The secret of childhood (translated) E-Book

Maria Montessori

• Herausgeber: ALEMAR S.A.S.
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

In this book, the fundamental building blocks of the Montessori method are described, at school and within the walls of the home: The Secret of Childhood outlines, step by step and in a clear and exciting manner, the child's entire journey towards the awakening of his or her consciousness. In pages that continue to amaze for their modernity, Maria Montessori describes the instinctive and mysterious work done in our first years of life, the free growth of the spirit in youth, and does not fail to offer practical and loving advice to those who, from parents to teachers, are responsible for growing up and have the world of childhood at heart. It is a journey into the practical and emotional intelligence of children that allows us, amidst toys and lies, love and misunderstandings, to discover how childish the world of adults can be at times, and how profound the love and intelligence of our children instead.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHILDHOOD, A SOCIAL ISSUE

PART ONE

I - THE CENTURY OF THE CHILD

II - THE ACCUSED

III - BIOLOGICAL INTERLUDE

IV - THE NEWBORN CHILD

V - NATURAL INSTINCTS

VI - THE SPIRITUAL EMBRYO

VII - DELICATE PSYCHIC CONSTRUCTIONS

VIII - THE ORDER

IX - INTELLIGENCE

X - STRUGGLES ON THE PATH TO GROWTH

XI - WALKING

ΧII - THE HAND

XIII - RHYTHM

XIV - THE SUBSTITUTION OF PERSONALITY

XV - THE MOVEMENT

XVI - MISUNDERSTANDING

XVII - INTELLECT OF LOVE

PART TWO

XVIII - THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD

XIX - THE REPETITION OF THE EXERCISE

XX - FREE CHOICE

XXI - TOYS

XXII - PRIZES AND PUNISHMENTS

XXIII - SILENCE

XXIV - DIGNITY

XXV - DISCIPLINE

XXVI - THE BEGINNING OF TEACHING

XXVII - PHYSICAL PARALLELS

XXVIII - CONSEQUENCES

XXIX - PRIVILEGED CHILDREN

XXX - THE SPIRITUAL PREPARATION OF THE TEACHER

XXXI - DEVIATIONS

XXXII - THE ESCAPES

XXXIII - BARRIERS

XXXIV - HEALINGS

XXXV - ATTACHMENT

XXXVI - POSSESSION

XXXVII - POWER

XXXVIII - THE INFERIORITY COMPLEX

XXXIX - FEAR

XL - THE LIE

XLI - REFLECTIONS ON PHYSICAL LIFE

PART THREE

XLII - THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE ADULT AND THE CHILD

XLIII - THE WORK INSTINCT

XLIV - THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TWO TYPES OF WORK

XLV - THE DRIVING INSTINCTS

XLVI - THE MASTER CHILD

XLVII - THE MISSION OF PARENTS

XLVIII - THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD

 

 

 

Maria Montessori

The secret of childhood

PREFACE

CHILDHOOD, A SOCIAL ISSUE

For some years now, a social movement in favour of children has been underway, and not because anyone in particular has taken the initiative. It happened like a natural eruption on volcanic ground, where scattered fires are spontaneously produced here and there. This is how great movements are born. Science undoubtedly contributed to this; it was the initiator of the sodal movement for children. Hygiene began to combat infant mortality; then it proved that childhood was a victim of school fatigue, an unknown martyr, condemned to perpetual punishment, since childhood itself ended with the end of the school term.

School hygiene described an unfortunate childhood, contracted spirits, tired intelligences, hunched shoulders and narrow chests, a childhood predisposed to tuberculosis.

