Froebel as a pioneer in modern psychology

by E. R. Murray

With this passage from “The First Action of a Child” we can compare the following from Stout’s “Analytic Psychology”:

“The peculiar feature in the life of animals which prevents progressive development is the existence of instincts which do for them what the human being must do for himself. Their inherited organization is such, that they perform the movements adapted to supply their needs on the mere occurrence of an appropriate external stimulus.… In man, a blind craving has to grope its way from darkness into light in order to become effective; in the animal the means of satisfaction are provided ready made by Nature at the outset.”

After having stated that “Every instinct is an impulse,” Professor James goes on to say that instinct depends upon the biological fact that the nervous system is “a pre-organized bundle of re-actions,” and that when impulses block one another, an animal with many impulses, and whose mind is elevated enough to discriminate, “loses the instinctive demeanour and appears to live a life of hesitation and choice, an intellectual life.”

Notwithstanding the very obvious fact that Froebel could know but little of the nervous system and its re-actions, it is still quite evident that his observation had led him to a clear recognition of the earlier stage, when “hesitation and choice” are impossible. The child, he says, “acts in obedience to an instinct which holds captive mind and body,” he is “incredibly short-sighted in his obedience to instinct.” That he also recognized the beginning of hesitation and choice is shown in his defence of the child who “in spite of abandonment to momentary impulse,” may have “an intense inner desire for goodness,” which, “if it could be appreciated in time,” would make of him a good man (E., p. 125); and also in his plea for the early awakening and training “of judgment and of that reflection which avoids so many blunders and which, in a natural way (i.e. without training), does not come to man sufficiently early.”—E., p. 79.

“Another source of boyish faults is in the precipitation, want of caution, indiscretion, in a word the thoughtlessness, the acting according to an impulse quite blameless, even praiseworthy, which holds captive all activity of mind and body, but whose consequences have not as yet entered into his experience, indeed it has not yet entered into his mind to define the consequences.”—E., p. 122.

Froebel gives from real life a few well-chosen examples of what the boy so “incredibly short-sighted in his obedience to impulse” may do; telling how one deliberately aims a stone at a window “with earnest effort to hit it, yet without even saying to himself that if it does so, the window must be broken,” and how he “stands rooted to the spot” when this happens. Another, a “very good-hearted boy, who dearly loved and took care of pigeons, aimed at his neighbour’s pigeon on the roof, without considering that if the bullet hit it the dove must fall.” No wonder that he urges the early awakening of that reflection (Nachdenken) which would avoid so much, and in this connection it must be remembered too that Froebel emphasized the indefiniteness of human instinct which makes comparison possible. It is also worth remarking that Froebel knew that it is only by noting consequences of actual deeds that reflection comes, and this he shows in one of his quaint parallels between “the history of creation and the development of all things.”

“Similarly in each child there is repeated the deed which marks the beginning of moral and human emancipation, of the dawn of reason—essentially the same deed that marked the dawn of reason in the race as a whole.”—E., p. 41.

It must have been a somewhat unorthodox view in 1826, but some pages further on Froebel speaks even more boldly of “the fall or—since the result is the same—the ascent of the mind of man from simple emotional development into the development of externally analytic and critical reason.”—E., p. 193.

Professor James goes on to state two other principles which make for non-uniformity of instinct. The first of these is that instincts are inhibited by habits, and the second that instincts are transitory.

The physiological fact of “plasticity” in which these principles are grounded, was of course quite out of Froebel’s ken. Nevertheless, the principles themselves do not escape his shrewd observation. Mr. McDougall points out that even acquired habits of thought and action, so important as springs of action in the developed human mind, are in a sense derived from and secondary to instincts. He goes on to say that “in the absence of instincts no habits could be formed,” so it is interesting to find Froebel arguing that the phenomena of habit is a proof of the existence of what in the infant he calls the impulse to activity or to self-employment.