FROEBEL AS A PIONEER IN MODERN PSYCHOLOGY

FROEBEL AS A PIONEER
IN MODERN PSYCHOLOGY

BY
E. R. MURRAY
Author of “A Story of Infant Schools and Kindergartens”

“Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping.

Pioneers! O Pioneers!”

BALTIMORE Md.
WARWICK & YORK, INC.
1914

(All rights reserved)

PREFACE

Some day Froebel will come to his own, and the carefulness of his observation, the depth of his thought, the truth of his theories, and the success of his actual experiments in education will all be acknowledged.

There are few schools nowadays so modern as the short-lived Keilhau, with its spirit of freedom and independence and its “Areopagus” in which the boys themselves judged grave misdemeanours while the masters settled smaller matters alone. There are few schools now which have such an all-round curriculum, including, as it did, the mother tongue as well as classics and modern languages; ancient and modern history; Nature study and Nature rambles; school journeys, lasting for two or three weeks and extending as far as Switzerland for the older lads, while the younger boys visited German towns and were made acquainted with peasant life; definite instruction in field-work, in building and carpentry, etc.; religious teaching in which Middendorf endeavoured “to show the merits of the religions of all nations”; physical training with the out-of-doors wrestling ground and shooting stand and gymnasium “for every spare moment of the winter,” and organized games; and dramatic teaching where “classic dramas” and other plays were performed, and for which the boys built the stage and painted the scenes. There was even co-education, “flirtation being unknown,” because all had their heads so full of more important matters, but where free intercourse of boy and girl “softened the manners of the young German savages.”

The purpose of this book is to show that all these things, besides the Kindergarten and the excellent plan for the Helba Institute, did not come into being by chance, but were the outcome of the deep reflection of a man who combined the scientific with the philosophic temperament; and who, because his ideal as a teacher was “Education by Development,” had made a special study of the instinctive tendencies, and the requirements of different stages of child development, as I have tried to prove in Chapters VI and VII.

I should like to explain one or two points, first, that though for all quotations I have referred to the most commonly used translations of Froebel’s writings, yet I have frequently given my own rendering when the other seemed inadequate; secondly, that I have endeavoured to give the context as often as possible, and have also given the actual German words, that I might not be accused of reading in modern ideas which are not really in the text; and, lastly, that I have purposely repeated quotations rather than give my readers the trouble of turning back to another page.

In conclusion may I take this opportunity of paying grateful thanks first to Miss Alice Words and to Miss K. M. Clarke, without whose kind encouragement I should never have completed my task, and also to Professor Alexander for several helpful suggestions, and to Miss Ida Sachs for friendly help.

E. R. Murray.

CONTENTS

EXPLANATION OF REFERENCES
To the Works of Froebel quoted in the text

CHAPTER I
Froebel’s Anticipation of Modern Psychology

“A great man condemns the world to the task of explaining him.”

The purpose of this little book is to show that Froebel’s educational theories were based on psychological views of a type much more modern than is at all generally understood. It is frequently stated that Froebel’s psychology is conspicuous by its absence, but in a somewhat close study of Froebel’s writings I have been again and again surprised to find how much Froebel seems to have anticipated modern psychology.

A probable reason for the overlooking of so much sound psychological truth is to be found in the fact that much of it is obscured by details which seem to us trivial, but which Froebel meant as applications of the theories he was endeavouring to make clear to minds not only innocent of, but incapable of, psychology.

Most educationists have read “The Education of Man,” but few outside the Kindergarten world are likely to have bestowed much thought on Froebel’s later writings. It is in these, however, that we see Froebel watching with earnest attention that earliest mental development which is now regarded as a distinct chapter in mental science, but which was then largely if not entirely ignored.

With the same spirit of inquiry and the same field for investigation—for children acted and thought then as they act and think now—it is only natural that Froebel should have made at least some of the same discoveries as the genetic psychologist of to-day.

It would be unfair at any date to expect a complete psychology from a writer whose subject is not mental science, but education. Mistakes, too, one must expect, and these are not to be ignored.[1] Still there remains a solid amount of psychological discovery for which Froebel has had as yet but little credit.

Indeed, just as his disciples have been inclined, like all disciples, to think that their master has said the last word on his own subject, so have opponents of Froebelian doctrines, irritated perhaps by these pretensions, made direct attacks on somewhat insufficient grounds. In a later chapter, an attempt has been made to deal with what seems unfounded in such attacks.[2]

The major part of the book, however, is intended to show the correctness of Froebel’s views on points now regarded as of fundamental importance, and generally recognized as modern theories. For this purpose passages from Froebel’s writings are here compared with similar passages from such undoubted authorities as Dr. James Ward, Professor Stout, Professor Lloyd Morgan, Mr. W. Macdougall, Mr. J. Irving King, and others.

In the first place, it should be noted that Froebel was fully aware of the necessity for a psychological basis for his educational theories.

Writing in 1841, he says:

“I am firmly convinced that all the phenomena of the child world, those which delight us, as well as those which grieve us, depend upon fixed laws as definite as those of the cosmos, the planetary system and the operations of Nature; it is therefore possible to discover them and examine them. When once we know and have assimilated these laws, we shall be able powerfully to counteract any retrograde and faulty tendencies in children, and to encourage, at the same time, all that is good and virtuous.”—L., p. 91.

Nor was Froebel in any doubt as to how these laws are to be discovered, and his order of investigation is very similar to that prescribed by Professor Stout. The latter, though regarding genetic psychology as “the most important and most interesting,” considers that it should be preceded by:—1, A general analysis of consciousness, analytic and largely introspective; 2, An investigation of the laws of mental process, “analytic also, inasmuch as we endeavour to ascertain the general laws of mental process by analysis of the fully developed mind.”

Froebel, too, regards the analytic as a necessary preparation for the genetic, and says that parents and teachers, who wish to supply the needs of the child at different stages of development:

“are to consider life firstly through looking into themselves, into the course of their own development, its phenomena and its claims—through the retrospection (Rückblick) of the earliest possible years of their own lives, and also the introspection (Einblick) of their present lives, that their own experience may furnish a key to the problem of the child’s condition (den Zustand des Kindes in sich zu lösen). Secondly, by the deepest possible search into the life of the child, and into what he must necessarily require according to his present stage of development.”—P., p. 168.

Professor Stout adds later that anthropology and philology may ultimately yield results as important as those yielded by physiology. Froebel could have no idea of the physiological parallel to mental process, but he did not omit the anthropological inquiry, for in another passage he enlarges his first point, declaring that:

“It is essential for parents and teachers, for the sake of their children, and that their educational efforts may meet with a rich reward, not only to recall as far as possible the first phenomena, the course and conditions of the development of their own lives, but that they should compare this with the phenomena, the course and conditions of the development of the world, and of life in general in Nature and History, and so by degrees raise themselves to a knowledge of the general as well as of the particular laws of life development, that the guidance of the child may find in these laws a higher and stronger—their true foundation, as well as their surest determination.”—P., p. 66.

Even his detractors generally allow that Froebel had a wonderful insight into child-nature, but this is too often spoken of as if it were due to some specialized faculty of intuition, not known to psychology.

Froebel’s knowledge of child-nature came to him precisely as it comes to the psychologist of the present day, through patient observation of the doings of little children, and thoughtful interpretation of their possible meaning. It is true that he drew his conclusions from too narrow a field, but of this he was well aware. In a letter to a cousin thanking her for the “comparative account of the various manifestations of children,” which she had sent him, he complains, and this, be it remembered, in 1840, that “it is a subject to which one can rarely get even cultivated parents to pay attention,” and he adds:

“I would beg of you to collect as many observations for me as you can, both things which you yourself have observed, and also remarks made by your Robert and the other children when at play. If you have the time for this, pray do it for the furtherance of the cause; other friends are at work for me in the same way.”—L., p. 67.

