Education is to assist and promote the natural, free development of the human being, or to furnish the outward conditions by which such development may be reached.

We might say that education is the formation of the human being. What other law could govern educational processes then, than that which determines natural develop ment? The law of nature must be the law of education. Since all development is a formative process, and every form is produced according to the law of harmony, this must be recognized as the guide in education. Hence the human being must be treated from the beginning as a creative being.

What conditions are to be fulfilled in order to render children creative? A child develops unconsciously, although consciousness begin with life. The developing process in nature is towards the production of certain forms or organisms. The child, considered physically, is a product of nature, the highest type of organic life known to us. The law of his life must, therefore, be the same as that of all life. The spirit unfolds at the same time as the bodily or

gans. It reveals itself through these organs just as the forces of nature are displayed in outward phenomena. And both natural and spiritual forces must conform to the same law if there is to be unity between force and matter, body and spirit. As long as the child lives in the period of unconsciousness or subject to natural instincts, he is more or less ruled by the law of naturewithout freedom of choice; without opposing the might of law by caprice, or acting contrary to it. In this period of unconsciousness the law of education should be applied according to Froebel.

The unconscious, instinctive activity of the child, guided by nature, needs guidance on the human side in order to reach its end. And this end is self-development, through representations of the works of nature, or the works of God and the works of man. Systematic and regular exercise of the child's powers are to be given, in place of the unconscious and aimless activity, without disturbing the child's experiments, but, on the contrary, giving fuller scope to them.

Instinct furnishes a safeguard in the ani

mal world, but reason is to accomplish the same end for the human being. The play of the child has the same purpose as the play of animals, the exercise of strength for the tasks of later life, according to the conditions of the species to which it belongs, Play fulfils its mission more perfectly the more it tends to production and creation.

indicated by the words; no more should we offer him the forms of things arbitrarily without meaning. That is to say, we should choose those things which express simply and clearly what the childish sense unconsciously seeks in order to understand his environment. This sense is weak and undeveloped and unable to comprehend any

play into productive activity. Word teaching would be entirely useless at this period, for the child only understands the words when he has learned the objects represented by them. The child recognizes these objects. through his senses, the first of which to be developed are taste and touch. These senses, with the gradually developing sense of sight, help the child to distinguish objects.

These things which exercise the senses, therefore, are to be the first material for teaching. These objects speak a dumb language to the child and teach him more than "the navigator of the globe learns in his travels." This unspoken language of things, together with the words he hears spoken about him, first teaches the child to speak himself. The word is the abstraction of the thing. Language is the meaning or the spirit of things in the concrete world; it is spirit. The child brings the capacity for language into the world; but there must be a certain development before it can use language. As language exerts so powerful an influence for good or evil upon the child, so the unspoken language of the things which serve the child in his play, or from which he receives his first impressions, cannot be of slight influence. We have asserted that the first perceptions of the child do not concern things as such, but their qualities. First of all it is the form, the boundary of objects which makes the impression. Therefore the first indirect teaching of the child must deal with form in some way. We do not offer the child empty words without the objects which are

form, color and material.

Where are the elements of things to be found but in the forms of nature? Crystals offer in their regularity the norms for all the forms of nature.

They constitute, in a certain way, the skeleton of the universe, show its ground plan, and this must be a mathematical plan, dependent on relations of size and number. The mathematical forms in the mineral kingdom furnish the types and elements for the knowledge of form, and these types must serve the child, at the beginning of life, as a concrete basis for all later knowledge. So we realize Froebel's idea, trace back all conceptions to their source in reality, that is, to their first representations in the childish mind. The representations are pictures of objects in the concrete world, consequently are ideas abstracted from the same, proceeding from the known to the unknown in the world, through higher stages of being to the contemplation of pure, spiritual nature.

Psychology treats, as a possession from birth, the capacity of the human being for comprehending the abstract. This is not right, for every capacity demands for its fulfillment educational conditions and exercise, which are found in doing, in work, and this from the very first. And yet education still consists in mere teaching instead of allowing this work to begin in the child's play. This error may have arisen from an extreme dualistic view of the world which serves the connection between the concrete and spiritual world, and relegates education

to the realm of pure reason and thought. The unconscious period of a child's life has been almost completely ignored and left more or less to chance.

There is no other way of restoring the disturbed equipoise in the culture of mankind than by putting the child in the same workshop, which was the school of man in the beginning of civilization, in the workshop of the Creator-nature. The human child, left to itself, would become a savage and perish. Froebel's aim is to give mothers and teachers a deeper insight into child nature. In order to introduce the child into a world of form the teacher needs lessons on form. This is the reason why the elements of mathematics are indispensable to the conductor of a Kindergarten, not indeed that she may teach mathematics to the children but to give them impressions of regular forms, such as appear in nature, through the senses of sight and touch.

