This account surely makes plain, that whatever Froebel may have believed with regard to the origin of species, he in no way believed that development in general was a one-sided process, in which the environment went for nothing.
In his “Criticism,” Mr. Graham Wallas remarked: “Whoever divorced his educational system from his philosophy, would have seemed to Froebel to have taken all force and meaning out of his work.” This is most true, and it approaches absurdity to attribute so limited a view to a man imbued as Froebel was with the philosophical doctrine of the reconciliation of the opposites.[57] That all development was the result of a harmony between opposites was one of his cardinal doctrines.
“We are living in an age,” he writes, “when we are consciously under a law of development acting by the reconciliation of opposites.”
Mr. Hailmann gives a long footnote where Froebel is quoted as comparing his idea of the law of connection or unification with the ideas of Fichte and Hegel, and saying:
“It is both of these, and yet has nothing in common with either of them; it is the law which the contemplation of Nature has taught me.… And where do we find absolute contrasts that have not somewhere and somehow a connection? In action and reaction the contrasts that we see everywhere give rise to the motions in the universe as they do in the smallest organism. This implies for all development a struggle which however sooner or later will find its adjustment; and this adjustment is the connection of contrasts.”—E., p. 42.
What Froebel knew of Hegel’s philosophy was probably gained from discussions among his friends, for in the hearing of Madame von Marenholz, he said, “I do not know how Hegel formulates and applies this law, for I have had no time for the study of his system,” and he went on to say of “the philosophical systems of others” that “most of them belong to a theory of the world that is passing away, whose one-sidedness becomes more apparent every day” (Reminiscences, 225). Ebers, too, speaks of Froebel’s ideas as opposed to those of Hegel.
Even Mr. Graham Wallas allows that Froebel’s casual references to the development of species are “surprisingly modern.” No orthodox views as to the exact date of the creation of the world keep him from accepting the newly discovered testimony of the rocks as to “the remains of perished ages.” Ardent as his religious convictions were, they had a philosophic width unusual indeed in his day. The Garden of Eden is to him a parable, repeated “in the experience of every child from the time of his appearance on earth to the time when he consciously (by the help of names) beholds himself in beautiful Nature spread out before him.” In each child he sees “repeated at a later period, the deed which marks the beginning of moral and human emancipation, of the dawn of reason.”
He refers calmly to
“the fall, or, since the result is the same, the ascent of the mind of man, from simple, uniform, emotional development, into the development of externally analytic and critical reason.”—E., p. 194.