Finally, after thirty years of study, we see the child as a human being displaced by society and, before that, by those who gave and preserve life to him. What is childhood? A constant disturbance for the adult who is preoccupied and exhausted by ever more absorbing occupations. There is no place for childhood in the cramped homes of the modern city, where families accumulate. There is no place for it in the streets, as vehicles multiply and pavements are crowded with people in a hurry. Adults have no time to take care of it because their pressing obligations overwhelm them. Father and mother are both forced to work, and when work is lacking, misery oppresses and crushes children as well as adults. Even in the best conditions, the child remains confined to his room, entrusted to wage-earning strangers, and is not allowed to enter that part of the house where the beings to whom he owes his life dwell. There is no refuge where the child feels that his soul is understood, where he can exercise his proper activity. He must be quiet, silent, without touching anything, because nothing belongs to him. Everything is inviolable, the exclusive property of the adult and forbidden to the child. What belongs to him? Nothing. A few decades ago, there were not even children's chairs. Hence the famous expression, which today only has a metaphorical meaning: 'I held you on my knee'.

When the child sat on the grown-ups' furniture or on the floor, he was reprimanded; it was necessary for someone to sit on his lap. Such is the situation of the child living in the adult's environment: an importunate who seeks something for himself and does not find it, who enters and is immediately rejected. His situation is similar to that of a man with no civil rights and no environment of his own; a being relegated to the margins of society, whom everyone can treat without respect, insult and punish, by virtue of a right conferred by Nature: the right of the adult.

By a curious psychic phenomenon, the adult has never bothered to prepare a suitable environment for his child; one would say he is ashamed of him in the social organisation. Νin working out his laws, man has left his heir lawless, and therefore outside the laws. He abandons him without direction to the instinct of tyranny that exists at the bottom of every adult heart. This is what we must say of childhood that comes into the world bringing new energies, energies that should indeed be the regenerative breath, capable of dissipating the asphyxiating gases accumulated from generation to generation during a human life full of errors.

But suddenly, in a society that had been blind and insensitive for centuries, probably since the origin of the species, a new awareness arose of the fate of the child. Hygiene rushed in the same way as one rushes to a disaster, to a cataclysm causing numerous victims; it fought against infant mortality in the first year of life; the victims were so numerous that the survivors could be considered as having escaped a universal flood. When, at the beginning of the 20th century, hygiene began to penetrate the working classes and spread, the life of the child took on a new aspect. Schools were transformed in such a way that those that had existed for more than ten years seemed to date back a century. Educational principles entered, by way of gentleness and tolerance, both families and schools.

In addition to the achievements of scientific projects, there are also, here and there, many initiatives dictated by sentiment. Many of today's reformers take childhood into consideration; in town planning works, gardens are set aside for children; squares and parks are built, playgrounds are set aside for children; children are thought of by building theatres, books and newspapers are published for them, trips are organised, furniture is built in suitable proportions. Finally, by developing a conscious class organisation, they tried to organise children, to instil in them the notion of social discipline and the dignity that comes with it for the individual, as happens in boy-scout-type organisations and 'children's republics'. The revolutionary political reformers of our time seek to take possession of childhood to make it a docile instrument of their designs. Whether for good or evil, whether to be helped loyally or for the self-interested purpose of using it as a tool, childhood is ever present today. It was born as a social element. It is powerful and penetrates everywhere. It is no longer just a member of the family, it is no longer the child who on Sundays, dressed in his best suit, would meekly walk around at his father's hand, careful not to soil his Sunday best. No, the child is a personality that has invaded the social world.

Now the whole movement in its favour has meaning. As mentioned earlier, it was neither provoked nor directed by initiators, nor coordinated by any organisation; we must therefore say that the hour of childhood has come. As a result, a very important social question presents itself in all its fullness: the social question of childhood.

It is necessary to assess the effectiveness of this movement: its importance is immense for society, for civilisation, for the whole of humanity. All sporadic initiatives, born without reciprocal ties, are a clear indication that none of them have any constructive importance: they are only proof that a real and universal impulse towards a great social reform has arisen around us. This reform is so important that it heralds new times and a new civilised era; we are the last survivors of an era that has already passed, one in which men were only concerned with creating an easy and comfortable environment for themselves: an environment for adult humanity.

We now stand on the threshold of a new era, in which it will be necessary to work for two different humanity: that of the adult and that of the child. And we are moving towards a civilisation that will have to prepare two sodal environments, two distinct worlds: the world of the adult and the world of the child.

The task ahead of us is not the rigid and external organisation of social movements that have already begun. It is not a question of facilitating a coordination of the various public and private initiatives in favour of childhood. In that case it would be an organisation of adults to help an external objective: childhood.

Instead, the social issue of childhood penetrates with its roots into the inner life, reaches us, adults, to shake our conscience and renew us. The child is not an outsider that the adult can only consider outwardly, with objective criteria. Childhood constitutes the most important element of the adult's life: the building element.

Man's good or evil in later life is closely linked to the childhood life from which it originated. On childhood will fall all our errors and they will have indelible repercussions. We will die, but our children will suffer the consequences of the evil that will have deformed their spirit forever. The cycle is continuous, nor can it be broken. To touch the child is to touch the most sensitive point of a whole, rooted in the remotest past and reaching towards the infinity of the future. Touching the child means touching the most delicate and vital point, where everything can be decided and renewed, where everything redounds with life, where the secrets of the soul are locked away, because it is there that the education of man is processed.

To work consciously for childhood and to pursue this work to the end with the prodigious intention of saving it, would be to conquer the secret of humanity, as so many secrets of outer nature have already been conquered.

The social issue of childhood is like a small plant, just sprouting from the ground and attracting us with its freshness. But we realise that this plant has deep, firm roots that are not easy to uproot. One has to dig, dig deep, to discover that those roots stretch out in all directions and extend far away, like a labyrinth. To uproot this plant it would be necessary to remove all the soil.

These roots are the symbol of the subconscious in human history. Static things, crystallised in man's spirit, which render him incapable of understanding his childhood and achieving an intuitive knowledge of his soul, must be removed.

The adult's striking blindness, his insensitivity towards children - the fruits of his own life - certainly have deep roots that extend across generations, and the adult who loves children, but who nevertheless unconsciously despises them, causes them a secret suffering, a mirror of our mistakes, a warning for our conduct. All this reveals a universal conflict, even if it remains unnoticed, between the adult and the child. The social question of childhood makes us penetrate the laws of human formation and helps us to create a new consciousness and, consequently, to give a new orientation to our social life.

PART ONE

I - THE CENTURY OF THE CHILD

The progress achieved in a few years in the care and education of children was so rapid and surprising, that it can be connected with an awakening of consciousness, rather than with the evolution of the means of life. There was not only progress due to child hygiene, which developed in the very last decade of the tenth century; but the personality of the child itself manifested itself in new aspects, taking on the highest importance.

It is impossible today to penetrate any branch of medicine or philosophy, or even sociology, without considering the contributions that can come from knowledge of child life.

A pale comparison of its importance might come from the clarifying influence that embryology had on all biological knowledge and even on that concerning the evolution of beings. But in the case of the child, one must recognise an infinitely greater influence than this on all questions reflecting humanity.

It is not the physical child that will be able to give a dominant and mighty thrust to the betterment of men, but it is the psychic child. It is the spirit of the child that can determine what will perhaps be the real progress of men and, who knows? the beginning of a new civilisation.

It was already prophesied by the Swedish writer and poet Ellen Key that our century would be the century of the child.

If one had the patience to investigate historical documents, one would find singular coincidences of ideas in the first crown speech made by the King of Italy Victor Emmanuel III in 1900 (right on the threshold of the new century), when he succeeded his murdered father; referring to the new era beginning with the century, the king called it 'the century of childhood'.

It is highly probable that these hints, almost prophetic lights, were a reflection of the impressions aroused by science, which in the last decade of the tenth century had illustrated the suffering child, assaulted by death in infectious diseases, ten times more than the adult, and the child victim of school torment.

No one, however, could foresee that the child contained within itself a secret of life, capable of lifting a veil over the mysteries of the human soul, that it carried within itself a necessary unknown capable of offering the adult the possibility of solving his or her individual and social problems. It is this point of view that can become the foundation of a new science of research on the child, the importance of which will influence the entire social life of mankind.

Psychoanalysis and the child

Psychoanalysis has opened up a previously unknown field of research by penetrating into the secrets of the subconscious, but it has hardly solved any nagging problems in the practice of life; however, it can prepare one to understand the contribution that the occult child can make.

Psychoanalysis has, it can be said, surpassed the cortex of consciousness that had been considered in psychology as something insuperable, as in ancient history had been the Pillars of Hercules, which represented a limit beyond which superstitions posed the end of the world.

Psychoanalysis has gone further: it has penetrated the ocean of the subconscious. Without this discovery, it would be difficult to illustrate the contribution that the psychic child can make to the deeper study of human problems.

It is known that in the beginning what became psychoanalysis was nothing more than a new technique to treat psychic illness: thus it was, at its inception, a branch of medicine. Psychoanalysis' truly luminous contribution was the discovery of the power that the subconscious has over human actions. It was almost a study of penetrating psychic reactions beyond consciousness, which bring to light, with their response, secret facts and unthought-of realities, overturning old ideas. In other words, they reveal the existence of an unknown, enormously vast world to which, one might say, the fate of individuals is linked. However, this unknown world has not been illustrated. As soon as one has crossed the Pillars of Hercules, one has not ventured into the expanses of the ocean. A suggestion comparable to Greek prejudice kept Freud within pathological limits.

Since Charcot's time in the last century, the subconscious had already appeared in the field of psychiatry.

Almost as if by an inner boiling over of unsettled elements making their way through the surface, the subconscious had opened a way by making itself manifest, in exceptional cases, in states of deepest psychic illness. Hence the strange phenomena of the subconscious, so at odds with the manifestations of consciousness, were thought to be merely symptoms of illness. Freud did the opposite: he found his way into the subconscious with the aid of a laborious technique; but he too remained almost exclusively in the pathological realm. For: which normals would submit themselves to the painful trials of psychoanalysis? That is, to a kind of operative act on the soul? Thus it was by treating the sick that Freud deduced his consequences for psychology; and it was largely personal deductions on an abnormal basis that gave shape to the new psychology. Freud imagined it, the ocean: but he did not explore it; and he gave it the character of the stormy strait.

It is for this reason that Freud's theories were not satisfactory; nor was the technique of treating the sick entirely satisfactory, because it did not always lead to the healing of the 'diseases of the soul'. This is why social traditions, which are repositories of ancient experience, have stood as a barrier to certain generalisations of Freud's theories. Whereas instead a new enlightening truth should have brought down the traditions, as reality brings down the figure. Perhaps the exploration of this immense reality needs more than a clinical treatment technique, or a theoretical deduction.

The secret of the child

It is perhaps due to different scientific fields and different conceptual approaches, the task of penetrating the vast unexplored field: to study man from the very beginning, trying to decipher in the soul of the child its unfolding through conflicts with the environment, and to receive the secret of the struggles through which the soul of man remained twisted and dark.

This secret was already touched upon by psychoanalysis. One of the most impressive discoveries, derived from the application of its technique, was the origin of psychosis in childhood. The memories called up from the unconscious demonstrated infantile sufferings that were not those commonly known, indeed they were so far from the prevailing opinion, as to be the most impressive and the most shocking of all the discoveries of psychoanalysis. The sufferings were purely psychic: slow and constant. Completely unnoticed as facts capable of being concluded in a psychically ill adult personality. It was the repression of the child's spontaneous activity due to the adult who has dominion over him, and therefore connected with the adult who has the greatest influence on the child: the mother.

It is necessary to distinguish these two levels of probing encountered by psychoanalysis: one, the more superficial one, comes from the collision between the individual's instincts and the conditions of the environment to which the individual must adapt, conditions that often conflict with instinctive desires; from this arise the healable cases, where it is not difficult to trace back to the field of consciousness the perturbing causes that lie beneath. Then there is another, deeper plane, the plane of childhood memories, where the conflict was not between the man and his present social environment, but was between the child and the mother.

This last conflict that has just been touched upon by psychoanalysis relates to illnesses that are difficult to cure and has therefore remained outside of practice, relegated to the mere importance of an anamnesis, i.e. an interpretation on supposed causes of illnesses.

