CHAPTER V
How Consciousness is Differentiated.—The Place of Action in the Development of Perception and of Feeling
Once objects have begun to emerge, differentiated out of the formless indistinctness, comes what Froebel calls the “sucking-in stage,” where the child “makes the external internal.”
Here, more than anywhere perhaps, Froebel shows his genius, his originality as a student of child psychology, in that he perceived that this mental sucking-in is not merely a matter of sense organs, but that it is also a muscular performance.
Who, before Froebel, understood the importance of motor activity from the very earliest days, as a means of gaining ideas, or realized as we now begin to do, that this is the true explanation of the “endless imitation which is the child’s vocation”?
In speaking of the “new-born child,” it is activity or action which is again and again repeated and emphasized as the outstanding characteristic, “an activity and action devoted to working with and prevailing over the outer.”
“As rest appears to be the earliest requirement of the bodily life, so movement soon appears as the demand of the soul life.”—P., p. 63.
The baby’s “feeble strength” is to be drawn into the game, where possible, “particularly that he may experience and perceive, directly through and in his own activity” (durch und in Eigenthätigkeit unmittelbar selbst erfahre und wahrnehme).—P., p. 78.
It is “through spontaneous activity, as well as through the mother’s instinctive knowledge of his needs” that the child gains “the first impressions of the soul, as it were, the first cognitions.”
Out of forty-nine Mother Songs, two only deal specifically with the senses, though all deal with action, and Froebel takes care to point out the close connection of sense and movement.