“The child loves all things that enter his small horizon and extend his little world. To him the least thing is a new discovery; but it must not come dead into the little world, nor lie dead therein, lest it obscure the small horizon and crush the little world.… It is the longing for interpretation that urges the child to appeal to us … the intense desire for this that urges him to bring his treasures to us and lay them in our laps.”—E., p. 73.
The help we are told to give at first is merely to supply the child with a name, for “through the name the form is retained in memory and defined in thought.” Later the mother is told to provide “encouragement and help, that the child may weave into a whole what he has found scattered and parted.” As a type of the help considered necessary we have:
“‘Mother, are the pigeons and hens birds, for the pigeons live in pigeon-houses and the chickens don’t fly?’ ‘Have they no feathers, child; have they no wings? Haven’t they two legs like all birds?’ ‘Are the bees and butterflies and beetles birds, too: for they have wings and fly much higher.…’ ‘Look, they have no feathers, they build no nests.’”—M., p. 56.
In another passage Froebel calls it not only advisable but necessary that the parents, without being pedantic or over-anxious, should connect the child’s doings with language, because this “increases knowledge, and awakens that judgment and reflection (die Urtheilskraft und das Nachdenken), to which man, left to Nature, does not attain sufficiently early.”—E., p. 79.
Giving names, and helping in classification is surely a sufficient parallel to Dr. Ward’s “thinking the material into shape,” and just as the latter says that by such training you can “make a child think” when it is five years old, so Froebel in his chapter on “Man in Earliest Childhood” makes his ideal father “sum up his rule of conduct in a few words,” declaring that: “To lead children early to think, this I consider the first and foremost object of child-training.”—E., p. 87.
Froebel’s theories, then, cannot be dismissed as based on “faculty psychology,” since it seems clear that wherever he found them his views on mental analysis were very similar to those now generally accepted. It is more remarkable, however, that he should have modern views about Conation and Will.
It is open to doubt whether any modern psychologist has yet given a better definition of fully developed Will than that given by Froebel eighty-seven years ago:
“Will is the mental activity of man ever consciously proceeding from a definite point, in a definite direction, to a definite conscious end and aim, in harmony with the whole nature of humanity.”—E., p. 96.
With this definition compare what Professor Stout has to say:
“In its most complex developments, mental activity takes the form of self-conscious and deliberate volition, in which the starting-point is the idea of an end to be attained, and the desire to attain it; and the goal is the realization of this end, by the production of a long series of changes in the external world … it belongs to the essence of will, not merely to be directed towards an end, but to ideally anticipate this and consciously aim at it.”[12]
Between these two definitions the difference is in the omission in Froebel’s definition of any mention of desire, and this is supplied a little later, when, having stated that “by school here is meant neither the schoolroom, nor school-keeping, but the conscious communication of knowledge for a definite purpose, and in definite connection,” he ends up with:
“By this knowledge, instruction and the school are to lead man from desire to will, from activity of will to firmness of will, and thus continually advancing, to the attainment of his destiny, of his earthly perfection.”—E., p. 139.
Now Professor Stout’s whole psychology is founded on his conception of mental activity. Towards the end of his second volume he says: “The reader is already familiar with my general doctrine. It has pervaded the whole treatment of psychological topics in this work. The aim of the present chapter is to present it in a more systematic form, and to guard it against objections. Our starting-point lies in the conception of mental activity as the direction of mental process towards an end.”
It is distinctly significant, therefore, to find how closely Froebel’s ideas on the subject resemble Professor Stout’s conception of mental activity.
“Conscious process,” writes Professor Stout, “is in every moment directed towards an end, whether this end be distinctly or vaguely recognized by the conscious subject, or not recognized at all.”
Froebel writes:
“In all activity, in every deed of man, even as a child, yes the very smallest, an aim is expressed, a reference to something, to the furthering or representing of something; … thus the child strives, even if unconsciously, to make his inner life objective, and through that perceptible, that so he may become conscious of it.”—P., pp. 237-240.
