[Footnote 97]: Froebel was driven to Yverdon by the perusal of some of Pestalozzi's works which Gruner had lent him. He stayed with Pestalozzi for a fortnight, and returned with the resolve to study further with the great Swiss reformer at some future time. In 1807, he became tutor to Herr von Holzhausen's somewhat spoilt boys, demanded to have the entire control of them, and for this object their isolation from their family. The grateful parents, with whom Froebel was very warmly intimate, always kept the rooms in which he dwelt with his pupils exactly as they were at that time, in remembrance of his remarkable success with these boys. Madame von Holzhausen had extraordinary influence with Froebel, and he continued in constant correspondence with her. In 1808 Froebel and his pupils went to Yverdon, and remained till 1810. But the philosophic groundwork of Pestalozzi's system failed to satisfy him. Pestalozzi's work started from the external needs of the poorest people, while Froebel desired to found the columns supporting human culture upon theoretically reasoned grounds and upon the natural sciences. A remarkable difference existed between the characters of the two great men. Pestalozzi was diffident, acknowledged freely his mistakes, and sometimes blamed himself for them bitterly; Froebel never thought himself in the wrong, if anything went amiss always found some external cause for the failure, and in self-confidence sometimes reached an extravagant pitch.
[Footnote 98]: Either Froebel or his editor has made a blunder here. Froebel went to Göttingen in July 1811 (see [p. 84]), and to Berlin in October 1812 (see [p. 89]).
[Footnote 99]: At this time, however, the symbols of the inorganic world did not appeal to Froebel with the same force as those of the organic world. In a letter to Madame von Holzhausen. 31st March, 1831, he writes: "It is the highest privilege of natural forms or of natural life that they contain agreement and perfection within themselves as a whole class, while differing and filled with imperfection in particular individuals; for look at the loveliest blooming fruit-tree, the sweetest rose, the purest lily, and your eye can always detect deficiencies, imperfections, differences in each one, regarded as a single phenomenon, a separate bloom; and, further, the same want of perfection appears also in every single petal: on the other hand, wherever mathematical symmetry and precise agreement are found, there is death".
[Footnote 100]: Not a figure of speech altogether; for Froebel did really decline a professorship of mineralogy which was offered him at this time, in order to set forth on his educational career.
[Footnote 101]: That is, putting development into a formula—
| Thesis | ↧ | Antithesis |
| Synthesis. | ||
The true synthesis is that springing from the thesis and its opposite, the antithesis. Another type of the formula is this—
| Proposition | ↧ | Counter-proposition |
| Compromise. | ||
Understanding by "Compromise" (Vermittlung) that which results from the union of the two opposites, that which forms part of both and which links them together. The formula expressed in terms of human life, for example, is—
| Father | ↧ | Mother |
| Child. | ||