“Natural instinct and good example will do much, but here, as in all human concerns, one must proceed by extension of knowledge, and by careful scrutiny, or both the one and the other may mislead or be misdirected. Experience cries aloud to us, to warn us of this danger. Assuredly man ought not to neglect his natural instincts, still less abandon them, but he must ennoble them through his intelligence, purify them through his reason.”—L., p. 222.
“In the progress of development three stages differentiate themselves and fall apart; and these stages are seen both in individual men, and in the race as a whole. They are:
(1) Unconsciousness, the merely instinctive stage;
(2) Vague Feeling, the tendency upwards towards consciousness; and
(3) Relatively clear Conscious Intelligence.
Everything that is acquired by a great unity, say by a family, a community, a nation, must in its beginnings be acquired by the single members of that unity; and further it will take them in one of the three grades of development, either that of mere unconsciousness, or of vague feeling, or in the third and highest grade, that of conscious intelligence, so far as it has been maintained by mankind up to the present time.”—(Letter to Madame D. Lutkens, dated March, 1851.)
It is in “The First Action of a Child” that we find Froebel contrasting the instincts of the lower animals with those of man. Here curiously enough, Froebel, according to Professor Stout, is almost more correct than Professor Lloyd Morgan himself, whose statement “that animals do not perceive relations” Professor Stout regards as misleading. His correction is, “unless an artificial restriction is put on the meaning of the term relation, this statement would imply that animals cannot perceive the position of objects in space or their motion.… Hence we should say, not that the perception of relation is deficient in animals, but only that definite perception of relations is deficient which depends on comparison.”
Now it is this very point of comparison which Froebel takes as the essential intellectual difference between the animal independent from birth thanks to fully developed instinct, and the child helpless and apparently inferior at first, yet destined for progress “self-active and free.” He writes:
“The animal whose life impulses, powers and abilities, whose instincts as they are called (dessen Lebenstriebe, Kräfte und Anlagen, dessen Instincte wie man es nennt) are at once so definite and strong, that in natural conditions it never fails, indeed cannot fail to overcome every hindrance within its life’s reach, the animal just on this account can never arrive at a knowledge of its powers, its qualities, its nature … for it lacks all points of comparison. It lacks all points of comparison, which, in the case of man proceed from the fact that the weakest output of strength meets with obstacles which increase as the strength increases, and which will only with difficulty be conquered or overcome and annihilated.
“It is quite different in the life of man, in the beginning of which practically nothing can be accomplished without help from without. Nothing especially can be accomplished through a preponderance of inner power such, for example, as the newly hatched duckling shows on the water. Thus everything external must, by Man, with his preponderance of helplessness, be overcome as an obstacle solely through inner advancing, and outer strengthening and increasing of power through free activity of the will.”—P., p. 25.