The foundations of will-power are now laid in his efforts to propel himself into a choice between the good and the bad, between right and wrong. Judgment and discretion appear in embryonic form and slowly and laboriously develop into cautious discernment and the faculty of deciding justly and wisely, which reach their approximate maturity late in the reflective period. It may be interesting to note that the law presumes that every person at the age of fourteen has common discretion and understanding, until the contrary is made out; but under that age there is no such presumption. It therefore follows that when a child under fourteen years of age is offered as a witness in a court of law, a preliminary examination conducted by the judge must be made to ascertain whether he has sufficient intelligence to relate the facts as they occurred and sufficient moral sense to comprehend the nature and obligation of an oath. But the law is conservative in its presumption, as such intelligence and moral comprehension are, in most instances, developed in the child at a much earlier age and numerous cases are cited in the law reports in which children as young as seven or eight have qualified, after examination, as witnesses competent to testify. During this period occur three cycles of particular susceptibility to religious influence. The first appears about the age of twelve under the stimulus of witnessing the conversion or affiliation with the church of some adult whom he looks up to, and is chiefly due to the faculty of imitation--one of the characteristics carried over from the individualistic period; the next occurs at age of fourteen, when his emotionalism is dominant, under the excitement of a powerful emotional experience; the third cycle of religious conversion appears at sixteen when he is leaving the heroic period and entering the thoughtful or reflective stage of his adolescence and such a conversion is grounded in the thoughtful promptings of the intellect, rather than the emotions. This is also the age of experimentation in which his longing to know the unknown leads him to make short excursions into the fields of mechanics, physics, electricity, hydraulics, magic, and others which hide their secrets from the casual observer. This trend of his activities may be directed by suggestion, supplemented with the necessary equipment, toward manual training and handicraft--ideal employments for the early adolescent.