In another letter to this cousin he says:

“It would delight me greatly if you could confide to me what you remember of your feelings, perceptions, and ideas as a mother greeting the new-born life of her infant, and your observations of the first movements of its limbs and the beginning of the development of its senses.”—L., p. 110.

To another friend he writes:

“In the interests of the children I have still another request to make—that you would record in writing the most important facts about each separate child. It seems to me most necessary for the comprehension, and for the true treatment of child-nature, that such observations should be made public from time to time, in order that children may become better and better understood in their manifestations, and may therefore be more rightly treated, and that true care and observation of unsophisticated childhood may ever increase.”—L., p. 89.

Froebel made these requests, as he made his own observations, as the result of the conviction with which he declares himself “thoroughly penetrated,”

“that the movements of the young and delicate mind of the child, although as yet so small as to be almost unnoticeable, are of the most essential consequence to his future life.”—P., p. 53.

“Why do we observe the child less than the germ of a plant? Is it to be supposed that in the child, the capacity to become a complete human being is contained less than in the acorn is contained the capacity to become a strong, vigorous and complete oak?”—P., p. 62.

“We cannot pass over unmentioned the fact, essential for the whole life of the child, for the whole course of his development, that phenomena and impressions which seem to us insignificant, and which we generally leave unnoticed, have for the child, and especially for his inner world, most important results, since the child develops more through what seems to us small and imperceptible, than through what appears to us large and striking … hence—wholly contrary to prevailing opinion—nowhere is consideration of that which is small and insignificant of more importance than in the nursery.”—P., p. 125.

Professor Dewey, one of the few important educational writers who do justice to Froebel as a pioneer, gives as a general summary of his educational principles:

“1. That the primary business of school is to train children in co-operative and mutually helpful living; to foster in them the consciousness of mutual interdependence, and to help them practically in making the adjustments that will carry this spirit into overt deeds.

“2. That the primary root of all educative activity is in the instinctive, impulsive attitudes and activities of the child, and not in the presentation and application of external material, whether through the ideas of others or through the senses; and that, accordingly, numberless spontaneous activities of children, plays, games, mimic efforts, even the apparently meaningless motions of infants—exhibitions previously ignored as trivial, futile, or even condemned as positively evil—are capable of educational use, nay, are the foundation-stones of educational effort.

“3. That these individual tendencies and activities are organized and directed through the uses made of them in keeping up the co-operative living already spoken of; taking advantage of them to reproduce on the child’s plane the typical doings and occupations of the larger maturer society into which he is finally to go forth; and that it is through production and creative use that valuable knowledge is secured and clinched.”[3]

So little, however, are these principles understood as Froebel’s, that in the Pedagogical Seminary for July, 1900, a paper was published on “The Reconstruction of the Kindergarten,” wherein it was maintained that the basis of reconstruction must be the child’s natural instincts. The writer, Mr. Eby, had apparently no idea that the Kindergarten was originally based on this very foundation. He evidently did not know that Froebel has given, in his “Education of Man,” a very fair account of these instincts, omitting nothing of great importance, and pointing, at least, to a better principle of classification than that adopted by Mr. Eby.[4] It is, however, only fair to Froebel to mention that he himself regarded his own account as far from being commensurate with the importance of the subject, for the year following that of the publication of “The Education of Man” he writes:

“Since these spontaneous activities of children have not yet been thoroughly thought out from a high point of view, and have not yet been regarded from what I might almost call their cosmical and anthropological side, we may from day to day expect some philosopher to write a comprehensive book about them.”—A., p. 76.

The problems Froebel endeavoured to solve are precisely those which are absorbing the genetic psychologist of the present day, as stated, for example, in Mr. Irving King’s “Psychology of Child Development,” viz.: “to examine the various forms of the child’s activity, to get some insight into the nature of the child himself”—“to get at the meaning of child-life in terms of itself.”

Every reader of “The Education of Man” will remember how Froebel uses his own boyish reminiscences to help others to understand childish actions often utterly misunderstood. In his paper on “Movement Plays” he writes:

“In that nurture of childhood which is intended to assist development, it is by no means sufficient to supply play-material in proportion merely to the stage of development already outwardly manifest. It is at the same time of the utmost importance to trace out the inner process of development and to satisfy its demands.… In the nurture, development, and education of the child, and especially in the attempt to employ him, his own nature, his own life and energy must be the main consideration. The knowledge of isolated and external phenomena may occasionally be a guide-post pointing our direction, but it can never be a path leading to the specific aim of child culture and education; for the condition of education is none other than comprehension of the whole nature and essence of humanity as manifested in the child.”—P., p. 239.

Just as Mr. Irving King, writing in 1904, says that we must take as our starting-point the child’s bodily activities, so did Froebel too declare, that:

“The present time makes upon the educator the wholly indispensable requirement—to comprehend the earliest activity, the first action of the child.”—P., p. 16.

To this first action, Froebel devotes a whole paper, “Das erste Kindesthun,” the opening sentence of which contains the words:

“As the new-born child, like a ripe grain of corn, bears life within itself which will be developed progressively and spontaneously, though in close connection with life in general, so activity and action are the first manifestations of awakening child-life.”—P., p. 23.

Writing in 1847, Froebel says that “decision, zeal, and perseverance” must be brought to bear upon his plan, in order that:

“(a) More careful observation of the child, his relationships and his line of development, may become general amongst us; and thereby

“(b) A better grounded insight be obtained into the child’s being, mental and physical, and the general collective conditions of his life.… Deeper insight will be gained into the meaning and importance of the child’s actions and outward manifestations.”—L., p. 248.

This quotation is important as showing that Froebel was deliberately looking for “a line of development,” that he might better understand “the child’s being, mental and physical.” Considering that Froebel wrote between 1826 and 1850, the important points on which he may be said to have successfully anticipated modern psychology are, his recognition that the mind is what he calls “a tri-unity” of action, feeling, and thought; his treatment of early mental activity and his definition of will; his conception of the earliest consciousness as an undifferentiated whole; his recognition of the importance of action not only in the realm of perception, but also in that of feeling; and his surprisingly complete account of instinct. Such anticipations are due to the fact that the idea of development then new to the scientific world possessed his very soul.

“Humanity, which lives only in its continuous development and cultivation, seems to us dead and stationary, something to be modelled over again and again in accordance with its present type. We are ignorant of our own nature and the nature of humanity.…”—E., p. 146.

“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. And God-likeness is and ought to be man’s highest aim in thought and deed.”—E., p. 328.

Justice has already been done to Froebel’s philosophy by Dr. John Angus MacVannel, who says in his closing paragraph:

“Froebel’s system has that unmistakable mark of greatness about it that makes it worth our faithful effort to understand it, and turn its conclusions to our advantage.… His philosophy of education taken as a whole seems, perhaps, the most satisfactory we have yet had. One cannot but believe, however, that the candid reader will at times find conclusions in his writings sustained by reasonings, that are inadequately developed and important questions by no means satisfactorily answered.… On the other hand we must not forget that it is insight, rather than exactitude, that is the life of a philosophy; herein lies the secret of Froebel’s lasting influence and power.”[5]

CHAPTER II
Froebel’s Analysis of Mind

It is probably due to the emphasis which Froebel laid upon the careful observation and equally careful interpretation of the very earliest manifestations of mental activity, that his views as to mental analysis approach so closely to more modern ideas. His psychology cannot possibly be dismissed as “faculty psychology” in which the mind of a child is regarded as a smaller and weaker replica of the mind of an adult. The older psychologies, Professor Stout points out, are based chiefly, if not entirely, on introspection alone, while Froebel, as we have already seen, demanded close observation of children in general, and of “each separate child,” as well as consideration of mental development in the race, in addition to introspection.

