Froebel realizes then, that true volition is the outcome of unconscious striving, that it can only come through action, and, what is most important, through action which is the outcome of feeling, “worthy his effort.” So, while stating that the formation of “a pure, strong and enduring will” is the main object of education, he takes care to point out that unless the boy is allowed to carry out in action “that which is within,” ideas which have appealed to him, and which he has already made his own, that main object will not be easily attainable.
“To raise activity of will to firmness of will, and so to arouse, and form a pure, strong and enduring will, for the representation of a characteristic humanity, is the chief aim, the main object of the school.… The starting-point of all mental activity in the boy should be energetic and healthy, the direction should be simple and definite, the aim certain and conscious, and worthy of his effort. Therefore to raise the natural activity of the will to true genuine firmness of will, all the boy’s activities should have reference to the development and accomplishment of what is within him. Activity of will proceeds from activity of the feelings, and firmness of will from firmness of the feelings, and where the first is lacking, the second will be difficult of attainment.”—E., p. 96.
CHAPTER IV
Characteristics of the Earliest Consciousness
It is in the emphasis he lays upon the mental activity of the child from the very first, that Froebel approaches so closely to the position of the modern psychologist, and in his account of the earliest consciousness he distinctly resembles Professors Ward and Stout.
Only to “some of our most distinguished modern psychologists” does Professor Stout attribute a strong disposition to recognize in the elementary processes of perception and association, the rudimentary presence of these mental operations which in their higher form we call reasoning and constructive imagination.
Now Froebel writes:
“One can recognize and watch, even in the first stages of childhood, though only in their slightest traces and tenderest germs, all the mental activities which certainly do not stand out prominently till later life. Say not, ye parents, How can such tendencies lie already in the life of the child still so unconscious and so helpless? If they did not lie in it they could never be developed from it … for where there is not the germ of something, this something will never be called forth and appear.… As man is a being intended for increasing self-consciousness, so shall he also become an inferring and judging being (schliessendes und urtheilendes). Man has also a quite characteristic power of imagination, and—what must never be forgotten, but continually kept before the eyes as important and guiding—the new-born child not only will become man, but the man with all his qualities, and with the unity of his being, already appears and indeed is in the child.”—P., pp. 30-49.
Psychologists in general, says Professor Stout, show a tendency, which he regards as erroneous, “to ignore the constructive aspect of early mental process, to recognize mental productiveness only in complete and advanced stages of mental development.”