himself in it, grabs up handfuls and flings them delightedly over his hair. Yesterday he discovered a molehole, and you cannot imagine all the pleasure he took in it. He also knows the joys of a slope which one can descend on one’s feet, or head over heels, or by rolling, and which is also splendid for somersaults. Every rise of ground interests him, and I wish you could see him pushing his cart up them. There is a little ditch where on the edge he likes to lie with his feet at the bottom and his body pressed tight against the slope. He played interminably, the other day, on top of a big stone; he kept stroking it, he had truly found a new pleasure there. And as for me, I find my wealth in watching him discover all these things.” It is thus a child of fifteen months gives man lessons in appreciation. Unfortunately, most systems of education do their best to substitute hackneyed phrases for the sense of discovery. A series of conventions are imposed on the child; he ceases to discover and experience the objects in the world in pinning them down with dry, formal labels by the help of which he can recognize them. He reduces his moral life little by little to the dull routine of classifying pins and pegs, and in this fashion begins the journey to maturity.