The effects of it in the mental life come out in action, pure and uninfluenced by calculation and duplicity and adult reserve.

There is around every one of us adults a web of convention and prejudice of our own making.

Not only do we reflect the social formalities of our environment, and thus lose the distinguishing spontaneities of childhood, but each of us builds up his own little world of seclusion and formality with himself.

We are subject, as Bacon said, not only to "idols of the forum," but also to "idols of the den." The child, on the contrary, has not learned his own importance, his pedigree, his beauty, his social place, his religion; he has not observed himself through all these and countless other lenses of time, place, and circumstance.

He has not yet turned himself into an idol nor the world into a temple; and we can study him apart from the complex accretions which are the later deposits of his self-consciousness.
2.