“For what man tries to represent or do, that he begins to understand.”—E., p. 76.
As we have seen that Froebel sets before himself the self-same task which Mr. King states as the business of the genetic psychologist, so it should be no surprise that he gives virtually the same answer to the question: What do the imitative activities mean to the child?
Mr. King’s answer is that the child’s emphasis is not on the copying of a certain act, but on the attainment of a certain experience that comes through the copying or imitating. “The child,” he says, “is seldom or never imitating from his own point of view, but is always trying to sort out some of his own ill-organized experiences.”
Froebel’s words are:
“The child, though unconsciously, strives to make his inner life outwardly objective and thus perceptible, and so to become conscious of it, to see it mirrored in the outward phenomena. It is for this reason that the child tries to do himself whatever he sees done.”—P., p. 240.
“If your child is to understand any action, you must let him carry it out himself, deeply rooted in this fact is his prompt and delighted imitation of whatever he finds around him.”—M., p. 16.
“Thought must form itself in action, and action resolve and clear itself in thought.”—P., p. 42.
Every stimulus, says Mr. King, is a suggestion to activity, and it is interesting to notice how two minds working on the same lines, though separated not only by years but by difference of language, can fall into almost the same phrases. Mr. King unconsciously uses almost Froebel’s very words when he writes: “The sight of the object tends to set the activity free.”
Froebel writes:
“As the ball stirs, moves, goes, runs and rolls, the child who is playing with it begins to feel the desire to do likewise.… The smallest child moves joyfully, springs gaily, hops up and down or beats with his arms when he sees a moving object. This is not merely delight in the movement of the object before him, but it is the working of the inner activity wakened in him by the sight of outer activity. Through such vision the inner life has been freed.”—P., p. 239.