In all diseases, including physical ones, the importance of events occurring in childhood was recognised: and the diseases that have their causes in childhood are the most serious and the least curable. So in childhood lies, one might say, the forge of predispositions.

While, however, the indication of physical illness has already led to the development of scientific branches, such as child hygiene, child care, and even eugenics, and has achieved a practical social movement of reform in the physical treatment of the child, psychoanalysis has not. The realisation of the infantile origins of the adult's severe psychic disturbances and the predispositions that intensify the adult's conflicts with the external world, has not led to any practical action for child life.

Perhaps because psychoanalysis has given itself over to a technique of probing the subconscious. That same technique that allowed discovery in the adult has become an obstacle with the child. The child, who by his very nature does not lend himself to the same technique, must not remember his childhood: he is childhood. It is necessary to observe him rather than probe him: but to observe him from a psychic point of view and from which one tries to detect the conflicts the child goes through in his relations with the adult and the social environment. It is evident that this point of view takes one out of the field of psychoanalytic techniques and theories and into a new field of observation of the child in its social existence.

It is not a matter of passing through the difficult bottlenecks of the survey of sick individuals, but of sweeping through the reality of human life, oriented towards the psychic child. It is the whole of human life in its unfolding from birth onwards that is presented in the practical problem. Unknown is the page of human history that recounts the adventure of the psychic man: the sensitive child who encounters his obstacles and finds himself immersed in insuperable conflicts with the adult stronger than him, who masters him without understanding him. It is the blank page where the unknown sufferings that disrupt the intact and delicate spiritual field of the child, organising in his subconscious an inferior man, different from the one that would be designed by nature, were not yet written.

This complex issue is illustrated, but not related to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is limited to the concept of illness and curative medicine; the question of the psychic child contains a prophylaxis with respect to psychoanalysis, because it touches upon the normal and general treatment of infant humanity, which treatment helps to avoid obstacles and conflicts, and thus their consequences, which are the psychic illnesses psychoanalysis deals with: or the simple moral imbalances, which it considers to extend to almost all of humanity.

An entirely new field of scientific exploration is thus born around the child, independent even from its only parallel, which would be psychoanalysis. It is essentially a form of aid to infant psychic life, and enters the full field of normality and education: its characteristic feature, however, is the penetration of as yet unknown psychic facts in the child, and at the same time the awakening of the adult; who before the child has erroneous attitudes, originating from the subconscious.

II - THE ACCUSED

The word repression that Freud speaks of regarding the deeper origins of the psychic perturbations encountered in adults is in itself an illustration.

The child cannot expand as it must in a developing being. And this is because the adult represses him. Adult is an abstract word: the child is an isolated one in society; therefore if the adult has an influence on him, this adult is immediately determined: it is the adult who is closest to the child. So, the mother primarily, then the father, finally the teachers.

It is the adults to whom society ascribes a task of their own that is the opposite, because to them it gives the credit for the education and development of the child. Instead, an accusation arises out of the probing depths of the soul against those who had recognised themselves as the guardians and benefactors of humanity. They become the accused. But since all are fathers and mothers and many are the teachers and guardians of children, the accusation spreads to the adult: to the society responsible for children. This startling accusation has an apocalyptic quality; it is as mysterious and terrible as the voice of the Last Judgement: "What did you do, of the children I entrusted to you?"

The first reaction is a defence, a protest: 'We did our best; the children are our love, we cared for them with our sacrifice'. Two contrasting concepts are placed before each other: one of them is conscious; the other refers to unconscious facts. The defence is known, it is ancient, it is rooted and is of no interest: what is of interest is the accusation, or rather the accused. Who goes round and round to perfect the care and education of children, and finds himself entangled in a labyrinth of problems, in a kind of open wood with no exit: because the error he carries within himself is unknown to him.

Preaching in favour of the child must maintain the attitude of accusation towards the adult: accusation without remission, without exception.

And suddenly the accusation becomes a fascinating focus of interest. Because it does not denounce involuntary errors, which would be humiliating, indicating a shortcoming, a diminution. It denounces unconscious errors: and therefore magnifies, leads to self-discovery. And all true enlargement comes from discovery, from the utilisation of the unknown.

