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Froebel as a pioneer in modern psychology. E. R. Murray
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isbn 4064066232443
Автор произведения E. R. Murray
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“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.
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:
“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