APPENDIX I
On the Meaning of the Word “Activity”
Professor Stout is particularly definite in his use of the word “activity,” and as he agrees with Mr. Bradley, from whom he quotes “that the current use of the word activity in the literature of philosophy is a scandal,” it may be well to inquire here whether Froebel used the word loosely or with some degree of definiteness.
Professor Stout considers the word “activity” specially appropriate to cases “in which the return of a causal process upon itself is especially prominent or important.” He quotes from Mr. Bradley again that “Activity seems to be self-caused change. A transition that begins with, and comes out of the thing itself is the process where we feel that it is active.” “Thus,” Mr. Stout comments, “the life and growth of organisms are specially appropriate examples of activity; for such processes are in a large measure immanent or self-determining.”
The first point that suggests itself is that in the majority of cases, Froebel may perhaps be said to have avoided the difficulty by his constant reference not only to activity but to “self-activity,” a word associated with the name of Froebel closely as his very shadow.
In the second place, we do find Froebel very markedly referring to the self-determining activity of organisms, in a passage where he is trying to show that all instruction should start from the child’s own desire and power of will. He says that the mother—grounding her instruction in her child’s desire to write to the absent father—acts like the sun, “whose warmth awakens in every grain of seed, life, impulse, power, self-activity, self-determination” (die Triebe, die Kraft, die Selbstthätigkeit und Selbstbestimmung).[60]
It is Froebel’s peculiarity that he brings his philosophical conceptions into the veriest details, and so even in speaking of how the mother may make a ball represent a springing kitten, etc., and saying that to the child the ball is “the uniting object,” yet, he says, considering the plays as proceeding from the child (vom Kinde aus), “all activity, though mediated (vermittelt) by the ball, proceeds definitely from the child, and though going through the ball, refers back again to the child, who is himself a unit.”
There is a particular passage which suggests that there existed a special definite idea in Froebel’s mind in regard to the word “activity,” and it is one which presents a difficulty to an ordinary and unphilosophical mind, though a possible light is thrown upon it by Mr. Bradley’s definition. In this passage activity (Thätigkeit) is very distinctly given as something higher than impulse (Triebe).
The working of the primeval Cause, “the uniting,” is called, Froebel says, “according to the different stages in development, Force, Impulse, Life, Life-impulse, Activity” (Wirken, Trieb, Leben, Lebenstrieb, Thätigkeit).