The whole universe is an expression of the Divine, but man alone can become conscious of his origin.
“All things are destined to reveal God in their external and transient being.… It is the special destiny of man, as an intelligent and rational being to become conscious of his divine essence and to render this active, to reveal it in his life, with self-determination and freedom.”—E., p. 2.
“Made in the image of God,” meant to Froebel self-conscious and self-determined. The relation of man to God is expressed by Froebel as the relation of the thought to the thinker “could the thought but become conscious of itself.” In a letter of 1843, he says:
“At the basis of the Kindergarten lies an idea which serves alike for all the interstellar spaces, for all systems of the sun; the fulfilment of the divine will and the manifestation of the same. In order to become such a manifestation of the divine, man has first to attain the basis of self-consciousness; to which end serves the early culture of the spirit of humanity in the world of childhood.”—L., p. 133.
In a paper entitled “A Second Review of the Plays,” which really deals chiefly with evolution, we read:
“We must see clearly the conditions of development in Nature and then employ them in life. Thus only can we raise man upon his own plane, that is, the spiritual plane, at least to such a degree of perfection as is shown on their plane by the types of Nature.
“Man—the all-surveying—must develop himself by gradual growth of consciousness, must raise himself eventually to clear consciousness of the foundation, conditions and goal of his life.”—P., p. 198.
It was as clear to Froebel as to Professor Lloyd Morgan that the lower animals are kept from reaching self-consciousness by the definiteness of their instincts,[19] but to Froebel as to Browning “in completed Man begins anew a tendency to God.” Like Browning again, Froebel finds that man has “somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become,” he, too, “finds Progress man’s distinctive mark alone, not God’s, and not the beasts’; God is, they are, man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.”
“Man in his first period of life on earth is to be regarded while a child in three separate relations, which are united in themselves.