Our particular mode of idealism causes us to suppress as far as possible the sensual centers, to make them negative. The whole of the activity is concentrated, as far as possible, in the upper or spiritual centers, the centers of the breast and throat, which we will call the centers of dynamic cognition, in contrast to the centers of sensual comprehension below the diaphragm.

And then a child arrives at puberty, with its upper nature already roused into precocious action. The child nowadays is almost invariably precocious in “understanding.” In the north, spiritually precocious, so that by the time it arrives at adolescence it already has experienced the extended sympathetic reactions which should have lain utterly dark. And it has experienced these extended reactions with whom? With the parent or parents.