We have seen that according to Froebel the earliest consciousness is a kind of self-consciousness. Mr. Irving King says that the very beginning of consciousness is “movement-stopped-by-something,” and Froebel says that when the baby kicks out or tramples with his feet and the mother responds by giving him her hand or chest to push against, the child reaches that “first consciousness of self which is born of physical opposition to and connection with the external world.” Here again we come to a point in which Froebel’s insight shows well in comparison with a typical modern genetic psychologist. “Many writers,” says Mr. Irving King, “have tried to select out certain kinds of activity as peculiarly connected with the development of the infant’s sense of self.” Preyer, for instance, connects this development specially with painful sensations; Baldwin, with experience associated with people, as contrasted with experience of things. His own conclusion is that “it seems more correct to say that all the child’s activities are factors of very nearly equal importance for developing the sense of self, as distinct from things and other people,” and it is this view that we find in Froebel’s writings. Even in “The Education of Man” we find:
“If man, in accordance with his destiny, is truly and thoroughly to know each thing of the surrounding world; if with the aid of each thing he is truly and thoroughly to know himself.…”—E., p. 92.
And among his later writings, in connection with the child’s play with bricks Froebel says:
“True and early knowledge of Nature and of the outer world and especially clear self-knowledge come to the child by this early dismembering and reconstruction and perception of real things, though not as yet, by any means, through verbal designation of the various productions of childish activity.”—P., p. 123.
“Self-consciousness,” says Mr. King, “is essentially a relative and variable term for all of us. It stands for a process of definition, that, strictly speaking, proceeds till maturity, or even later.” And Froebel, writing about how, through the mother’s play with a ball, a child may gain his earliest perceptions of object, space and time, says that by the coming and going of the ball, etc.,
“there goes forth to the child the object, recognized as such by the mind and so held fast, the consciousness of the object, and so consciousness itself awakens in the child.”
And without a pause he goes on:
“Self-consciousness belongs to the nature of man, and is one with it. To become conscious of itself is the first task in the life of the child, as it is the task of the whole life of man. That this task may be accomplished the child is, even from his first appearance, surrounded by a definite place and by objects: by the air blowing around all living creatures, as well as by the arousing, human, spiritual language of words.… Thus it is with the attainment of man to consciousness and the speech required and conditioned by that attainment to consciousness.”—P., p. 39.
It is rather interesting to notice that in her translation of this passage in which Froebel declares that self-consciousness comes to a child as a result of all his surroundings, Miss Jarvis omits the word “self.” She begins her paragraph with “Bewusstsein,” instead of “Selbstbewusstsein” as it stands in the original. To quote Mr. King, “It is generally held that these are two distinct attitudes, that consciousness may exist without an accompanying consciousness of the self as separate from the objects, activities and persons of the rest of the world.” Probably this was Miss Jarvis’s own view, and she left out the word “self” as having no place or meaning in the context. It was, however, not meaningless to Froebel himself.
Mr. King continues: “The really important point is not to be able to put the finger down on some one thing that proves a developed self-consciousness, but to be able to show at every point that the process of definition is a function of the growing complexity of the child’s activities.” And, in “The First Action of a Child” Froebel writes: