But Froebel, in speaking of the mother’s play with a mere infant, when the coloured ball may present “the perception of an object as such,” most distinctly states that the child’s “first impressions, as it were the first cognitions,” come to him in these early plays by means of his own activity, an activity of body emphatically, as we shall see presently, but an activity also of mind, of perception, “durch Wahrnehmen … durch dunkles Auffassen … durch Selbst-thätigkeit.”[20]
Froebel uses such expressions as “the spontaneous reception” and even “the critical reception of the outer world,” just as Dr. Ward, in refusing to recognize an internal sense, says “the new facts … are due to our mental activity, and not to a special mode of what has been called our sensitivity.”
The active, rather than the passive attitude, strikes Froebel so forcibly that he calls the two modes of consciousness, the receiving of, and reacting upon impressions, a “double expression.”
“The first voluntary needs of the child, if its bodily needs are satisfied and it feels well and strong, are observation of its surroundings, spontaneous reception of the outer world (selbstthätiges Aufnehmen der Aussenwelt) and play, which is spontaneous expression, or acting out of what is within. This double expression (Diese Doppeläusserung) of taking in and expressing outwardly is necessarily grounded in its nature, as in human nature in general; since the child’s first earthly destiny is to attain by critical reception (durch prüfende Aufnahme) of the outer world into itself, by manifold inward impressions and outward expressions of its inner world, and by critical comparison of both, to the recognition of their unity.…”—P., p. 29.
Professor Stout attributes this ignoring by certain psychologists of the constructive aspect of early mental process to a false view of the nature both of association and of construction, the fundamental fallacy of the associationists lying in their disposition to explain the nature and existence of a whole by reference to the nature and existence of the parts which are contained in it, so that “the parts must be supposed to pre-exist before they are combined, and to pre-exist in such a way that they need only to be in some manner externally brought together or associated in order to constitute the whole which contains them.”
In like manner Dr. Ward accuses psychologists of having “usually represented mental advance as consisting fundamentally in the combination and recombination of various elementary units, the so-called sensations and primitive movements, or, in other words, in a species of mental chemistry.”
That Froebel seems to have avoided the error thus pointed out by those two psychologists, is surprising enough, but it is even more surprising to find that this is probably due to the fact that his conception of the earliest possible consciousness is very much like theirs.
In rejecting “the atomistic view,” Professor Ward maintains that “the further we go back, the nearer we approach to a total presentation, having the character of one general continuum in which differences are latent.”
Froebel’s account, as given in “The Education of Man,” is very similar: