are involved? “But the child will lose respect for its parents.” It is certainly better that it should lose respect for them than that it should believe everything they say, even when they deceive it. Happily, respect for one’s parents is not at all the same thing as belief in their infallibility. Children early make use of liberty of judgment, they may early be taught to sift out the truth from a mass of more or less contradictory affirmations, their judgment may be developed instead of being supplied, as is at present attempted, ready and completely made. The essential thing is to avoid rousing their passions and converting them into fanatics. The child needs an atmosphere of calm for the harmonious development of its faculties; it is a delicate plant that must not be too soon exposed to wind and weather; but it does not follow that it should be kept in the obscurity or half light of religious legend. The sole means of sparing the child the trouble of passion and fanaticism is to place it outside of all religious communion and to habituate it to examine things coolly, philosophically; to take problems of religion for what they are; that is to say, for problems simply, with ambiguous solutions.[90] Nothing serves better to awake the intellectual spontaneity of the child than to say to it: This is what I believe, and these are my reasons for believing it; I may be wrong. Your mother, or such and such a person, believes something else for certain other reasons, right or wrong. The child acquires thus a rare quality, that of tolerance; its respect for its parents attaches to the diverse doctrines that it sees them professing; it learns, in its earliest years, that every sincere and reasoned belief is in the highest degree respectable. I am intimately acquainted with a child that has been reared in this way, and it has never had any occasion for anything but satisfaction with the education it has received. It has never been presented on the subject of human destiny, or the destiny of the world, with any opinion in the nature of an article of faith; instead of religious certitudes it has heard only of metaphysical possibilities and probabilities. Toward the age of thirteen and a half the problem of the destiny of mankind was abruptly suggested to it; the death of a very dear aged relative caused it to do more thinking than is customary at that age, but its philosophic beliefs proved themselves sufficient. They still are sufficient, although the child in question has been obliged several times to face the possibility, and the immediate possibility, of its own death. I cite the example as an experiment which bears on the question under discussion.