“At an early period there come, too, on the part of the parents, corresponding words which at first separate the child from the outer world, but afterwards re-unite them. With the help of these words, these objects present themselves, at first singly and rarely, but later in various combinations and more frequently in their self-contained definite individuality. At last man—the child—beholds himself as a definite individual object, wholly distinct from all others.”—E., p. 40.
The function of the name, as calling attention to the thing, seemed to Froebel of so much consequence, that he says, “the name creates the thing for the child.” It is in connection with the development of speech in the stage just following on infancy that he says: “Up to this stage, the inner being of man is still an unorganized undifferentiated unity. With language, organization sets in.”
“This period is pre-eminently the period of the development of the faculty of speech. Therefore it was indispensable that whatever the child did should be clearly and definitely designated by the word. Every object, every thing, became such, as it were only through the word; before it had been named, although the child might have seemed to see it with the outer eyes, it had no existence for him. The name, as it were, created the thing for the child.—E., p. 90.
“The object of giving names is not primarily the development of the child’s power of speech, but to assist his comprehension of the object, its parts and properties, by defining his sense-impressions.”—P., p. 242.
Professor Stout also speaks of the casual naming of the object, by those around the child as “a means of fixing the attention of the child on the object when it would otherwise pass unnoticed,” and he guards against the misconception that the name at the outset is a name for the child. He calls it “merely a special sound associated with a special percept in a quite casual and indefinite way.”
Froebel, too, is careful when he says:
“A definite tone is to be connected with a definite perception, and the tone when heard again may recall the perception.”
Though Froebel has little to say about the separate senses, and what little he has is worthless, yet on the other hand he has a great deal to say, especially in his later writings, about the child’s bodily activity, and the experiences and perceptions (Erfahrung-Wahrnehmen) he gains from it. Indeed he makes so much of this, and it is so essentially a modern way of thinking that it has been given a chapter to itself.