The same idea, that conscious process is directed to an end, though there may be no consciousness of that end, is given in another passage, where Froebel is speaking of the need for satisfying a child’s normal desire for playthings.
“Very often the child seeks for something, nevertheless he himself does not know at all what he seeks; at another time he puts something away from him and again knows not why.”—P., p. 168.
Of the earliest mental activity Professor Stout writes:
“In its earliest and simplest form, mental activity consists in those simple reactions which without being determined by any definite idea of an end to be realized, tend on the whole to the maintenance of immediate pleasure and the avoidance of immediate pain.”
The movements of the organism at this earliest stage “seem primarily adapted to the conservation and furtherance of vital process in general.”[13]
Froebel speaks of the child’s efforts:
“to put far from him that which is opposed to the needs of his life and yet would break in upon it.”—P., p. 167.
He tells the mother that, in the first stages at least, the restlessness and tears of the infant will warn her of the presence of anything in his surroundings hurtful to his development, while his laughter and movements of pleasure will show “what according to the feeling of the child is suited to the undisturbed development of his life as an immature human being.”
Mr. Stout goes on to say that such simple reactions are adapted “secondarily and by way of necessary corollary to the conservation and furtherance of conscious life.” He tells us that: “The primary craving with which the education of the senses begins, so far as it does not involve such practical needs as that of food, may be described as a general craving for stimulation or excitement … this conation being in the first instance in the highest degree indeterminate.”
Froebel, who speaks of the nurse “soothing the restless child vaguely striving for definite and satisfactory outward activity,” tells us that:
“if his bodily needs are satisfied and he feels himself well and strong, the first spontaneous employment of the child is spontaneous taking in (selbstthätiges Aufnehmen) of the outer world.”—P., p. 29.
He writes to Madame Schmidt, the cousin for whose assistance he has begged in observing children:
“This spontaneous activity of limb and vividness of sensation natural to infancy, and I may say inseparable from it, must also be carefully studied.”—L., p. 110.
And, in the Mother Songs, he says:
“You can see how his bodily activity, the movement and use of his limbs, like the activity of his senses, all turn towards one point: Life must be grasped, experienced and perceived … he wants to appropriate the outer and to re-embody it … his susceptibility for all that gives and takes up life will strike you as something that elevates his life in every way; even as young plants and animals are susceptible to the faintest workings of light and warmth, or the impressions of their environment, however delicate. Moreover, this receptivity is most closely related to great general excitability and sensibility (Erregbarkeit, Reizbarkeit).”—M., pp. 119-121.
Froebel’s views as to the nature both of early and of later mental activity then bear a strong resemblance to the modern view as stated by Professor Stout.[14]
In searching Froebel’s writings to find what he has to say about the stages lying between early mental activity and fully developed will, between what he calls “natural activity of the will, and true genuine firmness of will,” it soon becomes clear that it is impossible to separate what is said about will development, from what is said about intellectual development.[15] This is a natural consequence of Froebel’s constant insistence on the unity of consciousness, and it is the position of modern psychology, whether written from the analytic or the genetic point of view. Mr. Irving King writes: “The functional point of view emphasizes first of all the intimate inter-relation of all forms of mental activity and the impossibility of describing any one aspect of consciousness except with reference to consciousness as a whole.” Professor Stout, in his “Analytic Psychology,” has a section entitled “Conation and Cognition developed co-incidentally,”[16] while Froebel says:
“Thought must form itself in action, and action resolve and clear itself in thought.”—P., p. 42.
Froebel speaks of his projected institution at Helba as “fundamental,”
“inasmuch as in training and instruction it will rest on the foundation from which proceed all genuine knowledge and all genuine practical attainments; it will rest on life itself and on creative efforts, on the union and interdependence of doing and thinking, representation and knowledge, art and science. The institution will base its work on the pupil’s personal efforts in work and expression, making these, again, the foundation of all genuine knowledge and culture. Joined with thoughtfulness, these efforts become a direct medium of culture.”—E., p. 38.
