Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/83

 made the human project his hand in tools, and create even language at first through the hand, was no mere development of brute force or brute cunning. It was the impulse of a higher order of energy, preparing for one knows not what future of enfranchised and transformed power. And yet this finer force, overflowing, as it were, in creative work, was conditioned, so far as we may judge, by the health, the fitness, of the striving worker. It was the flower of a lowlier life. It may exist in the sickly; but disease tends to destroy it. It is found in the defective, but not always. It is always manifested by the healthy and normal individual.

Thus it is, for the educators of the normal at least, the central factor and pivot of all training.

Yet it does not show itself at birth or in infancy. It is evolved gradually, and declares itself only when early childhood is fairly past.

The child under seven uses his hand in a hundred different ways, but he does not, as a rule, project it.

But what, then, we may ask at this point, does his activity mean—his almost feverish restlessness, the restlessness that makes even the Jesuit teachers (so anxious nevertheless to influence the young) glad to leave him to his mother; a "self-activity" that