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 Herbart and Froebel: an attempt at synth 
 
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Columbia IDlnivetsitig 
 Contributions to lEbucation 
 
 Zcacbevs College Series 
 
 mo. X4 
 
HERBART AND FROEBEL: 
 
 AN ATTEMPT AT SYNTHESIS 
 
 Percival Richard Cole, Ph. D. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 TEACHERS COLLEGE 
 
 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 1907 
 
 J), 
 
BRANDOW PRINTING CO., 
 ALBANY, N. Y. 
 
ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 Introduction 3 
 
 Chapter I. The Philosophy of Froebel '7 
 
 I. A philosophy of nature 9 
 
 i. Nature as spirit visible 11 
 
 2. As objective 11 
 
 3. The unity of nature 12 
 
 4. Nature and man 14 
 
 5. Nature and development 14 
 
 6. Nature as symbol 15 
 
 II. A philosophy of man 18 
 
 1. The primacy of mind 18 
 
 2. Self-activity 20 
 
 3. The practical or moral life 21 
 
 4. The reign of law 25 
 
 5. Freedom 26 
 
 III. A theory of the absolute 33 
 
 1 . God as the ground of all things 33 
 
 2 . Pantheism 35 
 
 3. Teleology 36 
 
 Chapter II. The Philosophy of Herbart 41 
 
 I. The philosophical relations of Herbart 43 
 
 1. Herbart and Leibnitz 43 
 
 2. Ethical views 44 
 
 3. Herbart and Kant ^ 45 
 
 4. Spinoza and Leibnitz 48 
 
 5. Fichte and Schelling 50 
 
 II. The metaphysic of Herbart 52 
 
 1. The methodology of Herbart 52 
 
 2 . The ontology of Herbart 55 
 
 3. The cosmology of Herbart 61 
 
 4. The epistemology of Herbart 62 
 
 5.- Certain implications for education 63 
 
 III. The psychology of Herbart 65 
 
 I. The so-called faculties 65 
 
 , 72 . Ideas as dynamic 66 
 
 3. Reason and will 70 
 
 4. Another interpretation 71 
 
 Chapter III. The Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis 75 
 
 I. An attempt at a psychological synthesis 75 
 
 1. The soul and the concept 75 
 
 2. Mental forms and mental content 77 
 
4 Analytical Table of Contents. 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 3. Habit and attention 79 
 
 4. An evolutionary psychology 80 
 
 5. Mental structure and function 81 
 
 6. The self and the situation 84 
 
 II. Possibility of a metaphysical and ethical synthesis 85 
 
 1 . Freedom ' 85 
 
 2. Progress and equilibrium 86 
 
 3 . Possibility and actuality 87 
 
 4. Being and becoming 88 
 
 5. Intellect and will 90 
 
 6. The education of character 93 
 
 Chapter IV. An Attempt at an Educational Synthesis 95 
 
 I. Curriculum and method 95 
 
 1. Society and the curriculum 95 
 
 2. Educational values 97 
 
 3. Correlation and concentration 98 
 
 4. Formal steps 99 
 
 5. Epochs of culture loi 
 
 6. Technique 102 
 
 7. Instruction 103 
 
 8. Education for vocation 105 
 
 II. Nature and culture 107 
 
 1 . Nature and civilisation 107 
 
 2. Education by institutions 109 
 
 3. Individuality in 
 
 4. Interest 112 
 
 Summary 114 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The notion of a synthesis of Herbart and Froebel was first 
 suggested to the writer by Professor John Adams, of London 
 University, in 1905. Already the outline of a synthesis has 
 aippeared in an article in the Educational Review, written by 
 Professor Welton, and entitled A Synthesis of Herbart and 
 Froebel.^ Dr. F. H. Hayward, himself an able Herbartian 
 writer, has admitted that this phrase suggests the vision of a 
 third educational " Secret," beyond the secrets that seem to him 
 to have been disclosed in the respective works of Froebel and of 
 Herbart.'' The article by Professor Welton is suggestive, and 
 only too slight. A more inclusive comparative study has been 
 made by Professor MacVannel, of Columbia University.* With 
 the work of Professor Welton and of Professor MacVannel the 
 present attempt at a synthesis is in general accord. Like both 
 of these, it assumes the practical value of a philosophy of edu- 
 cation. It is, however, widely differentiated, as to its aims, 
 from the former by its scope, and from the latter by a less his- 
 torical mode of approach. The writer is deeply indebted to 
 Professor MacVannel, as well for his aid in the present under- 
 taking as for his invaluable contributions to a philosophy of 
 education. 
 
