Page:Counter-currents, Agnes Repplier, 1916.djvu/186

Counter-Currents overshadowed the innocent diversions of infancy. Nobody drew scientific deductions from jackstones, or balls, or gracehoops, save only when we assailed the wealth of nations by breaking a window-pane. Nobody was even aware that the impulses which sent us speeding and kicking up our heels like young colts were "vestigial organs of the soul." Dr. G. Stanley Hall had not yet invented this happy phrase to elucidate the simplicities of play. How we grasped our "objective relationship" to our mothers without the help of bird's-nest games, I do not know. Perhaps, in the general absence of experimentation, we had more time in which to solve the artless problems of our lives. Psychologists in those days were frankly indifferent to us. They had yet to discover our enormous value in the realms of conjectural thought.

The education of my childhood was embryonic. The education of to-day is exhaustive. The fact that the school-child 170