The significance of Frobel's Gifts consists in imprinting upon the childish mind impressions of unity and perfection, through the spherical form, proceeding to the cube, the best representative of variety, as shown in the solid bodies of nature. Here comes the first idea of the law of opposites. The cylinder, the mediating form between the sphere and the cube, shows both unity and variety. The divided solids follow, illustrating different relations of form, leading back to the source of all manifoldness of form to the ground forms, and their first development in nature.

The childish intelligence is not aroused by words, but the objects used in play speak their own language to the child. The ball tells him of its qualities of form, of motion, rolling, etc., of colors in their harmony.

In building with the divided solids the child learns by his own experience the law of balance, of gravity, and so on. Every thing is gained by impressions received

while exercising the child's own powers. The song which accompanies the play clothes things and facts in words, which can be understood by the child. In the same way Mother Nature first instructed her children, only more gradually, for words failed her, and her pupils were not ready for her teachings. This first education of man, ordered by God according to the law of his creation, was never understood and long forgotten. It has been recognized by a human mind, and at the very time when human conceit was abusing the unconscious child-life and compelling it to consciousness. There is no salvation from this error but in the return to Mother Nature, to the place where man first learned to know his own spirit, in the spirit of God, which lives in His works.

In a certain way Froebel lets the child construct the world for himself, proceeding from the simplest forms to those more complicated. This copying of the organic forms impresses itself upon the unconscious spirit, furnishes the types and symbols by which the riper mind forms the world of thought, and keeps the analogy between the outer and inner world in constantly increasing clearness. Knowledge rests on experience of form, number and language, as Pestalozzi taught. Number determines the size, relations of form; and language expresses the result as a conclusion. The deepest need of human nature is for expression, and by his works is the man revealed, as God in His creation. Through his own doing man comes to the consciousness of himself and of his possibilities. The child can learn to know things and himself in no other way, since he only understands what can be seen and handled. The play of all children shows this desire of doing something, of imitating the work of older people. The child lacks insight and skill for reaching the desired end, therefore must. stop with the playful attempt. Most of the

play material offered the child is already finished, and destroys the creative instinct, which has no opportunity for satisfaction.

The eagerness with which the little one seizes upon the Froebel material, the ease with which he follows the method, shows that no constraint is placed upon him. The child does not understand the law by which he works; but, as the animal obeys its instincts in accomplishing wonderful things, so the child works, during his unconscious period, guided by the understanding of the teacher. Froebel's law of education furnishes the necessary guide. This will be better understood and more honored when the new ideas of the relation of man to nature, which modern science strives to fathom, gain ground and materialism becomes reconciled to spirit, the ruler in God's world.

Froebel's method may be summed up briefly as follows: Froebel sought for the law of the human being. As a physical being man can be subject to no other law than that which rules in nature, consequently this law can be no other than the law of gravitation which rules the entire material world. It is this law which keeps in equilibrium all the forces of the universe, displayed as polarization, or as centrifugal and centripetal attraction.

This force, which acts in opposite directions, drawing toward and away from the centre, preserves the equipoise and harmony of all that exists. The movement of the heavenly bodies, as well as the unfolding of every grass-blade depend upon it, it is the law of creation, and, inasmuch as all movement and form depend upon it, it is the law of all activity. On this account it is also the law of human activity, or the law of the spiritual world. It is impossible to conceive of two kinds of law for bodily and

mental activity, since the mind must always act through the organs of the body. All physical and mental activity must be subject to law, and complete the circle of its movements as the blood circulates through the body. The first cycle of human life, the unconscious period of childhood, repeats itself continuously in the following periods of spiritual consciousness; that is to say, the entire life of man is mirrored in the instinctive life, or the capacity of the man is first displayed as instinct for the imaginary world finds its images and symbols in the visible world. This analogy between the unconscious and conscious being must be taken note of in education.

The law of all movement has been employed unconsciously in every kind of human work. This law is to be recognized, not by philosophical explanations of it, but by its conscious use. To every child who works in accordance with it, it becomes objective. This, Froebel's method makes possible. In this way every manual exercise becomes at the same time a mental exercise, through the consciousness of the rules governing the work. Spiritual development proceeds in the same way.

The individuality is allowed to express itself in the free choice of combinations and arrangement of material in the productive work. The freedom of the child is in no way constrained by Froebel's method, and everything produced becomes more or less artistic, according to the capacity of the individual. This method does away with unthinking work, which only employs the hands, without mental activity. Mechanical work is given over to machines. Artistic, productive work is only gained by applying the system in early childhood.

Translated by LUCY WHEELOCK. Boston, Mass.