Later, speaking of a child’s earliest attempts at walking, he says:
“The smallest child who begins to exercise the power of walking, loves to go from place to place—i.e. he likes to turn about and to change the relationships in which he stands to different objects, and in which they stand to him. Through these changes he seeks self-recognition and self-comprehension, as well as recognition of the different objects which surround him, and recognition of his environment as a whole.”—P., p. 243.
Dr. Ward requires still more and says that “the unity of a thing” carries us over to temporal continuity, and this he attributes to “the continuous presentation of such a group as the bodily self, which makes us infer continuity of existence, for presentations which have been presented, removed and re-presented.”
We have seen already that Froebel says the child perceives the ball “through departing and returning, as a space-filling object, as a body, just as he perceives himself, his corporeal frame, as a space-filling object, as a body.” And there is also a quaint, but interesting reference to something of this kind in one of the earliest Nursery Songs called “All Gone,” where the mother is distinctly told that she must help her child to realize continuity through change.
“How can the child understand what you mean when you say ‘It’s all gone, Baby’? He will not be contented unless you put meaning into it. What he saw just now he sees no longer, what was above is below, what was there is just now vanished. Where, then, has it gone?”
And the baby is supposed to be quieted by the mother’s playful tale of the present whereabouts of his bread and milk, a German version of the homely “Down red lane.”
Professor Ward’s last point in the intuition of things is “substantiality.” “What is it,” he says, “that has thus a beginning and continues indefinitely?” The answer is that “of all the constituents of things only one is universally present, that of physical solidity, which presents itself according to circumstances, as impenetrability, resistance or weight.… In other words, that which occupies space is the substantial; the other real constituents are but its properties or attributes, the marks or manifestations which lead us to expect its presence.”
Froebel, again, sums up the ideas he intends the child to gain from play with the ball:
“The ball shows contents, mass, matter, space, form, size and figure; it bears within itself an independent power (elasticity) and hence it has rest and movement, and consequently stability and spontaneity; it offers even colour, and at least calls forth sound; it is indeed heavy—that is, it is attracted—and thus shares in the general property of all bodies.… Therefore, it places man, on his entrance into the world, furnished with activity of limbs and senses, in the midst of all phenomena and perceptions of Nature and of all life … to place man through a skilful education in the understanding of Nature and life, and to maintain him in it with consciousness and circumspection cannot be done too early.”—P., p. 53.
The soft ball of the first gift is supposed to be given to the child when he is three or even two months old, but when he reaches six or eight months, he is supposed to be ready for something which “makes itself known especially through noise, sound, tone, as it were through speech.” The second gift therefore consists of a wooden sphere and a cube, which are intended not only to please the child by the noise they make, but to serve as material for comparison. The mother is told to roll the sphere and then, in order to make this oppositeness between sphere and cube perceptible to the child, to place the cube steadily before him and presently to take one of his little hands, pushing gently at first, but