This “too exclusive reliance upon introspection” to which Professor Stout refers as “the fundamental error” of the faculty psychology, caused the older writers to infer that just as a child is possessed of legs, arms and hands, smaller and weaker, but otherwise apparently the same as those of an adult, even so did he possess mental “faculties,” such as memory and imagination, which, like the little legs and arms, only required exercise in order to grow strong. “It never occurred to them,” writes Professor Stout, “that the powers of understanding, willing, imagining, etc., instead of existing at the outset, might have arisen as the result of a long series of changes, each of which paved the way for the next.” It did more than “occur” to Froebel, it was a cardinal point with him. Professor Stout points out that the idea of development is essential to mental science, and Froebel was a biologist actually studying development, before he became a psychologist. He came to the study of mind prepared to find just such a series of changes.[6] In speaking of evolution in general, he says:

“Each successive stage of development does not exclude the preceding, but takes it up into itself, ennobled, uplifted, perfected.”—P., p. 198.

He speaks of:

“the master thought, the fundamental idea of our time, that is, the education and development of mankind.”—L., p. 149.

And in his “Education of Man,” in a long and eloquent passage on the need for continuity of training from the tiniest of beginnings, he says:

“It is highly pernicious and even destructive to consider the stages of human development as distinct, and not as life shows them, continuous in themselves, in unbroken transitions.”—E., p. 27.

The analysis of mind which Froebel recognizes, is the still commonly accepted “tri-partite,” but he never fails to refer to this as a unity or a tri-unity. Indeed, his constant harping upon this string becomes almost wearisome, in spite of the ingenuity with which he continually varies his terms.

“The early phenomenon of child-life, of human existence in childhood, is an activity, one with feeling and perception (Wahrnehmen).”—P., p. 23.

“That the nature of man shows itself early in the life of the child, as feeling, acting and representing, thinking and perceiving, and that in this tri-unity is included the whole of his life utterance and activity, we have said repeatedly, and it lies open for any one to notice.”—P., p. 122.

Disguised as Love, Life, and Light, this trinity is made the connection of man, on the one side with Nature, on the other side with God. God—who is Life, Love, and Light, the All—shows Himself in Nature, in the universe as life (energy), in humanity as love, and in wisdom or in the spirit as light. Energy or life man shares with Nature; by love he is united with humanity; and by light or wisdom he is at one with God.

For his “gift plays” Froebel claims that they “take hold of the child in the tri-unity of his nature”:

“As now each of the single plays separately considered takes hold of the child early, in the tri-unity of his nature, as doing, feeling, and thinking, so yet more do the employments as a whole.”—P., p. 56.

And a forcible passage runs:

“Only if the child is treated through fostering his instinct for activity in the tri-unity of his nature, as living, loving, and perceiving, in the unity of his life, only thus can he develop as that which he is, the manifold and organized, but in himself single, whole.”—P., p. 12.

This development of the threefold yet single nature constitutes the “harmonious development,” reiterated ad nauseam and without explanation, in Kindergarten text-books. It is also the key to much that seems to us useless detail as to the toys and games of early childhood. The mother is told that:

“It is of the highest importance for the nurse to consider the earliest and slightest traces of the organization (Gliederung) within itself of the child’s mind as bodily, emotional and intellectual, that in his development from mere existence to perception and thought, none of these directions of his nature should be fostered at the expense of the other … the real foundation, the starting-point of human development is the heart and the emotions, but cultivation of action and thought (die Ausbildung zur That und zum Denken) must go side by side with it, constantly and inseparably: and thought must form itself into action, and action resolve and clear itself into thought; but both have their roots in the emotional nature.”[7]—P., p. 42.

The first part of the following quotation from a letter written in 1851 towards the close of Froebel’s life might almost be taken from a text-book of the present day:

“We find also three attitudes, spheres of work, and regions of mind in man:

“(1) the region of the soul, the heart, Feeling;

“(2) the region of the mind, the head, Intellect;

“(3) the region of the active life, the putting forth to actual deed, Will.

“As mental attitudes these three divisions seem the wider apart the more we contemplate them; as spheres of work and regions of mind they seem quite separate and perfect opposites. But the highest and most absolute opposition is that which most needs, and necessitates reconciliation; complete opposites condition their uniting link. The need for the uniting link appears in almost every circumstance of life.… To satisfy that need is the most imperative need now set before the human race, … you will realize that the strengthening of character which we all agree to be a necessity of the age, is to be gained not only by stimulating and elevating the soul and the emotions, but by raising the whole mind, by training the intellect and the will.… Then the heart would acknowledge and esteem the intellectual power, just as the intellect already recognizes feeling as that which gives true warmth to our lives; and life as a whole would make manifest the soul which quickens existence, and gives it a meaning, as well as the intellect which gives it precision and culture. Intellect, feeling and will would then unite, a many-sided power, to build up and constitute our life. In the room of the unstable character which must result from the mere cultivation of the one department of emotion; in the room of the doubt, or, I might say empty negation, which too often proceeds from the mere cultivation of the intellect; in the room of the materialism, animalism, and sensuality which must come from the mere attention to the body, and physical side of our nature; we should then have the harmonious development of every side of our nature alike, we should then be able to build up a life which would be everywhere in touch with God, with physical nature, with humanity at large.”—L., p. 300.

In his article in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Dr. Ward says, that in taking up the question of what we exactly mean by thinking, “we are really passing one of the hardest and fastest lines of the old psychology—that between sense and understanding. So long as it was the fashion to assume a multiplicity of faculties the need was less felt for a clear exposition of their connection. A man had senses and intellect much as he had eyes and ears; the heterogeneity in the one case was no more puzzling than in the other.”

In this connection it can again be shown that Froebel was in advance of the old psychologists. In the first of the two games in the Mother-Play book dealing with sense-training—two out of forty-nine, the remainder dealing chiefly with action—he makes it very clear that he draws no hard and fast line between sense and understanding. He tells the mother that Nature speaks to the child through the senses, which act as gateways to the world within, but that light comes from the mind:

“Durch die Sinne, schliesst sich auf des Innern Thor

Doch der Geist ist’s der dies zieht ans Licht hervor.”

And when he says that the baby in the cradle should not be left unoccupied if it wakes, he uses a pronoun in the singular in referring to “the activity of sense and mind.” He suggests hanging a cage containing a lively bird in the child’s line of vision and adds:

“This attracts the activity of the child’s senses and mind and gives it nourishment in many ways.”[8]—E., p. 49.

The faculty psychology and the formal discipline theory that came from it, says Professor Horne, did not admit the possibility of training one faculty, e.g. perception, by training another, e.g. reason, “it was not the mind that was trained, but its faculties.”

It is, however, of the merest infant that Froebel uses such expressions as “the awakening power of thought,” “the tenderest growth of mind,” and tells the mother that he “shows trace of thought, and can draw conclusions.” The ball is given to the baby to help him “to find himself in the midst of his perceptive, operative, and his comparing (thinking) activity.”[9]—P., p. 55. Long years before this he had written of the teaching of drawing, “this instruction addresses itself to the senses, and through them to the power of thought.”—E., p. 294.

“He who does not perceive traces of the future development of the child, who does not foster these with self-consciousness and wisdom, when they lie hidden in the depths and in the night, will not see them clearly, will not nourish them suitably, at least, not sufficiently, when they lie open before him.”—P., p. 58.

Instead of ready-made faculties Froebel recognizes possibilities, conditions, which will remain possibilities if the necessary stimulus is not forthcoming, for in noting how the mother talks to her infant, though she is obliged to confess that there can be no understanding of her words, he says the mother’s instinctive action is right:

“for that which will one day develop, and which must originate, begins and must begin when as yet nothing exists but the conditions, the possibility.”—P., p. 40.

Elsewhere he asks:

“Is it to be supposed that in the child the capacity for becoming a complete human being is contained less than in the acorn is contained the capacity to become a strong, vigorous and complete oak?”—P., p. 62.

