"Count of me but as one
Who am the scribe of Love, that when he breathes
Take up my pen and as he dictates, write."
(Carey's translation, Purgatorio, Canto XXIV.)
The child must create his interior life before he can express anything; he must take spontaneously from the external world constructive material in order to "compose"; he must exercise his intelligence freely before he can be ready to find the logical connection between things. We ought to offer the child that which is necessary for his internal life, and leave him free to produce. Perhaps it would not then be impossible to meet a child running with sparkling eyes to write a letter, or walking and meditating as he cultivates a nascent inspiration.
We ought to tend and nourish the internal child, and await his manifestations. If imaginative creation comes late, it will be because the intelligence is not sufficiently mature to create until late; and we should no more force it with a fiction than we would put a false mustache on a child because otherwise he will not have one till he is twenty.
The Moral Question
When we said, to begin with, that positive science had only given the "reform" of physical life, together with the modern rules of hygiene, as its contribution to society, we were unjust to positive science. It has considered not only physical life, but moral life.
It is enough to think of those studies in bacteriology which refer to the vehicles of infectious maladies in the environment, in order to recognize therefrom a primary token of the important place which is assigned to the community of human interests, and this is now affirmed with an emphasis never before displayed. Microbes multiply chiefly in damp and dirty places; underfed people are more prone to illness than others, and so are those who are overtired. Therefore illness and early death must be the heritage of the poor who, underfed and overtired, live in damp and dirty places? No. It is a question of vehicles. Microbes spread in all directions from the sources of infection, by means of dust, insects and all the usual objects of life, in fact by all the means of transport. They exist in inconceivable and fabulous numbers; and every sick person is an almost incredible source of illness and death. One single person would suffice to contaminate the whole of Europe.