Froebel as a pioneer in modern psychology

by E. R. Murray

“Limbs and senses seem to have very different provinces of activity, and so they have; yet so deep-seated is their linked interchange that neither of them fails to react on the other. And no Games for the limbs have presented themselves to us, not even the ‘Kicking Song’ which have not also made demands upon the sense of sight.”—M., p. 168.

“The use of the body and of the limbs is developed simultaneously and in the same proportion as the use of the senses, the order being determined by their own nature and the properties of the material world. Outer objects are near, or moving away, or fixed at a distance, and either invite rest, seizure and holding fast, or invite him who would bring them nearer to move towards them.”—E., p. 47.

Froebel’s account of the significance of the ceaseless activity of the young child anticipates to a certain extent that of Mr. Irving King, who, in his most interesting “Psychology of Child Development,” deals expressly with “the functional relation of consciousness to activity.” But the views of Professor Stout as expressed in his “Analytic Psychology,” and with which Froebel’s writing has already been compared, and those of Mr. Irving King do not appear to clash in any way.

Mr. King begins by discussing the “sort of consciousness” a young child must have, and concludes that it must from the very first be a unified consciousness, however vague, any discreteness being on the part of the object. He also states that the consciousness of a human being must differ from that of the animal entering life with many “ready-made complexes of adjustment,” because “Consciousness is related not to activity, but to the growth of activity.” We have just seen that Froebel too insists on a unified consciousness, that he too says that “the external world,” though composed always of the same variety of objects, “comes to the child as ‘an undifferentiated unity.’” Froebel is also quite sound as to the difference between the mental possibilities of the animal “whose instincts, as they are called, are at birth so definite and strong,” and that of the child “born in the extreme condition of helplessness,” by whom “everything external is to be overcome.”[22]

Reflex and instinctive acts which the child brings into the world with him, says Mr. King, are unconscious, as are reflex and habitual activities to the adult, but “the checking of a movement must make the child more definitely conscious of it … it is no longer mere movement, but movement-stopped-by-something. As soon as movement stands out, as soon as the consciousness of it is interwoven with something that is not movement, we have the basis for indefinite advance.”

Froebel says the same thing in the first of the Mother Songs, where he takes as the point of departure for all future training this movement-stopped-by-something, to which Mr. King refers as the earliest beginning of consciousness. The mother is told that when her baby “strikes out with his small arms, as he kicks with his feet,” it is a challenge, to which she instinctively responds by giving him her hand or her chest, “against which he tramples with alternate feet and so measures and increases his strength.” So, he reaches “that first consciousness of self, which is born of physical opposition to and connection with the external world.”—P., p. 171.

Every one knows that Froebel laid much stress on the necessity for what is usually called “expression,” which he called Darstellung—often translated “representation.” One of his reasons for this emphasis is, however, by no means always understood, viz. that it “induces clear perception.”

It is in discussing and criticizing Professor Baldwin’s description of imitation as a circular process, that Mr. Irving King brings out two points of view from which we may regard imitation, that of the observer and that of the so-called imitator. Imitation, he says, is a term for the observer only, and not a term for psychology at all. Baldwin says that “real or persistent imitation is the reaction that will reproduce the stimulating impression and so tend to perpetuate itself.” But as Mr. King shows in the case of the child who imitates his mother’s poking of the fire, “the response of the child to the copy does not reinstate the original stimulus.… What the child gets is not a reproduced stimulus, but a new experience.”

In “The Education of Man,” written years before his whole attention was given to the young child, Froebel had emphasized the necessity for “representation” which “induces and implies clear perception.”