It is for this reason that at all times the attitude of men towards their errors has been opposite. Every individual is offended by conscious error, and is attracted and fascinated by unknown error. For the unknown error contains the secret of perfection beyond the known and coveted limits, and elevates one into a higher realm. Thus the medieval knight was ready to duel at every smallest accusation that diminished his conscious field; he prostrated himself before the altar, however, humbly saying: 'I am guilty, I declare it before all; and the fault is mine alone. The biblical accounts give interesting examples of this contrast. What cause gathered the multitude around Jonah in Nineveh, and why was the enthusiasm in everyone, from the king to the people, such that they swelled the crowd of the prophet's followers? He accuses them of being terrible sinners, and says that unless they are converted, Nineveh will be destroyed. What does John the Baptist call the crowds on the banks of the Jordan, what sweet appellations does he find to bring about such an extraordinary turnout? He calls them all 'a race of vipers'.

Here is the spiritual phenomenon: people flocking to hear accusations; and to flock is to allow, to recognise. There are harsh and insistent accusations that call out from their depths to the unconscious, to make it identify with the consciousness: the whole spiritual unfolding is a conquest of the consciousness that takes on what was still outside it. Thus, as civil progress advances along the path of discovery.

Now to treat the child differently from today, to save him from the conflicts that endanger his psychic life, it is first necessary to take a fundamental, essential step, on which everything depends: and that is to modify the adult. In fact, by affirming that he already does all he can and that, as he expresses himself, he already loves the child to the point of sacrifice, he confesses that he is facing the insuperable. He must necessarily resort to the beyond, to the beyond that which is known, voluntary and conscious.

The unknown also exists for the child. There is a part of the child's soul that has always been unknown and must be known. Discovery that leads into the unknown is also necessary for the child. For besides the child observed and studied by psychology and education, there is still the ignored child. It is necessary to go in search of him with a spirit of enthusiasm and sacrifice, like those who, knowing that there is gold hidden in a place, run to unknown countries, and remove rocks to look for the precious metal. So must the adult do, searching for this something unknown that lies hidden in the soul of the child. It is the work to which all must contribute: without difference of caste, race or nation: for it is a matter of extracting the element indispensable to the moral progress of humanity.

The adult has not understood the child and the adolescent, and is therefore in a constant struggle with him: the remedy is not that the adult learns something intellectually, or that he integrates a lacking culture. No: the basis from which one must start is different. It is necessary for the adult to find within himself the still unknown error that prevents him from seeing the child. If this preparation has not been made, and if the aptitudes that relate to it have not been acquired, one cannot proceed further.

Coming to one's senses is not as difficult as one supposes. For the error, though unconscious in itself, gives the sufferings of anguish: and a mere hint of the remedy, makes one feel an acute need for it. Just as one who has a dislocated finger feels the need to put it back straight, because he knows that his hand cannot work and that his pain will not find calm; so one feels the need to straighten the conscience, as soon as the error is understood: for then the weakness and suffering that one had long endured become intolerable. Having done this, everything proceeds easily. As soon as the conviction has arisen in us that we had given ourselves too much credit, that we had believed ourselves capable of acting beyond our task and possibility, then it becomes possible and interesting to recognise the characters of souls other than our own, such as those of children.

The adult has become self-centred in relation to the child: not selfish, but self-centred. Hence he considers everything about the psychic child from the references to himself, thus managing an ever deeper incomprehension. It is this point of view that makes him regard the child as an empty being, which the adult must fill with his own effort; as an inert, incapable being for whom he must do everything; as a being without inner guidance, for whom the adult must point by point guide him from outside. Finally, the adult is like the creator of the child, and considers the good and the bad of the child's actions from the point of view of his relationship with him. The adult is the touchstone of good and evil. He is infallible, he is the good on which the child must model himself, everything in the child that deviates from the adult's character is evil that the adult hastens to correct.

In this attitude that unconsciously erases the child's personality, the adult acts convinced that he is full of zeal, love and sacrifice.