Professor Stout’s account of how the unconscious mental activity of early childhood becomes transformed into the definite and conscious activity of fully developed will is, stated briefly, something to this effect. It is of the essence of conation to seek its own satisfaction, and this is only possible as the conation becomes definite. “Blind craving gives place to open-eyed desire,” as the original conation tends to define itself. So “the gradual acquisition of knowledge through experience is but another expression for the process whereby the originally blind craving becomes more distinct and more differentiated.” The grouping of cognitions is not produced by the conscious needs: “It is the way in which the conation itself grows and develops.”
For this account we can find a wonderfully exact parallel in one of Froebel’s less well-known papers, that on “Movement Plays.”
“All outer activity of the child has its ultimate and distinctive foundation in his inmost nature and life. The deepest craving of this inner activity is to behold itself mirrored in some outward object. In and through such representation, the child himself grasps and perceives the nature, direction and aim of his own activity, and learns also further to regulate and determine his life, that is his activity, according to these outward phenomena.”—P., p. 238.
This craving for outward representation, by satisfaction of which the child gains knowledge of the ends of his activity, is an exact equivalent of Stout’s blind craving which gives place to open-eyed desire as it tends to define itself. Froebel’s conclusion, that only as this unconscious or blind craving for action is satisfied does the child become “conscious of the nature, direction and ends of his own activity,” is but another way of stating Professor Stout’s conclusion, that the grouping of cognitions, which is the gradual acquirement of knowledge through experience, is “the way in which the conation itself grows and develops.” So, cognition and conation are developed simultaneously, or, to repeat Froebel’s own phrase, “Thought forms itself in action, and action resolves and clears itself in thought.”
Professor Stout goes on to say that in this defining process one conation springs out of another, whereby as one conation is satisfied and so comes to an end, another becomes in its turn the end of activity. He takes as illustration the child learning to walk, saying, “The mental attitude of the child learning to walk is one of conscious endeavour. When he has become habituated to the act, he performs it without attending to his movements, his mind being fixed on the attainment of other ends.” Froebel proceeds in the same way, using the very same example. He has already said that at first the child:
“cares for the use of his body, his senses and limbs, merely for the sake of their use and practice, but not for the sake of the results of this use. He is wholly indifferent to this; or, rather, he has as yet no idea whatever of this.”—P., p. 48.
Now, in the paper on movement, he goes on:
“Each sure and independent movement gives the child pleasure, because of the feeling of power which it arouses in him. Even simple walking produces this effect, for it gives the child a threefold feeling, a threefold consciousness: First, the consciousness that he moves himself; secondly, that he moves himself from one place to another; third, that through this movement he attains or reaches something.… It is a well-established fact that his first walking gives the child pleasure as an expression of his power. To this pleasure, however, are soon added the two joy-bringing perceptions of coming to something, and of being able to attain something. These several perceptions should all be fostered at the same time … he should get his limbs, and indeed his whole body, into his own power. He should learn to use his bodily strength and the activity of his limbs for definite purposes.… The effort to reach a particular object may have its source in the child’s desire to hold himself firm and upright by it, but we also observe that it gives him pleasure to be actually near the object, to touch it, to feel it, to grasp it, and perhaps also—which is a new phase of activity—to be able to move it. Hence we see that the child when he has reached the desired object, hops up and down before it, and beats on it with his little arms and hands, in order, as it were, to assure himself of the reality of the object and to notice its qualities. It is well, while the child is making these experiments, to name the object and its parts. The object of giving these names is not primarily the development of the child’s power of speech, but to assist his comprehension of the object, its parts and its properties, by defining his sense-impressions.”—P., p. 241.
