Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/140

 so far as may serve to quicken, without stimulating the active powers.

The power also of entertaining more trains of ideas than one, simultaneously, on which so much of practical efficiency depends, in all walks of life, begins to develop itself about the same time; and must be watched and elicited; but this too is a subject of such importance as to demand separate treatment. Many of the points of contrast between a cultured and an uncultured mindbetween the vulgar and the refined, turn upon the training that may have been bestowed upon this very power.

The moral and the intellectual branches of education are again involved in another characteristic of childhood, as distinguished, on the one side, from infancy, and on the other, from a stage three or four years more advanced. What I mean is that penetrating and instinctive discernment of the character and motives of those around them, which is not often possessed earlier than the fifth year, and which is often lost, or set wrong, about the twelfth. It is true that the youngest infants sometimes exhibit an instinctive complacency, or repugnancy, toward those about them; but it is not generally found that these likings and dislikings have any correspondence with the real dispositions, or merits, of individuals: they seem rather to take their rise from merely accidental peculiarities of the personal appearance.

There is however something far more just and deep in those discriminations of character that are often made by children of seven and nine years old. Not indeed that all children have any such discernment of spirits; but few are totally destitute of it; and more than a few (girls especially, whose perceptions are more acute, and who, from their being much at home, and silent spectators of whatever is to be seen there, become accomplished dissecters of character) seem to dive into the bosom of whoever they have