III - BIOLOGICAL INTERLUDE

When Wolf made his discoveries about the segmentation of the germ cell known, he demonstrated the process of the creation of living beings, and at the same time gave a living aspect, amenable to direct observation, to the existence of inner directives towards a predetermined design. It was he who demolished certain physiological ideas, such as those of Leibnitz and Spallanzani, about the pre-existence of the completed form of beings in the germ. The philosophical school of the time assumed that in the egg, i.e. in the origin, the being was already formed, albeit imperfectly and in minimal proportions, which then unfolded when placed in contact with a favourable environment. This idea came from observing the seed of a plant, which already contains, hidden between the two cotyledons, a whole seedling where roots and leaves can be recognised, and which then, when placed in the earth, unfolds that pre-existing whole in the germ into a plant. A similar process was assumed for animals and man.

But when Wolf, after the discovery of the microscope, was able to observe how a living being is really formed (he began to study the embryo of birds), he found that the origin is a simple germ cell, where the microscope, precisely because of the possibility it gives of seeing the invisible, proves that no form pre-exists. The germ cell (which comes from the fusion of two cells) has only the membrane, the protoplasm and the nucleus, like any other cell: it alone represents the simple cell in its primitive form, without differentiation of any kind. Any living being, plant or animal, comes from a primitive cell. What we had seen before the discovery of the microscope, that is, the little plant inside the seed, is an embryo already unfolded by the germinating cell, and which has passed through the stage that takes place inside the fruit, which then throws the mature seed to the earth.

In the germ cell, however, there is a very singular property: that of dividing itself rapidly and dividing itself according to a pre-established pattern. Of this pattern, however, there is not the slightest material trace in the primitive cell. Only in its interior are there small corpuscles: the chromosomes that are related to heredity.

Following the earliest developments in animals, one sees the first cell divide into two cells; and then these into four, and so on, until it forms a kind of hollow ball called a morula, which then introflexes into two layers, which leave an opening; and thus a double-walled open cavity (gastula) is formed. Through multiplications, introflections, differentiations, a complicated being continues to unfold into organs and tissues. The germinative cell therefore, although so simple, clear and devoid of any material design, works and constructs with exact obedience, the immaterial command it carries within itself: as if it were the faithful servant who knows by heart the mission he has received and carries it out: but without carrying on him any document that might reveal the secret order received. The design can only be seen through the activity of the tireless cells, and one can only see the work already accomplished. Apart from the completed work, nothing appears.

In the embryos of mammals, and therefore of humans, one of the first organs to appear is the heart, or rather what will become the heart, a little bladder that immediately begins to pulsate in an orderly fashion, following an established rhythm: and it beats twice in the time it takes the maternal heart to beat once. And it will always continue to beat without tiring, because it is the vital engine that helps all the vital tissues that are being formed, propelling towards them the means necessary for life.

It is on the whole a hidden work: marvellous precisely because it is done so alone; it is precisely the miracle of creation from nothing. Those skilful living cells never make a mistake, and they find within themselves the power to transform themselves profoundly, some into cartilage cells, some into nerve cells, some into skin cells, and each tissue takes its precise place. This marvel of creation, a kind of secret of the universe, is strictly hidden: nature wraps it in veils and impenetrable envelopes. And it alone can break them: when it throws out a mature being, which appears in the world as the creature that was born.

But the being that is born is not only a material body, it becomes like a germinative cell, which includes within itself latent psychic functions, of a type already determined. This new body not only functions in its organs; it also has other functions: instincts, which cannot be deposited in a cell, must be deposited in a living body, in a being that has already been born. Just as every germinative cell holds within itself the design of the organism, without it being possible to penetrate its records, so every new-born body, whatever species it belongs to, holds within itself the design of psychic instincts, of functions that will place the being in relationship with its environment. Whatever this being may be; even an insect.

The wonderful instincts of bees, which lead them to such a complex social organisation, only begin to act in the bees, not already in the egg or the larvae. The instinct to fly is in the bird already born, and not before; and so on.