Froebel as a pioneer in modern psychology - E. R. Murray

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another, e.g. reason, “it was not the mind that was trained, but its faculties.”

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

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

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

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

      

      Elsewhere he asks:

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

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

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

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

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

      

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       Will and its Early Manifestations

       Table of Contents

      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,

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