[i]

FROEBEL AS A PIONEER IN MODERN PSYCHOLOGY

[ii]

[iii]

FROEBEL AS A PIONEER
IN MODERN PSYCHOLOGY

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

BALTIMORE Md.
WARWICK & YORK, INC.
1914

(All rights reserved)

[iv]

[v]

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,[vi] 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.

[vii]

CONTENTS

[viii]

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

[1]

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.

[2]

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:

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:

[4]

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:

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[5] one can rarely get even cultivated parents to pay attention,” and he adds:

In another letter to this cousin he says:

To another friend he writes:

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

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[7] 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[8] following that of the publication of “The Education of Man” he writes:

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:

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:

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

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

[10]

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.

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.…[11] 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]

[12]

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[13] 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:

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:

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.

[14]

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”:

And a forcible passage runs:

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[15] useless detail as to the toys and games of early childhood. The mother is told that:

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:

[17]

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:

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:

The faculty psychology and the formal discipline theory that came from it, says Professor Horne, did not[18] 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.

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:

[19]

Elsewhere he asks:

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

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:

[20]

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

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 help we are told to give at first is merely to supply the child with a name, for “through the name[21] 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:

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.

[22]

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:

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[23] schoolroom, nor school-keeping, but the conscious communication of knowledge for a definite purpose, and in definite connection,” he ends up with:

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:

[24]

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.

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:

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[25] 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:

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

And, in the Mother Songs, he says:

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:

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

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.”

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:

[29]

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

[30]

Another passage runs:

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.”

“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:

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.

[33]

“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:

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

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[34] not the beasts’; God is, they are, man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.”

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:

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.

[35]

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.

[36]

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:

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[38] consciousness, the receiving of, and reacting upon impressions, a “double expression.”

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.”

[39]

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:

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[40] 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:

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.

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:

[41]

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

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[42] 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:

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,[43] 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:

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.”

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).

[44]

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

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.

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.”

[46]

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:

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.

[47]

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.”

The baby’s “feeble strength” is to be drawn into the game, where possible, “particularly that he may[48] 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.

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[49] 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[50] 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.”

[51]

As we have seen that Froebel sets before himself the self-same task which Mr. King states as the business of the genetic psychologist, so it should be no surprise that he gives virtually the same answer to the question: What do the imitative activities mean to the child?

Mr. King’s answer is that the child’s emphasis is not on the copying of a certain act, but on the attainment of a certain experience that comes through the copying or imitating. “The child,” he says, “is seldom or never imitating from his own point of view, but is always trying to sort out some of his own ill-organized experiences.”

Froebel’s words are:

Every stimulus, says Mr. King, is a suggestion to activity, and it is interesting to notice how two minds working on the same lines, though separated not only by years but by difference of language, can fall into almost the same phrases. Mr. King unconsciously uses[52] almost Froebel’s very words when he writes: “The sight of the object tends to set the activity free.”

Froebel writes:

We have seen that according to Froebel the earliest consciousness is a kind of self-consciousness. Mr. Irving King says that the very beginning of consciousness is “movement-stopped-by-something,” and Froebel says that when the baby kicks out or tramples with his feet and the mother responds by giving him her hand or chest to push against, the child reaches that “first consciousness of self which is born of physical opposition to and connection with the external world.” Here again we come to a point in which Froebel’s insight shows well in comparison with a typical modern genetic psychologist. “Many writers,” says Mr. Irving King, “have tried to select out certain kinds of activity as peculiarly connected with the development of the infant’s sense of self.” Preyer, for instance, connects this development specially with painful sensations; Baldwin, with experience associated with people, as contrasted with experience of things. His own conclusion is that “it seems more correct to say that all the child’s activities are factors of very nearly equal importance for developing the sense of self, as[53] distinct from things and other people,” and it is this view that we find in Froebel’s writings. Even in “The Education of Man” we find:

And among his later writings, in connection with the child’s play with bricks Froebel says:

“Self-consciousness,” says Mr. King, “is essentially a relative and variable term for all of us. It stands for a process of definition, that, strictly speaking, proceeds till maturity, or even later.” And Froebel, writing about how, through the mother’s play with a ball, a child may gain his earliest perceptions of object, space and time, says that by the coming and going of the ball, etc.,

And without a pause he goes on:

It is rather interesting to notice that in her translation of this passage in which Froebel declares that self-consciousness comes to a child as a result of all his surroundings, Miss Jarvis omits the word “self.” She begins her paragraph with “Bewusstsein,” instead of “Selbstbewusstsein” as it stands in the original. To quote Mr. King, “It is generally held that these are two distinct attitudes, that consciousness may exist without an accompanying consciousness of the self as separate from the objects, activities and persons of the rest of the world.” Probably this was Miss Jarvis’s own view, and she left out the word “self” as having no place or meaning in the context. It was, however, not meaningless to Froebel himself.

Mr. King continues: “The really important point is not to be able to put the finger down on some one thing that proves a developed self-consciousness, but to be able to show at every point that the process of definition is a function of the growing complexity of the child’s activities.” And, in “The First Action of a Child” Froebel writes:

Speaking of his second plaything, intended for a child six months old, he says:

Froebel was bound to watch for early developments of self-consciousness, because his whole philosophy and pedagogy are based on his firm belief that while everything in the universe is an expression of the Divine, man alone is “destined” to express the God within “with self-determination.” So, of the little child, he writes:

[56]

As the child grows older, the mother, Froebel continues, tries to teach him to feel the complexity of his own body, “Give me your arm,” “Where is your hand?” she says, and she “playfully leads him to a knowledge of the members which he cannot see,” and the passage ends:

Nor does Froebel forget the idea of the self as the boy grows older.

Once the activities of running, jumping, etc., are familiar, the boy’s play takes on a new complexion. His games are now “trials of strength,” or “displays of strength.”

[57]

Surely it is another touch of genius that makes Froebel spring to the nascent idea of self as the reason for the child’s craving for tales of all kinds.

As Froebel shows so much insight into the paramount importance of action in the development of self-consciousness, it is not surprising to find that he recognizes also its special importance in the development of feeling.

It is probably to the late Professor James and his sparkling paradoxes that the educational world owes its grasp of the importance of expression in connection with feeling; we feel because we act, we are told, we do not run away because we are afraid, but we are afraid because we have run away. But all Froebelians had already learnt the truth at the bottom of this from Froebel’s Mother Songs.

When he wrote his earliest and greatest book, “The Education of Man,” Froebel was already far enough advanced to point out the necessity for at least verbal[58] expression of feeling. He then advocated giving to young boys simple prayers or words by which they can express childish gratitude for care and protection, so that these feelings may be retained and deepened.

The same remark is made in connection with the teaching of poems and songs. When feeling is aroused by the contemplation of Nature, it must be expressed. When Spring brings “gladness,” and Autumn “longing and hope,” and when Winter awakens “courage and vigour,” then:

Froebel had also noted even thus early how “the natural mother” from the very beginning cultivates feeling through expression, through gesture or action.

[59]

In the Mother’s Songs, written much later and after Froebel had made careful observation of young children, he is more emphatic, and his ideas of expression are both wider and more definite. In “The Education of Man” he had said that literature exercises and tests judgment and feelings, and he had added that this should be followed up by some constructive action. But now he knows that feeling when stirred ought to express itself in actual service, just as James suggests “speaking genially to one’s grandmother, or giving up one’s seat in a horse car, if nothing more heroic offers.”

The mother is told that at first she should help her little one to understand her care of him and his dependence on her by “the looking-glass of outer life,” by letting him, for instance, watch the hen caring for her chickens, and the parent birds feeding and brooding over their young in the nest. In the rhymed motto of “The Nest” she is told:

But the longer explanation has an important addition:

[60]

So, as the child begins to realize what he owes, comes the next little play, “The Flower Basket,” the key-note of which is given in its motto:

And the baby makes of his tiny hands a basket for flowers wherewith to celebrate the father’s birthday in orthodox German fashion. In Froebel’s own phrase, the “inner meaning” of the little finger play with its picture, is “to cherish thoughtfully the bond, which is invisible, yet which can be felt, whereby the life of humanity is bound together, the first opportunity for which is afforded by the life of the child and the family.” What is important here is that Froebel has pointed out the way in which this bond can be strengthened, that is by expression, by giving “outward form to what stirs feeling.”

This idea of service as expression of feeling comes into Froebel’s description of the ideal child, “merry, happy, strong and busy,” when the mother:

Again, in connection with childish productions, the little baskets, napkin rings, etc., that they have made, Froebel wrote:

Froebel always emphasizes the essential importance of family bonds in the development of feeling, and he not only instructs the mother to see to it that the child recognizes the family circle, but he tells her that he will realize his “kinship” by service done for the family.

As the feeling of the adult is called out by the helplessness of a child, so, too:

And in this connection too comes the warning that[62] feeling must not be allowed to evaporate without action:

The child is “to feel within himself Nature’s close interdependence”:

And again, as always, follows the need for expression of some kind. The children are not to be disturbed while they “say grace” over their doll’s feast.

[63]

It may be as well before leaving the subject to notice here one or two other points in connection with feeling that are touched upon by Froebel.

Though, as we have seen[23], the feeling side is always kept in closest connection with those of knowledge and action, yet the fundamental importance of the emotional side is stated quite distinctly. The child is “living, loving and perceiving,” or “creating, feeling and thinking,” still:

This is put more strongly in connection with the child’s imitation of the music of the bell note, the “bim-baum” or “ding-dong” sung by the mother, while she swings the ball to and fro, which according to Froebel “serves the emotional side.”

Another point Froebel makes in this connection, is that feeling alone can awaken feeling, and that those who complain of want of feeling in their children have probably themselves to blame. Want of good feeling[64] and the prevalence among boys of egotism, unfriendliness, etc., is explained as:

The elders must show sympathy with the child’s thoughts and feelings, they must not rest content with caring for his bodily welfare. If the child fails to find sympathy, for example in connection with his interest in Nature, if he “fails to find the same feelings among adults who suppress his germinating inner life” then, says Froebel:

We have spoken in this chapter of what is popularly called the instinct of imitation, and we have seen that Froebel makes much of what he calls the instinct or impulse of activity (Thätigkeitstrieb), or the instinct for employment (Beschäftigungstrieb).

It may be well now to consider what, considering the ideas of his day and generation, Froebel could find to say on a subject so important as the instinctive activities of human beings and of other animals, concerning which so much has now been written and which, according to Professor Dewey, Froebel regarded and rightly regarded as the foundation-stones of educational method.

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CHAPTER VI
Instinct and Instincts

“The older writings on Instinct are ineffectual wastes of words,” writes Professor James, “because their authors never came down to this simple and definite idea (that the nervous system is to a great extent a pre-organized bundle of reactions), but smothered everything in vague wonder at the clairvoyant and prophetic power of animals—so superior to anything in Man.”[24]

Froebel was certainly not in a position to know much of the nervous system, but what he wrote about instinct cannot be classed with these older writings. For even without modern knowledge, he waxes indignant over the opinions of those who created James’ “ineffectual wastes of words.” Far from allowing that instinct in the lower animals is superior to anything in man, Froebel maintains that the very weakness, indefiniteness of man’s instincts or impulses (Triebe) is a sign of his superiority.

At the same time it should be pointed out that Froebel does not make the opposite mistake of supposing that man has no instincts. Since he approached psychology from the biological side, so far as it could be known to him, Froebel was bound to have faith in instinct, in race-habit, in tendencies which, because they have been of use to the race, are bedded in the nature of each individual. It is to Froebel’s later writings and especially to the little paper, on “The First Action of a Child,” that we must turn to see how wonderfully correct are his views on the whole question of instinct.

It may be better to give first the position of modern writers on the subject by quoting from the last chapter of Professor Lloyd Morgan’s “Habit and Instinct,” a clear and concise passage showing that the contrary schools of thought represented on the one hand by the Darwin and Romanes and on the other by Professors James and Wundt, can after all be resolved into a matter of definition.

“If, then, the question be asked, whether man has a large or a small endowment of instinct, the answer will depend upon the precise definition of ‘instinct.’ If we take congenital definiteness as characteristic of instinct, we shall agree with Darwin, that ‘the fewness and the comparative simplicity of the instincts of the higher animals are remarkable as[68] compared with those of lower animals;’ and with Romanes that ‘instinct plays a larger part in the psychology of many animals than it does in the psychology of man.’ If, on the other hand, a broader definition of instinct be accepted, so as to include what is innate, in the sense before defined, we shall agree with Professor Wundt that human life is ‘permeated through and through with instinctive action, determined in part, however, by intelligence and volition;’ and shall not profoundly disagree with Professor Wm. James, who says that man possesses all the impulses that they (the lower animals) have and a great many more besides.”

In Mr. McDougall’s important contribution to the discussion of human instinct, he says that the view which is rapidly gaining ground is that the gradual evolution of intelligence “did not supplant and lead to the atrophy of the instincts, but controlled and modified their operation.” As Mr. McDougall goes on to state his belief “that the recognition of the full scope and function of the human instincts will appear to those that come after us as the most important advance made by psychology in our time,” it is important to the purpose of this book, to make clear to what extent Froebel’s views on the subject approach those of modern writers.

Mr. McDougall makes a very clear distinction between specific tendencies to which he limits the word instinct, and non-specific or general tendencies. Naturally Froebel did not reach this standpoint, but he does seem to have thought out his terminology. He felt strongly as to the use of words of foreign origin, and generally uses “Trieb,” “Lebenstrieb,” “Drang” or “Lebensdrang,” where we might use instinct. But he does occasionally use “instinct,” notably in a passage quoted below “whose impulses,[69] powers and abilities, whose instincts as they are called” (dessen Lebenstriebe Kräfte und Anlagen, dessen Instincte wie man es nennt), where he seems to be feeling about for the right expression. Other words in constant use are “Neigung,” “Streben” and “Richtung,” probably best translated by “tendency.” It can be argued, however, that to the word Trieb Froebel does seem to have attached a more definite meaning, and his use of this word is certainly limited.

Professor James’ account of instinct begins with the statement that “Every instinct is an impulse,” a driving to action, but the use of the words “Trieb” and “Drang” makes such a pronouncement unnecessary to a German writer, and if this root idea is not implied by the noun, it generally, in Froebel’s writings, makes its appearance in the verb. Thus we frequently read of “a longing which drives the child to,” etc. (die Sehnsucht die das Kind treibt).

The merest glance through Froebel’s writings is enough to show his belief in the existence of instinct in the human being. His references to it are constant. It is an impulse (Trieb) “which the child did not give himself, which came without his will, in later life even against his will,” but which “urges to action” (drängt ihn dazu). It is a force so strong, that it “holds captive mind and body.” The child is described as “driven by impulse” (des von Lebensdrang getriebenen Kindes). The boy again is “held captive by harmless, even praiseworthy, impulses” (sogar lobenswerten Triebe), or “gives himself up entirely to the impulses of his inner life” (dem Treibenden innern Leben).

In his earlier work, “The Education of Man,” Froebel is first concerned with urging that the young human being, “a product of Nature,” has instincts quite as trustworthy as those of any other young[70] animal, and the following eloquent passage is very well known:

It is true that to Froebel evolution is “the working of Divine Unity.” But there seems to be no special reason why this should invalidate what Froebel has to say, any more than Sir Oliver Lodge should be disqualified as a scientist, because he has produced a book in which he writes: “Development means unfolding latent possibilities … growth and development are in accordance with the law of the universe[71] … the law of the universe and the will of God are here regarded as in some sort synonymous terms.”

This is exactly Froebel’s position; he writes that

That Froebel not only recognized the presence of instinct in human beings, but that he also saw, as Professor Wundt puts it, that this is “determined in parts by intelligence and volition,” he states very plainly:

It is in “The First Action of a Child” that we find Froebel contrasting the instincts of the lower animals with those of man. Here curiously enough, Froebel, according to Professor Stout, is almost more correct than Professor Lloyd Morgan himself, whose statement “that animals do not perceive relations” Professor Stout regards as misleading. His correction is, “unless an artificial restriction is put on the meaning of the term relation, this statement would imply that animals cannot perceive the position of objects in space or their motion.… Hence we should say, not that the perception of relation is deficient in animals, but only that definite perception of relations is deficient which depends on comparison.”

Now it is this very point of comparison which Froebel takes as the essential intellectual difference between the animal independent from birth thanks to fully developed instinct, and the child helpless and apparently inferior at first, yet destined for progress “self-active and free.” He writes:

With this passage from “The First Action of a Child” we can compare the following from Stout’s “Analytic Psychology”:

“The peculiar feature in the life of animals which prevents progressive development is the existence of instincts which do for them what the human being must do for himself. Their inherited organization is such, that they perform the movements adapted to supply their needs on the mere occurrence of an appropriate external stimulus.… In man, a blind craving has to grope its way from darkness into light in order to become effective; in the animal the means of satisfaction are provided ready made by Nature at the outset.”

After having stated that “Every instinct is an impulse,” Professor James goes on to say that instinct depends upon the biological fact that the nervous[74] system is “a pre-organized bundle of re-actions,” and that when impulses block one another, an animal with many impulses, and whose mind is elevated enough to discriminate, “loses the instinctive demeanour and appears to live a life of hesitation and choice, an intellectual life.”

Notwithstanding the very obvious fact that Froebel could know but little of the nervous system and its re-actions, it is still quite evident that his observation had led him to a clear recognition of the earlier stage, when “hesitation and choice” are impossible. The child, he says, “acts in obedience to an instinct which holds captive mind and body,” he is “incredibly short-sighted in his obedience to instinct.” That he also recognized the beginning of hesitation and choice is shown in his defence of the child who “in spite of abandonment to momentary impulse,” may have “an intense inner desire for goodness,” which, “if it could be appreciated in time,” would make of him a good man (E., p. 125); and also in his plea for the early awakening and training “of judgment and of that reflection which avoids so many blunders and which, in a natural way (i.e. without training), does not come to man sufficiently early.”—E., p. 79.

