Part 7

Froebel was an experimental psychologist who used the terms of the German philosophy of his day. But the facts of life, the thing he was studying, was never for a moment absent from his mind. He lived in an age when the ideas of evolution were in the air, and before they had received their conclusive proof by being applied to morphology.

This application has for a time killed philosophy, for it has identified the new ideas with the physical sciences, and led men to study the human mind in psychology and from without. Whereas the mind and its laws can, in the nature of things, be studied only through introspection. Froebel had a scientific intellect of the very first calibre; he had the conception of flux, of change, of evolution to start with; and he took up introspectively the study of the laws of the human mind, choosing that province of the universe where they are most visibly and typically exposed,--the mind of the growing child.

The “laws” which he states are little more than a description of the phenomena that he observed. They are statements of the results of his experiments, and the language he employs can be translated to suit the education of almost any one. His attention was so concentrated upon fact that his terminology does not mislead. It can be translated into the language of metaphysics, of Christian theology, or of modern science, and it remains incorruptibly coherent.

His method of study was the only method which can obtain results in philosophy, self-study unconsciously carried on. He observed the child, and guessed at what was going on in its mind by a comparison with what he knew of himself. He was anxious to train young children intelligently, and he found it necessary to describe and formulate his knowledge of the operation of their minds. It turns out that he made a statement of the universe more comprehensive, a philosophy more universal, than any other of which we have any record.

But this is not the most important thing he did. He devised a method based upon his experiments and set agoing the kindergarten upon its course in conquest of the world. If it had not been for this, he might never have been heard of, for the world has small use for systems of philosophy, however profound, expressed in terms which have been superseded and are become inexpressive. But Froebel started a practice. He showed the way. He put in the hands of persons to whom his philosophy must ever remain a mystery, the means of working out those practical ends for which that philosophy was designed.

The greatness of Froebel lies in this, that he saw the essential. What sort of an animal is man, asks the morphologist, for he is beginning to reach this point in his studies, and before he has asked it, Froebel has answered him.

‘Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength.’

It may be said at once that the substance of everything Froebel says was known before. Solomon and Orpheus, Marcus Aurelius, Emerson, and all of us have known it. Otherwise Froebel would be unimportant. It is his correlation and his formulation of the main facts about human life that make him important. It is as a summary of wisdom, as a focus of idea, as a lens through which the rest of the ideas in the world can be viewed, that he is great.

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The laws he discovered may be stated in a paragraph. The child is a growing organism. It is a unity. It develops through creative activity. It is benefited by contact with other children and is happy in proportion as it is unselfishly employed.

Let us assume for a moment that these things are true, that they are the most important truths about the child; and let us see how they must affect our views of life, of politics, sociology, art, religion, conduct. There is of course no moment at which the child ceases to be a child. The laws of its growth and being are not at any discoverable time superseded by any new laws. Man as a creature, as an organism, has here by Froebel, and for the first time in history, been ingenuously studied, and the main laws of him noted. With the discovery that he is a unity, there vanishes every classification of science made since the days of Aristotle. They are convenient dogmas, thumb rule distinctions, useful as aids in the further pushing of our studies into the workings of this unity. Take up now a book of political economy, a poem, a history: this thought of Froebel’s runs through it like quicksilver. The scheme of thought of the writer is by it dissolved at once into human elements. You find you are studying the operation of the mind of some one, whom you picture to yourself as a man, as a unit; you are interpreting this by your own experience. It is all psychology, you are pushing your analysis. The universe is receiving its interpretation through you yourself. We are thus brought to the point of view of the mystic, as the only conceivable point of view.

“That the organism develops by creative activity.” This might have come as a deduction from Darwin. It is an expression in metaphysical language of the “struggle for life.” Froebel discovered it independently. The consequences of a belief in it are so tremendous, that no man who is not prepared to spend the rest of his life completely dominated by the idea, ought even to pause to consider it.

Your capacities, your beliefs, your development, your spiritual existence are the result of what you do. Active creation of some sort, occupation which takes your entire attention and calls upon you, merely incidentally and as a matter of course, for thought, resource, individual or original force; this will develop you and nothing else will.

