Chapter II: Froebel’s Analysis of Mind

It is probably due to the emphasis which Froebel laid upon the careful observation and equally careful interpretation of the very earliest manifestations of mental activity, that his views as to mental analysis approach so closely to more modern ideas. His psychology cannot possibly be dismissed as “faculty psychology” in which the mind of a child is regarded as a smaller and weaker replica of the mind of an adult. The older psychologies, Professor Stout points out, are based chiefly, if not entirely, on introspection alone, while Froebel, as we have already seen, demanded close observation of children in general, and of “each separate child,” as well as consideration of mental development in the race, in addition to introspection.

This “too exclusive reliance upon introspection” to which Professor Stout refers as “the fundamental error” of the faculty psychology, caused the older writers to infer that just as a child is possessed of legs, arms and hands, smaller and weaker, but otherwise apparently the same as those of an adult, even so did he possess mental “faculties,” such as memory and imagination, which, like the little legs and arms, only required exercise in order to grow strong. “It never occurred to them,” writes Professor Stout, “that the powers of understanding, willing, imagining, etc., instead of existing at the outset, might have arisen as the result of a long series of changes, each of which paved the way for the next.” It did more than “_occur_” to Froebel, it was a cardinal point with him. Professor Stout points out that the idea of development is essential to mental science, and Froebel was a biologist actually studying development, before he became a psychologist. He came to the study of mind prepared to find just such a series of changes.[6] In speaking of evolution in general, he says:

“Each successive stage of development does not exclude the
preceding, but takes it up into itself, ennobled, uplifted,
perfected.”--_P., p. 198._

He speaks of:

“the master thought, the fundamental idea of our time, that is,
the education and development of mankind.”--_L., p. 149._

And in his “Education of Man,” in a long and eloquent passage on the need for continuity of training from the tiniest of beginnings, he says:

“It is highly pernicious and even destructive to consider the
stages of human development as distinct, and not as life shows
them, continuous in themselves, in unbroken transitions.”--_E.,
p. 27._

The analysis of mind which Froebel recognizes, is the still commonly accepted “tri-partite,” but he never fails to refer to this as a unity or a tri-unity. Indeed, his constant harping upon this string becomes almost wearisome, in spite of the ingenuity with which he continually varies his terms.

“The early phenomenon of child-life, of human existence in
childhood, is an activity, one with feeling and perception
(Wahrnehmen).”--_P., p. 23._

“That the nature of man shows itself early in the life of
the child, as feeling, acting and representing, thinking and
perceiving, and that in this tri-unity is included the whole of
his life utterance and activity, we have said repeatedly, and
it lies open for any one to notice.”--_P., p. 122._

Disguised as Love, Life, and Light, this trinity is made the connection of man, on the one side with Nature, on the other side with God. God--who is Life, Love, and Light, the All--shows Himself in Nature, in the universe as life (energy), in humanity as love, and in wisdom or in the spirit as light. Energy or life man shares with Nature; by love he is united with humanity; and by light or wisdom he is at one with God.

For his “gift plays” Froebel claims that they “take hold of the child in the tri-unity of his nature”:

“As now each of the single plays separately considered takes
hold of the child early, in the tri-unity of his nature, as
doing, feeling, and thinking, so yet more do the employments as
a whole.”--_P., p. 56._

And a forcible passage runs:

“Only if the child is treated through fostering his instinct
for activity in the tri-unity of his nature, as living, loving,
and perceiving, in the unity of his life, only thus can he
develop as that which he is, the manifold and organized, but in
himself single, whole.”--_P., p. 12._

This development of the threefold yet single nature constitutes the “harmonious development,” reiterated _ad nauseam_ and without explanation, in Kindergarten text-books. It is also the key to much that seems to us useless detail as to the toys and games of early childhood. The mother is told that:

“It is of the highest importance for the nurse to consider the
earliest and slightest traces of the organization (Gliederung)
within itself of the child’s mind as bodily, emotional and
intellectual, that in his development from mere existence
to perception and thought, none of these directions of his
nature should be fostered at the expense of the other … the
real foundation, the starting-point of human development is
the heart and the emotions, but cultivation of action and
thought (die Ausbildung zur That und zum Denken) must go side
by side with it, constantly and inseparably: and thought must
form itself into action, and action resolve and clear itself
into thought; but both have their roots in the emotional
nature.”[7]--_P., p. 42._

The first part of the following quotation from a letter written in 1851 towards the close of Froebel’s life might almost be taken from a text-book of the present day:

“We find also three attitudes, spheres of work, and regions of
mind in man:

“(1) the region of the soul, the heart, Feeling;

“(2) the region of the mind, the head, Intellect;

“(3) the region of the active life, the putting forth to actual
deed, Will.

“As mental attitudes these three divisions seem the wider apart
the more we contemplate them; as spheres of work and regions
of mind they seem quite separate and perfect opposites. But
the highest and most absolute opposition is that which most
needs, and necessitates reconciliation; complete opposites
condition their uniting link. The need for the uniting link
appears in almost every circumstance of life.… To satisfy that
need is the most imperative need now set before the human
race, … you will realize that the strengthening of character
which we all agree to be a necessity of the age, is to be
gained not only by stimulating and elevating the soul and
the emotions, but by raising the whole mind, by training the
intellect and the will.… Then the heart would acknowledge and
esteem the intellectual power, just as the intellect already
recognizes feeling as that which gives true warmth to our
lives; and life as a whole would make manifest the soul which
quickens existence, and gives it a meaning, as well as the
intellect which gives it precision and culture. _Intellect_,
_feeling_ and _will_ would then unite, _a many-sided power_,
to build up and constitute our life. In the room of the
unstable character which must result from the mere cultivation
of the one department of emotion; in the room of the doubt,
or, I might say empty negation, which too often proceeds from
the mere cultivation of the intellect; in the room of the
materialism, animalism, and sensuality which must come from the
mere attention to the body, and physical side of our nature;
we should then have the harmonious development of every side
of our nature alike, we should then be able to build up a life
which would be everywhere in touch with God, with physical
nature, with humanity at large.”--_L., p. 300._

In his article in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Dr. Ward says, that in taking up the question of what we exactly mean by _thinking_, “we are really passing one of the hardest and fastest lines of the old psychology--that between sense and understanding. So long as it was the fashion to assume a multiplicity of faculties the need was less felt for a clear exposition of their connection. A man had senses and intellect much as he had eyes and ears; the heterogeneity in the one case was no more puzzling than in the other.”

In this connection it can again be shown that Froebel was in advance of the old psychologists. In the first of the two games in the Mother-Play book dealing with sense-training--two out of forty-nine, the remainder dealing chiefly with action--he makes it very clear that he draws no hard and fast line between sense and understanding. He tells the mother that Nature speaks to the child through the senses, which act as gateways to the world within, but that light comes from the mind:

“Durch die Sinne, schliesst sich auf des Innern Thor
Doch der Geist ist’s der dies zieht ans Licht hervor.”

And when he says that the baby in the cradle should not be left unoccupied if it wakes, he uses a pronoun in the singular in referring to “the activity of sense and mind.” He suggests hanging a cage containing a lively bird in the child’s line of vision and adds:

“This attracts the activity of the child’s senses and mind and
gives _it_ nourishment in many ways.”[8]--_E., p. 49._

The faculty psychology and the formal discipline theory that came from it, says Professor Horne, did not admit the possibility of training one faculty, e.g. perception, by training 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.