What the year brings to a man in the season when Nature lies clear and open before him, that it does not bring to him in the season when Nature is more often locked away from his gaze.  And as the two seasons bring diverse gifts, so do they require diverse things in return.  In the latter part of the year, when man is perforce driven more upon himself, his occupations should take on more narrowly personal characteristics.  Just as the winter’s life with nature is more fixed and narrowed, so also is the winter’s life with men; therefore, a boy’s life at this time needs material of some definite fashion, or needs fashionless material which can be shaped into definite fashion.  My pupils soon came to me, urged by this new necessity.  What life requires that life provides, wherever life is or has been; what youth requires that youth provides, wherever youth is or has been.  And what the later man’s life requires from a man, or from men in general, that also is provided by the boy’s life and the youth’s life when these have been genuinely lived through.  The demand of my pupils set me upon the following question:  “What did you do as a boy?  What happened to you to satisfy that need of yours for something to do and to express?  By what, at the same period of your life, was this need most fully met, or what did you then most desire for this purpose?” Then there came to me a memory from out my earliest boyhood, which yielded me all I wanted in my emergency.  It was the easy art of impressing figures and forms by properly arranged simple strokes on smooth paper.[64] I have often made use of this simple art in my later life, and have never found it fail in its object; and on this occasion, too, it faithfully served my pupils and me, for our skill, at first weak both on the part of teacher and pupil, grew rapidly greater with use.

From these forms impressed upon paper we rose to making forms out of paper itself, and then to producing forms in paste-board, and finally in wood.  My later experience has taught me much more as to the best shapes and materials for the study of forms,[65] of which I shall speak in its proper place.

I must, however, permit myself to dwell a little upon this extremely simple occupation of impressing forms on paper, because at the proper age it quite absorbs a boy, and completely fills and contents the demands of his faculties.  Why is this?  It gives the boy, easily and spontaneously, and yet at the same time imperceptibly, precise, clear, and many-sided results due to his own creative power.

Man is compelled not only to recognise Nature in her manifold forms and appearances, but also to understand her in the unity of her inner working, of her effective force.  Therefore he himself follows Nature’s methods in the course of his own development and culture, and in his games he imitates Nature at her work of creation.  The earliest natural formations, the fixed forms of crystals, seem as if driven together