“God neither ingrafts nor inoculates. He develops the most trivial and imperfect things in continuously ascending series and in accordance with eternal self-grounded and self-developing laws. And God-likeness is and ought to be man’s highest aim in thought and deed.”—E., p. 328.
Justice has already been done to Froebel’s philosophy by Dr. John Angus MacVannel, who says in his closing paragraph:
“Froebel’s system has that unmistakable mark of greatness about it that makes it worth our faithful effort to understand it, and turn its conclusions to our advantage.… His philosophy of education taken as a whole seems, perhaps, the most satisfactory we have yet had. One cannot but believe, however, that the candid reader will at times find conclusions in his writings sustained by reasonings, that are inadequately developed and important questions by no means satisfactorily answered.… On the other hand we must not forget that it is insight, rather than exactitude, that is the life of a philosophy; herein lies the secret of Froebel’s lasting influence and power.”[5]
CHAPTER II
Froebel’s Analysis of Mind
It is probably due to the emphasis which Froebel laid upon the careful observation and equally careful interpretation of the very earliest manifestations of mental activity, that his views as to mental analysis approach so closely to more modern ideas. His psychology cannot possibly be dismissed as “faculty psychology” in which the mind of a child is regarded as a smaller and weaker replica of the mind of an adult. The older psychologies, Professor Stout points out, are based chiefly, if not entirely, on introspection alone, while Froebel, as we have already seen, demanded close observation of children in general, and of “each separate child,” as well as consideration of mental development in the race, in addition to introspection.
This “too exclusive reliance upon introspection” to which Professor Stout refers as “the fundamental error” of the faculty psychology, caused the older writers to infer that just as a child is possessed of legs, arms and hands, smaller and weaker, but otherwise apparently the same as those of an adult, even so did he possess mental “faculties,” such as memory and imagination, which, like the little legs and arms, only required exercise in order to grow strong. “It never occurred to them,” writes Professor Stout, “that the powers of understanding, willing, imagining, etc., instead of existing at the outset, might have arisen as the result of a long series of changes, each of which paved the way for the next.” It did more than “occur” to Froebel, it was a cardinal point with him. Professor Stout points out that the idea of development is essential to mental science, and Froebel was a biologist actually studying development, before he became a psychologist. He came to the study of mind prepared to find just such a series of changes.[6] In speaking of evolution in general, he says:
“Each successive stage of development does not exclude the preceding, but takes it up into itself, ennobled, uplifted, perfected.”—P., p. 198.
He speaks of: