LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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