Not Stanley Hall himself insists more that the development of the individual shall follow the development of the race, and this in 1826, two years before Baer, and four years before Comte, to whom Herbert Spencer attributed the doctrine. “Humanity,” he says, “lives only in its continuous development.”
“Each successive generation and each successive individual human being, inasmuch as he would understand the past and present, must pass through all preceding phases of human development and culture, and this should not be done in the way of dead imitation or mere copying, but in the way of living spontaneous self-activity.”—E., p. 18.
There is certainly no ground for assuming that Froebel held any such pre-Darwinian views as a special creation of each species, for there is no point on which he insists more emphatically than that in Nature development is continuously progressive.
“In God’s world, just because it is God’s world, by Him created, one thing constant is expressed to which we give the name of unbroken progression of development in all and through all.”[58]—M., p. 154.
“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.”—E., p. 328.
Mr. Winch makes merry over Froebel’s sentence:
“As Man and Nature have one origin, they must be subject to the same laws,”
and remarks that “this conception is almost completely given up.… Our view now rather is one in which God and Nature are at strife, in which the ethical interest overcomes Nature.…”
But Froebel is far ahead of this. The great law to him is the Law of Development to which Man and Nature, which includes Man, are subject. The ethical interest is not, as Mr. Winch intimates, something transcending Nature, but is itself evolved. Morality, Froebel distinctly tells us, is “rooted” in Instinct, and “human development means spiritual development.”
Professor O’Shea says of the doctrine of Unfoldment which he attributes to Froebel that it “regards man on his spiritual side as an entity set apart from everything in the universe.”[59]