Froebel gives from real life a few well-chosen examples of what the boy so “incredibly short-sighted[75] in his obedience to impulse” may do; telling how one deliberately aims a stone at a window “with earnest effort to hit it, yet without even saying to himself that if it does so, the window must be broken,” and how he “stands rooted to the spot” when this happens. Another, a “very good-hearted boy, who dearly loved and took care of pigeons, aimed at his neighbour’s pigeon on the roof, without considering that if the bullet hit it the dove must fall.” No wonder that he urges the early awakening of that reflection (Nachdenken) which would avoid so much, and in this connection it must be remembered too that Froebel emphasized the indefiniteness of human instinct which makes comparison possible. It is also worth remarking that Froebel knew that it is only by noting consequences of actual deeds that reflection comes, and this he shows in one of his quaint parallels between “the history of creation and the development of all things.”

It must have been a somewhat unorthodox view in 1826, but some pages further on Froebel speaks even more boldly of “the fall or—since the result is the same—the ascent of the mind of man from simple emotional development into the development of externally analytic and critical reason.”—E., p. 193.

Professor James goes on to state two other principles which make for non-uniformity of instinct. The first of these is that instincts are inhibited by habits, and the second that instincts are transitory.

The physiological fact of “plasticity” in which[76] these principles are grounded, was of course quite out of Froebel’s ken. Nevertheless, the principles themselves do not escape his shrewd observation. Mr. McDougall points out that even acquired habits of thought and action, so important as springs of action in the developed human mind, are in a sense derived from and secondary to instincts. He goes on to say that “in the absence of instincts no habits could be formed,” so it is interesting to find Froebel arguing that the phenomena of habit is a proof of the existence of what in the infant he calls the impulse to activity or to self-employment.

This proof may not be quite so clear to others as it was to Froebel, but at least the passage shows the close connection in his mind between instinct—the impulse towards activity and employment—and habit, and that he had noted the interaction between the two.

There are many references to the transitory nature of at least childish impulses.

Writing of the origin of boyish faults Froebel says:

When we come to the enumeration of the various human instincts we find that Froebel can hardly be said to have omitted any that are important from an educational point of view, except perhaps the instinct of fear, and to this he would be loth to appeal.[25] Moreover, it can be shown that his explanation of[79] certain tendencies suggests a better basis of classification than is supplied by certain recent writers, who might be expected to surpass him with ease.

Before the publication of Mr. McDougall’s “Social Psychology,” there were but few attempts at any classification of instincts within at least the reach of English readers. In July, 1900, there appeared an article in “The Pedagogical Seminary” in which Mr. Eby proposed to reconstruct the Kindergarten on the basis of natural instinct. The writer had apparently no dawning idea that this was the original basis[26] of the institution he proposes to reform, but Froebel’s account of Instinct shows in certain ways a clearer understanding of the subject than does his own.

Mr. Eby’s tabulation was:

Another classification, well known at least to teachers, is that given by Mr. Kirkpatrick in his “Fundamentals of Child Study.”[27]

[80]

His list comprises:

Interesting, helpful and suggestive as these lists are, they both serve as examples of the difficulty, if not impossibility, of any hard-and-fast lines of classification. For example, regulative instincts, which Mr. Kirkpatrick divides into moral and religious, must be derived from social instincts; gregarious instincts cannot be satisfactorily separated from instincts of self-preservation, and surely all instincts must be adaptive.

Froebel’s account of the instincts of a child in some ways resembles that of Mr. McDougall, and it is certainly in some points more enlightening than either of the others.

Under the heading of Investigation, Froebel brings both the Number Instinct, and the Interest in Stories, to which Mr. Eby gives a position as fundamental as that of the Social Instinct. The constructive instinct[81] which Mr. Kirkpatrick brings under “Resultant and Miscellaneous,” has a very special place in Froebel’s account, as being one way of imitating, that is another mode of investigating the surroundings, and also what is equally important, a way by which the child gains a knowledge of his own power, reaches Self-Consciousness.

It is because of the emphasis Froebel continually lays upon the developing self-consciousness that his views somewhat tend to resemble those of Mr. McDougall, though it would be absurd to attempt to draw any parallel. For Froebel, though he in no way minimizes the importance of Imitation, and although it is as the apostle of Play that he is most widely known, yet, like Mr. McDougall, he never speaks either of an Instinct of Play nor of Imitation, that is, he never uses for these his special word Trieb; nor has he any Instinct for Religion. Curiously enough, too, Froebel, with his constant insistence on the threefold aspect of mind, partly forestalls Mr. McDougall’s view that “instinctive action is the outcome of a distinctly mental process, one which is incapable of being described in purely mechanical terms, … and one which, like every other mental process, has and can only be fully described in terms of the three aspects of all mental process, the cognitive, the affective, and the conative aspects.”

It is in connection with the very earliest activity that Froebel writes:

In the last sentence of this passage, which refers to the merest infant, and which immediately precedes Froebel’s comparison of human instincts with those of the lower animals, are indicated the lines on which we may say Froebel classified though he never did so formally. He deals only with the “purely” or “specifically” human, as he never tires of reiterating, so that fundamental animal instincts, self-preserving and race-preserving, such as feeding and the sexual impulse, are little noticed, and only in connection with the necessity for self-control.

But, as with Mr. McDougall much is made to depend on self-feeling, so with Froebel still more does everything centre round that self-consciousness which to him is of the very nature of man, and which is made possible by the undefined or undeveloped character of human instinct.

[83]

The instincts and impulses noted by Froebel, all, be it clearly understood, in the service of the growing self-consciousness, and self-determination are: the instinct to independent activity (der Trieb zur Frei- und Selbst-thätigkeit), the instinct to investigation (Forschungstrieb), with which Froebel deals very thoroughly and by which he explains a great deal, the impulse of acquisition, the instinct of construction or formation (Bildungstrieb Gestaltungstrieb), the social instinct and the maternal instinct.

Froebel himself never tabulates, yet his apparently careful use of the word Trieb, taken along with his convincing explanations of various tendencies (Richtungen, Neigungen, Streben) seems to show that in relation to instinct there were in his mind two pairs of ideas, so closely related as to be inseparable, viz.:

(a) Investigation and Control of Surroundings, and (b) Consciousness of Self and Self-Determination.

It is impossible to become conscious of one’s self except by becoming conscious of a world of objects.[28] It is equally impossible to become self-determining without gaining control over these objects, over the surroundings. In order to control the surroundings, one must first investigate them, and this investigation brings with it self-consciousness, knowledge of one’s own powers and consequent self-determination. All this seems fully in accordance with what has been already stated as to the close connection between volitional and intellectual development.

The two main lines on which instinctive action must run, if it is to be, as it must be, adaptive, are given in Froebel’s words, “to have power and understanding.” To adapt ourselves to our surroundings we must first know them, and secondly, have power over them. Even this separation into firstly and[84] secondly is more a matter of words than of reality. No one knew more clearly or emphasized more strongly than Froebel that action, by which alone we gain power, is also the child’s royal road to knowledge. This he states very plainly in the “Plan” which he drew up for the school at Helba, which unfortunately never came into existence.

Knowledge of his surroundings is however not the only knowledge that the child gains through action; this is his only way of gaining knowledge of himself, of his power and of his weakness. It is through outward activity that, as Froebel says, he “comes to self-consciousness and learns to order, determine and master himself,” and it is in connection with the earliest Impulse to Activity that Froebel writes:

It may seem very presumptuous to venture to discuss here the classification of instincts adopted by Mr. McDougall, yet there are in it a few points which would not have appealed to Froebel, and it is conceivable that Mr. McDougall might make alterations in a future edition and attach even more importance to positive self-feeling as Froebel would undoubtedly have done. It is impossible to imagine Froebel having any dealings with an Instinct of Self-Abasement, though the Instinct of Self-Assertion is in full accordance with his ideas. And while it is hard to see the biological utility of an Instinct of Self-Abasement, it does seem as if the frustration of the Instinct of Self-Assertion might be made to cover all that is brought under its opposite.

It is difficult, too, to imagine Froebel allowing an Instinct of Pugnacity, and Mr. McDougall allows that this presupposes the other instincts, and that it cannot strictly be brought under his own definition of instinct. He allows, too, that this instinct is “lacking in the constitution of the females of some species,” and it seems impossible not to notice the difference between little boys and girls in this respect. Surely it puts too much to the credit of mere pugnacity to say: “A man devoid of the pugnacious instinct would not only be incapable of anger, but would lack this great source of reserve energy, which is called into play in most of us by any difficulty in our path.”[29] The Instinct of Self-Assertion, if it is worth anything, ought to be sufficient not only to produce anger,[30] but also to call up reserve energy to deal with difficulties.[87] Certainly Froebel would have said so. No doubt it is because of her weaker physique that the woman has not the pugnacity of the man, but Froebel too wrote mainly of the boy, and he puts boyish tussling and fighting down to the instinctive desire to measure and to increase power and this can easily be matched on the female side, though the power measured may not be that of muscle.

In passing, it may be suggested that it hardly seems worth while to postulate an Instinct of Repulsion with the impulses or actions of rejecting evil-tasting substances from the mouth and of shrinking from objects which are slimy or slippery. Surely the rejection of[88] unsuitable food might be a compound reflex action tending to the preservation of health; while shrinking from slimy objects, and even from the touch of fur, might have had their uses in the case of children left in caves, and might be drawn under the instinct of fear.

There does not seem to be anything to which Mr. McDougall would take exception in what Froebel has to say about Play or about Imitation.

As to play, Froebel must be regarded as a pioneer in the attempt to explain a subject all important to educators, and by his explanation certain kinds, and notably imitative play find an appropriate place under his instinct of investigation (Forschungstrieb).

As the word Investigation certainly implies activity, it may be permissible to wonder why Mr. McDougall has not made use of the terms “The Instinct of Investigation and the Emotion of Curiosity,” the more so that he himself has clearly a strong inclination to use the word curiosity to express emotion.[31]

Imitation, as we have seen,[32] is, according to Froebel, action which renders a child conscious of what is around him, conscious of his inner life of perceptions, ideas and feelings, conscious of his own power. Froebel also points out that imitation, as well as habit, is the outcome of a more fundamental impulse to activity.

[89]

Mr. McDougall notes “at least three distinct classes” of imitative actions. The first class consists of expressive actions, secondary to the sympathetic induction of the emotions they express, as when a child responds to a smile with a smile, and here we remember how Froebel notes the child’s first smile to his mother as the earliest sign of what he calls “the feeling of community.” The third class is the deliberate and voluntary imitation of an admired person, which does not concern us here. The second class are “simple ideo-motor actions evoked by the visual presentation of a movement,” and as a parallel to this we have Froebel’s “working of the inner activity wakened by the sight of outer activity.”

A point to which exception may well be taken is that in the infant Froebel notes what he seems to regard as a fundamental tendency, the impulse or instinct of activity, or as he frequently puts it, the impulse to busy oneself, which, however, soon differentiates into two more specific tendencies, viz. the impulse to investigate and the constructive impulse.

It may be worth mentioning that Groos would like to assume a “universal impulse to activity,” and though he “can only hold fast to the primal need for activity,” yet according to him Ribot approaches this assumption.—(“The Play of Man,” p. 3).

Even in the infant, however, this instinct or impulse to activity is devoted to “penetrating what is outer,” and the Kindergarten, meant for children from three to six, is intended to foster the three instincts, activity, investigation and construction, as well as to cultivate the social instinct by placing a little child among his equals. Froebel describes it in his plan as:

As regards the child, the word Trieb, which is exactly equal to impulse, seems to be applied only in one other direction, to what we would call the social instinct, and here again Froebel shows his recognition of the vagueness and indefiniteness of early consciousness. As he attributes to the infant the one impulse to activity which differentiates later into Investigation and Construction, so in the infant he recognizes a “feeling of community” (Gesammtgefühl), but says that it differentiates later into something more definite.[33]

Under the important Instinct of Investigation, or the Instinct for Self-Instruction, Froebel includes a great deal. Many different activities until recently somewhat carelessly talked of collectively as “play,” Froebel has separated and explained as the child’s way of investigating his surroundings. Even “the earliest activity and first action of the child,” Froebel says, shows “the instinct to self-teaching and self-instruction.”

Imitative action or imitative play is always referred to as action which helps towards understanding[92] of the surroundings. In the “Mother Songs” we read:

Representation, however, may be carried out in many ways, by the use of material, as well as by bodily action so that the constructive instinct also subserves that of investigation.

[93]

Here Froebel has plainly stated the main object of his specially selected play-material. The ordinary parent not being “the man advanced in insight,” who “makes clear to himself the purpose of playthings,” Froebel often saw children supplied with expensive but unsuitable toys, toys which would not bring the child any nearer his destination, “to have power and understanding, to become ever more and more self-conscious and self-determining.”

As the child grows older his constructions advance, but still they connect themselves with investigating:

Investigating naturally leads to exploring, “external objects invite him who would bring them nearer to move toward them,” and so the child once he is able to stand begins to travel:

The boy has lost none of this tendency to explore, but he goes further afield, and it is worth noting that because the boy has a distinct purpose in view his exploring is distinctly called work.

[96]

Even the baby shows trace of the collecting or acquiring instinct, but to Froebel this still falls under the head of investigation. The child who has just learned to walk is:

The boy, still only from six to eight years old, keeps up the collecting habit with more method and with a wider range, and he demands assistance.

This quotation brings us to another mode of investigation, that of asking questions, which Froebel was not likely to miss.

Professor O’Shea has an interesting section on what he calls “The Sense of Location,” which he says is “at the bottom of one of the most interesting and important phenomena of adjustment—the questioning activity.” So it may be worth while to notice that Froebel, whom the Professor has dismissed with one slighting reference, has been beforehand with him here, and has dealt with this same early beginning in one of his earliest Mother Songs, viz. “It’s all Gone,” where he says to the mother:

Questioning implies language, but Froebel has no language instinct. He does, however, call speech immediate (unmittelbar), usually translated “innate,” and he does say that because others talk to him, the child’s capacity for speech will develop of necessity[98] and will break forth spontaneously.

It is in connection with the child’s earliest investigations that Froebel brings in the learning to speak. In “The Education of Man,” he notes how the young child brings all his discoveries, “his treasures,” to the mother’s lap, and she is warned to give the right kind of help and at the right time.

All the help the mother need give at first is to supply names, since as Froebel says, “the name, as it were, creates the thing for the child.” Later she must help him to compare and classify.

Expression, of course, of which speech is but one form, is to Froebel all-important. “Speech,” he says, is “required and conditioned by the attainment to consciousness,” and as self-consciousness is the characteristic of humanity, so speech is “the first manifestation of mankind.” In his “Autobiography” Froebel writes:

In talking of the mother’s play with an infant he says that she accompanies every action with words, “even if obliged to confess that there can be no understanding of the spoken word,” as “the general sense of hearing is not yet developed, still less the special sense of hearing words.” Froebel says she is right:

[100]

Words, says Froebel, first separate the child from the world outside him.

Both in the earlier “Education of Man,” and in his later writings Froebel uses the strong expression that “the word creates the thing” for the child, and in one passage he adds that by language the idea is defined and retained.

[101]

Of very early speech Froebel says that it shows:

Having investigated his surroundings, near or far, and collected what seems to him attractive, the child, whether older or younger, arranges his treasures in some way, and this arrangement implies some comparison. “Like things must be ranged together and things unlike must be separated,” says Froebel of the child “scarce able to walk,” who has collected “the small, smooth, pebbles washed out of the sand by the rain.” This “arranging objects of each kind singly in a row” is at first no doubt only a recognition of the like and unlike, but Froebel notes that it is also one way in which the child may arrive at “the capacity for counting” by which his sphere of knowledge is again extended.

To many children, however, counting may come through efforts to draw. I have seen a child of four-and-a-half, in drawing a man, make a line for the arm, then lay down her pencil to count her own fingers and[102] then draw five lines for the man’s hand. Froebel says:

Yet another mode of Investigation is that of Experimenting; every normal child is what Froebel calls “a self-teaching scientist.”

It may well be through his ceaseless experimenting that the little child begins to draw, gains what the late Mr. Ebenezer Cooke called “a language of line,” or as Froebel puts it, notices “linear phenomena, which[103] direct his attention to the linear properties of surrounding objects.”

I have watched a child go through the process of discovering “linear phenomena,” just as Froebel describes it, no doubt from his own observation. A boy of three, having folded a piece of paper for the roof of a house, was colouring it, by rubbing on red chalk, when he called out, “Oh! I’m making lines.” The other children went on rubbing, but Phil made “lines” till the roof was finished.

But Froebel does not leave unnoticed the fact that the very earliest “drawing” is an outgrowth of the muscular action to which his instinct of activity is[104] urged by the stimulus of contact.

Here, perhaps, is the right place to introduce what Froebel had to say about the artistic tendencies of[105] children, since Art, to him, is always expression.

So, when Froebel comes to speak of art as a subject of the school curriculum he says: “Here, art will be considered only as the pure representation of the inner … differentiated according to the material it uses, whether motion, as such, audible in sound, or visible in lines, surfaces and colours, or massive”; and he adds:

[106]

In connection with the mother’s instinctive rhythmic crooning and dandling of the infant, Froebel says:

In the “Mother Songs,” too, Froebel writes:

In what he says of the Interest in Stories, Froebel again seems to show deeper insight than either Mr. Eby or Professor Kirkpatrick. Mr. McDougall does not touch upon the subject. It is still the outcome of the child’s instinctive desire to understand himself and his surroundings. Froebel says very truly that he can only understand others in proportion as he understands himself, and can only learn to understand himself, his own life, by comparing it with that of others. The desire for stories is “a striving, a longing, a demand of the mind” (ein Streben, eine Sehnsucht, eine Forderung des Gemüthes). For the little one, the simplest story of the mother bird feeding her young ones is a help to the understanding of his own life, makes his own life objective; the mother’s “effective story will hold up a looking-glass to the child, especially if it be told at the right time.” For the boy the story does the same and also answers to his instinctive demand not only to understand the present, but the past:

Even the fairy story seems to have found its legitimate place under the same heading, the instinct for investigation. Froebel sees that it covers for the little child the ground occupied by myth in the primitive consciousness. It explains the otherwise inexplicable.

The outcome of the instinct of construction, which is also so closely connected with the instinct of investigation, is that “sense of power” which is self-consciousness. Without this there can be no self-determination, but, says Froebel, “the sense of power must precede its cultivation.” With this growing personality, too, Froebel connects what is called the instinct of Acquisition, which begins when the little child “painfully secures his bit of straw,” and the boy of six to eight shows “the tendency to appropriate what he finds in the darkness of cave and forest.”

And here, just when he is emphasizing the fast developing consciousness of self, with its demand for its own space and its own material, Froebel brings out the strength of the social instinct in boyhood. It is here that he points out that this effort to construct has a uniting, not a separating, tendency. Continuous with the last quotation comes:

Froebel describes such joint work first in the Keilhau schoolroom—his own phrase is “education room”—where the younger boys are using building blocks, sand, sawdust, and moss, which they have brought in from the forest around and then among the older boys.

Of games of physical movement, running, wrestling, etc., Froebel writes:

Froebel had studied boys to some purpose, and he tells us not, however, to expect too much in the way of social virtues. Justice, self-control, honesty, courage and “severe criticism of pleasant indolence” may be expected, but mutual forbearance and consideration for those who are weaker or less familiar with the game, though not entirely lacking, are referred to as “the more delicate blossoms” of the playground. It is here that he says with wise moderation, “The feeling of power must precede its cultivation.”

The social instinct does not suddenly spring into existence in boyhood. It has its roots in what Froebel calls the Feeling of Community which unites the child first with the mother, then with father, brothers and sisters.

The sympathy of the little child ought to be trained and is trained by the wise mother always through action.

In the Finger Play called “The Nest,” Froebel tells the mother:

And the action which fosters the growth of sympathy is not to be merely representative; The Garden Song has this motto:

It is because “the desire for unity is the basis of all true human development” that the child is to be encouraged to help in the work he sees going on around him.

It is an essential part of the Kindergarten to consider the child as a member of the human family. It is described in one place as:

Among his Group Instincts Mr. Kirkpatrick mentions the Love of Approbation, and this receives special attention from Froebel at a surprisingly early stage. It is in the “Mother Songs,” in connection with his adaptation of an old German nursery rhyme about knights who come to visit “a good child,” that Froebel tells the mother that:

[115]

In the same connection he writes:

The Love of Approbation cannot be separated from what Mr. Kirkpatrick calls the Regulative, i.e. the Moral and Religious Instincts, for it is both social and regulative, and in the social instincts Froebel sees the foundation of the religious instincts or tendencies, to which we shall come presently. But he also notes a “sense of order,” as Mr. Sully does in his delightful “Studies of Childhood,” and this he traces back to very early beginnings, connecting it with the tendency towards rhythm.

One of the earliest Mother Plays, “Tic-tac,” deals with rhythmic movement, and in “The Education of Man” Froebel takes the beginning of “conscious control” still further back. His ideal mother fosters[116] “all-sided life,” that is, she fosters the cognitive, emotional and conative, the first by calling the child’s attention to his own body and his immediate surroundings, and the second by “seeking to awaken and to interpret the feeling of community between the child and the father, brother and sister,” and Froebel goes on:

It is surprising to find that Froebel, writing so early, has nothing at all resembling any special “moral faculty.” His references to “Conscience” are decidedly interesting, though given in quaint connection with games and rhymes for mere babes. He asks why the “Where’s Baby?” game gives such delight, and shows his psychological insight in the answer he finds, viz. that it is the feeling or recognition of self, of personality, which gives such joy.

[117]

The game which follows this repeats the hiding experience, but this time with the cry of “cuckoo,” from some one unseen, and this is likened to the conscience call, which is described as “consciousness of union in separation and of separateness, that is personality, in union.”—M., p. 98.

Mr. Kirkpatrick’s second Regulative instinct or tendency is that of Religion, but Froebel again, like Mr. McDougall, finds that Religion has its roots in an instinct “not specifically religious,”[36] viz. in the Social Instinct. He says this in “The Education of Man” in the plainest of terms.

It seems quite in accordance with this that Froebel should write that he likes better the German word Gott-einigkeit—union with God—than the foreign word religion; and also that he should speak of “developing the sense of kinship with man in every child, and the sense of kinship with God in every man.” So, in his “Mother Songs,” he tells the mother to give her child duties to perform, that so he may “feel his kinship” with her:

There is never a separation between Morality and Religion:

There is only one other instinct mentioned by Froebel, and that is the parental, or, rather, the maternal instinct. He is eager that this should be recognized as an instinct, but he is equally eager that, like other human instincts, its action should be determined by intelligence. In describing the “Plan” for his Kindergarten, Froebel pleads for more careful observation of the child and his relationships, and says that “thereby”:

As to the early beginnings of the instinct in the little girl we can find just a few references, sufficient to show that it did not pass unnoticed, and it seems here legitimate to say that “the girl anticipates her destiny,” as Froebel does in speaking of doll-play, though certainly this does not cover all such play:

[120]

The boy’s destiny is “to penetrate and rule Nature,” so in the “Mother Songs” Froebel describes how the boy is “cowering that no sign of life in the chicken family may escape him, while the girl starts up, all her care of things stirred, in order to beckon or call the hen or cock not to forget their chickens.”—M., p. 143.

In all his writings, Froebel refers to how much he has learned from mothers: “It was in watching your clever mother-doings that I learnt.” But, as he says of himself, it was “a necessary part of me to be irresistibly driven to search out the ultimate or primary cause of every fact of life,” and so he writes:

So, in what he says of this last instinct, Froebel is faithful to what he has said of all human instincts.

[122]

CHAPTER VII
Play and Its Relation to Work

To write even a small book on Froebel without directly touching on the subject of play would be impossible, though in dealing with instincts and the carrying out of natural activities we have necessarily considered much that comes under this heading.

On the educative value of play, Froebel is recognizedly original, and his views have influenced and are influencing schools for young children in most civilized countries. Indeed, it would be difficult to show that modern writers on play, in spite of the scientific thoroughness of their investigations, classifications and terminology, have made much advance upon Froebel’s theories. Rather do they tend to show how remarkable was his insight, and how surprisingly well grounded his theories.

Nothing, however, has yet been said as to the relation of play to work, no direct definition has yet been given, nor has any reference been made to the now familiar theories of play.

In Froebel’s day, these, as clearly formulated theories, were non-existent. His work was that of a pioneer, and his theory might have been called that of “Preparation through Recapitulation.” He would, however, have allowed that play is sometimes, though not always, recreative, and he makes clear the necessity for what he calls “healthy vital energy” (gesunden[123] Lebensmuthe), but he would never have called this mere “surplus energy,” because he thought it was not more than was required:

Ebers, the Egyptologist, tells us that when he was a boy at Keilhau full provision was made for this abounding energy. We read of walks long and short, of botanizing and geologizing rambles, of climbing trees and cliffs for birds’ eggs, of which only one might be taken from a nest. We hear of Indian games out of Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, of classic and other dramas on winter evenings, and of Homeric battles, which Froebel, he says, would have called “signs of creative imagination and individual life.” There was swimming and skating and coasting and “the spacious wrestling ground with the shooting stand and the gymnasium for every spare moment of the winter”; and a piece of ground “assigned to each pupil, where he could wield spade and pickaxe, roll stones, sow and reap.” But the great game was the Bergwacht, where the boys, divided into four parties that all might be active, actually constructed, and then attacked and defended stone fortresses. “How quickly,” says Ebers, “we learned to use the plummet, to take levels, hew the stone and wield the axe.” The weapons were blunted stakes. It was forbidden to touch the head, but it was a point of honour among[124] the boys to yield as prisoner if touched by the pole, “and what self-denial it required!” These combats were held on fine Saturday evenings, and when all was over “the women,” probably the girls of the school community, had lighted fires and made supper ready, and the lads slept in their fortresses while two sentinels marched up and down, relieved every half-hour. On the Sunday following the boys were not required to go to church, “where we should merely have gone to sleep.”

It has frequently been brought as an accusation against Froebel that he makes no clear cut distinction between work and play, and that is true, but who nowadays does? Common sense would probably join hands with the philosopher in saying that the feeling of freedom is the chief distinction of play as opposed to work, and this is the definition quite distinctly given by Froebel. The definition is given in his detailed enumeration of “the various directions of an active life of instruction and education,” and after mentioning religious training, cultivation of the body as the means of expressing mind, the study of Nature, etc., etc., he comes to:

Another definition given in “The First Action of a Child” is:

It is because it is spontaneous that Froebel calls play, during the period of earliest childhood, when the child is gaining control of language, “the highest phase of human development at this stage.”

[125]

For modern views on play we turn to the exhaustive study made by Karl Groos in his two volumes, “The Play of Animals,” and “The Play of Man.” Here we find the writer taking “the conception of impulse life as a starting-point,” and reaching the conclusion “that among higher animals certain instincts are present which, especially in youth, but also in maturity, produce activity that is without serious intent, and so give rise to the various phenomena which we include in the word ‘play.’” In this play, Groos goes on, “opportunity is given to the animal through the exercise of inborn dispositions, to strengthen and increase his inheritance in the acquisition of adaptations to his complicated environment, an achievement which would be unattainable by mere mechanical instinct alone.” In the treatment of human play he considers “an analogous position is tenable,” but, for the word instinct, with its particular reactions, he must substitute “natural or hereditary impulse.”

We have already seen that though Froebel recognized the existence and importance of human instinct, still he distinguished between it and the “definite and strong instincts” which belong to the animals lower than man. We have seen that he regarded the play of childhood as “spontaneous self-instruction” based on the instincts of investigation and of construction or representation, action being regarded as the principal means of investigating, as well as of gaining control[126] over the surroundings and over the self. We have noticed, too, that Groos feels inclined to assume a universal “impulse to activity,” and points out that Ribot approaches such an assumption, though for himself he can only venture to “hold fast to the fact of the primal need for activity.” Froebel does, as we have seen, attribute to the infant the one instinct of activity, which in one place he calls “the natural longing for some mode of activity inherent in all children,” and this he says becomes differentiated at a later period.

The special place given by Groos to imitation as “the link between instinctive and intelligent conduct” is also noteworthy. For we have seen that Froebel regards imitation in precisely the same light, never calling it an instinct, but saying that it is the outcome of spontaneous activity, and that it leads on to understanding.

It is impossible to make plain how Froebel regarded play, until it is known how he regarded work, work, too, not only for a child but for a human being. What he desired for all was work which produces joy; he calls it “a debasing illusion that man works, produces, creates, only in order to preserve his body, only to secure food, clothing and shelter.” Man, he says, works “primarily and in truth that his real essence may[127] assume outward form,” and one of his sayings is that “the true spirit of life is the genuine spirit of play.” In an ideal state of affairs, no human being would be condemned to entirely mechanical work. Work “worthy of the nature of man” is to Froebel work which in some way expresses the man; mechanical work is dismissed as “degrading man into a beast of burden or a machine.” It is because man is of God that he must work, must produce. “Nearer we hold of God who gives, than of his tribes who take, I must believe,” is Froebel’s thought in Browning’s words:

It is too cheap a jibe to throw at Froebel and his educational theories that he makes little distinction between work and play. It ought never to come from any one who has made even a slight study of psychology. The sting is meant to lie in the suggestion that play is trifling and easy and that it requires no exertion, while work is serious and demands concentrated effort, but this view will not bear any consideration. Every one knows that the play even of an adult, where the differentiation between work and play ought to be more possible, is often most exhausting, either to body or to mind. As to the play of childhood, one of the best known passages in “The Education of Man” is the one in which Froebel protests that:

It is in this passage, too, that he speaks of the child “wholly absorbed in play,” who after “playing enduringly even to the point of fatigue” has fallen asleep “while so absorbed,” and calls this “the most beautiful expression of child-life at this stage.”

It is Froebel’s glory that as early as 1826 he had applied the theory of development to education and, rightly or wrongly, he believed that if we could but supply to our school children material suited to their needs according to their stage of development, they would respond with the same eagerness that the younger child shows in what we call his play, but what Froebel called his “self-culture and self-education.” He states[129] this view quite distinctly:

The view that “the material of instruction and the manner of teaching” are necessarily conditioned by the child’s stage of development is a view that has rapidly gained ground. Froebel did his best to apply it, and it had a partial application in the “culture epochs” theory of the Herbartians. It has received a stronger impetus into what seems at present a much truer direction, from the experimental work carried out at Chicago, under the auspices of Professor Dewey. Froebel maintained that it was a condition of satisfactory work in every subject. For example, in connection with the teaching of writing he says:

Froebel speaks in the same way of work in colours, saying “children feel the need of a knowledge of colours.” Of poetry in general, including religious verses and prayers, he says “these must be given according to the requirements of the development of the child’s mind, and must give expression to what is already there.”

Returning now to the subject of play as such, we find that Groos retains as “general psychological criteria of play,” but two “of the elements popularly regarded as essential—namely, its pleasurableness, and the actual severance from life’s serious aims.” Of these he says: “Both are included in activity performed for its own sake.”

It is in connection with very young children that Froebel speaks of activity for its own sake, and here he does not differentiate between work and play. He is true to his theory that in all things capable of development, “what is definite proceeds everywhere from what is indefinite.” So he says that:

He maintains that:

[131]

But, in the case of the boy a little older, though still only seven or eight, Froebel does distinctly differentiate, giving the definition of play already quoted, “spontaneous expression and practice of every kind,” and saying of work, that:

Of the infant, Froebel writes:

Of the older child Froebel very distinctly insists that he wants more than the activity, that he wants outward result. But the result of which he speaks is one which Groos himself would not disallow. It is only the outward product of the impulse which has been gratified, a result which is present to the mind of the older child, while to the infant no such consciousness[132] is possible.

Inquiring into the kind of pleasure derived from play, Groos finds that it rests primarily on the satisfaction of inborn impulses, which press for discharge, and he gives three special “inborn necessities which ground our pleasure in play—namely, the exercise of attention, the demand to be an efficient cause, and imagination.”

As to attention, he suggests that it lends a meaning to the vague idea of a general need for activity, speaking of “the pitiable condition of boredom” if opportunity is withheld.

Froebel, of course, has much to say about the instinct of activity, or, as he usually calls it in “The First Action of a Child,” the instinct of employment (Beschäftigungstrieb), which is noticeable “even when the so-called three months’ slumber has just ended.” He, too, frequently refers to “the ennui and pernicious lack of occupation,” to the “mischievous idleness which results from our not satisfying or misdirecting the natural longing for activity inherent in all children.” It is because Froebel’s thoughts always run on conscious revelation of the self within as the explanation of human life, that he makes so much of “the child’s instinct to employ itself” (Triebe des Kindes, sich zu beschäftigen). This also explains how so much that he says corresponds with what Groos brings forward with regard to “the[133] joy in being a cause,” and its modifications. These modifications are (a) pleasure in the mere possession of power, (b) emulation, when a model is copied, and (c) in the case of imitative competition there is pleasure in surpassing others as well as the enjoyment of success resulting from that pleasure of overcoming difficulties which comes under the combative instinct.

Froebel is warning parents that they must provide for their children opportunity for the exercise of the impulse to formative activity by letting them help, even if their help is really a hindrance, and he says:

It is evidently difficult even for practised thinkers to grasp the importance of what we so glibly call play in the case of the young child. Mr. Kirkpatrick, for instance, fully recognizes its importance in regard to children somewhat older, and he makes a suggestive distinction between play and amusement, calling play active, while amusement is passive. Others, he says,[135] work for our amusement. But when he speaks of the infant, he slips into the mistake of saying that the infant, even though active, “amuses” itself. To the ordinary observer the whole life of a young child is play, but it would be as correct to say that it is all work.

Professor Stout, true to what he calls the tendency of the moderns to see in the little child what is writ large in the adult, allows “purely intellectual curiosity” on the part of the infant. We have no right to call an infant passive and therefore amused even when the mother shakes the rattle for his edification. He may be striving hard to accommodate his organs of sight, he may be recalling previous sounds similar and dissimilar, he may be watching and comparing different movements and different positions. He has so much to learn “with the world so new and all,” and, to judge from his seriousness, it is at times a most momentous inquiry. The baby to whom the activity of throwing is new, and who spends full twenty minutes in throwing a tram ticket on the floor of the car—which the patient mother restores each time—throwing, too, with such force and evident purpose, cannot properly be said to be playing. Nor can the infant who stares with such concentration at the lighted lamp and who, when the mother moves out of the direct range of the light, strives with all its feeble strength to readjust its position to that entrancing brightness.

Of the very young child, Froebel writes:

When Groos reaches the pedagogical standpoint, he says:

“We have repeatedly found in the course of this inquiry that even the most serious work may include a certain playfulness, especially when enjoyment of being a cause and of conquest are prominent. Between flippant trifling, and conscientious study there is a wide chasm which nothing can bridge, but not all play is such trifling. Who would forbid the teacher’s making the effort to induce in his pupils a psychological condition like that of the adult worker, who is not oppressed by the shall and must in the pursuit of his calling, because the very exertion of his physical and mental powers in work, involving all his capabilities, fills his soul with joy? Since play thus approaches work, when pleasure in the activity as such, as well as its practical aim, becomes a motive power (as in the gymnastic games of adults), so may work become like play, when its real aim is superseded by enjoyment of the activity itself. And it can hardly be doubted that this is the highest and noblest form of work.”[37]

It is beyond dispute that this is the kind of work that Froebel desired for all humanity, so it is not surprising if he drew no hard and fast line between work and the “play” which he insists “is not trivial,” and which he urges parents to protect and guide. Of[137] play at the stage of boyhood he writes:

And in reference to the right kind of instruction he says:

One distinct line of division is that drawn by Groos when he says that with young animals and probably with children “their first manifestation of what is afterwards experimentation, fighting and imitative play, etc., is rarely conscious, and therefore we cannot assert with assurance that it is pleasurable.”[38] In this case he says the biological but not the psychological germ of play is present. Froebel never lost sight of the psychological point of view in so far as his desire always was to see what the action meant to the actor, what the child’s play meant to the child, and also in that he desired all the activity to be joyous, to be performed for its own sake. But it was really the biological[138] view that he endeavoured to reach and to set forth.