And he speaks of how the mother appeals to the infant as

“understanding, perceptive and capable, for where there is not the germ of something, that something can never be called forth and appear.”—P., p. 31.

It is true that in the same passage in which he speaks of “the tenderest growth of mind,” he does speak of mental powers (Geisteskräfte), as indeed every one does, but a few lines above he has spoken of “the cultivation of the mental power of the child in different directions.”[10] Besides, the mental powers to which he here alludes, and which are to be awakened and fostered in the infant, are the powers “to compare, to infer, to judge, to think.”—P., p. 57. Here, too, Froebel gives a description of what he means by memory, and it is clearly not a separate faculty considered apart from another faculty, viz. imagination:

“The plays carried on with the ball awaken and exercise the power of the child’s mind to place again before himself mentally a vanished object, to see it mentally even when the outer perception is gone; these games awaken and practise the power of re-presenting, of remembering, of holding fast in remembrance an object formerly present, of again thinking of it; that is, they foster the memory.”—P., p. 57.

So even the infant is to think, and the progress is well described in the Mother Plays as

“from experience of a thing, joined with thought about it, up to pure thought.”—M., p. 121.

In a lecture[11] given many years ago, Dr. Ward sought to drive home to teachers the futility of this hard and fast line between sense training and training to think. And there are some interesting parallels between Dr. Ward’s metaphors here and Froebel’s writing in “The Education of Man.” Dr. Ward said:

“Training of the senses, as it is not very happily called, is, if it is anything, so much intellectual exercise.… And nothing can be more absurd than to suppose it is not necessary.… By a judicious training in observation you begin to make a child think when it is five years old.… If a child is to think to any purpose, he must think as he goes on; as soon as the material he has gathered begins to oppress him he must think it into shape, or it will tend to smother intellectual life at its dawn, as a bee is drowned in its own honey, for want of cells in which to store it.”

It is in describing how the little child collects pebbles, twigs, leaves, etc., that Froebel writes:

“The child loves all things that enter his small horizon and extend his little world. To him the least thing is a new discovery; but it must not come dead into the little world, nor lie dead therein, lest it obscure the small horizon and crush the little world.… It is the longing for interpretation that urges the child to appeal to us … the intense desire for this that urges him to bring his treasures to us and lay them in our laps.”—E., p. 73.

The help we are told to give at first is merely to supply the child with a name, for “through the name the form is retained in memory and defined in thought.” Later the mother is told to provide “encouragement and help, that the child may weave into a whole what he has found scattered and parted.” As a type of the help considered necessary we have:

“‘Mother, are the pigeons and hens birds, for the pigeons live in pigeon-houses and the chickens don’t fly?’ ‘Have they no feathers, child; have they no wings? Haven’t they two legs like all birds?’ ‘Are the bees and butterflies and beetles birds, too: for they have wings and fly much higher.…’ ‘Look, they have no feathers, they build no nests.’”—M., p. 56.

In another passage Froebel calls it not only advisable but necessary that the parents, without being pedantic or over-anxious, should connect the child’s doings with language, because this “increases knowledge, and awakens that judgment and reflection (die Urtheilskraft und das Nachdenken), to which man, left to Nature, does not attain sufficiently early.”—E., p. 79.

Giving names, and helping in classification is surely a sufficient parallel to Dr. Ward’s “thinking the material into shape,” and just as the latter says that by such training you can “make a child think” when it is five years old, so Froebel in his chapter on “Man in Earliest Childhood” makes his ideal father “sum up his rule of conduct in a few words,” declaring that: “To lead children early to think, this I consider the first and foremost object of child-training.”—E., p. 87.

Froebel’s theories, then, cannot be dismissed as based on “faculty psychology,” since it seems clear that wherever he found them his views on mental analysis were very similar to those now generally accepted. It is more remarkable, however, that he should have modern views about Conation and Will.

CHAPTER III
Will and its Early Manifestations

It is open to doubt whether any modern psychologist has yet given a better definition of fully developed Will than that given by Froebel eighty-seven years ago:

“Will is the mental activity of man ever consciously proceeding from a definite point, in a definite direction, to a definite conscious end and aim, in harmony with the whole nature of humanity.”—E., p. 96.

With this definition compare what Professor Stout has to say:

“In its most complex developments, mental activity takes the form of self-conscious and deliberate volition, in which the starting-point is the idea of an end to be attained, and the desire to attain it; and the goal is the realization of this end, by the production of a long series of changes in the external world … it belongs to the essence of will, not merely to be directed towards an end, but to ideally anticipate this and consciously aim at it.”[12]

Between these two definitions the difference is in the omission in Froebel’s definition of any mention of desire, and this is supplied a little later, when, having stated that “by school here is meant neither the schoolroom, nor school-keeping, but the conscious communication of knowledge for a definite purpose, and in definite connection,” he ends up with:

“By this knowledge, instruction and the school are to lead man from desire to will, from activity of will to firmness of will, and thus continually advancing, to the attainment of his destiny, of his earthly perfection.”—E., p. 139.

Now Professor Stout’s whole psychology is founded on his conception of mental activity. Towards the end of his second volume he says: “The reader is already familiar with my general doctrine. It has pervaded the whole treatment of psychological topics in this work. The aim of the present chapter is to present it in a more systematic form, and to guard it against objections. Our starting-point lies in the conception of mental activity as the direction of mental process towards an end.”

It is distinctly significant, therefore, to find how closely Froebel’s ideas on the subject resemble Professor Stout’s conception of mental activity.

“Conscious process,” writes Professor Stout, “is in every moment directed towards an end, whether this end be distinctly or vaguely recognized by the conscious subject, or not recognized at all.”

Froebel writes:

“In all activity, in every deed of man, even as a child, yes the very smallest, an aim is expressed, a reference to something, to the furthering or representing of something; … thus the child strives, even if unconsciously, to make his inner life objective, and through that perceptible, that so he may become conscious of it.”—P., pp. 237-240.

The same idea, that conscious process is directed to an end, though there may be no consciousness of that end, is given in another passage, where Froebel is speaking of the need for satisfying a child’s normal desire for playthings.

“Very often the child seeks for something, nevertheless he himself does not know at all what he seeks; at another time he puts something away from him and again knows not why.”—P., p. 168.

Of the earliest mental activity Professor Stout writes:

“In its earliest and simplest form, mental activity consists in those simple reactions which without being determined by any definite idea of an end to be realized, tend on the whole to the maintenance of immediate pleasure and the avoidance of immediate pain.”

The movements of the organism at this earliest stage “seem primarily adapted to the conservation and furtherance of vital process in general.”[13]

Froebel speaks of the child’s efforts:

“to put far from him that which is opposed to the needs of his life and yet would break in upon it.”—P., p. 167.

He tells the mother that, in the first stages at least, the restlessness and tears of the infant will warn her of the presence of anything in his surroundings hurtful to his development, while his laughter and movements of pleasure will show “what according to the feeling of the child is suited to the undisturbed development of his life as an immature human being.”

Mr. Stout goes on to say that such simple reactions are adapted “secondarily and by way of necessary corollary to the conservation and furtherance of conscious life.” He tells us that: “The primary craving with which the education of the senses begins, so far as it does not involve such practical needs as that of food, may be described as a general craving for stimulation or excitement … this conation being in the first instance in the highest degree indeterminate.”

Froebel, who speaks of the nurse “soothing the restless child vaguely striving for definite and satisfactory outward activity,” tells us that:

“if his bodily needs are satisfied and he feels himself well and strong, the first spontaneous employment of the child is spontaneous taking in (selbstthätiges Aufnehmen) of the outer world.”—P., p. 29.

He writes to Madame Schmidt, the cousin for whose assistance he has begged in observing children:

“This spontaneous activity of limb and vividness of sensation natural to infancy, and I may say inseparable from it, must also be carefully studied.”—L., p. 110.