Another passage runs:
“The present effort of mankind is an endeavour after freer self-development.… Therefore the more or less clear aim of the individual is to attain to clearness about himself and about life, to comprehension and right use of life, to both insight and accomplishment.… Therefore the educator must understand the earliest activity and encourage the impulse to self-culture, through independent doing, observing and experimenting.”—P., p. 16.
To say that a conation tends to define itself is only to say that unconscious ends tend to be replaced by conscious ends, and we have seen that both Froebel and Professor Stout give unconsciousness or consciousness of the end, as the difference between earlier and later forms of mental activity. Professor Stout’s conclusion is that “apart from the perpetual germination of one conation out of another, the characteristic features of the mental life of human beings would be inexplicable.”
Now, to be conscious of one’s ends or aims is, in a certain sense, to be self-conscious, so the transition from earlier to later forms of mental activity is practically the development of self-consciousness. It is interesting, therefore, to see that just as Professor Stout gives as his explanation of human life, the perpetual germination of one conation out of another, so Froebel gives as his explanation, his meaning of life, the gradual development of self-consciousness.
Self-consciousness, involving true volition, or self-determination, is to Froebel “the end of man, for which he first was planned.” It is, as he constantly put it, man’s “destination.”
“To become clearly conscious of all the conditions and relations in which and by means of which man exists makes man first become man in consciousness and in action.”—P., p. 12.
“For man is destined for consciousness, for freedom, for self-determination.”—E., p. 136.
“Self-consciousness belongs to the nature of man, is one with it; to become conscious of itself is the first task in the life of the child as a human being, as it is the task of his whole life.”—P., p. 40.
“Who amongst us,” exclaims Professor Royce, “conceives himself in his uniqueness except as the remote goal of some ideal process of coming to himself and of awakening to the truth about his own life? Only an infinite process can show me who I am.”[17]
Froebel never loses sight of this. In his Autobiography he tells how he began “unwillingly” to write something in the album of a friend who was the owner of a beautiful farm, and he concludes: “Then my thoughts grew clear and I continued, ‘Thou givest man bread; let my aim be to give man himself.’” That he verily believed that the gradual development of self-consciousness is the first task in the life of the child is abundantly evident. In the very beginning of his Mother Songs he tells the mother to give her child something to push against, “to bring the child to self-knowledge as soon as possible,” and at the end he says, “When a child or human being has found himself and has firm hold over himself, he is ready to walk joyfully through life.”
In “The First Action of a Child,” Froebel writes:
“The nature of man, as man, is that he is self-conscious, and this is stamped with distinctness enough to be observed in the quite peculiar character of childish activity,[18] in his impulse to busy himself self-actively, spontaneously: an impulse which awakens simultaneously with mind, and which is in harmony with feeling and perception. If this tendency to spontaneous activity is fostered, man’s triune nature—energy, emotion and intellect—is satisfied.”—P., p. 21.
A realization of what Sir Oliver Lodge calls “the universal struggle for self-manifestation and corporeal realization, which plays so large a part in all activity,” underlies all that Froebel has to say of the progress from unconscious activity to self-conscious volition. His view of the Universe is exactly that tentatively suggested by Professor Lodge, viz. that something akin to this universal struggle “is exhibited in a region beyond and above what is ordinarily conceived of as ‘Nature.’ The process of evolution can be regarded as the gradual unfolding of the Divine Thought or Logos, throughout the universe, by the action of Spirit upon matter.”
This takes us out of the region of psychology, but Froebel’s subject was not psychology, per se, but child development, as a part of the whole plan of evolution, man being the most highly developed of creatures.
The whole universe is an expression of the Divine, but man alone can become conscious of his origin.
“All things are destined to reveal God in their external and transient being.… It is the special destiny of man, as an intelligent and rational being to become conscious of his divine essence and to render this active, to reveal it in his life, with self-determination and freedom.”—E., p. 2.
