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Rh When we abandon the attempt to define immaturity by means of fixed comparison with adult accomplishments, we are compelled to give up thinking of it as denoting lack of desired traits. Abandoning this notion, we are also forced to surrender our habit of thinking of instruction as a method of supplying this lack by pouring knowledge into a mental and moral hole which awaits filling. Since life means growth, a living creature lives as truly and positively at one stage as at another, with the same intrinsic fullness and the same absolute claims. Hence education means the enterprise of supplying the conditions which insure growth, or adequacy of life, irrespective of age. We first look with impatience upon immaturity, regarding it as something to be got over as rapidly as possible. Then the adult formed by such educative methods looks back with impatient regret upon childhood and youth as a scene of lost opportunities and wasted powers. This ironical situation will endure till it is recognized that living has its own intrinsic quality and that the business of education is with that quality.

Realization that life is growth protects us from that so-called idealizing of childhood which in effect is nothing but lazy indulgence. Life is not to be identified with every superficial act and interest. Even though it is not always easy to tell whether what appears to be mere surface fooling is a sign of some nascent as yet untrained power, we must remember that manifestations are not to be accepted as ends in themselves. They are signs of possible growth. They are to be turned into means of development, of carrying power forward, not indulged or cultivated for their own sake. Excessive attention to surface phenomena (even in the way of rebuke as well as of encouragement) may lead to their fixation and thus to arrested development. What impulses are moving toward, not what they have been, is the important thing for parent and teacher. The true principle of respect for immaturity cannot be better put than in the words of Emerson:

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360 "disease of language" by which the primitive and purer nature-myth was corrupted; e.g. the story of Kronos devouring his offspring was the result of a vulgar misunderstanding of the swallowing of the Days by Time. The theory won well-nigh universal acceptance, and held the field for years until doubt was thrown on the validity of the equations; e.g. while Max Müller translated the Vedic goddess Urvasi as "the dawn," Dr. Roth translated that name as "lewd or wanton"! One by one the assumed equations were challenged, with the result that scarcely any have survived the more rigid tests of a later comparative philology.

Working, "in giant ignorance of Mannhardt," on the same lines of enquiry, Lang reached the conclusion shrewdly anticipated by Fontenelle, a nephew of Corneille, more than a century and a half ago, that "all nations invented the astounding part of their myths while they were savages, and retained them from custom and religious conservatism." Hence, to understand the ugly and crazy myths of civilized races, we must make ourselves familiar with the thoughts, manners, and myths of races who are now in the same savage state as were the prehistoric ancestors of Greeks, Romans, and other advanced peoples. This method is emphasised in Andrew Lang's last words on the subject in a posthumous review published nine days after his death. "We knew little about the evolution of religion, or of social organisations and institutions, or of mythology, till we began to study them comparatively, by observing their forms, and as far as possible their development, among all peoples of whom we have sufficient knowledge."

It is, then, in his original contributions towards the supersession of the philological by the anthropological method of interpretation that the folklorist and the comparative mythologist owe Andrew Lang an incalculable debt. And there is warrant for the belief that he would have accepted in this recognition the most welcome tribute to the abiding features of his life-work.

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62 "Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude. But I hear the outcry which replies to this suggestion: Would you verily throw up the reins of public and private discipline; would you leave the young child to the mad career of his own passions and whimsies, and call this anarchy a respect for the child's nature? I answer,—Respect the child, respect him to the end, but also respect yourself.… The two points in a boy's training are, to keep his naturel and train off all but that; to keep his naturel, but stop off his uproar, fooling, and horseplay; keep his nature and arm it with knowledge in the very direction in which it points." And as Emerson goes on to show this reverence for childhood and youth instead of opening up an easy and easy-going path to the instructors, "involves at once, immense claims on the time, the thought, on the life of the teacher. It requires time, use, insight, event, all the great lessons and assistances of God; and only to think of using it implies character and profoundness."

.—Power to grow depends upon need for others and plasticity. Both of these conditions are at their height in childhood and youth. Plasticity or the power to learn from experience means the formation of habits. Habits give control over the environment, power to utilize it for human purposes. Habits take the form both of habituation, or a general and persistent balance of organic activities with the surroundings, and of active capacities to readjust activity to meet new conditions. The former furnishes the background of growth; the latter constitute growing. Active habits involve thought, invention, and initiative in applying capacities to new aims. They are opposed to routine which marks an arrest of growth. Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself. The criterion of the value of school education is the extent in which it creates a desire for continued growth and supplies means for making the desire effective in fact.

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