 In the present dissertation, the term synthesis has been 
 broadly interpreted. At the same time it has not been used to 
 denote an aggregation of the educational principles of Froebel 
 and of Herbart. Neither is it intended to imply that in cases 
 where Herbart may be said to maintain a thesis, and Froebel an 
 antithesis, anything like an equal validity need always be attrib- 
 uted to the respective principles that may be emphasised by 
 each. That which is sought is neither an aggregation of prin- 
 ciples, nor an indifference to them, nor a forced equality of 
 emphasis upon them, but a type of synthesis that may be called 
 organic. The term organic may be opposed to mechanical, or to 
 
 ^September, 1900. 
 
 ^The Secret of Herbart. London, 1904. p. vii. 
 
 ^The Educational Theories of Herbart and Froebel. Teachers College, New York. 1905. 
 
6 Introduction. 
 
 that piecemeal or mosaic type of eclecticism which is not uncom- 
 mon in the literature of education. Perhaps an organic syn- 
 thesis may be taken to imply at once an endeavour for approxi- 
 mate consistency, and a repudiation of the attribute of finality. 
 The value of the synthesis is likely to depend upon the breadth 
 and depth of the interpretation of experience which it may con- 
 vey. For the essential implication of a synthesis is a higher 
 standpoint, a broader view, than those that are to be reconciled. 
 Such a standpoint, such a view, should be possible in the light of 
 a more recent philosophy. 
 
 Probably there are those who may feel that in the following 
 pages something is to a degree read into Herbart and Froebel; 
 and that the result is more akin to an outline of a philosophy of 
 education than to the more limited reconciliation of two his- 
 toric systems of educational thought. Such criticism is not 
 unwillingly accepted. In a sense, to read a fuller meaning into 
 Herbart and Froebel is the very purpose and final cause of the 
 synthesis. The problem is philosophical, and to a degree even 
 metaphysical; but it is also eminently practical. For at present 
 one of the chief practical difficulties in American education is 
 the synthesis, or articulation, or reconciliation, of the primary 
 school with the kindergarten. The primary school tends to be 
 dominated by the ideas of Herbart, as the kindergarten is domi- 
 nated by the ideas of Froebel ; so that there is apparently a need 
 of a synthetic theory of education which may tend to the 
 more amicable reconstruction of them both. 
 
 Below are given the specific aims of the present attempt at a 
 synthesis. 
 
 1. To review the educational theories of Herbart and Froebel 
 in the light of the philosophies which they imply. 
 
 2. To compare and interpret those theories of Herbart and 
 Froebel which concern reality, consciousness and character. 
 
 3. To adjust in a measure the emphasis of Herbart upon cul- 
 ture, instruction and mental content with the emphasis of Froebel 
 upon nature, self-activity and will. 
 
 One can only set Froebel upon the philosophical plane of 
 Herbart by crediting him with what is implied as well as what 
 is expressed in his educational theory. This done, he is often 
 found to be in close sympathy with modem thought. Froebel, 
 indeed, was a man of wide and deep reading. He twice rejected 
 
Introdiiction. 7 
 
 the opportunity to become a university professor. He had read 
 eagerly as a boy and a student; and his reading as a man 
 included the Levana of Richter, the writings of Arndt and 
 Novalis, the Bruno of Schelling, the works of Pestalozzi, and 
 the Ideal of Humcmity and the Journal of Human Life of 
 Krause.^ " The Sonntagsblatt" writes Eleonore Heerwart, 
 " leads us to a further conclusion concerning Froebel : he was a 
 man of wide reading. Not only does every number bear as a 
 motto at the beginning expressions of famous men, but also 
 ' voices ' and short biographical notices of such men as tended 
 to ratify his views of education and of life."" Such evidence of 
 culture, it is true, bears no comparison to the profound scholar- 
 ship of Herbart. Its value is to indicate, with a greater degree 
 of certainty, the source and spirit of many of the ideas of Froebel 
 which in themselves are less comprehensible. 
 