And, in the Mother Songs, he says:

“You can see how his bodily activity, the movement and use of his limbs, like the activity of his senses, all turn towards one point: Life must be grasped, experienced and perceived … he wants to appropriate the outer and to re-embody it … his susceptibility for all that gives and takes up life will strike you as something that elevates his life in every way; even as young plants and animals are susceptible to the faintest workings of light and warmth, or the impressions of their environment, however delicate. Moreover, this receptivity is most closely related to great general excitability and sensibility (Erregbarkeit, Reizbarkeit).”—M., pp. 119-121.

Froebel’s views as to the nature both of early and of later mental activity then bear a strong resemblance to the modern view as stated by Professor Stout.[14]

In searching Froebel’s writings to find what he has to say about the stages lying between early mental activity and fully developed will, between what he calls “natural activity of the will, and true genuine firmness of will,” it soon becomes clear that it is impossible to separate what is said about will development, from what is said about intellectual development.[15] This is a natural consequence of Froebel’s constant insistence on the unity of consciousness, and it is the position of modern psychology, whether written from the analytic or the genetic point of view. Mr. Irving King writes: “The functional point of view emphasizes first of all the intimate inter-relation of all forms of mental activity and the impossibility of describing any one aspect of consciousness except with reference to consciousness as a whole.” Professor Stout, in his “Analytic Psychology,” has a section entitled “Conation and Cognition developed co-incidentally,”[16] while Froebel says:

“Thought must form itself in action, and action resolve and clear itself in thought.”—P., p. 42.

Froebel speaks of his projected institution at Helba as “fundamental,”

“inasmuch as in training and instruction it will rest on the foundation from which proceed all genuine knowledge and all genuine practical attainments; it will rest on life itself and on creative efforts, on the union and interdependence of doing and thinking, representation and knowledge, art and science. The institution will base its work on the pupil’s personal efforts in work and expression, making these, again, the foundation of all genuine knowledge and culture. Joined with thoughtfulness, these efforts become a direct medium of culture.”—E., p. 38.

Professor Stout’s account of how the unconscious mental activity of early childhood becomes transformed into the definite and conscious activity of fully developed will is, stated briefly, something to this effect. It is of the essence of conation to seek its own satisfaction, and this is only possible as the conation becomes definite. “Blind craving gives place to open-eyed desire,” as the original conation tends to define itself. So “the gradual acquisition of knowledge through experience is but another expression for the process whereby the originally blind craving becomes more distinct and more differentiated.” The grouping of cognitions is not produced by the conscious needs: “It is the way in which the conation itself grows and develops.”

For this account we can find a wonderfully exact parallel in one of Froebel’s less well-known papers, that on “Movement Plays.”

“All outer activity of the child has its ultimate and distinctive foundation in his inmost nature and life. The deepest craving of this inner activity is to behold itself mirrored in some outward object. In and through such representation, the child himself grasps and perceives the nature, direction and aim of his own activity, and learns also further to regulate and determine his life, that is his activity, according to these outward phenomena.”—P., p. 238.

This craving for outward representation, by satisfaction of which the child gains knowledge of the ends of his activity, is an exact equivalent of Stout’s blind craving which gives place to open-eyed desire as it tends to define itself. Froebel’s conclusion, that only as this unconscious or blind craving for action is satisfied does the child become “conscious of the nature, direction and ends of his own activity,” is but another way of stating Professor Stout’s conclusion, that the grouping of cognitions, which is the gradual acquirement of knowledge through experience, is “the way in which the conation itself grows and develops.” So, cognition and conation are developed simultaneously, or, to repeat Froebel’s own phrase, “Thought forms itself in action, and action resolves and clears itself in thought.”

Professor Stout goes on to say that in this defining process one conation springs out of another, whereby as one conation is satisfied and so comes to an end, another becomes in its turn the end of activity. He takes as illustration the child learning to walk, saying, “The mental attitude of the child learning to walk is one of conscious endeavour. When he has become habituated to the act, he performs it without attending to his movements, his mind being fixed on the attainment of other ends.” Froebel proceeds in the same way, using the very same example. He has already said that at first the child:

“cares for the use of his body, his senses and limbs, merely for the sake of their use and practice, but not for the sake of the results of this use. He is wholly indifferent to this; or, rather, he has as yet no idea whatever of this.”—P., p. 48.

Now, in the paper on movement, he goes on:

“Each sure and independent movement gives the child pleasure, because of the feeling of power which it arouses in him. Even simple walking produces this effect, for it gives the child a threefold feeling, a threefold consciousness: First, the consciousness that he moves himself; secondly, that he moves himself from one place to another; third, that through this movement he attains or reaches something.… It is a well-established fact that his first walking gives the child pleasure as an expression of his power. To this pleasure, however, are soon added the two joy-bringing perceptions of coming to something, and of being able to attain something. These several perceptions should all be fostered at the same time … he should get his limbs, and indeed his whole body, into his own power. He should learn to use his bodily strength and the activity of his limbs for definite purposes.… The effort to reach a particular object may have its source in the child’s desire to hold himself firm and upright by it, but we also observe that it gives him pleasure to be actually near the object, to touch it, to feel it, to grasp it, and perhaps also—which is a new phase of activity—to be able to move it. Hence we see that the child when he has reached the desired object, hops up and down before it, and beats on it with his little arms and hands, in order, as it were, to assure himself of the reality of the object and to notice its qualities. It is well, while the child is making these experiments, to name the object and its parts. The object of giving these names is not primarily the development of the child’s power of speech, but to assist his comprehension of the object, its parts and its properties, by defining his sense-impressions.”—P., p. 241.

Another passage runs:

“The present effort of mankind is an endeavour after freer self-development.… Therefore the more or less clear aim of the individual is to attain to clearness about himself and about life, to comprehension and right use of life, to both insight and accomplishment.… Therefore the educator must understand the earliest activity and encourage the impulse to self-culture, through independent doing, observing and experimenting.”—P., p. 16.

To say that a conation tends to define itself is only to say that unconscious ends tend to be replaced by conscious ends, and we have seen that both Froebel and Professor Stout give unconsciousness or consciousness of the end, as the difference between earlier and later forms of mental activity. Professor Stout’s conclusion is that “apart from the perpetual germination of one conation out of another, the characteristic features of the mental life of human beings would be inexplicable.”

Now, to be conscious of one’s ends or aims is, in a certain sense, to be self-conscious, so the transition from earlier to later forms of mental activity is practically the development of self-consciousness. It is interesting, therefore, to see that just as Professor Stout gives as his explanation of human life, the perpetual germination of one conation out of another, so Froebel gives as his explanation, his meaning of life, the gradual development of self-consciousness.

Self-consciousness, involving true volition, or self-determination, is to Froebel “the end of man, for which he first was planned.” It is, as he constantly put it, man’s “destination.”

“To become clearly conscious of all the conditions and relations in which and by means of which man exists makes man first become man in consciousness and in action.”—P., p. 12.

“For man is destined for consciousness, for freedom, for self-determination.”—E., p. 136.

“Self-consciousness belongs to the nature of man, is one with it; to become conscious of itself is the first task in the life of the child as a human being, as it is the task of his whole life.”—P., p. 40.

“Who amongst us,” exclaims Professor Royce, “conceives himself in his uniqueness except as the remote goal of some ideal process of coming to himself and of awakening to the truth about his own life? Only an infinite process can show me who I am.”[17]

Froebel never loses sight of this. In his Autobiography he tells how he began “unwillingly” to write something in the album of a friend who was the owner of a beautiful farm, and he concludes: “Then my thoughts grew clear and I continued, ‘Thou givest man bread; let my aim be to give man himself.’” That he verily believed that the gradual development of self-consciousness is the first task in the life of the child is abundantly evident. In the very beginning of his Mother Songs he tells the mother to give her child something to push against, “to bring the child to self-knowledge as soon as possible,” and at the end he says, “When a child or human being has found himself and has firm hold over himself, he is ready to walk joyfully through life.”

