“You can see how his bodily activity, the movement and use of his limbs, like the activity of his senses, all turn towards one point: Life must be grasped, experienced and perceived … he wants to appropriate the outer and to re-embody it … his susceptibility for all that gives and takes up life will strike you as something that elevates his life in every way; even as young plants and animals are susceptible to the faintest workings of light and warmth, or the impressions of their environment, however delicate. Moreover, this receptivity is most closely related to great general excitability and sensibility (Erregbarkeit, Reizbarkeit).”—M., pp. 119-121.
Froebel’s views as to the nature both of early and of later mental activity then bear a strong resemblance to the modern view as stated by Professor Stout.[14]
In searching Froebel’s writings to find what he has to say about the stages lying between early mental activity and fully developed will, between what he calls “natural activity of the will, and true genuine firmness of will,” it soon becomes clear that it is impossible to separate what is said about will development, from what is said about intellectual development.[15] This is a natural consequence of Froebel’s constant insistence on the unity of consciousness, and it is the position of modern psychology, whether written from the analytic or the genetic point of view. Mr. Irving King writes: “The functional point of view emphasizes first of all the intimate inter-relation of all forms of mental activity and the impossibility of describing any one aspect of consciousness except with reference to consciousness as a whole.” Professor Stout, in his “Analytic Psychology,” has a section entitled “Conation and Cognition developed co-incidentally,”[16] while Froebel says:
“Thought must form itself in action, and action resolve and clear itself in thought.”—P., p. 42.
Froebel speaks of his projected institution at Helba as “fundamental,”
“inasmuch as in training and instruction it will rest on the foundation from which proceed all genuine knowledge and all genuine practical attainments; it will rest on life itself and on creative efforts, on the union and interdependence of doing and thinking, representation and knowledge, art and science. The institution will base its work on the pupil’s personal efforts in work and expression, making these, again, the foundation of all genuine knowledge and culture. Joined with thoughtfulness, these efforts become a direct medium of culture.”—E., p. 38.
Professor Stout’s account of how the unconscious mental activity of early childhood becomes transformed into the definite and conscious activity of fully developed will is, stated briefly, something to this effect. It is of the essence of conation to seek its own satisfaction, and this is only possible as the conation becomes definite. “Blind craving gives place to open-eyed desire,” as the original conation tends to define itself. So “the gradual acquisition of knowledge through experience is but another expression for the process whereby the originally blind craving becomes more distinct and more differentiated.” The grouping of cognitions is not produced by the conscious needs: “It is the way in which the conation itself grows and develops.”
For this account we can find a wonderfully exact parallel in one of Froebel’s less well-known papers, that on “Movement Plays.”
“All outer activity of the child has its ultimate and distinctive foundation in his inmost nature and life. The deepest craving of this inner activity is to behold itself mirrored in some outward object. In and through such representation, the child himself grasps and perceives the nature, direction and aim of his own activity, and learns also further to regulate and determine his life, that is his activity, according to these outward phenomena.”—P., p. 238.
This craving for outward representation, by satisfaction of which the child gains knowledge of the ends of his activity, is an exact equivalent of Stout’s blind craving which gives place to open-eyed desire as it tends to define itself. Froebel’s conclusion, that only as this unconscious or blind craving for action is satisfied does the child become “conscious of the nature, direction and ends of his own activity,” is but another way of stating Professor Stout’s conclusion, that the grouping of cognitions, which is the gradual acquirement of knowledge through experience, is “the way in which the conation itself grows and develops.” So, cognition and conation are developed simultaneously, or, to repeat Froebel’s own phrase, “Thought forms itself in action, and action resolves and clears itself in thought.”