 ^Cf, Hanschmann. Friedrich Froebel. Eisenach, 1874. p. 27, p. 47, p. 41, p. 168, etc. 
 ^Wilhelmine, Frobets erste Gattin. Eisenach, 1905. p. 219. ^Sd 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 The Philosophy of Froebel. 
 
 In his optimism, his will to believe, and his proclivity towards 
 assumptions, Froebel had an entire school of contemporary 
 thought to bear him company. For the appeal to faith as equal 
 in authority to reason, the tendency to mysticism in expression, 
 and symbolism in thought, and the supremacy of the synthetic 
 over the analytic view, are to be regarded as marks not of Froe- 
 bel only, but of romanticists generally, including the Schlegels, 
 Tieck, Schleiermacher, Novalis, and Schelling. Science, art, 
 religion and philosophy were all one to romanticism, for a com- 
 mon feeling unified them and manifested them as aspects of a 
 unitary and organic life. Thus Froebel would have none of the 
 warning of an academic friend, that he should be guarded against 
 philosophy which leads to doubt and darkness, but welcome art, 
 the giver of life and joy.^ As to Schelling, so to Froebel, phil- 
 osophy was an art, and art a philosophy, so that when either 
 speaks as one who prophesieth, understanding nothing, he is apt 
 to compensate for an occasional lack of lucidity by the certainty 
 of his intuition.^ It is in vain to expect of either Froebel or 
 Schelling a scholastic systematisation of his contributions to the 
 life of the spirit. 
 
 Froebel appears to draw his inspiration now from Schelling, 
 now again from Fichte. In general, he follows Schelling when 
 his discourse is of nature, or of symbolism, or when he takes 
 an esthetic view of things; but Fichte, whenever he thinks in 
 terms of morality, personality, will, duty, or citizenship. Among 
 the philosophers contemporary with Froebel, Krause had already 
 effected a similar synthesis. To Krause Froebel wrote a long 
 autobiographical letter; and in return Krause sent Froebel his 
 books. Between these two there existed certain personal affini- 
 ties. Both were Thuringians, both sons of clergymen, both 
 inured to a certain measure of poverty and hardship, both lovers 
 of nature from their youth, both wanderers according to the 
 standard of their period and nation, and both contemporaries 
 
 ^Autobiography. Translated by Michaelis and Moore. Syracuse, N. Y. 1889. p. 40. 
 'Cf. Schelling, Clara. Stuttgart, 1865. p. 175. 
 
10 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 save for Krause's advantage of a single year and for his com- 
 paratively early death.^ Yet despite all these coincidences their 
 lives as educators were by no means similar. For Froebel, 
 although he had deep philosophical interests, a love of learning, 
 and opportunities for advancement in the universities of Berlin 
 and Sweden,* lay under an inner compulsion of which the con- 
 scientious Krause knew nothing, to be a Menschenbildner.' Thus 
 it was not Krause with his four daughters and eight sons, but 
 the childless Froebel, who became the passionate lover and 
 devoted teacher of children. 
 
 Similarity of philosophical and religious convictions drew 
 Froebel and Krause close together. In a review in Isis, which 
 he wrote in 1823 upon Froebel's essay of the preceding year,* 
 Krause attempted to call attention to the entire harmony of that 
 essay with his own expressions of 181 1 in Das Urbild der 
 Menschheit and Tagblatt des Menschheit Lebens. Indeed, quite 
 in common with Krause," Froebel was convinced of the congru- 
 ence of religion and science, the harmony of reason and art, the 
 unity of mankind, the value of social service, theism as against 
 pantheism, the dominance of the reUgious view in life, the 
 might of love, the indivisibility of moral worth and beauty, and 
 the freedom of the will as obeying only the law of its own idea. 
 As with Krause, so with Froebel, God is permanent yet ever 
 changing and working in all things as natura tiaturans, transcend- 
 ent yet immanent, with even something of a special stress on the 
 immanence. For them both, nature is through and through 
 spiritual, and endowed with a tranquil constancy all her own. 
 For them both, man for his part is essentially social, the sexes 
 are spiritually and intellectually co-ordinate and equal, and the 
 family is the chief institute of education, although by no means 
 to the extent of the exclusion of education from the national con- 
 cern. For the rest, Froebel had a more unitary conception of 
 mind and body than Krause, who treated man as a triune bodily, 
 mental, and spiritual being. Krause for his part had a univer- 
 sality conceivably beyond even Froebel's, since he desired the name 
 of the school of Froebel at Keilhau to be changed from Allge- 
 
 'Krause, b. 1781. d. 183J. Froebel. b. 1781, d. 1852. 
 The University of Stockholm. 
 