In “The First Action of a Child,” Froebel writes:

“The nature of man, as man, is that he is self-conscious, and this is stamped with distinctness enough to be observed in the quite peculiar character of childish activity,[18] in his impulse to busy himself self-actively, spontaneously: an impulse which awakens simultaneously with mind, and which is in harmony with feeling and perception. If this tendency to spontaneous activity is fostered, man’s triune nature—energy, emotion and intellect—is satisfied.”—P., p. 21.

A realization of what Sir Oliver Lodge calls “the universal struggle for self-manifestation and corporeal realization, which plays so large a part in all activity,” underlies all that Froebel has to say of the progress from unconscious activity to self-conscious volition. His view of the Universe is exactly that tentatively suggested by Professor Lodge, viz. that something akin to this universal struggle “is exhibited in a region beyond and above what is ordinarily conceived of as ‘Nature.’ The process of evolution can be regarded as the gradual unfolding of the Divine Thought or Logos, throughout the universe, by the action of Spirit upon matter.”

This takes us out of the region of psychology, but Froebel’s subject was not psychology, per se, but child development, as a part of the whole plan of evolution, man being the most highly developed of creatures.

The whole universe is an expression of the Divine, but man alone can become conscious of his origin.

“All things are destined to reveal God in their external and transient being.… It is the special destiny of man, as an intelligent and rational being to become conscious of his divine essence and to render this active, to reveal it in his life, with self-determination and freedom.”—E., p. 2.

“Made in the image of God,” meant to Froebel self-conscious and self-determined. The relation of man to God is expressed by Froebel as the relation of the thought to the thinker “could the thought but become conscious of itself.” In a letter of 1843, he says:

“At the basis of the Kindergarten lies an idea which serves alike for all the interstellar spaces, for all systems of the sun; the fulfilment of the divine will and the manifestation of the same. In order to become such a manifestation of the divine, man has first to attain the basis of self-consciousness; to which end serves the early culture of the spirit of humanity in the world of childhood.”—L., p. 133.

In a paper entitled “A Second Review of the Plays,” which really deals chiefly with evolution, we read:

“We must see clearly the conditions of development in Nature and then employ them in life. Thus only can we raise man upon his own plane, that is, the spiritual plane, at least to such a degree of perfection as is shown on their plane by the types of Nature.

“Man—the all-surveying—must develop himself by gradual growth of consciousness, must raise himself eventually to clear consciousness of the foundation, conditions and goal of his life.”—P., p. 198.

It was as clear to Froebel as to Professor Lloyd Morgan that the lower animals are kept from reaching self-consciousness by the definiteness of their instincts,[19] but to Froebel as to Browning “in completed Man begins anew a tendency to God.” Like Browning again, Froebel finds that man has “somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become,” he, too, “finds Progress man’s distinctive mark alone, not God’s, and not the beasts’; God is, they are, man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.”

“Man in his first period of life on earth is to be regarded while a child in three separate relations, which are united in themselves.

“(a) As a child of Nature, that is according to his earthly and natural conditions and connections, and in this relation bound, chained, unconscious, subject to impulses (als ein gebundenes, gefesseltes, unbewusstes, den Trieben unterworfenes).

“(b) As a child of God, and in this relation as a free being, destined to self-consciousness.

“(c) As a child of Humanity, and in this relation, as a being struggling from bondage toward freedom, toward consciousness.”—P., p. 11.

And the beginning of all he finds in “The First Action of the Child.” In the paper to which he gives this title Froebel writes:

“Helplessness and personal will, a mind of one’s own, soon become therefore the turning-points of child-life, the fulcrum of which is free spontaneous activity, self-employment.”—P., p. 27.

It is because Froebel believes this, that we hear so much of creative activity. Consciousness, which Meredith calls “the great result of mortal suffering,” is the outcome of all the unconscious striving.

“The child, although unconsciously, strives to make his life outwardly objective, and thus perceptible and so to become conscious of it.”—P., p. 240.

“Man only comes to the power of self-examination and self-knowledge in any relation whatever with the greatest difficulty, and must first learn to study himself … in the mirror of Nature and of all creation.”—L., p. 57.

“The child must perceive and grasp his own life in an objective manifestation before he can perceive and grasp it in himself. Such mirroring of the inner life, such making of the inner life objective, is essential, for through it, the child comes to self-consciousness and learns to order, determine and master himself.”—P., p. 238.

Froebel realizes then, that true volition is the outcome of unconscious striving, that it can only come through action, and, what is most important, through action which is the outcome of feeling, “worthy his effort.” So, while stating that the formation of “a pure, strong and enduring will” is the main object of education, he takes care to point out that unless the boy is allowed to carry out in action “that which is within,” ideas which have appealed to him, and which he has already made his own, that main object will not be easily attainable.

“To raise activity of will to firmness of will, and so to arouse, and form a pure, strong and enduring will, for the representation of a characteristic humanity, is the chief aim, the main object of the school.… The starting-point of all mental activity in the boy should be energetic and healthy, the direction should be simple and definite, the aim certain and conscious, and worthy of his effort. Therefore to raise the natural activity of the will to true genuine firmness of will, all the boy’s activities should have reference to the development and accomplishment of what is within him. Activity of will proceeds from activity of the feelings, and firmness of will from firmness of the feelings, and where the first is lacking, the second will be difficult of attainment.”—E., p. 96.

CHAPTER IV
Characteristics of the Earliest Consciousness

It is in the emphasis he lays upon the mental activity of the child from the very first, that Froebel approaches so closely to the position of the modern psychologist, and in his account of the earliest consciousness he distinctly resembles Professors Ward and Stout.

Only to “some of our most distinguished modern psychologists” does Professor Stout attribute a strong disposition to recognize in the elementary processes of perception and association, the rudimentary presence of these mental operations which in their higher form we call reasoning and constructive imagination.

Now Froebel writes:

“One can recognize and watch, even in the first stages of childhood, though only in their slightest traces and tenderest germs, all the mental activities which certainly do not stand out prominently till later life. Say not, ye parents, How can such tendencies lie already in the life of the child still so unconscious and so helpless? If they did not lie in it they could never be developed from it … for where there is not the germ of something, this something will never be called forth and appear.… As man is a being intended for increasing self-consciousness, so shall he also become an inferring and judging being (schliessendes und urtheilendes). Man has also a quite characteristic power of imagination, and—what must never be forgotten, but continually kept before the eyes as important and guiding—the new-born child not only will become man, but the man with all his qualities, and with the unity of his being, already appears and indeed is in the child.”—P., pp. 30-49.

Psychologists in general, says Professor Stout, show a tendency, which he regards as erroneous, “to ignore the constructive aspect of early mental process, to recognize mental productiveness only in complete and advanced stages of mental development.”

But Froebel, in speaking of the mother’s play with a mere infant, when the coloured ball may present “the perception of an object as such,” most distinctly states that the child’s “first impressions, as it were the first cognitions,” come to him in these early plays by means of his own activity, an activity of body emphatically, as we shall see presently, but an activity also of mind, of perception, “durch Wahrnehmen … durch dunkles Auffassen … durch Selbst-thätigkeit.”[20]

Froebel uses such expressions as “the spontaneous reception” and even “the critical reception of the outer world,” just as Dr. Ward, in refusing to recognize an internal sense, says “the new facts … are due to our mental activity, and not to a special mode of what has been called our sensitivity.”

The active, rather than the passive attitude, strikes Froebel so forcibly that he calls the two modes of consciousness, the receiving of, and reacting upon impressions, a “double expression.”

