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That is why it is of prime importance that the vital education of the child should begin
as early as possible, indeed, as soon as he is able to use his senses. In this way many bad
habits will be avoided and many harmful influences eliminated.

This vital education has two principal aspects, very different in their aims and methods,
but both equally important. The first concerns the development and use of the sense
organs. The second the progressing awareness and control of the character, culminating in
its transformation.

The education of the senses, again, has several aspects, which are added to one another
as the being grows; indeed it should never cease. The sense organs, if properly cultivated,
can attain a precision and power of functioning far exceeding what is normally expected
of them.

In some ancient initiations it was stated that the number of senses that man can develop
is not five but seven and in certain special cases even twelve. Certain races at certain
times have, out of necessity, developed more or less perfectly one or the other of these
supplementary senses. With a proper discipline persistently followed, they are within the
reach of all who are sincerely interested in this development and its results. Among the
faculties that are often mentioned, there is, for example, the ability to widen the physical
consciousness, project it out of oneself so as to concentrate it on a given point and thus
obtain sight, hearing, smell, taste and even touch at a distance. To this general education
of the senses and their functioning there will be added, as early as possible, the cultivation
of discrimination and of the aesthetic sense, the capacity to choose and adopt what is
beautiful and harmonious, simple, healthy and pure. For there is a psychological health
just as there is a physical health, a beauty and harmony of the sensations as of the body and
its movements. As the capacity of understanding grows in the child, he should be taught,
in the course of his education, to add artistic taste and refinement to power and precision.
He should be shown, led to appreciate, taught to love beautiful, lofty, healthy and noble
things, whether in Nature or in human creation. This should be a true aesthetic culture,
which will protect him from degrading influences. For, in the wake of the last wars and
the terrible nervous tension which they provoked, as a sign, perhaps, of the decline of
civilisation and social decay, a growing vulgarity seems to have taken possession of human
life, individual as well as collective, particularly in what concerns aesthetic life and the life
of the senses. A methodical and enlightened cultivation of the senses can, little by little,
eliminate from the child whatever is by contagion vulgar, commonplace and crude. This
education will have very happy effects even on his character. For one who has developed a
truly refined taste will, because of this very refinement, feel incapable of acting in a crude,
brutal or vulgar manner. This refinement, if it is sincere, brings to the being a nobility and
generosity which will spontaneously find expression in his behaviour and will protect him
from many base and perverse movements. And this brings us quite naturally to the second
aspect of vital education which concerns the character and its transformation.

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