In his article in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Dr. Ward says, that in taking up the question of what we exactly mean by thinking, “we are really passing one of the hardest and fastest lines of the old psychology—that between sense and understanding. So long as it was the fashion to assume a multiplicity of faculties the need was less felt for a clear exposition of their connection. A man had senses and intellect much as he had eyes and ears; the heterogeneity in the one case was no more puzzling than in the other.”
In this connection it can again be shown that Froebel was in advance of the old psychologists. In the first of the two games in the Mother-Play book dealing with sense-training—two out of forty-nine, the remainder dealing chiefly with action—he makes it very clear that he draws no hard and fast line between sense and understanding. He tells the mother that Nature speaks to the child through the senses, which act as gateways to the world within, but that light comes from the mind:
“Durch die Sinne, schliesst sich auf des Innern Thor
Doch der Geist ist’s der dies zieht ans Licht hervor.”
And when he says that the baby in the cradle should not be left unoccupied if it wakes, he uses a pronoun in the singular in referring to “the activity of sense and mind.” He suggests hanging a cage containing a lively bird in the child’s line of vision and adds:
“This attracts the activity of the child’s senses and mind and gives it nourishment in many ways.”[8]—E., p. 49.
The faculty psychology and the formal discipline theory that came from it, says Professor Horne, did not admit the possibility of training one faculty, e.g. perception, by training another, e.g. reason, “it was not the mind that was trained, but its faculties.”
It is, however, of the merest infant that Froebel uses such expressions as “the awakening power of thought,” “the tenderest growth of mind,” and tells the mother that he “shows trace of thought, and can draw conclusions.” The ball is given to the baby to help him “to find himself in the midst of his perceptive, operative, and his comparing (thinking) activity.”[9]—P., p. 55. Long years before this he had written of the teaching of drawing, “this instruction addresses itself to the senses, and through them to the power of thought.”—E., p. 294.
“He who does not perceive traces of the future development of the child, who does not foster these with self-consciousness and wisdom, when they lie hidden in the depths and in the night, will not see them clearly, will not nourish them suitably, at least, not sufficiently, when they lie open before him.”—P., p. 58.