“The first voluntary needs of the child, if its bodily needs are satisfied and it feels well and strong, are observation of its surroundings, spontaneous reception of the outer world (selbstthätiges Aufnehmen der Aussenwelt) and play, which is spontaneous expression, or acting out of what is within. This double expression (Diese Doppeläusserung) of taking in and expressing outwardly is necessarily grounded in its nature, as in human nature in general; since the child’s first earthly destiny is to attain by critical reception (durch prüfende Aufnahme) of the outer world into itself, by manifold inward impressions and outward expressions of its inner world, and by critical comparison of both, to the recognition of their unity.…”—P., p. 29.

Professor Stout attributes this ignoring by certain psychologists of the constructive aspect of early mental process to a false view of the nature both of association and of construction, the fundamental fallacy of the associationists lying in their disposition to explain the nature and existence of a whole by reference to the nature and existence of the parts which are contained in it, so that “the parts must be supposed to pre-exist before they are combined, and to pre-exist in such a way that they need only to be in some manner externally brought together or associated in order to constitute the whole which contains them.”

In like manner Dr. Ward accuses psychologists of having “usually represented mental advance as consisting fundamentally in the combination and recombination of various elementary units, the so-called sensations and primitive movements, or, in other words, in a species of mental chemistry.”

That Froebel seems to have avoided the error thus pointed out by those two psychologists, is surprising enough, but it is even more surprising to find that this is probably due to the fact that his conception of the earliest possible consciousness is very much like theirs.

In rejecting “the atomistic view,” Professor Ward maintains that “the further we go back, the nearer we approach to a total presentation, having the character of one general continuum in which differences are latent.”

Froebel’s account, as given in “The Education of Man,” is very similar:

“Although in itself made up of the same objects and of the same organization, the external world comes to the child at first, out of its void, as it were, in misty, formless indistinctness, in chaotic confusion, even the child and the outer world merge into one another.”—E., p. 40.

This description reminds us of Professor James’ picturesque expression, “big, blooming, buzzing confusion,” which is so often quoted, but which does not really convey so true a picture as Dr. Ward’s account, for where there is no distinction there can surely be no confusion. But a few pages further on we find Froebel describing the infant consciousness before speech begins, as “still an unorganized, undifferentiated unity” (noch eine ungegliederte mannigfaltigkeitslose Einheit). This is identical with the expression used by Professor Stout, who, in speaking of the stage to which he gives the name “implicit apprehension,” the apprehension of an unanalysed whole, uses the phrase “distinctionless unity.” Froebel talks of the child feeling himself a whole and “so also, though unconsciously, seeking to grasp a whole, never merely a part as such.” And just as Dr. Ward claims for psychology as well as for biology “what may be called a principle of progressive differentiation or specialization,” so Froebel writes:

“The child mind develops according to the law which governs world development, viz.: that of progression from the unlimited to the limited, from the general to the special, from the whole to the part.”—P., p. 170.

In this, of course, lies the reason for Froebel’s correct apprehension of the infant mind, he was biologist first, and his mind was full of the idea of development.

“At the same time there begins in the child, as in the seed-corn, a development towards complexity.”—P., p. 172.

“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 and this is the way in which your child’s life is sure to show itself.”—M., p. 121.

Professor Ward goes on to discuss what is implied in this process of differentiation or mental growth, saying that if analogies are to be taken from the physical world at all, the growth of a seed or embryo, will furnish far better illustrations of the unfolding of the contents of consciousness than the building up of molecules.

It was the endeavour, and quaint enough it seems to us, to translate this psychological truth into educational practice, that led Froebel to lay so much stress on the fact that the earliest of his so-called “Gifts” are indivisible wholes:

“Let us place ourselves at the nursery table, and try to perceive what the child is impelled to do in the beginning of his self-employment. Let us sit ourselves as unnoticed as possible considering how the child, after he has examined the self-contained tangible object in its form and colour, has moved it here and there and proved its solidity, how he then tries to divide it, at least to change its form.… Thus after perception of the whole, the child desires to see it separated into parts.… Let us stop at this significant phenomenon and try to discern through it what plaything following on the self-contained ball, hard and soft, and the solid hard cube, we should for inner reason and without arbitrariness give to the child.”—P., p. 117.

Then come directions as to the manner in which the toy is to be presented:

“in order to give the child the impression of the whole (den Eindrück des Ganzen). From this as the first fundamental perception (der ersten Grundanschauung) everything proceeds and must proceed.”[21]

Starting from the conception of an undifferentiated totality or objective continuum, Dr. Ward says, “Of the very beginnings of this continuum we can say nothing, absolute beginnings are beyond the pale of science. Actual presentation consists in this continuum being differentiated; every differentiation constitutes a new presentation. Hence the common-place of psychologists: ‘We are only conscious as we are conscious of change.’” …

As to absolute beginnings, Froebel too writes that these are past finding out, but he does so in order to call the mother’s attention to the importance of the very earliest steps:

“Do not say, It is much too early.… Too early? Do you know when, where and how your child’s intellectual development begins? Can you tell when and where is the boundary of existence that has not yet begun, and of its actual beginning, and how this boundary manifests itself?”—M., p. 154.

Coming now to what Froebel has to say as to how his “unorganized unity” becomes differentiated, we shall not find that his brief account differs in any really fundamental way from that of Professor Ward. Some of his expressions have a very modern sound, such as: “how the outer world begins to divide and analyse itself”; how “out of the indefinite outside and around the child comes the definite”; or again how the child gains “the three great perceptions of object, space and time, which at first were one collective perception.” (“Die drei grossen Wahrnehmungen von Gegenstand, Raum und Zeit; welche anfangs in einer Gesammtwahrnehmung in dem Kinde ruhten.”)—P., p. 37.

Commenting upon the phrase “We are only conscious as we are conscious of change,” Dr. Ward remarks that the word change does not sufficiently explain what happens in differentiation, for this implies that the increased complexity is due to the persistence of former changes; such persistence being essential to the very idea of growth or development.… At the same time he is careful to point out that neither in “retentiveness” nor in assimilation is there “any confronting of the old with the new,” any “active comparison.” Without change of impression consciousness would be a blank, but “a difference between presentations is not at all the same as the presentation of that difference. The former must precede the latter; the latter, which requires active comparison, need not follow … we must recognize objects before we can compare them.”

Froebel says that:

“All the development of the child has its foundation in almost imperceptible attainments and perceptions … the first perceptions, in the beginning almost imperceptible and evanescent, are fixed, increased and clarified by innumerable repetitions, and by change.”—P., p. 38.

Froebel, too, goes back to this very earliest stage, the stage when a baby “begins to notice.” He says that this indication of an intellect (Seelenaeusserung) begins when the child is a few weeks old, and is occasioned at first by the movement, that is change in position, of a bright object, “in and by means of the motion the child first perceives the object.”—P., p. 64.

In another passage Froebel speaks of change as “a dim conception of sequence, and thus of dim comparison.”

“These first impressions come to the child by means of perception and seeing, and by means of coming, staying and vanishing (of the ball); by means of change, thus also, in a certain point of view by means of early dim conceptions of sequence, of foundation and result, of cause and effect, and thus of dim comparison.”—P., p. 65.

A change or difference which does not imply active comparison, and a change or sequence which does imply dim comparison are not very far apart, and Froebel makes his meaning clearer still by using the words “unconsciously comparing” (unbewusst vergleichend).

“By this play his attention is called to the precise shape of the cube; and he will look at it sharply, unconsciously comparing it with the hand, to which his eyes were first attracted.”—P., p. 84.

Nor does Froebel omit to notice the necessary close connection of the new with the old, which Dr. Ward emphasizes.

“The child very often seeks for something without at all knowing what he seeks; in like manner he repels something without at all knowing why. Yet the child does not for this reason turn away accidentally, neither does he seek the accidental. Generally it is the new for which the child seeks, but not a novelty which has no connection with what has hitherto been, for that, should it appear, would obstruct development. He seeks the new which has developed from the old, like a bud from a branch. He seeks a new unexpected turn, a new unexpected use of a thing, new unexpected properties, new and yet unconsciously anticipated development, a new unexpected connection with his life.… The child indeed seeks for the new that is outside of himself, but not on account of its externality. Really he is seeking the new of which he feels premonitions in himself, in his own development. Since, however, he does not yet know this, and so cannot give an account of it, the child seeks especially for change, in order to gain a means of growing up within himself, and of growing forth outwardly from himself.

