It is therefore that certain phases of the study of child life have
a high worth without giving definite scientific results. Peculiarly
significant among these is the study of the autobiographies of
childhood. The door to the great universe is always to the personal
world. Each of us appreciates child life through his own childhood,
and though the children with whom it is his blessed fortune to be
associated. If then it is possible for him to know intimately another
child through autobiography, one more window has been opened into the
child world--one more interpretative unit is given him through which to
read the lesson of the whole.

It is true, autobiographies written later in life cannot give us the
absolute truth of childhood. We see our early experiences through the
mists, golden or gray, of the years that lie between. It is poetry as
well as truth, as Goethe recognized in the title of his own self-study.
Nevertheless the individual who has lived the life can best bring us
into touch with it, and the very poetry is as true as the fact because
interpretative of the spirit.

It is peculiarly necessary that teachers harassed with the routine of
their work, and parents distracted with the multitude of details of
daily existence, should have such windows opened through which they may
look across the green meadows and into the sunlit gardens of childhood.
The result is not theories of child life but appreciation of children.
How one who has read understandingly Sonva Kovalevsky's story of her
girlhood could ever leave unanswered a child starving for love I cannot
see. Mills' account of his early life is worth more than many theories
in showing the deforming effect of an education that is formal
discipline without an awakening of the heart and soul. Goethe's great