Coming now to the Theories of Play, it seems clear that, if he had ever heard of them, Froebel would have endeavoured to combine those of Recapitulation and Preparation. He states quite plainly that these are not incompatible, recognizing that in any work or play, by which the child retraces past stages of human development, he gains what is most necessary for his own future life, control over his surroundings as well as over himself, something after the manner in which these have been gained by the race.

It is often said that traditional games are mere survivals, degenerate imitations of ancient customs, and therefore not worth encouraging. But children are not bound by tradition, and Froebel is probably right when he says:

We cannot always tell why children enjoy the game, or what they gain from it. Such games are at least the earliest and simplest introduction to “the rules of the game,” and they contain the elements of choosing sides and of whispered secrets. These things may seem small to the ordinary onlooker, but not to the real observer, who sees the amount of self-control required by a child of four or five, that he may not proclaim the secret aloud, the difficulty he has in whispering, and the importance to him of the choice between oranges and lemons or whatever it may be. There are certainly some which most thinking persons, Froebelian or otherwise, would wish to discourage.[140] As Froebel himself said of some that he found in use:

Certainly, Froebel would have had no dealings with either work or play which would interfere with progressive development, he wanted recapitulation because he regarded that “great necessary highway” as the road to sure progress.

Some educators who have made much of the “culture epochs” might have avoided mistakes and exaggerations if they had taken to heart Froebel’s repeated warning that the child has “living relations” not only with the past, but with the future, besides being at the same time the child of the present generation.

Underlying all that Froebel has to say of play, is the idea that it is a preparation for future life activities. This is implied even in the definition given of the play of the child of three years old, viz. that it is “spontaneous self-instruction”; it is most evident in the passage:

Of his later institution, the Kindergarten, Froebel says:

About the play of boyhood Froebel says:

[143]

Of his own Keilhau boys he writes:

In America at least the authorities are beginning to realize the truth of Froebel’s words as to the importance of playgrounds, and actual experiment has shown that he was right in saying that “even the plays should be under right guidance,” not for purposes of repression, but for the encouragement of real play which “must necessarily break forth in joy from within.”

It was in watching boys one day—“boys,” he says, “of the right age for these plays, but whose life is not awakened, or has been dulled, and who now idly lounge around, getting in their own way, as it were”—that a friend said to him, “I do not understand how these boys cannot play, how many plays we had at their age!” And it is here that Froebel gives his version of the “surplus energy” theory when he writes:

It is here, too, in the section entitled, “Play or Spontaneous Expression and Practice of Every Kind” that Froebel begins a general classification of boy’s play:

This general classification is very much the same as that of Groos, who divides Play first into two main classes, viz. Playful Experimentation and Playful[146] Exercise of the Second or Socionomic Order. Under the first heading come I. Playful Activity of the Sensory Apparatus; II. Playful Use of the Motor Apparatus; and III. Playful Exercise of the Higher Mental Powers. The first two correspond to Froebel’s Sense Plays and Physical Plays, and the third to his Intellectual Plays. Under the second heading, Groos brings Fighting Plays, which as we have seen Froebel attributes to the unconscious desire to measure and increase strength; Imitative Play, which to Froebel is the child’s way of learning by action; Love Plays of which Froebel takes no notice at all, and Social Play. Under this comes what has been given as to the importance of Playgrounds, and much of what Froebel wrote as to the Kindergarten Games. For instance, as part of the work of the students in his Training Course comes:

Games of this kind have been much misused, especially by being given a rigidity of form which, Froebel wrote:

The number and variety of plays and games noted by Froebel is quite surprising. Of the long list given by Groos there are few indeed which he does not mention.[41] The plays for older children are given in “The Education of Man,” but other games encouraged at Keilhau are to be found in the accounts given by Ebers. Even in his earlier work Froebel shows how closely he had been observing the play of little children, but this he worked out later in his Mother Songs, in the papers on his various “Gifts,” and in that on Movement Play. These later books were written and the play material was planned because Froebel saw that the children who do not play are those “in whom life has not awakened or has been dulled,” just because “the true aim and the spirit of play is rarely understood and the games are seldom managed according to the needs of the boy.”

[148]

CHAPTER VIII
Froebel’s Play-Material and its Original Purpose

To one who believed, as Froebel did, that “the means by which the child gains his first ideas of his own nature and life and the nature and life of the cosmos, are his play and playthings,” these playthings could not be indifferent.

Froebel was speaking of his own Play-material—known by the name of “Froebel’s Gifts” because he thought them the most suitable gifts for little children—when he wrote:

And although his opinion of the importance of that particular series of playthings, which he chose from among those he saw in general use, may have been exaggerated, still there is a good deal of sound psychology in what he says about them. In speaking of[149] imitative action and construction, we have already touched upon what were perhaps the most important ideas underlying this series.[42]

But Froebel also writes of his Gifts that “they will cover the whole ground of training in sense perception,” and he has managed to think out a very fair number of the points which Dr. Ward, in his Analysis of Perception, notes as important.

One of Froebel’s frequent Reviews of his play-material begins:

Then Froebel explains in so many words the really psychological aim or meaning of his sequence of “Gifts,” so well known by name—and even better known in most un-psychological practice—but little understood in their real and original significance, as a means of perception, the earlier ones at least, for children much below even Kindergarten age.

The very first “intimation of an intellect,” Froebel writes, is when the child is seen to “keep his gaze fixed upon the motion of a bright object. This begins a few weeks after birth.” The ball is to be given to the baby “when the starting-point of recognition and knowledge (Erkennens und Erkenntniss), viz. perceiving, noticing, thinking (das Gewahrwerden, das Bemerken und Beachten) becomes perceptible”: when the child “can freely move its little arms and hands, when it can perceive and distinguish tones, and can turn its attention and gaze in the direction from which these tones come.”

In his analysis of Perception, Dr. Ward distinguishes (i) Assimilation or Recognition, (ii) Localization or Spatial Fixation, and (iii) Objective Reference, or Intuition of Things. Of these, the first, Assimilation, has already been taken up in Chapter IV, and we have seen that, according to Dr. Ward, it involves Retention and Differentiation, though in itself there is no active comparison, and we have seen that Froebel also spoke[152] of the earliest impressions as “almost imperceptible, but fixed by repetition and by change,”[43] and of a “perception of sequence” involving “dim” or “unconscious comparison.”

Of the second process Dr. Ward writes: “To treat of the localization of impressions is really to give an account of the steps by which the psychological individual comes to a knowledge of space,” and he goes on to say that psychologists may have been too apt to examine “the conception of space and not our concrete space perceptions.” Now Froebel did consider concrete space perception, and with a certain amount of care. That he saw its importance is clear from the fact that in discussing his “means of employment” he says:

And although Froebel may not fully have realized that, as Dr. Ward puts it: “The infant’s earliest lessons in spatial perception are in exploring his limbs,” still we do find him writing from Blankenburg, in a letter accompanying the first sketch of his Nursery Songs:

Having said that “the child first perceives himself, his corporeal frame, as a space-filling object, as a body, by means of his life,” or his activity, the first two of this collection naturally deal with large body movements. In the one the mother alternately lowers and raises the infant, “letting him really feel a slight shock,” and in the other the baby tramples with his feet, and she is told to supply the object of resistance. This resistance, as we have seen, gives him “the dim consciousness[154] of self, which comes out of physical opposition to, and connection with, the outer world,” which Dr. Ward speaks of under the head of Localization of Impressions. Dr. Ward writes that “the distinction between his own and foreign bodies begins when the child feels the difference between a series of movements accompanied by passive touches, and one without passive touches,” but Froebel goes no further than noting what comes through “resistance.” The ball, however, as we have just seen, is to be used so as to assist the child’s comprehension of “a self-included space-filling object,” and through play with the ball he is to gain the “three great perceptions of object, space and time.”

In the Intuition of things, Dr. Ward distinguishes five points “concerning which psychology may be expected to give an account: (a) the reality; (b) solidity or occupation of space; (c) permanence, or, rather, continuity in time; (d) unity and complexity; and (e) substantiality and the connection of its attributes and powers.”

(a) Reality he disposes of as “not strictly an item by itself, but a characteristic of all the items that follow.” Of (b), Solidity or Impenetrability, he writes that “here our feelings of effort come specially into play. They are not entirely absent in those movements of exploration by which we attain a knowledge of space; but it is when these movements are definitely realized, or are only possible by increased effort, that we reach the full meaning of body as that which occupies space.” Dr. Ward goes on to add as “in the highest degree essential,” that muscular effort should meet with something which seems to be “making an effort the counterpart of our own.”

Besides telling the mother to give the required definite resistance, by opposing her hand or chest to[155] the little trampling feet, Froebel gives a “new play, a new perception of the object,” when he tells the mother that “as soon as the child is sufficiently developed to perceive the ball as a thing separate from himself,” she should tie a string to it and pull gently.

Unity and Complexity, “the remaining factors in the psychological constitution of things,” says Dr. Ward, “might be described in general terms as the time-relations of their opponents.…”

And Froebel, going straight on from “the opposite something,” comes in like manner to time-relations.

Dr. Ward gives as the first step “in the psychological constitution of distinct things”—as opposed to what he calls “mere thingstuff”—“the simultaneous projection into the same occupied space of the several impressions, which we thus come to regard as the qualities of the body filling it.”

Froebel writes:

To reach unity and complexity, says Ward, “it is essential that objects should recur, and recur as they have previously recurred, if knowledge is ever to begin.” The constituent impressions must also “be again and again repeated in like order to prompt anew the same grouping,” and the constancy of one group must present itself “along with changes in other groups, and in the general field.… It is only where a group, as a whole, has been found to change its position relatively to other groups, and—apart from causal changes—to be independent of changes of position among them, that such complexes can become distinct unities and yield a world of things.”

Froebel writes of one of his early plays:

Later, speaking of a child’s earliest attempts at walking, he says:

Dr. Ward requires still more and says that “the unity of a thing” carries us over to temporal continuity, and this he attributes to “the continuous presentation of such a group as the bodily self, which makes us infer continuity of existence, for presentations which have been presented, removed and re-presented.”

We have seen already that Froebel says the child perceives the ball “through departing and returning, as a space-filling object, as a body, just as he perceives himself, his corporeal frame, as a space-filling object, as a body.” And there is also a quaint, but interesting reference to something of this kind in one of the earliest Nursery Songs called “All Gone,” where the mother is distinctly told that she must help her child to realize continuity through change.

And the baby is supposed to be quieted by the mother’s playful tale of the present whereabouts of his bread and milk, a German version of the homely “Down red lane.”

Professor Ward’s last point in the intuition of things is “substantiality.” “What is it,” he says, “that has thus a beginning and continues indefinitely?”[159] The answer is that “of all the constituents of things only one is universally present, that of physical solidity, which presents itself according to circumstances, as impenetrability, resistance or weight.… In other words, that which occupies space is the substantial; the other real constituents are but its properties or attributes, the marks or manifestations which lead us to expect its presence.”

Froebel, again, sums up the ideas he intends the child to gain from play with the ball:

The soft ball of the first gift is supposed to be given to the child when he is three or even two months old, but when he reaches six or eight months, he is supposed to be ready for something which “makes itself known especially through noise, sound, tone, as it were through speech.” The second gift therefore consists of a wooden sphere and a cube, which are intended not only to please the child by the noise they make, but to serve as material for comparison. The mother is told to roll the sphere and then, in order to[160] make this oppositeness between sphere and cube perceptible to the child, to place the cube steadily before him and presently to take one of his little hands, pushing gently at first, but

By even these few representations the mother can present to her child:

Many plays are suggested, all to be accompanied by song or rhyme, only, says Froebel, “one must not go on in opposition to the wish of the child, but always follow his requirements and needs and his own expressions of life and activity.”

It is in this connection that Froebel notices how early a child begins to note cause.

[161]

The sphere and cube are also to be compared as to shape:

So the mother is directed to hide the cube in her hand and show it again—so that the child will watch for its reappearance.

Froebel’s “Gift III” is a little box containing eight-inch cubes for building purposes, and after the child has clearly gained the idea of “outer object”[162] Froebel says:

The time when the child wants this something to arrange is given as any time “between the ages of one and three.” It is the time when “his greatest delight consists in the quick alternation of building up and tearing down.”—P., p. 106.

[163]

At first the little one will be satisfied with arranging and rearranging the cubes, piling them one upon another, “placing one before, behind, beside another.” Soon, however, he will try to make something definite, and “the intelligent nurse interprets the dim idea and sees whether a something, a table, a chair, etc., can be perceived in what is represented.” Then the something must have a purpose, so the chair is grannie’s chair, the table is ready for the soup, and so on.

There is nothing here which is not quite a usual proceeding. Froebel’s peculiarity of treatment comes from his desire to give the blocks to the child as a whole which he can take to pieces. This is the reason of the traditional proceeding, perhaps still kept up in old-fashioned kindergartens, when the children first slip the lid out a little way, then reverse the boxes, pull out the lid and lift it off the box. The directions are Froebel’s own, and are given:

It is clear that this meaning is quite lost when the same proceeding is forced on older children, who are quite accustomed to pull down and build up.

Froebel emphasizes the fact that the pieces are of the same cubical form as the whole thus presented, and adds:

[164]

It is in speaking of this simplest of toys that Froebel enters a strong protest against the complex and useless toys which afford no scope for childish activity.

This quotation sets forth quite plainly the main idea underlying all the varied toys or play-material known as the “Gifts and Occupations” of the Kindergarten.

According to Mr. Hailmann and other writers, the gifts are material by which the child can gain ideas, and the occupations furnish material for gaining skill. But Mr. Hailmann allows that this distinction, which to him seems important, was never formulated by Froebel.

[165]

Froebel’s psychological knowledge, in fact, was in advance of that of his interpreters. He knew that it was by action, by manipulation of material, that the child gains his ideas and that the clear distinction between gift and occupation which to Mr. Hailmann is “very important” is on the contrary actually non-existent.

Gifts III to VI are boxes of building blocks, intended to present sequence in difficulty of manipulation, and also increasing variety of form. Because of the stress he laid on self-expression, Froebel thought very highly of the educational possibilities of a box of bricks. In “The Education of Man” he writes:

After the bricks come the coloured tablets of Gift VII, which children from four and upwards, if left free, often highly appreciated as material for making patterns; and the Sticks or splints of various lengths of Gift VIII, with which they used to lay outlines of familiar objects. English children often use burnt matches for this, sometimes they do the same thing with “mother’s pin-box,” and a child quite innocent of Kindergarten ideas has been seen to appropriate the various nails[166] of a tool-box to the same purpose. Along with the sticks Froebel supplied rings of metal or paper; the little English child who used the nails took small curtain rings for the petals of her flower and screw nails for its stalk. In Gift IX the child is presented with very small articles for stringing or arranging—beads, coloured beans, pebbles, etc. A child’s pleasure in this material and in the sticks and rings probably shows that he is ready to practise movements of the thumbs and forefingers. Froebel said that the use of these sticks called the child’s attention to “linear phenomena,” and I have already mentioned that many years ago, when we were still using Froebel’s play-material, I heard a child call out, “Oh, I’m making lines!” just after he had been using the sticks. The other children contentedly went on rubbing with the crayons; but this young discoverer continued to make laborious lines, always from left to right, till the work was completed to his satisfaction.

The remaining “Gifts” include coloured paper to fold and cut either to produce such objects as boats, boxes, purses, chairs, etc., or to form patterns, or to weave together for the well-known paper mat; drawing and paper materials; modelling clay and sand, and so on.

The weakness of the series is the semi-psychological semi-mathematical arrangement, which has been dealt with in the following chapter. What Froebel meant to do was to pick out from among the material he saw given to children, or appropriated by them, those things which seemed to him best adapted to call out the activities of children at various ages or stages, in accordance with his idea that “the man advanced in insight should make clear to himself the purpose of playthings, viz. to help the child to express himself, and to bring the phenomena of the outer world nearer[167] to him.”

Surprise has often been expressed that Froebel did not include such toys as dolls in his series.

One reason is that he did not live long enough, for he does speak of doll-play and says that later the time will come “when we shall speak of the doll and the hobby-horse as the plays of the awakening life of the girl and of the boy.” In his brief reference he does speak of the child’s own nature becoming objective through the doll-play, and he adds that by such play she “anticipates and feels her destiny.” He notes, too, with interest that:

Undoubtedly Froebel was right in demanding simple toys and in characterizing the “too complex toy” as a “viper under the roses,” and also in demanding that toys should be carefully considered and chosen so as to meet the needs of the child’s developing mind. But the plays and the toys of a developing child cannot be definitely prescribed, and every similar attempt is likely to fail, as Froebel’s has done. In his choice, Froebel was biased by the great idea which obsessed him, the idea of development. Like all human beings, he had the defects of his virtues, and it is to these defects that we must now turn our attention.

[168]

CHAPTER IX
Weak Points Considered

An honest attempt to show what credit is due to Froebel, for the remarkable anticipations of modern theories on which he based his pedagogy, seems to involve the opposite process of inquiring whether or not any of his practices can be shown to have an unsound basis.

The modern boys’ school, with a few, and a very few exceptions, does not even approach the school at Keilhau as a place of real education, as any one may see who reads the account given of it by Georg Ebers. On the other hand, the modern Kindergarten is probably in many ways an advance upon the original attempts. Many practices of which Froebel approved are now discarded, some no doubt because of progress in physiological discovery; we know now that a child is not fitted as regards nervous development and muscular control to deal with fine pricking or drawing in chequers.