“Made in the image of God,” meant to Froebel self-conscious and self-determined. The relation of man to God is expressed by Froebel as the relation of the thought to the thinker “could the thought but become conscious of itself.” In a letter of 1843, he says:
“At the basis of the Kindergarten lies an idea which serves alike for all the interstellar spaces, for all systems of the sun; the fulfilment of the divine will and the manifestation of the same. In order to become such a manifestation of the divine, man has first to attain the basis of self-consciousness; to which end serves the early culture of the spirit of humanity in the world of childhood.”—L., p. 133.
In a paper entitled “A Second Review of the Plays,” which really deals chiefly with evolution, we read:
“We must see clearly the conditions of development in Nature and then employ them in life. Thus only can we raise man upon his own plane, that is, the spiritual plane, at least to such a degree of perfection as is shown on their plane by the types of Nature.
“Man—the all-surveying—must develop himself by gradual growth of consciousness, must raise himself eventually to clear consciousness of the foundation, conditions and goal of his life.”—P., p. 198.
It was as clear to Froebel as to Professor Lloyd Morgan that the lower animals are kept from reaching self-consciousness by the definiteness of their instincts,[19] but to Froebel as to Browning “in completed Man begins anew a tendency to God.” Like Browning again, Froebel finds that man has “somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become,” he, too, “finds Progress man’s distinctive mark alone, not God’s, and not the beasts’; God is, they are, man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.”
“Man in his first period of life on earth is to be regarded while a child in three separate relations, which are united in themselves.
“(a) As a child of Nature, that is according to his earthly and natural conditions and connections, and in this relation bound, chained, unconscious, subject to impulses (als ein gebundenes, gefesseltes, unbewusstes, den Trieben unterworfenes).
“(b) As a child of God, and in this relation as a free being, destined to self-consciousness.
“(c) As a child of Humanity, and in this relation, as a being struggling from bondage toward freedom, toward consciousness.”—P., p. 11.
And the beginning of all he finds in “The First Action of the Child.” In the paper to which he gives this title Froebel writes:
“Helplessness and personal will, a mind of one’s own, soon become therefore the turning-points of child-life, the fulcrum of which is free spontaneous activity, self-employment.”—P., p. 27.
It is because Froebel believes this, that we hear so much of creative activity. Consciousness, which Meredith calls “the great result of mortal suffering,” is the outcome of all the unconscious striving.
“The child, although unconsciously, strives to make his life outwardly objective, and thus perceptible and so to become conscious of it.”—P., p. 240.
“Man only comes to the power of self-examination and self-knowledge in any relation whatever with the greatest difficulty, and must first learn to study himself … in the mirror of Nature and of all creation.”—L., p. 57.
“The child must perceive and grasp his own life in an objective manifestation before he can perceive and grasp it in himself. Such mirroring of the inner life, such making of the inner life objective, is essential, for through it, the child comes to self-consciousness and learns to order, determine and master himself.”—P., p. 238.
Froebel realizes then, that true volition is the outcome of unconscious striving, that it can only come through action, and, what is most important, through action which is the outcome of feeling, “worthy his effort.” So, while stating that the formation of “a pure, strong and enduring will” is the main object of education, he takes care to point out that unless the boy is allowed to carry out in action “that which is within,” ideas which have appealed to him, and which he has already made his own, that main object will not be easily attainable.
“To raise activity of will to firmness of will, and so to arouse, and form a pure, strong and enduring will, for the representation of a characteristic humanity, is the chief aim, the main object of the school.… The starting-point of all mental activity in the boy should be energetic and healthy, the direction should be simple and definite, the aim certain and conscious, and worthy of his effort. Therefore to raise the natural activity of the will to true genuine firmness of will, all the boy’s activities should have reference to the development and accomplishment of what is within him. Activity of will proceeds from activity of the feelings, and firmness of will from firmness of the feelings, and where the first is lacking, the second will be difficult of attainment.”—E., p. 96.
