make short cuts to the higher brain. But it is pretty well established now that this haste does not advance things—that to reach the higher levels too quickly is to arrive there with nothing of any value—with nothing to be worked up in the crucible of the higher centres. The great and deep channels of the sympathetic system—the system of nerves that run to all the great organs of the trunk—must have filled and must reverberate with all the swelling tides of life, in order to pour at last into new channels and feed the higher brain centres from their abundance.
So it was found that the formal school lesson is, for infants, not only a waste of time, but an unhygienic exercise—that it prevented the full exercise of regions that should be, early in the life history, in full functional activity. "How few young children are allowed to remain with wandering mind on the knees of their good mothers, touching, dreaming in peace … and coming forth from this baptism of emotion thinkers, discoverers, poets, saviours. …" Thus wrote Séguin many years ago.
The French word "égarer," which I have translated as "wandering mind," indicates here surely, not mind astray, but mind in the making.
To turn now to the middle brain. A little while ago it was an unknown land. But of late years a
