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 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 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 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 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 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:

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 “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 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 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 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.”

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, 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 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 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 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 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.

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.” 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:

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 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 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.”

In “The Education of Man” he speaks of