It is in the emphasis he lays upon the mental activity of the child from the very first, that Froebel approaches so closely to the position of the modern psychologist, and in his account of the earliest consciousness he distinctly resembles Professors Ward and Stout.
Only to “some of our most distinguished modern psychologists” does Professor Stout attribute a strong disposition to recognize in the elementary processes of perception and association, the rudimentary presence of these mental operations which in their higher form we call reasoning and constructive imagination.
Now Froebel writes:
“One can recognize and watch, even in the first stages of childhood, though only in their slightest traces and tenderest germs, all the mental activities which certainly do not stand out prominently till later life. Say not, ye parents, How can such tendencies lie already in the life of the child still so unconscious and so helpless? If they did not lie in it they could never be developed from it … for where there is not the germ of something, this something will never be called forth and appear.… As man is a being intended for increasing self-consciousness, so shall he also become an inferring and judging being (schliessendes und urtheilendes). Man has also a quite characteristic power of imagination, and—what must never be forgotten, but continually kept before the eyes as important and guiding—the new-born child not only will become man, but the man with all his qualities, and with the unity of his being, already appears and indeed is in the child.”—P., pp. 30-49.
Psychologists in general, says Professor Stout, show a tendency, which he regards as erroneous, “to ignore the constructive aspect of early mental process, to recognize mental productiveness only in complete and advanced stages of mental development.”
But Froebel, in speaking of the mother’s play with a mere infant, when the coloured ball may present “the perception of an object as such,” most distinctly states that the child’s “first impressions, as it were the first cognitions,” come to him in these early plays by means of his own activity, an activity of body emphatically, as we shall see presently, but an activity also of mind, of perception, “durch Wahrnehmen … durch dunkles Auffassen … durch Selbst-thätigkeit.”[20]
Froebel uses such expressions as “the spontaneous reception” and even “the critical reception of the outer world,” just as Dr. Ward, in refusing to recognize an internal sense, says “the new facts … are due to our mental activity, and not to a special mode of what has been called our sensitivity.”
The active, rather than the passive attitude, strikes Froebel so forcibly that he calls the two modes of consciousness, the receiving of, and reacting upon impressions, a “double expression.”
“The first voluntary needs of the child, if its bodily needs are satisfied and it feels well and strong, are observation of its surroundings, spontaneous reception of the outer world (selbstthätiges Aufnehmen der Aussenwelt) and play, which is spontaneous expression, or acting out of what is within. This double expression (Diese Doppeläusserung) of taking in and expressing outwardly is necessarily grounded in its nature, as in human nature in general; since the child’s first earthly destiny is to attain by critical reception (durch prüfende Aufnahme) of the outer world into itself, by manifold inward impressions and outward expressions of its inner world, and by critical comparison of both, to the recognition of their unity.…”—P., p. 29.
Professor Stout attributes this ignoring by certain psychologists of the constructive aspect of early mental process to a false view of the nature both of association and of construction, the fundamental fallacy of the associationists lying in their disposition to explain the nature and existence of a whole by reference to the nature and existence of the parts which are contained in it, so that “the parts must be supposed to pre-exist before they are combined, and to pre-exist in such a way that they need only to be in some manner externally brought together or associated in order to constitute the whole which contains them.”
In like manner Dr. Ward accuses psychologists of having “usually represented mental advance as consisting fundamentally in the combination and recombination of various elementary units, the so-called sensations and primitive movements, or, in other words, in a species of mental chemistry.”
That Froebel seems to have avoided the error thus pointed out by those two psychologists, is surprising enough, but it is even more surprising to find that this is probably due to the fact that his conception of the earliest possible consciousness is very much like theirs.
In rejecting “the atomistic view,” Professor Ward maintains that “the further we go back, the nearer we approach to a total presentation, having the character of one general continuum in which differences are latent.”
