Self-consciousness, involving true volition, or self-determination, is to Froebel “the end of man, for which he first was planned.” It is, as he constantly put it, man’s “destination.”
“To become clearly conscious of all the conditions and relations in which and by means of which man exists makes man first become man in consciousness and in action.”—P., p. 12.
“For man is destined for consciousness, for freedom, for self-determination.”—E., p. 136.
“Self-consciousness belongs to the nature of man, is one with it; to become conscious of itself is the first task in the life of the child as a human being, as it is the task of his whole life.”—P., p. 40.
“Who amongst us,” exclaims Professor Royce, “conceives himself in his uniqueness except as the remote goal of some ideal process of coming to himself and of awakening to the truth about his own life? Only an infinite process can show me who I am.”[17]
Froebel never loses sight of this. In his Autobiography he tells how he began “unwillingly” to write something in the album of a friend who was the owner of a beautiful farm, and he concludes: “Then my thoughts grew clear and I continued, ‘Thou givest man bread; let my aim be to give man himself.’” That he verily believed that the gradual development of self-consciousness is the first task in the life of the child is abundantly evident. In the very beginning of his Mother Songs he tells the mother to give her child something to push against, “to bring the child to self-knowledge as soon as possible,” and at the end he says, “When a child or human being has found himself and has firm hold over himself, he is ready to walk joyfully through life.”
In “The First Action of a Child,” Froebel writes:
“The nature of man, as man, is that he is self-conscious, and this is stamped with distinctness enough to be observed in the quite peculiar character of childish activity,[18] in his impulse to busy himself self-actively, spontaneously: an impulse which awakens simultaneously with mind, and which is in harmony with feeling and perception. If this tendency to spontaneous activity is fostered, man’s triune nature—energy, emotion and intellect—is satisfied.”—P., p. 21.
A realization of what Sir Oliver Lodge calls “the universal struggle for self-manifestation and corporeal realization, which plays so large a part in all activity,” underlies all that Froebel has to say of the progress from unconscious activity to self-conscious volition. His view of the Universe is exactly that tentatively suggested by Professor Lodge, viz. that something akin to this universal struggle “is exhibited in a region beyond and above what is ordinarily conceived of as ‘Nature.’ The process of evolution can be regarded as the gradual unfolding of the Divine Thought or Logos, throughout the universe, by the action of Spirit upon matter.”
This takes us out of the region of psychology, but Froebel’s subject was not psychology, per se, but child development, as a part of the whole plan of evolution, man being the most highly developed of creatures.