But a better knowledge of physiology does not account for all the changes that have taken place. Important as they undoubtedly were in Froebel’s eyes, the modern Kindergartener is inclined to smile over her predecessors’ “worship of the ‘Gifts’”; and, though we are agreed as to the importance of games, the modern teacher chooses from a wide, perhaps too wide a range, and no longer reposes blind faith in certain circle-games with their supposed “symbolic” virtue.

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To some, the word symbolic will at once suggest Froebel’s weakest point, others will resent any such idea, for symbolism appeals strongly to one and repels another. For Froebel himself, undoubtedly the whole world was symbolic, in so far as he regarded the universe as one expression of the Divine. To him, as to Browning:

But this has not affected his educational practice to the extent generally supposed.

At the same time it does seem as if one, if not two, psychological errors lie at the root of certain practices which the modern Froebelian has discarded.

It would be most unfair to Froebel not to emphasize what is often overlooked, viz. that the “Gifts” were important in his eyes solely because he believed that in them he was presenting toys, or “play-material,” exactly suited to the succeeding stages of the child’s development, bodily and mental. “The new gift,” he says, “corresponds both to the child’s increasing constructive ability, and to his growing capacity to comprehend the external world.” And he writes:

It should also be noted that Froebel did not commit the mistake of inventing new toys. What he attempted to do was what we are all attempting now, viz. to use what natural instinct has already selected,[170] as a basis for conscious educational work. Balls and building blocks, coloured tablets and papers, sand and clay, are all spontaneously appropriated by normal children. Even these materials which seem to us unchildlike are not so in different surroundings. For instance, in the Black Forest, one may watch children playing with long slivers of wood exactly like Froebel’s laths, and these they take from the cut logs which are being hauled up for winter storage.

Again, it is only fair to point out that Froebel’s followers have appropriated material which he suggested as suited to children aged from three months to five or six years, and have used them with children from four or five to six or seven and even older.[45] Teachers have also found it convenient to disregard Froebel’s frequent warnings not to interfere, to let the child “bang and pound” when he wants to, to let him “play quietly and thoughtfully by himself as long as he will,” to give him “the greatest possible freedom of expression.” In some, at least, of the original text-books on Kindergarten practice, written by Froebel’s early disciples, this advice is totally disregarded, and we find prescribed the most formal of object lessons, dealing with the properties of the ball in set questions and answers; only at the end comes “If there is time, the children may be allowed to roll the ball.”

Still, when all due allowance is made, there remains the fact that Froebel attributed far too much importance to the series of toys he arranged, and in addition to this he must be held in large measure responsible for the extraordinary amount of mathematical perceptions of which young children have been considered capable,[171] and beneath which many gleams of intelligence may have been extinguished.

The psychological error which seems to underlie both these mistakes in pedagogy seems to have been that of making too much of the outer factor in the process of perception. Froebel was quite right and quite modern in refusing to draw any hard and fast line between sense perception and thinking, in saying that the child moves “from perception of a thing, joined with thought about it, up to pure thought.” But he must have failed somehow, sufficiently to grasp the fact that all that is present to sense is not necessarily perceived, that perception depends not merely upon what is presented, but upon previous mind content. The word “apperception,” though apparently somewhat fallen into disfavour of late, has certainly been of service in emphasizing this point.

What seems strange is that in the very book, in which we find the theory disregarded in practice, we find Froebel stating the theory itself in the plainest of terms:

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No one, surely, can maintain that these words are carried into effect in e.g.:

There is certainly no “old within the child” of one to three, which can condition this achievement, nor is there any spontaneity. For the child a little older we have:

Now the “hints” refer to making clear to the child, always in justice, be it remembered, in the concrete, “as perceptible facts only,” such points as “similarity[173] of size with dissimilarity of shape and position, in such words as:

Certainly children differ very much, and some have a special aptitude for mathematical relations, but to most children under five these words would convey nothing. Half may have a meaning, though at that age and for some time after we hear of “a fair half” and “quarter” is generally used as a name for any fraction recognized as not a half, even if it should be greater. Such words as fourth and eighth can have no meaning for a child who shows no consciousness of difference when shown six, seven or eight objects. At the age of three, an average child recognizes three objects, but when a fourth is added, he proceeds to count one by one, he does not recognize three plus one.

Again, we must repeat that Froebel never intended any mathematical ideas to be forced upon unwilling children. He constantly tells the mother not to force, and he frequently speaks of the child’s “accidental productions which will become a point of departure for his self-development,” through the explanatory rhymes, to be sung by the mother in order to call the child’s attention to the results of his own action. It is true, too, that it is in connection with this kind of work, or play, that Froebel writes of “the knowledge-acquiring side of the game, which is the quickly tiring side.”

But the fact remains that either Froebel made a miscalculation as to what mathematical ideas are within the grasp of children of tender age, or else he attributed too much consequence to what is outside. It is indeed quite possible to present to a child of any age,[174] by means of the cubes of his Fifth Gift, several particular instances of the Theorem of Pythagoras, as Froebel suggests. But though the construction is present to the sense of both child and adult, the career of the child of five or six, who perceives or apperceives the relationship of the squares so presented, may be watched with interest. He is likely to distinguish himself in mathematical research, should he live long enough. Froebel ought to have known, indeed he did know, for he taught it to others, that the child does not “quickly tire” of acquiring knowledge suited to his stage of development by methods equally suitable. From the houses and railway trains, of which at this stage they seem never to tire, children probably gain as much knowledge as Nature means them to absorb by such means. In Froebel’s own hands, with his real and sympathetic understanding of the need for freedom of action, probably no harm was done, but it is easy to see how the ordinary teacher would grasp at the possibility of producing mathematical prodigies through what was supposed to be play.

The same error seems to show itself in various ways, e.g., in some of the reasons Froebel gives for choosing his First Gift, though there is no fault to be found with the choice. He was right in saying that the child first takes in a whole, not a variety of elements, to be combined later. Because of this fact, the ordinary coral and bells, with all its complexity, is just as much a whole to the infant as the woollen ball. But Froebel does seem to have thought that he must make the “outer objects,” or toys from which the child is to gain his earliest ideas, as simple as these ideas, and this certainly implies a wrong view of perception. The same objection might be taken to Froebel’s directions as to how the Third Gift—an 8-inch cube, cut once in each direction—is to be presented;[175] how in order “to furnish to the child clearly and definitely the impression of the whole, of the self-contained, from which fundamental perception everything must proceed,” the box is to be reversed, the lid slipped out and the box is to be lifted “that the play thing may appear as a cube closely united.” But in this case Froebel is “presenting” the first divided unit, “something which may be taken to pieces, arranged and re-arranged and finally re-constructed,” for it is “by this dismembering and re-constructing, and perception of real objects that true knowledge and especially self-knowledge comes to the child.”

A second psychological error, or at least an inconsistency, seems to lie at the root of certain practical directions Froebel gives with regard to the use of his toys. In spite of his iteration and re-iteration that the child’s mind is a unity, that though separation is “permitted for the thinking mind,” there is none in reality, yet in his anxiety for the due fostering of the whole, of the “doing, feeling and thinking” his harmonious development, in actual practice he has an attempted separation which has had bad results. A Kindergarten practice, now discontinued, was to make the children build, either on different occasions, or during different parts of one lesson, what Froebel called (a) Life-forms or Objects (Lebens oder Sachformen), i.e. houses, churches, etc.; (b) Beauty or Picture forms (Schönheits oder Bildformen), i.e. symmetrical designs; and (c) Knowledge or Instruction forms (Erkenntniss oder Lernformen), i.e. squares, triangles, etc. Though this classification is based on the familiar and important “knowing, willing and feeling,” yet it is plain that a child may experience quite as much emotion, probably more, in building a house as in making a star pattern, and that the active side is involved in every kind of construction. Froebel[176] draws a parallel, legitimate to a certain extent, between intellect, feeling and will on the one hand, and truth, beauty and usefulness on the other. Here, however, we can quote him against himself; “Separation is only permitted for the thinking mind.” The useful ought to be beautiful, there is beauty in all truth, and the æsthetic revelation of the world is the world in order. Beauty degenerates into mere ornament and artificiality, when separated from life and use. “Mathematics,” as Froebel wrote himself, “is neither foreign to life, nor deduced from life; it is the expression of life as such: its nature may be studied in life, and life may be studied with its help.… Mathematics should be studied more physically and dynamically as the outcome of nature and energy.”—E., p. 206-7.

The result of this suggested separation has in past times been disastrous. Failing to recognize that a young child is of necessity exercising his intellectual power in constructing his castle or bridge of blocks, and failing still more to realize that ornament is far from synonymous with beauty, teachers have wearied and stupefied children with mathematical forms for which they were not ready, and have forced upon them symmetrical designs when their souls hungered for “puffer trains.”[46]

It is easy to show that what Froebel wanted was only due attention to what we now call the affective and conative as well as to the intellectual. From the very first he insists on this, and justly, though his way of doing it may seem to us quaint. About the[177] child’s imitation of the clock he writes:

Two further reasons may be given for Froebel’s belief in his selected series of toys: (a) his delight in the theory of development, and (b) his eagerness to bring the child as soon as possible to that consciousness of self which differentiates man from the lower animals.

Every sign of unity of plan within the universe gave Froebel real joy, and he traces development from the simple to the complex, from the undifferentiated to the differentiated, not only in plant and animal life, but also in the inorganic. Much of what he says on crystals may be fanciful, but much is beautiful and suggestive. “Chemical combination” is to him “the life of the inorganic world,” and he writes:

Although this particular passage was written in connection with Nature Study for older boys, yet it is from thoughts such as these that Froebel seems to have taken an idea that man-in-infancy ought to meet, if it may be so expressed, matter-in-infancy. Though everything in the surroundings was to help to bring about self-consciousness, “the air blowing about all living creatures, as well as the arousing spiritual language of words,” yet that definite thing-in-itself, which is to help the child to an early dim consciousness of self is to be “the counterpart of himself,” a simple undifferentiated whole “susceptible of a progressive development.”

And now we must come to the question of Froebel’s “Symbolism,” a thorny subject, because one into which the personal equation enters largely. Some writers, notably Miss Susan Blow, author of “Symbolic Education,” regard this symbolism as all-important, Froebel’s glory rather than his weakness. Others consider that it appeals to adults alone and that where it is supposed to affect children it tends towards artificiality and sentimentality. In so far as this is true, it must be regarded as a weak point.

It is, however, not an easy task to settle what ideas are covered by the term “Froebel’s symbolism.” The[180] dictionary meaning for symbol is “a visible sign or representation of an idea; anything which suggests an idea, as by resemblance or convention; an emblem; a representation; a type; a figure; as the lion is the symbol of courage and the lamb of meekness or patience.”

It certainly passes my comprehension how anything can symbolize an idea not yet acquired, however much it may help in calling up ideas already more or less clearly gained. The crown may symbolize power to an adult, but not to the child, who when told that Stephen and Matilda fought for the crown, innocently inquired: “Couldn’t they have had another one made?” The Union Jack may symbolize British nationality or British freedom, or even British Jingoism to adults who already possess these ideas, but not to a little child. On the other hand, any kind of celebration appeals to children, as to more primitive people, and to be allowed to march round the playground on Empire Day carrying a flag arouses a joyous emotion, which will later be interwoven with patriotic ideas of various kinds. It is decidedly open to question whether as regards the child Froebel himself intended much more than this, whatever his followers may have done.

Professor Thorndyke gives us to understand that Froebel says a child plays with a ball because it symbolizes “infinite development and absolute limitation.” Now it is true that Froebel wrote in his “Aphorisms”—quoted in a footnote to Hailmann’s “Education of Man”—“The spherical is the symbol of diversity in unity and of unity in diversity.… It is infinite development and absolute limitation.” But the “Aphorisms” were not written for children, and Hailmann quotes the passage in speaking of Froebel’s philosophical doctrines as to the ultimate nature of[181] force and matter!

To Froebel, Spirit is everywhere striving for utterance. The Universe—the Manifold—is the revelation of one great mind, and everything in Nature, “though soundless it be to the ear, a message can give emblematic (sinnbildlich) but clear.” Certainly, he would have the boy study Nature, “the writing and book of God,” but it is not to the boy that he says:

For Froebel as for Goethe, the Time Spirit “weaves for God the garment we see Him by.” He calls “the temporal an expression of the eternal, the material a manifestation of the spiritual.” He speaks of “the Power which reveals itself by uniting all things, in Nature in the Universe as weight, in human life as Love,” and it pleases him to put into the hand of the boy—in that picture of a family group by which he typifies Humanity—a ball hanging by a string, and this he calls an emblem or symbol (Sinnbild).

There is nothing in all this with which any one need quarrel. Froebel was assuredly an idealist, but in these days that is no longer a term of reproach. No one, to whom it does not appeal, need use the suggestion, but to those of us who believe that right guidance of a child’s delight in fairy tales is one way of developing his sense of reverence, there is nothing so very far fetched even in Froebel’s way of trying to bring to the child’s consciousness, the spirit striving for utterance not only in every beautiful form, but in[182] everything beautiful as he does in “The Smell Song.”

Of fairy tales Froebel says:

So, when the child delights in the scent of the flower, Froebel says to the mother: “Let your child find in all things a mind, a struggle for being. Colour form and spicy smell all forthtell the One ruling hand which called all into existence.” But all she is told to pass on to the child is only the thought that an angel has put the scent there and is saying: “The little one does not see me, but without me there would be no fragrance.”

Although in one sense the educator of young children need have no dealings at all with “symbolism,” yet in another, a walking-stick does, for the boy who bestrides it, symbolize, a horse, as a piece of wood may symbolize for his little sister the infant whom she may nurse and caress, with what Froebel calls “the dim and transferred perception of inner life.” Here Froebel seems quite right, as when in speaking of a child’s visit to a toyshop he says, “a true child is content with very little of the outer, he is satisfied by a doll or cart, a whistle or a sheep, provided only that in or through it he can find his own world and represent it in actual deeds.”—M., p. 199.

It may be said, too, that there is symbolism in children’s drawings, the animal or object is symbolized by that which to the child is the most outstanding[183] characteristic. One small boy drew a camel with a rider so small that some one protested he could not see over the hump, so the artist promptly drew a second rider in front. Being asked if he could draw an elephant, he assented cheerfully and added a trunk to his camel. By the addition of claws the elephant became a cat, but at that point he paused, remarking, “It’s not very like a cat, it’s more like a bird,” and a pair of wings completed the transformations. In like manner by help of a walking stick a child becomes his own father, and a pair of spectacles transforms him into his grandmother. But in all such cases the child is dealing with ideas he has already grasped.

To say that circle or ring games help a child to gain an idea of unity—Ring a Ring of Roses may give the first dim idea of corporate unity—is a very different thing from saying that a circle is to the child a symbol of unity. This is the kind of thing, however, that Froebel is supposed to have said, but after careful investigation one is surprised to find how little there is, and to what extent Froebel’s disciples and translators seem to have read in their own interpretations.

For instance, in searching for passages about symbolism, we find in the English translation of the paper on Movement Plays, a passage stating that the “Snail Game” forms a frequent conclusion to a “games” period, because it yields the form of the circle, “which is symbolic of wholeness.” On comparing this with the original, however, we find that this phrase is an addition of the translator’s. No doubt she considered it explanatory, but all that Froebel himself says is that the game is suitable “because it finally unites all the players in a lively and completely finished whole.” To practical teachers, who know the difficulty of getting a number of children to settle down after a game, this[184] may bear a very different meaning.

It seems to me that Froebel’s translators have been altogether too fond of the word “symbolic.” The German words usually translated “symbol” and “symbolic” are “Sinnbild” and “Vorbild,” with their respective adjectives. After considering innumerable passages in which these words occur it seems plain that Froebel’s meaning would often have been better expressed by “typical,” or by “significant,” and sometimes by “metaphorical.”

For instance, it is quite legitimate to say of such perceptions as Froebel intended a child to gain from his second “Gift”—resistance, weight, hardness and softness, noise, etc.—that the ball and cube give, and are only intended to give, “normal, fundamental and typical perceptions” (nur die normalen, begründenden und vorbildlichen Anschauungen), and Froebel goes on to say that the same perceptions must come from many other objects. There is nothing symbolic here, and there is no reason for using this word.

That in many passages significant would be a much more correct translation than symbolic is abundantly evident. Froebel was convinced, and most people will now agree with him, that there is real meaning or significance in those activities, which are common to children of all countries, and this meaning he endeavours to discover. Small blame to him if, though wonderfully correct on the whole, he sometimes hits upon a wrong meaning, in which case we are apt to fall back upon that convenient scapegoat, his symbolism.

In one of his letters he thanks his cousin for describing to him how she had watched a tiny child “who quietly let his eye travel from the ball hanging at the end of its cord, up to the hand which held it,” and he adds:

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What Froebel deduced from the incident was that the child looks not only at the appearance of the swinging ball, but for the cause of the swinging phenomenon, the supporting, moving hand. So it is plain that for “full of symbolism” we should here read “full of significance.” Or, again, in his excellent sketch of early boyhood, with its desire to share the work of the father, its desire to explore, to collect, to construct, etc., Froebel concludes:

Here, again, significant would be a better English translation than symbolical.

Again, in accordance with his belief in instinct, Froebel declares that it is his “firm conviction that wherever we find anything that gives children ever freshly a joy belonging to real life there is at the bottom of it something important for a child’s life.” When he sees that children often enjoy going to church and joining in the singing at an age when the words can have no meaning, he says: “All the spontaneous activity of child-life is symbolical (Sinnbildlich).” But there is not a word of anything that is ordinarily called[186] “symbolical” in what follows, so far as the child is concerned. The little one is supposed to have “reached a new life-stage,” viz. “the dim anticipation that he is not alone in life, but one amid mankind.” Consequently he is attracted by “assembly life.” The most ardent believer in symbolism can make little of the very practical answers the mother is told to give to the child’s questions. He is to be answered “out of the range of his own experience, feelings and ideas, his own intellectual development and necessities.” He is to be told that when he is old enough to go to church, he will not only like to hear the organ, but will find out “why flowers bloom and birdies sing and why we still remember Christmas Day.”

