Behind all these ways and means stands the master method--or shall I say the master principle ?--of self-expression.
Recognising, as she does, that each of the expansive instincts is a definite expression of the soul's spontaneous effort to grow, and a clear indication of a particular direction in which Nature wishes the soul to grow,--and recognising, as she also does, that the business of growing must be done by the growing organism and cannot be delegated to any one else,--Egeria entrusts the work of self-realisation to the child himself, and makes no attempt to relieve him of an obligation which no one but himself can discharge.
Now self-realisation is a twofold process.

In the absence of a fitter and more adequate word, I have applied the term _perceptive_ to those faculties by means of which we lay hold upon the world that surrounds us, and draw it into ourselves and make it our own.

And I have contended that this group of faculties has, as its counterpart and correlate, another group of faculties which I have called _expressive_,--the faculties by means of which we go out of ourselves into the world that surrounds us, and give ourselves to it and try to identify ourselves with it,--and that the relation between these two groups is so vital and so intimate that each in turn may be regarded as the very life and soul of the other.

In words which I have already used, the perceptive faculties, at any rate in childhood, grow through the interpretation which expression gives them, and in no other way, and the expressive faculties grow by interpreting perception, and in no other way.

That these two groups of faculties are, as it were, the reciprocating engines by means of which the vital movement which we call self-realisation is effected, is the conviction on which Egeria's whole scheme of education may be said to be pivoted.