The ends that he sets before himself are those which Comte set before the human race,--"savoir pour prevoir, afin de pouvoir: induire pour deduire, afin de construire." The desire to make things, to build things up, to control ways and means, to master the resources of Nature, to put his knowledge of her laws and facts to a practical use, is strong in his soul.

Give him a box of bricks, and he will spend hours in building and rebuilding houses, churches, towers, and the like.

Set him on a sandy shore, with a spade and a pail, and he will spend hours in constructing fortified castles with deep, encircling moats into which the sea may be duly admitted.

Or he will make harness and whips of plaited rushes, armour of tea-paper, swords of tin-plate, boxes and other articles of cardboard, waggons, engines, and other implements of wood.
We will call this the _constructive instinct_.
In both these instincts the child is struggling to grow, to expand his being, by going out of himself, through the correlated channels of theory and practice, into what I may call the machinery of Nature's life,--an aspect of that life which reveals its mysteries to reason rather than to emotion, or (to use the language of Eastern philosophy) to the faculties that try to find order in the Many, rather than to those which try to hold intercourse with the One.[16] Whichever channel he may use,--and indeed they are not so much two channels as one, for each in turn is for ever leading into and then passing out of the other,--his concern is always for "facts," for the actualities of things, for "objective truth." We will therefore call these the _Scientific Instincts_, and place them in a class by themselves.
There are six instincts, then,--six formative and expansive instincts--which Nature has implanted in every normal child, and which education, so far as it aims at being loyal to Nature, should take account of and try to foster.

Two of these are _sympathetic_; two are _aesthetic_; two are _scientific_.