There is another child in the Mother Songs, who wants to visit the moon, and drags his mother towards the ladder that he may climb up. According to the translator Froebel says he wants to point out “the higher symbolical meaning.” But what he says is that one remark presses itself upon him, how “we ought to cultivate intelligently the child’s observation of and pleasure in the moon, and in the night sky, and not let this sink into the formlessness and emptiness of mere wonder.” For example, it is, he says, quite as easy to tell a child that the moon is a beautiful bright swimming ball, as to say it is a man; or that the stars are sparkling suns which look small because they are far away, as to call them “golden pins,” and he adds “Truth never injures, but error always does.”

There are certainly some instances in which Froebel found for the tendencies and actions of children, a meaning that does not commend itself to common sense, but as a rule he only “ventures to suggest” rather than insists, and his practical application is generally unobjectionable. We assent willingly, when Froebel tells us that rhythmic movement, passive as[187] well as active, is the earliest beginning of all ordered activity. But we smile when, in accounting for the childish interest in clocks, after allowing for the mystery, he goes on:

As he truly and naïvely remarks, “this opinion of mine hurts, as an opinion, neither the child nor any one else,” and the application may, even in this instance, be useful as he says it is, viz. that we should use this pleasure to instil the beginnings of punctuality or law and order. As an opinion it is not worthy of Froebel’s insight, and we can only say that instances of this kind are really negligible, though some have been unnecessarily emphasized by certain Froebelians to whom they appeal.

There are, it is true, a few instances which deserve the strictures which have been heaped up somewhat rashly. It is only put as a question, but Froebel does say of children’s pleasure in circle games, “May not their delight spring from the longing and efforts to get an all-round, or all-sided, grasp of an object?”

As to metaphor, Froebel delights in this; his bent of mind is to take pleasure in all analogies, and he suggests that the mother should make more use of the metaphors implied in ordinary language. For example, he speaks of “the transferred moral meaning of such words and phrases as ‘straight and straightforward,’ and of ‘walking in crooked paths.’” In using little finger plays to give a child control over his hands, the mother is told to think how important for later life is “the right handling of things, in the actual as well as in the figurative sense.” The wise mother is represented[188] as cherishing the child’s love of light and brightness, saying, “Never shrink away from light”; and while she shows the picture she says, “Here is a boy who has broken the window and now he must go a long way to fetch the glazier unless he can content himself with a dark board that will keep out the dear bright light. You must not heedlessly stop Light’s entering your heart and mind, for if you do, you will have to buy it back by trouble and loss of time lest heart and mind become dark. Open your door and little window to the light.” Thus she makes the child “see inner things through the outer,” and uses his pleasure in light to make him hate deeds of darkness. But there is no harm in all this, the words are used as a clergyman uses the half-dozen words of his text, as a germ of thought which he cultivates, as a finger-post pointing the way in which our minds may travel. And Froebel, like the clergyman, sometimes travels far from the branching of the roads.

Froebel’s curious attempts at etymology ought perhaps to be mentioned as a weak point, though they really do not affect his theories, psychological or educational, one way or another. The ball, as the child’s first object through which he gains his first perceptions of solidity, weight, mass, etc., is described as on that account “an image of the universe” (der B—all ist der Bild des Alles). The thought is worth having, the pseudo-etymology does not much matter.

To sum up, then, there is mysticism in Froebel’s writings as addressed to the adult, and with this no one has any right to quarrel even if it should not appeal to him or her personally. But an undue preponderance has been given to this side of Froebel by those to whom it appeals, or so it seems to me. It does not appeal to me, nor can I perceive that it affects to any appreciable extent the educational theories based on[189] the psychological grounds so carefully considered by Froebel. To writers like Miss Blow, the author of “Symbolic Education,” such a statement would no doubt seem outrageous. With intellectual people possessed of Miss Blow’s philosophic insight, children may be safe from artificiality and sentimentality. But the average teacher is incapable of philosophy, and when the uncultured mind is supplied with food it cannot digest, that mind is starved. The teacher who glibly uses phrases which she does not understand has reached a state of mind immeasurably below plain ignorance, for it is destructive of honest thought and common sense.[47] The main business of the Froebelian is to forward the cause to which Froebel devoted his life “to bring about a more general use of progressive development in the culture and education of children. We must throw overboard everything that hampers action and set before ourselves, as in his day Froebel tells us he attempted to do, the definite task of “founding anew the practical methods of actual teaching so as to bring them into satisfactory relation with the needs of our life of to-day.”

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CHAPTER X
Some Criticisms Answered

Professor Adams ends the first chapter of his delightfully witty “Herbartian Psychology” with a challenge to all educational thinkers to come out of their caves and defend their idols. Throughout the book, there is many a side-thrust at Froebel, all of a more or less disparaging nature, in spite of the humorous twinkle which has a fairly permanent abode in the eye of the writer.

Some of the accusations are tolerably sweeping, for example, that Froebelianism “as a psychology is simply non-existent”; that Froebel has failed to correlate theory and practice; that although in “The Education of Man” “we have beautiful, if obscurely expressed, truths about education,” yet the Kindergarten cannot be evolved from it, in fact “between the two there is a great gulf fixed, a gulf that Froebel has not bridged.”

But the main contention is that Froebel disapproves in theory of any interference with the natural course of development. The Froebelian teacher is thus, according to Professor Adams, reduced to the position of a “humble under-gardener” who merely watches with interest and admiration, and education becomes “a general paralysis.”

Mr. Graham Wallas, whose objections to Froebel, or at least to Froebelianism[48], as he understands it,[191] are well known, bases these on the ground that because he was a pre-Darwinian evolutionist, Froebel was bound to overrate the importance of the innate as a factor in development, and to undervalue the other factor of environment.

Professor O’Shea disposes of Froebel in one sentence and in much the same way, as an advocate of what he calls “the doctrine of Unfoldment,” where “everything is inner and self-relating,” as opposed to the conception gained from Biology, which “implies that the business of a human being is to get properly related to the world—religious, social and physical—of which he is an integral part.”

If Froebel really believed that development is entirely from within, as stated by Professor O’Shea, or if he failed to realize the importance of the surroundings, as Mr. Graham Wallas expresses it, he would naturally disapprove of any interference, as Professor Adams says he does. The Froebelian, being thus reduced to passive watching, the mere provision of a Kindergarten would be an interference with the surroundings and a contradiction in practice of the theory of non-interference. If non-interference is really the theory propounded in “The Education of Man,” there certainly is a gulf between it and the Kindergarten, a gulf it would be difficult to bridge.

But Froebelians are not prepared to admit the premises of any of these critics. It seems to many of us that these and all similar criticisms are due to misunderstanding. This is sometimes clearly due to careless reading, and consequent want of attention to the context, but even where this is not the case, misunderstandings occur. Few, of late years, have made[192] any real study of Froebel’s writings as a whole, such as is necessary to get at his real meaning, which is often obscured by prolixities and repetitions, and sometimes hidden among apparent trivialities.

Professor O’Shea, for example, does not seem to be aware to what extent Froebel, like himself, derived his educational aim and principles from biology. He has probably never realized the deep interest taken by Froebel in the then all-absorbing question of natural development. Clearly he has no idea that Froebel has given expression to a conception of education, practically identical with that given above which he himself draws from biology,[49] and sets in contrast with the one he unjustly attributes to Froebel.

There is no doubt whatever that Froebel laid much stress on what is innate. In his generation, he tells us the child was looked upon “as a piece of wax, or lump of clay, which man can mould into what he pleases.” Because Froebel was a student of biology he knew better. He knew, as we have seen, that human beings have instincts, innate tendencies or dispositions differing from those of the lower animals chiefly in their indefiniteness. We are not so afraid of the word “innate” nowadays, when both innate ideas and innate faculties are safely buried, and that Froebel had no dealings with these has been amply shown.

But that this stress on innate tendencies implies that the child is to unfold from within, the educator standing by passive[50], or that Froebel imagined that the developing process could go on with little or no[193] reference to the environment, is quite another matter.

Few of Froebel’s critics have taken the trouble to look up the original German before pronouncing condemnation, and this explains part of the injustice that has been done to him. The passage upon which much, perhaps most, of the adverse criticism is based is the one in which Froebel applies to education the term “leidend,” translated “passive” in both the English, or, rather, American editions of “The Education of Man.” The translation of “leidend” as “passive” is not a happy one. Moreover, the translators have endeavoured to help the reader by dividing the text into numbered sections, a proceeding which though often helpful, sometimes tends to break the continuity of Froebel’s thought. This effect is heightened in Hailmann’s translation by the interpolated notes, however valuable as some of these are in themselves. This passage, however, opens with “therefore,” and those who take exception to it ought to have considered the preceding argument. Fair criticism looks back to see why and under what circumstances education is to be “passive or following,” as opposed to “dictating and limiting.”

In the first place, absolutely passive education is a contradiction in terms. Froebel begins by stating that:

He defines the Theory of Education as “the system of directions derived from the knowledge and study of that law to guide human beings in the apprehension of their life-work”; and the Practice of Education as “the self-active application of this knowledge in the[194] direct development and cultivation of rational beings towards the attainment of their destiny.”

To go on from this to say, on the next page but one, that the educator is to do nothing, to stand aside and be truly passive, would be absurd.

That our word “passive” is not the equivalent of Froebel’s word “leidend,” is easily proved, for in another passage where Froebel does mean “passive” he couples “leidend” with “inactive,” and puts passive in a bracket beside it. The passage runs: “wo das Kind äusserlich als unthätig, leidend (passiv) erscheint.” In the passage under discussion “passiv” does not appear at all, and “leidend” is coupled, not with “inactive,” but with “following,” and is contrasted with “dictating, limiting and interfering.”[51]

A few lines further we read how the gardener may even destroy the vine “if he fail in his work passively and attentively to follow the nature of the plant.” He cannot surely “work” and be inactively passive at the same time.

A more correct translation of “leidend” here would perhaps be “tolerant” or “suffering” in its old sense of “permitting,” “bearing with,” or having patience with.

As to immediate context, Froebel has just stated that education ought “to lift man to a knowledge of himself and mankind, to a knowledge of God and Nature, and to the pure and consecrated life conditioned thereby.” “But,” he goes on, “education must be founded on what is essential or innermost, and though the real nature of things can only be known by outer manifestations, yet it behoves the educator to be very careful how he judges, for the child that[195] appears good outwardly, is often not really good, i.e. does not will the good from his own determination, or from love, respect for or recognition of it,” while “the outwardly rough self-willed child often has within him a vigorous struggle to do what seems to him right.” Judging from outer manifestations furnishes constant occasion for false judgments concerning the motives of children, for endless misunderstanding between parent and child, and for unreasonable demands made upon children.

And here comes the force of the conjunction: “Therefore,” says Froebel, “education, instruction and training in their fundamental principles must necessarily be tolerant, following, not dictating, not limiting or defining, not interfering.”

What is it, then, that Froebel is telling us to follow almost passively, interfering, in our ignorance, as little as possible? Simply the natural order of development, the natural instincts of childhood, which in this very passage he is arguing are as trustworthy as those of other young animals. Here, as everywhere, man can only control Nature by following, by obeying her laws.

[196]

Surely we have here a plea to “suffer (leiden) little children,” to bear with the little one, still, as Froebel describes him, “still, as it were, in the process of creation,” nay, more, a plea for the actual recognition and fostering of these instinctive tendencies which Professor Dewey calls “the foundation-stones of educational method,” rather than a recommendation to “gratify every youthful impulse,” or to stand aside altogether. For the context, the whole, is not yet complete.

Froebel goes on to say that if we are certain of any tendency to unhealthy development we are to interfere with full severity (so tritt geradezubestimmende, fordernde Erziehungsweise in ihrer ganzen Strenge ein).

And now comes a sentence apparently quite overlooked by Mr. Graham Wallas, who blames Froebel for underestimating the environment. In the mean-time, until we are sure that our interference is justifiable, “nothing is left for us to do but to bring the child into relations and surroundings in all respects adapted to him.”[52]—E., p. 11.

In many other passages Froebel shows plainly that he had no thought of the “gratifying of every youthful impulse” in the sense of individual caprice.

In his plea for monetary help to establish Kindergartens and training establishments connected with them, he complains that in existing institutions children are either “repressed and their energies crippled, or else we are confronted with the wild and uncontrollable character which results when children are uncared for and are left altogether to their own impulses.”—L., p. 159.

“Life has no room for wilfulness and whims,” he says in his Mother Songs; “Boyhood is the age of Discipline” he states in “The Education of Man.”[197] But, as he himself sums up this discussion:

The proof of whether or not the educator has succeeded in rightly adjusting the claims of freedom and authority, Froebel expresses in words recalling Kant’s, “When the ‘Thou Shalt’ of the Law becomes the ‘I will’ of the doer, then we are free.”

To emphasize the fact that Froebel did realize the importance of environment, and to anticipate the criticism that this shortened rendering is an interpretation in the light of modern educational theories, of Froebel’s somewhat cumbrous phrases, we can turn to a passage in his later writing, part of which has been quoted elsewhere:

[198]

It is, of course, true that Froebel was pre-Darwinian in time, but it is equally true that he was post-Darwinian in many of his beliefs.

To find out whether or not his educational doctrines are really based on false or exploded theories of development, as the Criticism of Mr. Graham Wallas[199] implies, we must gather together from Froebel’s various writings, his most important references to the subject.

The key-note to his interest in it lies probably in the yearning for unity and union in all relations, which was a part of his individuality. This may have dated back to the time when, a puzzled little mortal of eight or nine years old, he was most unwisely allowed to hear his father exhorting and rebuking his parishioners. It seemed to the boy that most of the trouble arose from the fact that human beings, and human beings alone, so far as he knew, were divided into two sexes, and he felt that he would have arranged matters differently. Comfort came to him when his older brother, by showing him the male and female flower of the hazel, gave him some idea of a great law of Nature. Strange comfort, too, it seems, for a boy not yet ten years old!

The late Mr. Ebenezer Cooke pointed out long ago[54] that Mr. Graham Wallas had not only overshot the mark in saying that “Darwin transferred the cause of development from within to without,” but that he had himself failed to draw any distinction between the facts of development, as seen in the individual, and the theory of the origin or development of species, which we associate with the names of Darwin and Wallace. Mr. Cooke pointed to Froebel’s connection with Batch, the founder of a Natural History Society, of which Goethe was a member, as showing that he was in direct touch with those who were working out the theory of development of the individual.

Froebel himself refers to this Natural History Society in his Autobiography, saying that “students,” of whom he was one, “who had shown living interest and done active work in Natural Science,” were invited[200] to become members, and that this awoke within him “a yearning towards higher scientific knowledge.” At this time Froebel was but a youth of seventeen, with no idea that education was to be his life work. Three years later, he meets a private tutor, “a young man quite out of the common, with actively inquiring mind,” who was “especially fond of making comprehensive schemes of education.” The year after this we find him reading what he can of anthropology and history, and saying of his reading: “It taught me of man in his broad historical relations and set before me the general life of my kind as one great whole.”

One year more, and while he is looking for a situation with an architect—in spite of uneasy communing with himself as to how architecture was to be used “for the culture and ennoblement of mankind”—Grüner claps him on the shoulder with “Give up architecture, it is not your vocation at all! Become a teacher.”

It is perhaps because Froebel passed thus from interest in biology to interest in education that at this time he gives to his own question, What is the purpose of education?—almost the identical answer that Professor O’Shea puts into the mouth of his biologist[55], and which he sets in opposition to Froebel’s supposed opinions:

In the very beginning, then, of his educational career, Froebel emphasized rather than overlooked “the relationships amidst which man is set,” but he was to learn more yet about development.

Six years later he is back at a university, and “just at this time,” he says, “those great discoveries of the French and English philosophers became generally known through which the great manifold external world was seen to form a comprehensive outer world.”

The English writer may have been Erasmus Darwin. The French writer was no doubt Lamarck, to whom belongs “the immortal glory of having for the first time worked out the theory of Descent as an independent scientific theory of the first order and as the philosophical foundation of the whole science of Biology.”

From some such source, at any rate, Froebel must have gained “the key-note of development,” viz., that it is always from the undifferentiated to the differentiated. We have already seen that he applied this to mental development and so gained his modern conception of the earliest infant consciousness, “an undifferentiated unorganized unity.”

[202]

In “The Education of Man” he speaks of

and in the Mother Songs he says:

Or, again:

Such quotations fully exonerate Froebel from belief in any “pre-formation” theory, whether physical or mental, as indeed Mr. Cooke made abundantly plain.

It is in one of his later papers[56] that Froebel generalizes and states very plainly how everything is developed under the influence of its environment.

When child development is in question, far from minimising, as he is supposed to do, the importance of environment, parents and teachers are told:

Or, again:

This account surely makes plain, that whatever Froebel may have believed with regard to the origin of species, he in no way believed that development in general was a one-sided process, in which the environment went for nothing.

In his “Criticism,” Mr. Graham Wallas remarked: “Whoever divorced his educational system from his philosophy, would have seemed to Froebel to have taken all force and meaning out of his work.” This is most true, and it approaches absurdity to attribute so limited a view to a man imbued as Froebel was with the philosophical doctrine of the reconciliation of the opposites.[57] That all development was the result of a harmony between opposites was one of his cardinal doctrines.

“We are living in an age,” he writes, “when we are consciously under a law of development acting by the reconciliation of opposites.”

