Chapter XIII: Appendix: I

ON THE MEANING OF THE WORD “ACTIVITY”

Professor Stout is particularly definite in his use of the word “activity,” and as he agrees with Mr. Bradley, from whom he quotes “that the current use of the word activity in the literature of philosophy is a scandal,” it may be well to inquire here whether Froebel used the word loosely or with some degree of definiteness.

Professor Stout considers the word “activity” specially appropriate to cases “in which the return of a causal process upon itself is especially prominent or important.” He quotes from Mr. Bradley again that “Activity seems to be self-caused change. A transition that begins with, and comes out of the thing itself is the process where we feel that it is active.” “Thus,” Mr. Stout comments, “the life and growth of organisms are specially appropriate examples of activity; for such processes are in a large measure immanent or self-determining.”

The first point that suggests itself is that in the majority of cases, Froebel may perhaps be said to have avoided the difficulty by his constant reference not only to activity but to “self-activity,” a word associated with the name of Froebel closely as his very shadow.

In the second place, we do find Froebel very markedly referring to the self-determining activity of organisms, in a passage where he is trying to show that all instruction should start from the child’s own desire and power of will. He says that the mother--grounding her instruction in her child’s desire to write to the absent father--acts like the sun, “whose warmth awakens in every grain of seed, life, impulse, power, self-activity, self-determination” (die Triebe, die Kraft, die Selbstthätigkeit und Selbstbestimmung).[60]

It is Froebel’s peculiarity that he brings his philosophical conceptions into the veriest details, and so even in speaking of how the mother may make a ball represent a springing kitten, etc., and saying that to the child the ball is “the uniting object,” yet, he says, considering the plays as proceeding from the child (vom Kinde aus), “all activity, though mediated (vermittelt) by the ball, proceeds definitely from the child, and though going through the ball, refers back again to the child, who is himself a unit.”

There is a particular passage which suggests that there existed a special definite idea in Froebel’s mind in regard to the word “activity,” and it is one which presents a difficulty to an ordinary and unphilosophical mind, though a possible light is thrown upon it by Mr. Bradley’s definition. In this passage activity (Thätigkeit) is very distinctly given as something higher than impulse (Triebe).

The working of the primeval Cause, “the uniting,” is called, Froebel says, “according to the different stages in development, Force, Impulse, Life, Life-impulse, Activity” (Wirken, Trieb, Leben, Lebenstrieb, Thätigkeit).

This placing of activity so high in the scale is at least no accident, and conscious self-determination is constantly attributed to man as “the most perfect earthly being,” and to man alone.

Mr. Stout proceeds to examine the conception of self-determining process, with special reference to changes within the sphere of an individual consciousness, taking as the most convenient point of departure, such illustrative analogies as come from the physical world, and beginning with the simplest form of self-determination, the law of inertia.[61]

“Conscious life,” he says, “is always in some degree self-sustaining, this indeed is an indispensable part of the connotation of all such words as activity, endeavour, conation, effort, striving, will, attention. All such terms imply that the process to which they refer, tends by its intrinsic nature in a certain direction, or toward a certain end.”

Now the word “endeavour” or “effort” (Streben) is a word Froebel constantly uses in speaking of a child’s activity, and he does more than merely “imply” that this process “tends in a certain direction, or toward a certain end” when he affirms that “In every activity, in every deed of man, and of the smallest child, an aim is expressed.”

Professor Stout goes on to say that in conscious states we can always distinguish between determination from within and from without, and “it is a point of vital significance that this distinction coincides with that between mental activity and mental passivity.”[62] With mental passivity Froebel has but few dealings, if indeed he has any. There is one passage in which he uses the word passive (passiv); this, however, merely states that the child, in accommodating himself to his surroundings, may outwardly appear inactive or passive, but only in order to have more scope for his inner activity (wo es äusserlich als unthätig, leidend [passiv] erscheint … um so seiner innern Thätigkeit mehr Spielraum zu verschaffen).

From what he does say there is little doubt but that Froebel would willingly have subscribed to Professor Stout’s dictum, “that to be mentally active is identical with being mentally alive or awake,[63] though in degree the activity may shade off gradually from that “involving a sense of strain, to that of almost passivity.” But just as Professor Stout rejects the idea of purely passive consciousness, so, too, does he reject “pure” mental activity. “It is impossible to find any bit of mental process which is determined purely from within.”[64]… “At the same time it is equally true that no change within is entirely determined from without.”[65] Mr. Stout does not say that pure activity--a purely self-determined process--cannot exist, for “we should, by parity of reasoning, be bound to reject the second law of motion.”[66] “But it rests,” he says, “with the advocates of pure activity, if there are such, to adduce a case of it, and until such a case is brought forward we must assume that there is none.… No portion of matter can be, even for a moment, outside the sphere of influence of other portions.”

We have seen that Mr. O’Shea practically accuses Froebel of being an “advocate of pure activity,”[67] nor is he the only one of Froebel’s critics who does so. If, however, it be considered an accident that Froebel should in one passage put “conscious self-determination” at the highest point of life development, and in another passage give this place to “activity” which Mr. Bradley and Mr. Stout tell us is to be regarded as self-determined, is it also an accident that in the very same passage Froebel should state that “everything in Nature develops and forms itself under the total collective influence of all other things”?

If these correspondences are not accidental, then it must be allowed in the first place that Froebel attached a fairly definite meaning to the word “activity,” including self-determination in its connotation; and in the second place that the grounds on which he is charged with being a believer in “pure activity” are very insufficient. When Mr. Stout says that even if it is allowable “as an illustrative hypothesis” to regard the physical universe as an internally complete system,[68] it is clear that “the stream of individual consciousness is no such self-contained unit,” but “the merest fragment of universal reality, as its correlated brain process is the merest fragment of the material world[69]”; is this anything but a statement of that unity, on which Froebel insists in season and out of season--which appears on almost every page of his writings, so that the word has become the veriest “cant” of the half-trained Kindergarten teacher[70].

The philosophic conception of unity, the belief that there is no separation in either world, physical or psychical, or between either world, was always present to Froebel’s mind. “In Nature,” he writes, “every phenomenon has its sufficient foundation and its necessary consequence.” But as every philosopher would say, so Froebel said, “Separation is permitted for the observing, thinking and comparing intellect, and the outwardly representing life, and is indeed required by it, but must by no means on that account be permitted to appear in the mind which is intended to grasp and constantly to retain in its original inner union, that which is outwardly apparently separated by the thinking intellect, the reason and the life.”[71] So Professor Münsterberg, writing as a professed scientist, says, “Science is to me, not a mass of disconnected information, … but the certainty that nothing can exist outside the gigantic mechanism of causes and effects, but Science is not and cannot be, and ought never to try to be, an expression of ultimate reality.”[72]

It would never have dawned on Froebel, nor would it have appealed to him, to separate his philosophy from his science, but there is no more contradiction in Froebel’s “self-activity” which is influenced from without, than there is in Professor Stout when he speaks of self-determination as included in the connotation of “activity,” and adds that until a case of “pure activity” is brought forward, we must assume that there is none.

Of all his “means of play,” Froebel says:

“In order, therefore, on the one hand to introduce the child
to the handling of his play material, we gave him the ball, …
but each of these means of play summons the child in return
to self-activity, to free self-activity; to movement, to
free independent movement” (zur Selbsthätigkeit, zur freien
Selbsthätigkeit; zur Bewegung, zur freien, inabhängigen
Bewegung).[73]