unshadowed; while the organs of the human mind gradually bring to bear God's manifestation in nature, which, point by point, forms the human understanding, by making an intellectual consciousness of what the heart knows.
Because the science of education is the analysis and gauging of love by intellect, Froebel sought the true form of the art of education in the method of the mother's love, which he studied out with a philosophic earnestness. Not that any mother could tell him the secret. It cannot be put into formulas, nor does it come by intuition into the scientific form in which a Kindergartner needs to have it. Froebel, in watching the mother, saw that she was "led in a way she knew not." But he divined the meaning of that way, and its issues, and gives it to the Kindergartner.
The beginning of a child's life is its learning the fact and uses of its body. Here, as everywhere, human action blindly gropes for knowledge. The child cannot even find the breast to suck, but sucks what is nearest, compelling the mother to give it the breast by automatic motions which she understands; or by cries which awaken her heart. Gradually these reciprocal instincts open upon the child the first thing it knows; namely, that it is dependent for the means of life. For a child knows, in its heart, for a long time before it reflects and gets the thought, that not in itself, but outside of itself, is the source of its life. Of course, it is bodily life merely that it seeks at first, trying to incorporate the without with the within by eating every thing; the organs for this action on the outward world being first developed. But if it is regularly fed and kept comfortable, the eye will be satisfied with seeing, the ear with hearing, the hand with handling.
Now it is no less the instinct of the mother to make the baby's body the first plaything, than to feel its own body is the first pleasure of the child. To use its organs in play is the first action in which the voluntary combines with the instinctive animal impulse.
The first distinctive human intelligence a child expresses, is the recognition of its mother's smile. Its higher life begins in the reciprocation of that smile. No mere animal smiles! The mother's heart also goes to meet the child's faith with vocal expressions of tender joy; the heart of the child is awakened by tones which emparadise it, and it answers by like tones. There is nothing among the lower animals like this conversation of mother and child, by looks and tones, emparadising both. By and by, it notices light and colors, and begins to play with its hands and feet.
Hence the most characteristic work of Froebel is "The Mother's Cosseting Songs." In this imperfect world, mothers are not always true to ideal motherhood; but ignorance, and often indolence, and other forms of self-indulgence, superinducing stupidity,—even a tyrannous sense of property in the child, and sometimes mere timidity, interferes. And, in general, Froebel saw how little most mothers reflect on the great work they are doing when they play with their children. He wished them to study into the laws they are obeying, in order to discover their scope and meaning, that they may be able to supplement with thought the short-comings of their too often spoilt instincts. Mothers taught him more than they knew themselves; and he repaid the debt by telling them what they taught him in these "Cosseting Songs," which he gathered from many lips and brought together for the enriching of all.
First may be seen in the pictured illustrations which accompany the songs, that the plays are merely the sympathetic furtherance of the child's own motions. The mother enjoys the sight of her baby kicking up its little legs, fumbling its little hands, and enjoying its bodily existence generally; and she sympathizingly intervenes, and draws the child to forget itself in its heart-sense of her sympathetic presence. She feeds the instinctive putting forth of its own joy, the first form of its faith, with the expression of her joy; and thus the heart grows with the body, and the mind opens to expect boundless love, which it reciprocates without reserve. A healthy child
"Loves whate'er it looks upon."
If it is not happy and loving, it is the condemnation of its environment. Some one in relation with it, perhaps more than one, has failed to show the necessary love; and "better were it for such," as Jesus Christ has said "that a millstone were hung about their necks, and they were cast into the uttermost depths of the sea." If these words mean any thing,—and who will dare say they are mere rhetoric?—then let us take care that we do not rush into the work of education, without being sure that we shall not do so immense a mischief; and let mothers see to it, that they do not put their children into the care of persons who do not combine love and knowledge of childhood in measures not to be expected of the common run of children's nurses and primary teachers.
Not only because every mother is not an ideal mother, but because sometimes children are consigned, by inevitable circumstance, to other nursing than a wise mother's, such a manual as the "Cosseting Songs" is indispensable to instruct nurses.