The connection between this thought and the previous one is apparent. It is only by such creative activity that the organism as a unit gets into play. If you set a man copying or memorizing, you have occupied only a fraction of him. If you set him to making something, the minute he begins, his attention is concentrated. Willy nilly he is trying to make something significant, he is endeavoring to express himself, the forces and powers within him begin coming to his succor, offering aid and suggestion. Before he knows it, his whole being is in operation. The result is a statement of some sort, and in the process of making it the creature has developed. But when you say “significant” you have already implied the existence of other organisms. He is not expressing himself only, he is expressing them all, and here comes Froebel with his third great discovery, that it is by constant personal intercourse with others that the power to express is gained. And on top of this comes the last law, so closely related to the third as to be merely a new view of it, but discovered by experiment, tested by practice, announced empirically and as a fact, that the child is unselfish and only really happy when at work creatively and for the use and behoof of others.

This conclusion throws back its rays over the course of the argument, and we are compelled to see, what we have already known, that unselfishness and intellectual development are one and the same thing, that there is no failure of intellect which cannot be expressed in terms of selfishness, and no selfishness that cannot be expressed as intellectual shortcoming. Criminology has reached the same point by another route.

The matter is really very simple, for anything self-regardant means a return of the organism upon itself, a stepping on your own toes, and brings self-consciousness, discomfort, pain. Self-sacrifice on the other hand brings fulfilment. The self-sacrifice is always illusory, and the development real. This becomes frightfully apparent in ingenuous and unhappy love affairs, for the organism robbed of fulfilment returns upon itself.

It makes little difference what province of thought we begin with in applying these views to the world. They give results like a table of logarithms. They do more than this, they unravel the most complex situations, they give the key to conduct and put a compass in the hands of progress. They explain history, they support religion, they justify instinct, they interpret character. They give the formula for doing consciously what mankind has been doing unconsciously in so far as it has been doing what any one of us in his soul approves of or cares to imitate.

Let us take up the most obvious deductions. If people develop according to their activities, their opinions will be a mere reflex of their conduct. What they see in the world comes out of what they do in the world. Here in a mere niche of Froebel we find the whole of Emerson.

The power and permanence of Sainte Beuve are due to his having applied this theory to the interpretation of literature. He is not content till he has seen the relation between the conduct and the opinions, the conduct and the art of a character.

Or take Emerson himself, why was it that being so much he was not more? How came it that after his magnificent prologue in the Phi Beta Kappa address, which is like the opening of a symphony, he relapsed into iteration and brilliant but momentary visions of his own horizon? He kept repeating his theme till he piped himself into fragmentary inconsequence. The reason is that he had learned all he knew before he retired to Concord and contemplation. Active life would have made him blossom annually and last like Gladstone.

Or take Goethe: all that is questionable in him results from his violation of two of Froebel’s laws of psychology. He fixed his attention upon self-development and thereby gradually ossified. Every moment of egotism was an intellectual loss. His contact with people, meanwhile, became more and more formal as he grew older, and his work more and more inexpressive.

Give me a man’s beliefs, and I will give you his occupation. What has happened to that radical that he seems to have become so moderate and reasonable? You find that for six months he has been clerk to the Civil Service Reform Club. Why is the mystical poetry of this intellectual man as vacant as the fashion print he edits for his daily bread? His employment has tracked his mind to these unearthly regions. He is dead here too.

There is no such thing as independent belief, based on evidence and reflection. The thing we call belief is a mere record left by conduct. If you sincerely go through the regimen of Loyola’s manual, you will come out a Jesuit. You can no more resist it than you can resist the operation of ether. This man is an optimist. It means that he has struggled. That man is a pessimist. It means that he has shirked. Here is one who has been in touch with all movements for good during a dismal era of corruption, and yet he has no faith. It means that the whole of him has not been enlisted. His conscience has drawn him forward. It is not enough. There is compromise in him. He is not an absolute fighter.

Here is the most excellent gentleman in America, an old idealist untouchably transcendental, an educated man. To your amazement he thinks that it is occasionally necessary to subsidize the powers of evil. He was bred a banker.

Here is a village schoolma’am who from a rag of information in a county paper has divined the true inwardness of a complicated controversy at Washington which you happen to know all about. She has been reforming a poorhouse.

A is a clergyman, good but ineffective. He relies on beneficence and persuasion. He does not know the world better than a club loafer knows it. The only entry to it is by attack, the only progress by action.

B is a good fellow, yet betrays a momentary want of delicacy which gives you a shock, and which you forgive him, saying: “It is a coarseness of natural fibre.” It is no such thing. There is in every man a natural fibre as fine as a poet’s. His coarseness is the residuum of an act.

You meet a man whom you have known as a court stenographer, and whom you have supposed to be drowned in worldly cares. At a chop house he gives you a discourse on Plato’s Phædrus which he interprets in a novel way. The brains of the man surprise you. This man, though he looks sordid, positively must have been sending a younger brother to college during many years. There is no other explanation of him.