 ^Cf. Hanschmann, Friedrich Froebel. Eisenach. 1874. p. 101. 
 *Ueber deutsche Eniehung, iiberhaupt. 
 
 'Cf. Ueber Krause und Froebel. Paul Hohlfeld. Dresden. 1873. pamm. Aiso 
 Hanschmann, Friedrich Froebel. p. X48 sqq. 
 
Philosophy of Froebel. ii 
 
 nieine deutsche Erziehungsaitstalt to the broader title, Reinmen- 
 schliche Erziehungsanstalt fiir Deutsche. But this appeal of 
 Krause to the catholicity of the ideals of the school of Rousseau 
 perhaps lacks the happiness of the self-identification of Froebel 
 with the surging forces of nationality. 
 
 As a direct discipline of Krause and Schelling,^ Froebel devel- 
 oped a world-view on the basis of a daring idealism. His own 
 temperament inclined to the artistic, and was not averse even to 
 mystic tendencies. His philosophy, then, is no cautious critique ; 
 but neither need it be viewed as a closed system. It is, perhaps, 
 none tlie less a philosophy because here and there it may lie 
 open to ridicule, and oftener to misinterpretation. To adequately 
 analyse his view of education is indeed to trace the ramifications 
 of a wealth of overlapping categories. The problems of develop- 
 ment, nature, spirit, will, society, and duty need to be examined 
 and related in thought. At any rate as they are coming to be 
 used in current educational literature, the well-worn categories 
 of unity, development and self-activity seem to furnish an inade- 
 quate clue by which to unravel such a labyrinth of fundamental 
 questions as confronts us here. Let us rather borrow from 
 Froebel the scheme of the Menschen Erziehung, to the extent 
 merely of discussing in succession his philosophy of nature, his 
 philosophy of man, and his philosophy of the absolute. 
 
 It seemed to Kant, the philosopher of Konigsberg, that since, 
 according to his analysis, the outer world can only produce sensa- 
 tions, or the raw material of knowledge, whereas the mind is much 
 more than sensations, or their sum or product, it should follow 
 that mind must be possessed of an a priori s)Tithetic activity of its 
 own. " If," he said, " intuition must conform to the nature of 
 the objects, I do not see how we know anything a priori ; on the 
 other hand if the object, as object of sense, conforms to the 
 nature of our own capacity of intuition, I can very well con- 
 ceive such a possibility."' This declaration of a revolution in 
 thought, which was likened by Kant himself to the supersession 
 of the Ptolemaic by the Copernican hypothesis of the revolution 
 
 'Especially through Middendorff, Langethal, and Krause, Froebel was also a disciple 
 of Schleiermacher. Cf. Hanschmann. Friedrich Froebel. Eisenach, 1874. p. 94. 
 ^Kritik der reinen Vemmtft. Berlin, 1889. p. 19. 
 
12 Herbart and Fraebel. 
 
 of the heavenly bodies, received independent confirmation from 
 psychology and the religious consciousness. Fichte and Schel- 
 ling built upon the Kantian principle a completer idealism, hav- 
 ing in each case faults of its own, but transcending the dualism 
 which, with a suspicion of the old Cartesian leaven, Kant had 
 perpetuated in his system by the retention of an unknowable, 
 mentally unconditioned, residuum of things-in-themselves. For 
 his part Fichte, taking his departure from the Critique of Judg- 
 ment rather than that of the Pure Reason, projected an idealism 
 all too subjective, in which only the Ego exists. But for Fichte, 
 since life is regarded as the reconquest, by the practical or moral 
 Ego, of the field of self-limitation which the theoretical or know- 
 ing Ego has set about itself, and which common sense calls the 
 objective world, and since also the process of moral reconquest 
 implies a universal moral order, the moral order was the one 
 true self, the infinite will, the mediator between the self and the 
 spiritual world, and the common source of both ; in a word, God.* 
 