“Above all, therefore, it is the old within the child which clarifies, unfolds and transmutes itself, thus developing that which is new. The whole process takes place according to a definite law resting in the child himself, in his life, in life as such.”—P., p. 168.

We have seen that Froebel draws no hard and fast line between sensation and thought. On more than one occasion, he does refer to something less definite than a perception, in one passage using the word “Eindrück,” and in another the term “Vorentwickelung,” translated by Miss Jarvis as “preliminary impression,” of which he says it is “to be raised later, at the right time, by look and by word, to a clear perception.”—P., p. 86.

In “The Education of Man,” Froebel’s earlier work, he deals with the function of language, “the word,” in differentiating “the misty formless darkness,” the nothing, the mist.

“At an early period there come, too, on the part of the parents, corresponding words which at first separate the child from the outer world, but afterwards re-unite them. With the help of these words, these objects present themselves, at first singly and rarely, but later in various combinations and more frequently in their self-contained definite individuality. At last man—the child—beholds himself as a definite individual object, wholly distinct from all others.”—E., p. 40.

The function of the name, as calling attention to the thing, seemed to Froebel of so much consequence, that he says, “the name creates the thing for the child.” It is in connection with the development of speech in the stage just following on infancy that he says: “Up to this stage, the inner being of man is still an unorganized undifferentiated unity. With language, organization sets in.”

“This period is pre-eminently the period of the development of the faculty of speech. Therefore it was indispensable that whatever the child did should be clearly and definitely designated by the word. Every object, every thing, became such, as it were only through the word; before it had been named, although the child might have seemed to see it with the outer eyes, it had no existence for him. The name, as it were, created the thing for the child.—E., p. 90.

“The object of giving names is not primarily the development of the child’s power of speech, but to assist his comprehension of the object, its parts and properties, by defining his sense-impressions.”—P., p. 242.

Professor Stout also speaks of the casual naming of the object, by those around the child as “a means of fixing the attention of the child on the object when it would otherwise pass unnoticed,” and he guards against the misconception that the name at the outset is a name for the child. He calls it “merely a special sound associated with a special percept in a quite casual and indefinite way.”

Froebel, too, is careful when he says:

“A definite tone is to be connected with a definite perception, and the tone when heard again may recall the perception.”

Though Froebel has little to say about the separate senses, and what little he has is worthless, yet on the other hand he has a great deal to say, especially in his later writings, about the child’s bodily activity, and the experiences and perceptions (Erfahrung-Wahrnehmen) he gains from it. Indeed he makes so much of this, and it is so essentially a modern way of thinking that it has been given a chapter to itself.

CHAPTER V
How Consciousness is Differentiated.—The Place of Action in the Development of Perception and of Feeling

Once objects have begun to emerge, differentiated out of the formless indistinctness, comes what Froebel calls the “sucking-in stage,” where the child “makes the external internal.”

Here, more than anywhere perhaps, Froebel shows his genius, his originality as a student of child psychology, in that he perceived that this mental sucking-in is not merely a matter of sense organs, but that it is also a muscular performance.

Who, before Froebel, understood the importance of motor activity from the very earliest days, as a means of gaining ideas, or realized as we now begin to do, that this is the true explanation of the “endless imitation which is the child’s vocation”?

In speaking of the “new-born child,” it is activity or action which is again and again repeated and emphasized as the outstanding characteristic, “an activity and action devoted to working with and prevailing over the outer.”

“As rest appears to be the earliest requirement of the bodily life, so movement soon appears as the demand of the soul life.”—P., p. 63.

The baby’s “feeble strength” is to be drawn into the game, where possible, “particularly that he may experience and perceive, directly through and in his own activity” (durch und in Eigenthätigkeit unmittelbar selbst erfahre und wahrnehme).—P., p. 78.

It is “through spontaneous activity, as well as through the mother’s instinctive knowledge of his needs” that the child gains “the first impressions of the soul, as it were, the first cognitions.”

Out of forty-nine Mother Songs, two only deal specifically with the senses, though all deal with action, and Froebel takes care to point out the close connection of sense and movement.

“Limbs and senses seem to have very different provinces of activity, and so they have; yet so deep-seated is their linked interchange that neither of them fails to react on the other. And no Games for the limbs have presented themselves to us, not even the ‘Kicking Song’ which have not also made demands upon the sense of sight.”—M., p. 168.

“The use of the body and of the limbs is developed simultaneously and in the same proportion as the use of the senses, the order being determined by their own nature and the properties of the material world. Outer objects are near, or moving away, or fixed at a distance, and either invite rest, seizure and holding fast, or invite him who would bring them nearer to move towards them.”—E., p. 47.

Froebel’s account of the significance of the ceaseless activity of the young child anticipates to a certain extent that of Mr. Irving King, who, in his most interesting “Psychology of Child Development,” deals expressly with “the functional relation of consciousness to activity.” But the views of Professor Stout as expressed in his “Analytic Psychology,” and with which Froebel’s writing has already been compared, and those of Mr. Irving King do not appear to clash in any way.

Mr. King begins by discussing the “sort of consciousness” a young child must have, and concludes that it must from the very first be a unified consciousness, however vague, any discreteness being on the part of the object. He also states that the consciousness of a human being must differ from that of the animal entering life with many “ready-made complexes of adjustment,” because “Consciousness is related not to activity, but to the growth of activity.” We have just seen that Froebel too insists on a unified consciousness, that he too says that “the external world,” though composed always of the same variety of objects, “comes to the child as ‘an undifferentiated unity.’” Froebel is also quite sound as to the difference between the mental possibilities of the animal “whose instincts, as they are called, are at birth so definite and strong,” and that of the child “born in the extreme condition of helplessness,” by whom “everything external is to be overcome.”[22]

Reflex and instinctive acts which the child brings into the world with him, says Mr. King, are unconscious, as are reflex and habitual activities to the adult, but “the checking of a movement must make the child more definitely conscious of it … it is no longer mere movement, but movement-stopped-by-something. As soon as movement stands out, as soon as the consciousness of it is interwoven with something that is not movement, we have the basis for indefinite advance.”

Froebel says the same thing in the first of the Mother Songs, where he takes as the point of departure for all future training this movement-stopped-by-something, to which Mr. King refers as the earliest beginning of consciousness. The mother is told that when her baby “strikes out with his small arms, as he kicks with his feet,” it is a challenge, to which she instinctively responds by giving him her hand or her chest, “against which he tramples with alternate feet and so measures and increases his strength.” So, he reaches “that first consciousness of self, which is born of physical opposition to and connection with the external world.”—P., p. 171.

Every one knows that Froebel laid much stress on the necessity for what is usually called “expression,” which he called Darstellung—often translated “representation.” One of his reasons for this emphasis is, however, by no means always understood, viz. that it “induces clear perception.”

It is in discussing and criticizing Professor Baldwin’s description of imitation as a circular process, that Mr. Irving King brings out two points of view from which we may regard imitation, that of the observer and that of the so-called imitator. Imitation, he says, is a term for the observer only, and not a term for psychology at all. Baldwin says that “real or persistent imitation is the reaction that will reproduce the stimulating impression and so tend to perpetuate itself.” But as Mr. King shows in the case of the child who imitates his mother’s poking of the fire, “the response of the child to the copy does not reinstate the original stimulus.… What the child gets is not a reproduced stimulus, but a new experience.”

In “The Education of Man,” written years before his whole attention was given to the young child, Froebel had emphasized the necessity for “representation” which “induces and implies clear perception.”