Froebel’s account, as given in “The Education of Man,” is very similar:
“Although in itself made up of the same objects and of the same organization, the external world comes to the child at first, out of its void, as it were, in misty, formless indistinctness, in chaotic confusion, even the child and the outer world merge into one another.”—E., p. 40.
This description reminds us of Professor James’ picturesque expression, “big, blooming, buzzing confusion,” which is so often quoted, but which does not really convey so true a picture as Dr. Ward’s account, for where there is no distinction there can surely be no confusion. But a few pages further on we find Froebel describing the infant consciousness before speech begins, as “still an unorganized, undifferentiated unity” (noch eine ungegliederte mannigfaltigkeitslose Einheit). This is identical with the expression used by Professor Stout, who, in speaking of the stage to which he gives the name “implicit apprehension,” the apprehension of an unanalysed whole, uses the phrase “distinctionless unity.” Froebel talks of the child feeling himself a whole and “so also, though unconsciously, seeking to grasp a whole, never merely a part as such.” And just as Dr. Ward claims for psychology as well as for biology “what may be called a principle of progressive differentiation or specialization,” so Froebel writes:
“The child mind develops according to the law which governs world development, viz.: that of progression from the unlimited to the limited, from the general to the special, from the whole to the part.”—P., p. 170.
In this, of course, lies the reason for Froebel’s correct apprehension of the infant mind, he was biologist first, and his mind was full of the idea of development.
“At the same time there begins in the child, as in the seed-corn, a development towards complexity.”—P., p. 172.
“Whether we are looking at a seed or an egg, whether we are watching feeling or thought, what is definite proceeds everywhere from what is indefinite and this is the way in which your child’s life is sure to show itself.”—M., p. 121.
Professor Ward goes on to discuss what is implied in this process of differentiation or mental growth, saying that if analogies are to be taken from the physical world at all, the growth of a seed or embryo, will furnish far better illustrations of the unfolding of the contents of consciousness than the building up of molecules.
It was the endeavour, and quaint enough it seems to us, to translate this psychological truth into educational practice, that led Froebel to lay so much stress on the fact that the earliest of his so-called “Gifts” are indivisible wholes:
“Let us place ourselves at the nursery table, and try to perceive what the child is impelled to do in the beginning of his self-employment. Let us sit ourselves as unnoticed as possible considering how the child, after he has examined the self-contained tangible object in its form and colour, has moved it here and there and proved its solidity, how he then tries to divide it, at least to change its form.… Thus after perception of the whole, the child desires to see it separated into parts.… Let us stop at this significant phenomenon and try to discern through it what plaything following on the self-contained ball, hard and soft, and the solid hard cube, we should for inner reason and without arbitrariness give to the child.”—P., p. 117.
Then come directions as to the manner in which the toy is to be presented:
“in order to give the child the impression of the whole (den Eindrück des Ganzen). From this as the first fundamental perception (der ersten Grundanschauung) everything proceeds and must proceed.”[21]
Starting from the conception of an undifferentiated totality or objective continuum, Dr. Ward says, “Of the very beginnings of this continuum we can say nothing, absolute beginnings are beyond the pale of science. Actual presentation consists in this continuum being differentiated; every differentiation constitutes a new presentation. Hence the common-place of psychologists: ‘We are only conscious as we are conscious of change.’” …
As to absolute beginnings, Froebel too writes that these are past finding out, but he does so in order to call the mother’s attention to the importance of the very earliest steps:
“Do not say, It is much too early.… Too early? Do you know when, where and how your child’s intellectual development begins? Can you tell when and where is the boundary of existence that has not yet begun, and of its actual beginning, and how this boundary manifests itself?”—M., p. 154.
