The English writer may have been Erasmus Darwin. The French writer was no doubt Lamarck, to whom belongs “the immortal glory of having for the first time worked out the theory of Descent as an independent scientific theory of the first order and as the philosophical foundation of the whole science of Biology.”
From some such source, at any rate, Froebel must have gained “the key-note of development,” viz., that it is always from the undifferentiated to the differentiated. We have already seen that he applied this to mental development and so gained his modern conception of the earliest infant consciousness, “an undifferentiated unorganized unity.”
In “The Education of Man” he speaks of
“the all-pervading law of Nature according to which the general gives rise to the particular,”—E., p. 167.
and in the Mother Songs he says:
“Whether we are looking at a seed or an egg, whether we are watching feeling or thought, what is definite proceeds everywhere from what is indefinite.”—M., p. 121.
Or, again:
“In the child as in the grain of seed, there begins a development proceeding towards complexity.”—P., p. 172.
Such quotations fully exonerate Froebel from belief in any “pre-formation” theory, whether physical or mental, as indeed Mr. Cooke made abundantly plain.