intellectual effort required of the average schoolboy in mastering his
Greek or Latin lesson, his algebra or physics, would be out of the
question. The middle-aged citizen attends exclusively to the routine
details of his business; and new truths, especially when they require
involved trains of close reasoning, are no longer within the scope of
his capacity.

The sensational curiosity of childhood is appealed to more particularly
by certain determinate kinds of objects. Material things, things that
move, living things, human actions and accounts of human action, will
win the attention better than anything that is more abstract. Here again
comes in the advantage of the object-teaching and manual training
methods. The pupil's attention is spontaneously held by any problem that
involves the presentation of a new material object or of an activity on
any one's part. The teacher's earliest appeals, therefore, must be
through objects shown or acts performed or described. Theoretic
curiosity, curiosity about the rational relations between things, can
hardly be said to awake at all until adolescence is reached. The
sporadic metaphysical inquiries of children as to who made God, and why
they have five fingers, need hardly be counted here. But, when the
theoretic instinct is once alive in the pupil, an entirely new order of
pedagogic relations begins for him. Reasons, causes, abstract
conceptions, suddenly grow full of zest, a fact with which all teachers
are familiar. And, both in its sensible and in its rational
developments, disinterested curiosity may be successfully appealed to in
the child with much more certainty than in the adult, in whom this
intellectual instinct has grown so torpid as usually never to awake
unless it enters into association with some selfish personal interest.
Of this latter point I will say more anon.