Coming now to what Froebel has to say as to how his “unorganized unity” becomes differentiated, we shall not find that his brief account differs in any really fundamental way from that of Professor Ward. Some of his expressions have a very modern sound, such as: “how the outer world begins to divide and analyse itself”; how “out of the indefinite outside and around the child comes the definite”; or again how the child gains “the three great perceptions of object, space and time, which at first were one collective perception.” (“Die drei grossen Wahrnehmungen von Gegenstand, Raum und Zeit; welche anfangs in einer Gesammtwahrnehmung in dem Kinde ruhten.”)—P., p. 37.
Commenting upon the phrase “We are only conscious as we are conscious of change,” Dr. Ward remarks that the word change does not sufficiently explain what happens in differentiation, for this implies that the increased complexity is due to the persistence of former changes; such persistence being essential to the very idea of growth or development.… At the same time he is careful to point out that neither in “retentiveness” nor in assimilation is there “any confronting of the old with the new,” any “active comparison.” Without change of impression consciousness would be a blank, but “a difference between presentations is not at all the same as the presentation of that difference. The former must precede the latter; the latter, which requires active comparison, need not follow … we must recognize objects before we can compare them.”
Froebel says that:
“All the development of the child has its foundation in almost imperceptible attainments and perceptions … the first perceptions, in the beginning almost imperceptible and evanescent, are fixed, increased and clarified by innumerable repetitions, and by change.”—P., p. 38.
Froebel, too, goes back to this very earliest stage, the stage when a baby “begins to notice.” He says that this indication of an intellect (Seelenaeusserung) begins when the child is a few weeks old, and is occasioned at first by the movement, that is change in position, of a bright object, “in and by means of the motion the child first perceives the object.”—P., p. 64.
In another passage Froebel speaks of change as “a dim conception of sequence, and thus of dim comparison.”
“These first impressions come to the child by means of perception and seeing, and by means of coming, staying and vanishing (of the ball); by means of change, thus also, in a certain point of view by means of early dim conceptions of sequence, of foundation and result, of cause and effect, and thus of dim comparison.”—P., p. 65.
A change or difference which does not imply active comparison, and a change or sequence which does imply dim comparison are not very far apart, and Froebel makes his meaning clearer still by using the words “unconsciously comparing” (unbewusst vergleichend).
“By this play his attention is called to the precise shape of the cube; and he will look at it sharply, unconsciously comparing it with the hand, to which his eyes were first attracted.”—P., p. 84.
Nor does Froebel omit to notice the necessary close connection of the new with the old, which Dr. Ward emphasizes.
“The child very often seeks for something without at all knowing what he seeks; in like manner he repels something without at all knowing why. Yet the child does not for this reason turn away accidentally, neither does he seek the accidental. Generally it is the new for which the child seeks, but not a novelty which has no connection with what has hitherto been, for that, should it appear, would obstruct development. He seeks the new which has developed from the old, like a bud from a branch. He seeks a new unexpected turn, a new unexpected use of a thing, new unexpected properties, new and yet unconsciously anticipated development, a new unexpected connection with his life.… The child indeed seeks for the new that is outside of himself, but not on account of its externality. Really he is seeking the new of which he feels premonitions in himself, in his own development. Since, however, he does not yet know this, and so cannot give an account of it, the child seeks especially for change, in order to gain a means of growing up within himself, and of growing forth outwardly from himself.
“Above all, therefore, it is the old within the child which clarifies, unfolds and transmutes itself, thus developing that which is new. The whole process takes place according to a definite law resting in the child himself, in his life, in life as such.”—P., p. 168.
We have seen that Froebel draws no hard and fast line between sensation and thought. On more than one occasion, he does refer to something less definite than a perception, in one passage using the word “Eindrück,” and in another the term “Vorentwickelung,” translated by Miss Jarvis as “preliminary impression,” of which he says it is “to be raised later, at the right time, by look and by word, to a clear perception.”—P., p. 86.
In “The Education of Man,” Froebel’s earlier work, he deals with the function of language, “the word,” in differentiating “the misty formless darkness,” the nothing, the mist.