Mr. Hailmann gives a long footnote where Froebel is quoted as comparing his idea of the law of connection or unification with the ideas of Fichte and Hegel, and saying:

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What Froebel knew of Hegel’s philosophy was probably gained from discussions among his friends, for in the hearing of Madame von Marenholz, he said, “I do not know how Hegel formulates and applies this law, for I have had no time for the study of his system,” and he went on to say of “the philosophical systems of others” that “most of them belong to a theory of the world that is passing away, whose one-sidedness becomes more apparent every day” (Reminiscences, 225). Ebers, too, speaks of Froebel’s ideas as opposed to those of Hegel.

Even Mr. Graham Wallas allows that Froebel’s casual references to the development of species are “surprisingly modern.” No orthodox views as to the exact date of the creation of the world keep him from accepting the newly discovered testimony of the rocks as to “the remains of perished ages.” Ardent as his religious convictions were, they had a philosophic width unusual indeed in his day. The Garden of Eden is to him a parable, repeated “in the experience of every child from the time of his appearance on earth to the time when he consciously (by the help of names) beholds himself in beautiful Nature spread out before him.” In each child he sees “repeated at a later period, the deed which marks the beginning of[206] moral and human emancipation, of the dawn of reason.”

He refers calmly to

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.”

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.

Mr. Winch makes merry over Froebel’s sentence:

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]

Froebel, however, writes:

[208]

“Training and ennobling,” these words bring us back to the educational doctrines Froebel based upon what he knew of development, physical and mental, from whatever source he may have gained his information.

“From the beginning of the Darwinian reconstruction of the moral sciences,” says Mr. Graham Wallas, “it was absurd, while speaking of ‘environment,’ to ignore the fact that the deliberate care and contrivance of the parent must form a large part of the environment of the child.” Undoubtedly.

But it was because Froebel exalted “the deliberate care and contrivance of the parent” that he wrote “The Education of Man,” to tell his generation how best to care and contrive. It was because he realized that this deliberate care and contrivance must begin from the very first that he wrote his Mother Songs. He tells the mother here that “if she is wise, in all she does a noble meaning lies”; that she must “do nothing aimlessly or she’ll create a child she cannot educate.” He tells her that it is “by watching what makes the child’s eyes bright, that she will know how best to give delight,” and that she must “seek to strengthen power and mind in all things.”

In very truth the Kindergarten itself, with all its imperfections, is nothing more nor less than an attempt to supply that very environment which its founder is supposed to undervalue—an attempt to foster, by providing suitable conditions, those innate tendencies or natural activities, to which Froebel attached infinite importance.

This is why the discovery of the name Kindergarten gave Froebel the pleasure expressed in his cry, “Eureka, I have it! Kindergarten shall be its name.” The original designation contained the actual words “through the culture of the instinct for activity, inquiry and creation, inherent in man,” but this[209] original title spreads over several lines of print. “Garden” to Froebel expresses just what he wanted, “As in a garden under God’s favour, and by the care of a skilled, intelligent gardener, growing plants are cultivated in accordance with Nature’s laws, so here, in our child-garden, shall the noblest of all growing things, men (that is, children, the germs and shoots of humanity), be cultivated in accordance with the laws of their own being, of God and of Nature.”—L., p. 161.

This is why he urges on his pupil, Ida Seele, to retain the name in spite of the prejudices it aroused. It is to her that he writes:

There is no gulf between the Kindergarten, and “The Education of Man,” with its appeal to educators to follow instead of interfering with Nature’s methods, to foster instead of repressing the “instincts of activity and of construction,” to foster play, which though “merely natural life,” yet holds “the seed leaves of all later life.”

Froebel’s gardener is “skilled and intelligent,” and a skilled gardener is supposed to have scientific knowledge of his plants, of the conditions of soil, exposure, etc., best suited to them. Professor Adams says that “to call a child a plant does not advance matters much, and it certainly does not account for the use of the cubes, spheres and such like.” This, however, it does most certainly if these cubes and spheres are the right food material for the child’s mind, as Froebel at any rate believed.

All the employments of the Kindergarten, all the varied materials, the sand and clay, the pencil and paint brush, the building blocks, cardboard, sawdust, moss, nut-shells, etc., for constructive or “representative” play are definitely mentioned and definitely commended in “The Education of Man.” They are commended because they are the employments and the material which children everywhere find for themselves; because Froebel had sufficient knowledge of biology to know that instinctive action must somehow benefit the individual and the race; and also because he had psychological insight enough to see that by such activities children gain not merely skill, but clear ideas and “firmness of will.”

Professor Adams writes: “Not Philosophy, but common sense, experience and loving observation, have[211] led Froebel and his followers to adopt certain apparatus and certain methods, which are excellent in themselves, and which in capable hands produce admirable results. For this he deserves all the honour that has been heaped upon him—but he has not explained John.”

True enough, Froebel has not explained, at least, he has not entirely explained that charming John, the Professor’s own creation and type of all our children. Who has? Still, by his efforts as a pioneer in genetic psychology—the result of his belief that “only by the study of development in ourselves and others, can we learn to understand the child”—and by the two sketches so full of insight into child-life and into boy life, which he has given us in “The Education of Man,” surely Froebel has done at least his share even in explaining John.

No doubt he learnt much from “loving observation.” Nor does he undervalue it, but, in his case, the observation was induced by the Philosophy, as well as by the love. For, as he tells us, “it is a necessary part of me to be irresistibly driven to search out the ultimate cause of every fact in life, to discover its roots.” He learned much from watching both mothers and children, but he says:

An education which “follows” needs shown by the child, which “follows” the laws of development, physical and mental, as far as these can be discovered from history, from introspection, and from observation[212] of children in general and of “each individual child,” that is the “patiently following” education which Froebel puts before us as an ideal. “For,” he says:

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APPENDIX I
On the Meaning of the Word “Activity”

Professor Stout is particularly definite in his use of the word “activity,” and as he agrees with Mr. Bradley, from whom he quotes “that the current use of the word activity in the literature of philosophy is a scandal,” it may be well to inquire here whether Froebel used the word loosely or with some degree of definiteness.

Professor Stout considers the word “activity” specially appropriate to cases “in which the return of a causal process upon itself is especially prominent or important.” He quotes from Mr. Bradley again that “Activity seems to be self-caused change. A transition that begins with, and comes out of the thing itself is the process where we feel that it is active.” “Thus,” Mr. Stout comments, “the life and growth of organisms are specially appropriate examples of activity; for such processes are in a large measure immanent or self-determining.”

The first point that suggests itself is that in the majority of cases, Froebel may perhaps be said to have avoided the difficulty by his constant reference not only to activity but to “self-activity,” a word associated with the name of Froebel closely as his very shadow.

In the second place, we do find Froebel very markedly referring to the self-determining activity of organisms, in a passage where he is trying to show that all instruction should start from the child’s own[214] desire and power of will. He says that the mother—grounding her instruction in her child’s desire to write to the absent father—acts like the sun, “whose warmth awakens in every grain of seed, life, impulse, power, self-activity, self-determination” (die Triebe, die Kraft, die Selbstthätigkeit und Selbstbestimmung).[60]

It is Froebel’s peculiarity that he brings his philosophical conceptions into the veriest details, and so even in speaking of how the mother may make a ball represent a springing kitten, etc., and saying that to the child the ball is “the uniting object,” yet, he says, considering the plays as proceeding from the child (vom Kinde aus), “all activity, though mediated (vermittelt) by the ball, proceeds definitely from the child, and though going through the ball, refers back again to the child, who is himself a unit.”

There is a particular passage which suggests that there existed a special definite idea in Froebel’s mind in regard to the word “activity,” and it is one which presents a difficulty to an ordinary and unphilosophical mind, though a possible light is thrown upon it by Mr. Bradley’s definition. In this passage activity (Thätigkeit) is very distinctly given as something higher than impulse (Triebe).

The working of the primeval Cause, “the uniting,” is called, Froebel says, “according to the different stages in development, Force, Impulse, Life, Life-impulse, Activity” (Wirken, Trieb, Leben, Lebenstrieb, Thätigkeit).

This placing of activity so high in the scale is at least no accident, and conscious self-determination is constantly attributed to man as “the most perfect earthly being,” and to man alone.

[215]

Mr. Stout proceeds to examine the conception of self-determining process, with special reference to changes within the sphere of an individual consciousness, taking as the most convenient point of departure, such illustrative analogies as come from the physical world, and beginning with the simplest form of self-determination, the law of inertia.[61]

“Conscious life,” he says, “is always in some degree self-sustaining, this indeed is an indispensable part of the connotation of all such words as activity, endeavour, conation, effort, striving, will, attention. All such terms imply that the process to which they refer, tends by its intrinsic nature in a certain direction, or toward a certain end.”

Now the word “endeavour” or “effort” (Streben) is a word Froebel constantly uses in speaking of a child’s activity, and he does more than merely “imply” that this process “tends in a certain direction, or toward a certain end” when he affirms that “In every activity, in every deed of man, and of the smallest child, an aim is expressed.”

Professor Stout goes on to say that in conscious states we can always distinguish between determination from within and from without, and “it is a point of vital significance that this distinction coincides with that between mental activity and mental passivity.”[62] With mental passivity Froebel has but few dealings, if indeed he has any. There is one passage in which he uses the word passive (passiv); this, however, merely states that the child, in accommodating himself[216] to his surroundings, may outwardly appear inactive or passive, but only in order to have more scope for his inner activity (wo es äusserlich als unthätig, leidend [passiv] erscheint … um so seiner innern Thätigkeit mehr Spielraum zu verschaffen).

From what he does say there is little doubt but that Froebel would willingly have subscribed to Professor Stout’s dictum, “that to be mentally active is identical with being mentally alive or awake,[63] though in degree the activity may shade off gradually from that “involving a sense of strain, to that of almost passivity.” But just as Professor Stout rejects the idea of purely passive consciousness, so, too, does he reject “pure” mental activity. “It is impossible to find any bit of mental process which is determined purely from within.”[64]… “At the same time it is equally true that no change within is entirely determined from without.”[65] Mr. Stout does not say that pure activity—a purely self-determined process—cannot exist, for “we should, by parity of reasoning, be bound to reject the second law of motion.”[66] “But it rests,” he says, “with the advocates of pure activity, if there are such, to adduce a case of it, and until such a case is brought forward we must assume that there is none.… No portion of matter can be, even for a moment, outside the sphere of influence of other portions.”

We have seen that Mr. O’Shea practically accuses Froebel of being an “advocate of pure activity,”[67] nor is he the only one of Froebel’s critics who does so. If, however, it be considered an accident that Froebel should in one passage put “conscious self-determination”[217] at the highest point of life development, and in another passage give this place to “activity” which Mr. Bradley and Mr. Stout tell us is to be regarded as self-determined, is it also an accident that in the very same passage Froebel should state that “everything in Nature develops and forms itself under the total collective influence of all other things”?

If these correspondences are not accidental, then it must be allowed in the first place that Froebel attached a fairly definite meaning to the word “activity,” including self-determination in its connotation; and in the second place that the grounds on which he is charged with being a believer in “pure activity” are very insufficient. When Mr. Stout says that even if it is allowable “as an illustrative hypothesis” to regard the physical universe as an internally complete system,[68] it is clear that “the stream of individual consciousness is no such self-contained unit,” but “the merest fragment of universal reality, as its correlated brain process is the merest fragment of the material world[69]”; is this anything but a statement of that unity, on which Froebel insists in season and out of season—which appears on almost every page of his writings, so that the word has become the veriest “cant” of the half-trained Kindergarten teacher[70].

The philosophic conception of unity, the belief that there is no separation in either world, physical or psychical, or between either world, was always present to Froebel’s mind. “In Nature,” he writes, “every phenomenon has its sufficient foundation and its necessary consequence.” But as every philosopher would say, so Froebel said, “Separation is permitted[218] for the observing, thinking and comparing intellect, and the outwardly representing life, and is indeed required by it, but must by no means on that account be permitted to appear in the mind which is intended to grasp and constantly to retain in its original inner union, that which is outwardly apparently separated by the thinking intellect, the reason and the life.”[71] So Professor Münsterberg, writing as a professed scientist, says, “Science is to me, not a mass of disconnected information, … but the certainty that nothing can exist outside the gigantic mechanism of causes and effects, but Science is not and cannot be, and ought never to try to be, an expression of ultimate reality.”[72]

It would never have dawned on Froebel, nor would it have appealed to him, to separate his philosophy from his science, but there is no more contradiction in Froebel’s “self-activity” which is influenced from without, than there is in Professor Stout when he speaks of self-determination as included in the connotation of “activity,” and adds that until a case of “pure activity” is brought forward, we must assume that there is none.

Of all his “means of play,” Froebel says:

[219]

APPENDIX II
Comparison of Plays noted by Froebel with the Enumeration given by Groos

Much that is given in Groos’ more elaborate classification can also be found in Froebel’s suggestions, particularly where younger children are concerned. For plays coming under the heading of Playful Activity of the Sensory Apparatus, Froebel has a parallel for every kind except that of Temperature, and for this Groos has not himself found anything that can fairly be called play.

For Sensations of Contact there is the Kicking Play, and Taste and Smell are also represented in the Mother Play book. For Hearing play we have the wooden ball, “a plaything for the child liable to produce noise by its movement,” as well as the Tic-tac and Finger Piano plays, and for receptive play, the mother is told to speak, rhythmically if possible, or to sing with every play. For Sensations of Brightness we have “Mother you want to foster this delight in all things that are sparkling clear and bright” of the “Fish in the Brook,” as well as “The Lightbird,” which Froebel has “found over and over again in all grades of the culture that makes up social life in village and in town.”

Sensations of colour are well provided for. In “The Two Windows” we have: “See the beautiful coloured circles and rays, just like rainbow and dew-drops, see how beautifully the colours play through each other.” Colour is a feature in Gift I, in beadwork,[220] in the tablets, in paper folding, cutting and plaiting, and besides these there are crayons and paints, and frequent reference is made to the child’s pleasure in the colour of flowers.

Froebel also makes much play depend on perception of form: “Attention to the form and figure of the object can also be utilized for the child in play,” or, again, “Early in life the child delights in round and varied pebbles, he seeks and collects them, he takes pleasure in the straight edged and right angled.” He has found “The Target” play very widely spread, “plainly because it contains, as I see it, the first trace of an endeavour to make a child notice position and form.”

For perception of movement, to which Froebel would have added perception of change of position, there are many plays with the ball as well as “Tic-tac,” “The Child and the Pigeons,” “The Lightbird,” “The Fish in the Brook,” etc.

Groos’ next class is Play with the Motor Apparatus and under this comes first Playful movement of the Bodily Organs. Here we have Froebel saying: “The first toys and occupations of the child come from himself: he plays with his own limbs.”—L., p. 108. “The child at this stage begins to play with his limbs—his hands, his fingers, his lips, his tongue, his feet, as well as with the expression of his eyes and face.”—E., p. 48.

Under playful locomotion, Groos actually quotes Froebel’s description of the child learning to walk, and we have also marching, running, and racing games; “the large majority,” says Froebel, “I have created simply by watching the children at play.… Thus I have prepared a limping-game because I see my boys always limping and hopping.”

[221]

Next comes Playful Movement of Foreign Bodies, and under this heading Groos gives “Hustling things about, pushing, pulling, shaking, seizing and pushing away, dabbling in water, handling sand and clay, kite-flying, and capture of insects.” Of these Froebel mentions pushing of carriages, kite-flying, hobby-horse riding; he makes much of play with water, sand and clay, and he speaks of the catching of insects, etc., desiring that it should be wisely checked by directing the activity into other channels.

As to Destructive or Analytic Movement Play, Froebel notes that: “The child wishes to know all the properties of the thing, for this reason he examines it on all sides; for this reason he tears and breaks it; for this reason he puts it in his mouth and bites it.”—E., p. 73. “The cruel treatment of insects and other animals originates in the little boy’s desire to obtain an insight into the life of the animal.”—E., p. 164.

Of Constructive or Synthetic Movement Play, so much has been said already, that it is not necessary to dwell on it. Froebel, in fact, gives a far more inclusive account of this than Groos himself, not omitting his “simplest form,” viz. moulding new forms with sand, etc., nor the collecting and arranging in rows which to Groos and to Froebel is a more primitive form of construction. Of Exercise of Endurance, too, we have spoken, in quoting passages where Froebel shows the boyish desire to measure and to increase strength. Throwing and Catching Plays have their place in the “Apprentice and Master Workman” game.

The important third class, the Playful Use of the Higher Mental Powers, includes according to Groos a good deal that he has dealt with under other heads, e.g. Memory Play includes (a) Recognition and (b) Reflective Memory. Under the former comes that pleasure in recognition of form which has already been[222] dealt with, the pleasure given by pictures, often, says Groos, greater than is given by the reality. Froebel, too, says that if the father makes a sketch, “this man of lines, this horse of lines, will give the child more joy than an actual man, an actual horse will do.”—E., p. 77. Froebel, too, notes the pleasure it will give a child to name flowers through recognition of a form: “Spurred like a rider, circled like a snail, umbrellas, wheels, he’ll find the names.”—M., p. 181. There is also the recognition of animal and other noises, as in Froebel’s Yard Gate. Rote learning as a play Froebel hardly mentions.

As to the two groups which Groos brings under the heading of Imagination, viz. “Illusion either playful or serious,” and “the voluntary or involuntary transformation of our mental content,” these receive full recognition. Froebel notes how the stick becomes a horse or the knotted handkerchief the baby, as well as the play of listening to and inventing stories.

Under the head of Attention comes such games as Hide and Seek, because of the alternate stress and relaxation, and Froebel noted before Darwin did the pleasure of the baby in Bo-peep. Groos also brings curiosity under this heading, and we have seen that Froebel deals fully with such play as the outcome of the instinct of investigation, or the instinct for self-teaching.

Froebel would certainly not draw the line where Groos does, when he says “the true characteristics of play are in inverse ratio to the intensity of the desire for knowledge,” and if this rule were strictly adhered to, a good deal of what Groos does call play might have to come out.

