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Traherne could bear in himself such a picture of man's infancy because, as he himself emphasizes, he was in possession of an unbroken memory of the experiences which the soul enjoys before it awakens to earthly sense-perception.
And if we wish to speak of Traherne, as Dobell tried to do, we speak correctly only if we call him a 'Reidean before Reid was born'. The present chapter has shown us how this conception of the Idea is bound up with the view that is held of the relationship between human nature in early childhood and human nature in later life.
But anything in the nature of story periods, games periods, handwork periods, only impedes the variously developing children in their hunger for experiences. Their curriculum is life as the teacher has spread it out before them; there are no subjects at this stage; the various aspects ought to be of the nature of a glorious feast to these young children. Traherne says in the seventeenth century:
Let our first quotation be one from the opening paragraph of the third 'Century' in which Traherne introduces himself as the bearer of certain uncommon powers of memory and, arising from these powers, a particular mission as a teacher: 'Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born are the best unto this day, wherein I can see the Universe.
If this is what life means to the young child, and Traherne only records what many of us have forgotten there is little need for interference: we can only spread the feast and stand aside to watch for opportunities.
We then found Traherne saying from his recollections that in the original form of man's consciousness his soul is endowed with the faculty of seeing 'true' Ideas, and we found Reid on similar grounds fighting the significance which the term 'idea' had assumed under his predecessors.
And it was the Church of Herbert, of Jeremy Taylor, of Traherne how above all he would have loved the works of Traherne if they had then been discovered! that Boase represented. A Church domestic, so to speak, with priestly powers, but wielded as the common laws of a household.
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