To say “yea” to everything—to mud, to filth, to danger, to illness (for positive children are positive even to their bodily disorders), to the rain, to animals, to vermin, to the knife, to explosives, to ladders, to dangerous altitudes, to the precipice, and so on—is of course, supremely delightful, supremely healthy; but it cannot be allowed in its full catholicity. This I am perfectly ready to knowledge. The luxuriance of the child’s positiveness _must_ be pruned. The human being must be reared for society. He must be taught the limitations of his freedom; above all, he must be taught taste and discrimination: what to select and what to reject. And there is perhaps no more solemn moment in life than when a full-grown man or woman, in perfect possession of all the necessary intellectual equipment for the task, approaches his universally yea-saying junior to discipline it—that is to say, to determine its “yea,” to limit it, and to confine it only to a certain set of things. The problem is obviously, how can the child be kept positive to this world while being rendered negative to the undesirable elements in this life. Or to put it in a sentence: how can I make my little boy say “No” to warts without saying “No” to the world? To all those who approach the child with a negative creed, to all those who are vultures themselves, or who derive from the vulture breed, the order is clearly “Hands off!” Only people who have retained their positive attitude to life should be allowed to interfere where children are concerned; because ordered social life itself is discipline, and but very little careful and discriminating guidance need be added. When Herbert Spencer said that children of large families were always better than those of small families, because in the case of the former the parents have less time to interfere with natural processes, he propounded a very true principle as far as the modern negative world is concerned; because most of the juvenile discipline nowadays is not only imposed by negative people, but the very social environment in which these people move and breathe is also negative and hostile to life. The object and province of juvenile discipline are simply these: to rear a positive human being for social life; to discipline it to selection and rejection without forcing it to scout or to suspect vital functions or vital virtues. It sounds simple enough when stated in a single line; but how many misunderstandings, how many ruined careers, how many bitter, disappointed and ill-adapted adults are not the result of the opposite principle, the principle which reads that the positive child should above all be taught to distrust its deepest instincts, its body, and to be suspicious of the world, the flesh and the Devil—the latter meaning very often no more than wanton spirits.