The plays which fall under the head of Reason have two bearings, says Groos, first causality, and second inherence. There are various references to[223] the “joy of being a cause” from the child “whose capacity for speech is as yet undeveloped,” but who draws away the support and as the cube falls “turns to his mother in joyous triumph,” up to the pride of Keilhau boys, who “might not have accomplished their fortresses without the sapper,” but “who believed that if cast on a desert island, each could build a hut of his own.” Froebel also brings in intellectual games such as draughts, and he notes how children will invent their own words and their own alphabets in play. Of the making and solving of riddles I think Froebel never speaks.

As to what Groos says of Experimentation with the feelings, the parallels in Froebel are surprise plays such as Hide and Seek, adventure and hunting games where there may be play with fear, and the legends and stories.

Under the Impulse of the Second or Socionomic order, come the Fighting Plays, Love Play, Imitative Play, and Social Play. Of Love Play, Froebel has none, but the hunting and fighting were allowed abundant scope at Keilhau. Of Imitative Play there is much that can be cited from the playful imitation of simple movements and sounds in the Mother Songs and the Kindergarten Games, to the “classic dramas” of the Keilhau boys. Plastic and constructive play, too, goes from the simplest sand play, through the Kindergarten handwork, not only up to the fortress making, but also to the “boxes with locks and hinges, so neatly finished, veneered, and polished that many a trained cabinet-maker’s apprentice could have done no better,” which were made at Keilhau.

Of the Social Plays Groos says with feeling that, however advisable, it is wellnigh impossible to make a distinct class. He starts, however, with the “need of bodily association or the herding instinct.” He brings[224] in the child’s eager desire to be with his fellows, and the importance in adult life of festivals, religious or otherwise. He mentions the child’s voluntary submission to a leader, and speaks of play as instrumental in teaching children submission to law. We have noticed Froebel speaking of the “combined games, which will train the child, by his very nature eager for companionship, in the habit of association with comrades, in good fellowship and all that this implies.” He also wants the child to take alternately some special part in the game and to be merely one of the crowd: “Each child should have a chance to lead, for it is especially developing to a child to recognize himself as independent as well as a member of the whole.” Among the older boys, the Bergwachts for instance were carefully organized under separate leaders and the captain of the first band was director of the whole. Froebel, too, made much of festivals at Keilhau, and this has always been a recognized feature of the Kindergarten.

Enjoyment of the comic never, I think, makes its appearance at all. Froebel had many gifts, but the saving sense of humour does not appear to have been among them.

[225]

INDEX

• A
• Acquisition, Instinct of, 96, 109
• Activity, Spontaneous, 132
• Differentiation, 90
• Earliest Activity, 1, 9, 34, 126
• Consciousness and Self-Consciousness, Development of, 48, 81, 84, 85
• Nature of First Voluntary Employments, 135
• Expression, see that title
• Foundation of Education, 6, 84, 142, 210
• Fundamental Tendency, 47, 85, 88, 90
• Meaning of, in Froebel’s Writings, 213 et seq.
• Self-determination included in connotation, 217
• Universal Impulse, 90, 126
• Adams, Prof., quoted, 190, 210
• Amusement, Distinction from Play, 134
• Analysis of Mind
• Observation and Introspection, 12
• Order of Investigation of Laws of Mental Process, 3, 4
• Sense and Understanding, Inseparability, 17, 20
• Tri-une Character, 13
• Animal Instincts, 72
• Anticipations of Modern Psychology, 2 et seq.—Summary, 10
• Anthropological Aspect of Psychological Inquiry, 4, 8, 206
• Approbation, Love of, 114, 115
• Arrangement and Comparison, 101, 166
• Artistic Tendencies of Children, 105
• Associationists, Fallacy of, 38
• “Atomistic View,” 38, 39
• Attacks on Froebel, 2, 190-1
• B
• Baer referred to, 206
• Baldwin, Prof., quoted, 50, 52
• Ball-Play—Ideas to be gained, etc., 40, 150, 151, 155, 156, 159
• Batch, Froebel’s connection with, 199
• Biological Studies, Influence on Froebel’s Views, connection with stress laid on Development, etc., 13, 40, 67, 138, 192, 199, 210
• Blow, Miss Susan—Froebel’s Symbolism, 179, 189
• Bradley, Mr., quoted, 213
• C
• Cause, Early Notice of, 160
• Change—Use in fixing Impressions, 43, 152
• Collecting or Acquiring Instinct, 96, 109
• Colour, Sense of, 165, 166
• Community, Feeling of, refer to Social Instinct
• Comte referred to, 206
• Conation, refer to Will
• Connection or Unification, Law of, 204
• Conscience, references to, 116, 117
• Consciousness
• Development by Action, 48
• —Movement stopped by Something, 49, 52
• [226]Earliest Consciousness
• Absolute Beginnings—Beyond the pale of Science, 41
• Indefiniteness, 39, 49, 91—Undifferentiated, unorganized Unity, 91, 201
• Process of Differentiation, 40, 42, 47
• Reasoning and Constructive Imagination, 36, 38
• Unity of, 26
• See also title Self-Consciousness
• Construction, Instinct of, 90
• “Sense of Power,” i.e., Self-Consciousness resulting, 109, 133
• Subserving Instinct of Investigation, 92, 94
• Continuous Development, see Development
• Cooke, Mr. Ebenezer, quoted, 102, 199, 202
• Counting, Development of Capacity for, 101, 102
• Criticisms of Froebel, 2, 190
• “Culture Epochs” Theory, 129
• D
• Darwin, references to, 67, 201
• Development—Froebel’s Theory of Continuous Development, 10, 128, 140, 178, 179, 206, 207, 209
• Biological Studies, Connection with, 13
• Development from within, 136, 192, 195, 196
• “Harmonious Development,” 14-16
• Individual development of, following that of the Race, 206
• Law of—Unlimited to Limited, Whole to Part, Indefinite to Definite, 40, 130, 150, 151, 155, 201, 202
• Possibilities and Conditions in place of Faculties, 18-20
• Reconciliation of Opposites, Result of, 204
• Self-directed Process, 212 note
• Three Stages, 71
• Development of Species, Modernness of Froebel’s View, 205
• Dewey, Prof.
• Experimental Work at Chicago, 129
• Summary of Froebel’s Educational Principles, 6
• Discipline
• Adjusting Claims of Freedom and Authority, 197
• Direction of Impulse, not  Opposition, 212 note
• Non-Interference Theory, 190, 191, 192 note, 193-5
• Doll-Play, 167
• Drawing
• Counting Capacity, Means of developing, 101
• Origin of Earliest Drawing, 103
• Process of discovering “Linear Phenomena,” 103, 166
• Duties as a means of realizing Kinship, 61, 114, 118
• E
• Ebers—Account of Life at Keilhau, 123, 147, 168
• Eby, Mr., quoted, 7, 79
• Emotion, see Feeling
• Employment, Instinct of, refer to Activity
• Environment, Alleged Neglect by Froebel, 190, 196
• —Reply to Critics, 197, 199, 200-4, 208, 210
• Evolution—Froebel’s Post-Darwinianism, 198, 205
• Experimenting—Mode of Investigation, 102
• Exploring Tendency, 94-5
• Expression
• Art as, 105
• Feeling, Importance in Development of, 57-62
• Need for, 50, 99, 133
• Play, Definition of, 124, 125
• Understanding, Means of, 92
• [227]F
• Faculty Psychology, Criticism of, 13, 17 et seq.
• Fairy Tales, 108, 182
• Family Bonds, 61, 113
• Fear, Froebel’s attitude towards, 78 and note
• Feeling, Development of, etc., 130
• Action, Importance of, 57-62
• Family Bonds and Service for the Family, 61, 113
• Fundamental Importance, 63
• Starting Point of Education, 117
• Want of Good Feeling in Children, Cause, 63-4, 112
• Fichte, Reference to, 204
• Fletcher, Dr., quoted, 212 note
• Following and Tolerating—Character of True Education, 160, 195
• G
• Games, refer to Play
• Genetic Psychology preceded by Analytic, 3
• “Gifts” and “Gift Plays”
• Description of the Series, 159-166
• Excessive Importance attached to, 170
• Hailmann’s, Mr., distinction between “Gifts” and “Occupations,” 164, 165
• Psychological Aim or Meaning, 40, 149, 150, 164, 169, 178
• Selection following Natural Instinct, 169, 170
• Tri-Unity of Child-Nature, Relation of Gift Plays to, 14
• Weakness of the Series, 166
• Two Mistakes, and the Psychological Errors underlying them, 170-6
• Groos, Karl, quoted, 90, 125, 126, 130, 132, 136, 137, 145, 147, 219
• Grüner, reference to, 200
• H
• Habit
• Instinct, Proof of existence of, 76
• Outcome of Impulse of Activity, 88
• Hailmann, Mr., quoted, 164, 193
• Hall, Stanley, quoted, 206
• “Harmonious Development,” 14-16
• Hegel, Froebel’s knowledge of, 205
• Helba Plan, 26, 84, 212 note
• Herbartians—“Culture Epochs” Theory, 129
• Horne, Prof., quoted, 17
• I
• Imitation
• McDougall’s, Mr., Three Classes of Imitative Actions, 89
• Outcome of Activity and Means of Expression, 47, 88, 126
• Results gained, 50, 51, 91
• Instincts
• Classifications
• Eby, 79, 80
• Froebel, 83 et seq.
• Kirkpatrick, 79, 80, 81
• McDougall, 79, 81
• Direction and Training needed, 71, 121
• Divergent Views a matter of Definition, 67-8
• Froebel’s belief in Instinct, 67, 69, 70, 74, 125
• Froebel’s Terminology, 68, 69
• Habit and Instinct, Interaction between, 76
• Indefinite in Man—Proof of Superiority and Capacity for Progressive Development, 66, 72, 75
• Specific and General Tendencies, Distinction between, 68
• Specifically Human Instincts only dealt with by Froebel, 82
• Transitory Nature, 75, 77, 78
• Two Main Lines of Instinctive Action, 83
• [228]Interdependence of Life, 62
• Intuition of Things—Dr. Ward’s Points, 154-5
• Investigation, Instinct of, 88, 90-2, 94-7, 102, 107
• J
• James, Prof., quoted, 39, 57, 59, 65, 68, 69, 73-5
• Jarvis, Miss—Translation of passage re Self-Consciousness, 54
• Joy in Activity, 136-7, 139, 143, 145
• K
• Keilhau, Life at, 111, 123, 143, 147, 168, 212 note, 223, 224
• Kindergarten
• Associated Games, Social Training, etc., 114, 146, 147
• Defined, 90, 114, 142
• Disregard of Froebel’s instructions by his disciples, 147, 170
• End and Aim of, 90, 142, 208, 210
• Gifts and Occupations, refer to title Gifts
• No gulf between Kindergarten and “The Education of Man,” 210, 212 note
• King, Mr. Irving, quoted, 8, 26, 48, 49, 50-2, 54
• Kirkpatrick, Mr., quoted, 79-80, 114, 115, 117, 134
• L
• Lamarck, reference to, 201
• Language
• Development of capacity for Speech, 97-101
• Earliest Training, Use in—Names the beginning of Organization, 21, 29, 45, 46, 98, 100
• Feeling, Development of, 58
• Location, Sense of, 152, 153
• Source of questioning Activity, 97
• Lodge, Sir Oliver, quoted, 32
• M
• McDougall, Mr., quoted, 68, 76, 86, 89, 117
• MacVannel, Dr. J. A., quoted, 10
• Marenholz, Madame von, 205
• Material of Instruction and Manner of Teaching—Conditioned by stage of Development, 129
• Maternal Instinct, 119, 120
• Mathematical Perceptions—Over-estimate of Children’s Capacity, 170-4
• Memory—Froebel’s Description, 19
• Mental Activity, 3, 4, 13, 23-7
• Earlier and later Forms, 30
• Possibilities—Difference between Child and Animal, 49
• Sense and Understanding, Close connection, 17, 20, 207
• Mental Analysis, see Analysis of Mind
• Metaphor, Froebel’s delight in, 187-8
• Moral Faculty, 116, 118, 207
• Morgan, Prof. Lloyd, quoted, 33, 67, 72
• Mother Wit—Need for Thought and Training, 120, 211
• Movement, see Activity
• Münsterberg, Prof., quoted, 218
• Music—Importance of early Training, 106
• Mysticism, see Symbolism
• N
• Naming, refer to Language
• Natural Instincts, see Instincts
• Non-Interference, Froebel’s Theory of, 190-5
• Number, Discovery of, 101, 102
• O
• Observation of Children, 4-6, 8, 9, 29, 74, 87, 92, 94, 96, 103, 104, 109, 111, 133, 162, 165
• Order, Sense of, and the Instinct of Rhythm, 115, 116
• [229]Organization and Language, 21, 29, 45-6, 100
• Outer Factor in Perception, over-emphasized by Froebel, 171, 173, 174
• O’Shea, Prof., quoted, 97, 191, 200, 207, 216
• P
• Parental Instinct, 119, 120
• Personality, Consciousness of, see Self-Consciousness
• Philosophy, Froebel’s, 10
• Physical and Psychical, Close connection between, 17, 20, 207
• Play
• Amusement, Distinction from, 134
• Biological View, 138
• Classifications (Froebel and Groos), 145, 219
• Earliest Childhood, Play in, 124, 125, 128, 130, 147
• Educative Value, Originality of Froebel’s View, 122
• Groos’ Criteria, 130
• Guidance needed, 143, 145 and note
• Imitative Play, 88
• Joy in Games, 133, 136, 139
• Recreative Play, 122
• Self-Consciousness, Development of, in Boyhood, 56
• Social Virtues, Development by Games, 111, 144, 146
• Surplus Energy Theory, 123, 144
• Theories of Play—Recapitulation and Preparation, 138, 140, 141, 142
• Work and Play
• Distinction between—Froebel’s definition, 124, 128
• Earliest Activity—No Differentiation, 130, 131
• Early Boyhood, Differentiation in, 131, 132
• Playgrounds, Importance of, 143
• Play-Material
• Definite prescription impossible, 167
• First Playthings, 153
• Importance in relation to Development, 148, 149
• Mistake of giving expensive and complex toys, 164
• Number and variety of games noted, 147
• Object of Froebel’s play-material, 93
• See also title Gifts
• Poems and Songs, Use in Development of Feeling, 58, 130
• Preyer quoted, 52
• Psychological Basis for Educational Theories, 2
• Pugnacity, Instinct of, 86
• Purpose of Education, 200
• Refer also to Self-Consciousness
• Q
• Quantity, Relations of, 101
• Questioning Activity, 97
• R
• Reflection, Development of, 75
• Religious Instincts
• Foundation in Social Instincts, 115, 117
• Morality and Religion, 118
• Work and Religion, 127
• Religious Convictions of Froebel, 205-6
• Repetition, Impressions fixed by, 43, 152
• Representation (Darstellung), see Expression
• Rhythm—Importance of early development of Instinct, 106, 160, 187
• Order, Sense of, Connection with, 115, 116
• Ribot quoted, 90, 126
• Romanes quoted, 68
• Royce, Prof., quoted, 31
• S
• Seele, Ida, 209
• Self-Abasement and Self-Assertion, Instincts of, 86
• Self-Consciousness, Development of, 52, 53, 56, 84, 109, 116, 117, 153
• Early Developments, 54, 55
• [230]Indefiniteness of Instinct rendering development possible, 82
• Purpose of Education and “End of Man,” 30-5, 53, 178
• Tales, Craving for, due to nascent idea of Self, 57, 107
• Self-Determination, refer to Will
• Self-Employment, refer to Activity
• Self-Instruction, Instinct of, refer to Investigation
• Sense and Movement, Connection of, 48
• Sense and Understanding, Close connection of, 17, 20, 207
• Separation attempted in use of “Gifts”—Psychological error, 175-6
• Service as Expression of Feeling, 59, 60
• Social Instinct
• Development from the “Feeling of Community,” 91, 110-12
• Early Training essential, 63-4, 112
• Games, Education in, 111-12, 144, 146
• Religious Instincts, Foundation of, 115, 117
• Speech, refer to Language
• Spencer, Herbert, quoted, 206
• Sphere and Cube (Gift II)—Material for Comparison, 41, 159, 161
• Spontaneous Activity, see Activity
• Stories, Interest in, 57, 107
• Stout, Prof., quoted, 3, 4, 12, 22, 23, 24, 26, 36, 37, 38, 48, 73, 135, 213, 215, 216
• Summary of Froebel’s Educational Principles, 6
• “Surplus Energy” Theory, 123, 144
• Symbolism—Froebel’s alleged excessive and far-fetched Symbolism, 169, 179-82
• Exaggeration by disciples and translators, 183-6, 188
• Instances—Practical application usually harmless, 186-7
• T
• Tales, Craving for, 57, 107
• Thorndyke, Prof., quoted, 180
• Time-Relations, 155
• Toys, refer to titles Gifts and Play-Material
• Tri-une Nature of Man, 10, 32, 34, 89, 116, 126
• U
• Unfoldment, Doctrine of, see Development
• Unification or Connection, Law of, 204-5
• Unity and Complexity, 155, 157, 158
• Froebel’s yearning for Unity, 199, 217
• W
• Wallas, Mr. Graham—Criticisms of Froebel, 190, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 208
• Ward, Dr., quoted, 17, 20, 36, 37, 38, 149, 151, 152, 154, 155, 157, 158
• Welton, Prof., quoted, 212 note
• Will
• Definitions (Froebel and Stout), 22
• Development
• Action and Feeling, Development through, 35
• Bound up with Intellectual Development, 26, 27
• Parallel Accounts (Froebel and Stout), 27, 28
• Self-Consciousness involving true volition, 30
• Winch, Mr.—Criticism of Froebel, 192 note, 207
• Women’s Work in Education—Intelligent knowledge needed in addition to natural Instinct, 120, 211
• Work
• Condition of best work, 127, 128
• Play, Relation to, see title Play
• Religion and Work, 118, 119
• Wundt, Prof., quoted, 68

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