Froebel as a pioneer in modern psychology

by E. R. Murray

It certainly passes my comprehension how anything can symbolize an idea not yet acquired, however much it may help in calling up ideas already more or less clearly gained. The crown may symbolize power to an adult, but not to the child, who when told that Stephen and Matilda fought for the crown, innocently inquired: “Couldn’t they have had another one made?” The Union Jack may symbolize British nationality or British freedom, or even British Jingoism to adults who already possess these ideas, but not to a little child. On the other hand, any kind of celebration appeals to children, as to more primitive people, and to be allowed to march round the playground on Empire Day carrying a flag arouses a joyous emotion, which will later be interwoven with patriotic ideas of various kinds. It is decidedly open to question whether as regards the child Froebel himself intended much more than this, whatever his followers may have done.

Professor Thorndyke gives us to understand that Froebel says a child plays with a ball because it symbolizes “infinite development and absolute limitation.” Now it is true that Froebel wrote in his “Aphorisms”—quoted in a footnote to Hailmann’s “Education of Man”—“The spherical is the symbol of diversity in unity and of unity in diversity.… It is infinite development and absolute limitation.” But the “Aphorisms” were not written for children, and Hailmann quotes the passage in speaking of Froebel’s philosophical doctrines as to the ultimate nature of force and matter!

To Froebel, Spirit is everywhere striving for utterance. The Universe—the Manifold—is the revelation of one great mind, and everything in Nature, “though soundless it be to the ear, a message can give emblematic (sinnbildlich) but clear.” Certainly, he would have the boy study Nature, “the writing and book of God,” but it is not to the boy that he says:

“The works speak, by the form the Spirit manifests itself. By that which has been produced and created, the nature and spirit of the producer and creator make themselves known. The world must therefore necessarily manifest the nature of its original cause—the spirit of its Creator.”

For Froebel as for Goethe, the Time Spirit “weaves for God the garment we see Him by.” He calls “the temporal an expression of the eternal, the material a manifestation of the spiritual.” He speaks of “the Power which reveals itself by uniting all things, in Nature in the Universe as weight, in human life as Love,” and it pleases him to put into the hand of the boy—in that picture of a family group by which he typifies Humanity—a ball hanging by a string, and this he calls an emblem or symbol (Sinnbild).

There is nothing in all this with which any one need quarrel. Froebel was assuredly an idealist, but in these days that is no longer a term of reproach. No one, to whom it does not appeal, need use the suggestion, but to those of us who believe that right guidance of a child’s delight in fairy tales is one way of developing his sense of reverence, there is nothing so very far fetched even in Froebel’s way of trying to bring to the child’s consciousness, the spirit striving for utterance not only in every beautiful form, but in everything beautiful as he does in “The Smell Song.”

Of fairy tales Froebel says:

“The child, like the man, would like to know the meaning of what happens around him. This is the foundation of the Greek choruses, especially in tragedies. This, too, is the foundation of many legends and fairy tales, and it is the result of the deeply-rooted consciousness of being surrounded by that which is higher and more conscious than ourselves.”—P., p. 147.

So, when the child delights in the scent of the flower, Froebel says to the mother: “Let your child find in all things a mind, a struggle for being. Colour form and spicy smell all forthtell the One ruling hand which called all into existence.” But all she is told to pass on to the child is only the thought that an angel has put the scent there and is saying: “The little one does not see me, but without me there would be no fragrance.”

Although in one sense the educator of young children need have no dealings at all with “symbolism,” yet in another, a walking-stick does, for the boy who bestrides it, symbolize, a horse, as a piece of wood may symbolize for his little sister the infant whom she may nurse and caress, with what Froebel calls “the dim and transferred perception of inner life.” Here Froebel seems quite right, as when in speaking of a child’s visit to a toyshop he says, “a true child is content with very little of the outer, he is satisfied by a doll or cart, a whistle or a sheep, provided only that in or through it he can find his own world and represent it in actual deeds.”—M., p. 199.