 To Schelling, nature was more than the self-set limit of Fichte, 
 more than subjective, and more than moral ; for surely it is need- 
 less or fantastic to morally reconquer, with Fichte, say the spots 
 on the surface of the sun. The world had for Schelling an 
 esthetic unity. Nature was spirit visible, spirit nature invisible. 
 Through Krause and other channels the Absolute of Schelling, 
 although in its final form too negative, too like a mere indiffer- 
 ence,^ and too vulnerable to the satire of Hegel,' may have helped 
 to reveal to Froebel the common ground and source of visible 
 and invisible spirit in the unifying will of God.* This was a 
 culmination of the romanticist tendency of thought, which, half 
 poetic, more than half intuitive, and all inspired as it was, is in 
 so many cases the key to the peculiarities of Froebelian education. 
 
 The attitude of Froebel towards nature is definitely marked by 
 the following positions: Nature is (a) spirit visible; (b) objec- 
 tive; (c) a unity, such that every part is utterly in harmony with 
 every part; (d) one with the mind of man, in the sense of involv- 
 ing a necessary correspondence with his spirit, based upon a com- 
 mon foundation in the absolute spirit, or in God ; (e) an harmoni- 
 ous system developing according to its own inner laws, and as it 
 
 'C/. Fichte, Werke. Berlin, 1845. II. p. 399. 
 
 'Cjf. Schelling, Werke. Stuttgart und Augsburg. 1859. IV. p. 103, 
 
 "V. Phdnomenolcgie des Geistes. Preface. 
 
 *Cj. Menschen Erziehung, hrsg, Seidel. p. 144. 
 
Philosophy of Froebel. 13 
 
 were an organic whole; and finally (f) a type and symbol of the 
 life of humanity. 
 
 1. Nature as spirit visible. Schelling, in reaction from the 
 determination of nature according to Fichte as an abstract limit, 
 held nature to be parallel to man and even larger and more real. 
 He believed that there was no phenomenon in consciousness 
 whose embodiment in nature he could not see. Such a doctrine 
 may be interpreted in either of two ways. It may imply no 
 more than the objectivity of nature, which Fichte in a way had 
 denied. It may mean, again, that consciousness is a mere pro- 
 duct ; and no ultimate process. If this be so, man is to be inter- 
 preted from nature, rather than nature from man. But this is 
 not the point of view of Froebel, highly though he valued the 
 reality of nature. For him it may be said that nature at every 
 point adumbrated spiritual relationships. Indeed, if the ethical 
 meaning of idealism be no more mysterious than this, that it lies 
 in seeking the explanations of things in their ideas, of lower 
 forms in their higher possibilities, then it was a true idealism that 
 moved Froebel, when the crux came of interpreting the given 
 symbolic relation between consciousness and nature, to call 
 nature the symbol, mind the reality. Herein is the philosophical 
 basis of Froebel's symbolism, in itself not necessarily unsound, 
 however ridiculous in a few of its applications.^ On the prin- 
 ciples of Froebel, the educator need not go beyond symbolism 
 to mysticism, if he will but teach nature not in its mere exter- 
 nality, but in its life, beauty, spirit and meaning. There is little 
 danger of reading spirit into nature if nature be visible spirit. 
 The danger is only of misreading — corruptio optimi lit pessima. 
 For only gradually are we differentiated from our environment, 
 which therefore shares in our spiritual nature; and whether by 
 the poetic process as with Wordsworth, or by school rambles as 
 with Froebd,^ the growing mind is pledged by instinct, by kin- 
 ship, and by utility, to cherish in relation to it a manner of 
 sympathetic intercourse. 
 
 2. Nature as objective. Although they tended to regard nature 
 as spiritual, or organic to consciousness, neither Schelling, nor 
 Hegel, nor Froebel desired to detract from her objectivity, her 
 reality, or her permanence. Nature to Schelling was the " com- 
 
 '£.g. Der B-all ist ein Bild des All. Kindergartenwesen (Seidel) p. 40. 
 ^Mtnschen Erziehung, h-sg. Seidel. p. 96. 
 
14 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 plete real side in the eternal process of subject becoming object; " 
 and the philosophy of nature was the " first and necessary side 
 of philosophy itself."^ Froebel would have been willing to grant 
 that nature is objectively given, but essentially as a means to 
 conscious life, and subordinate to man, " a more beautiful ladder 
 than Jacob's between earth and heaven."" An educational appli- 
 cation by Froebel of the doctrine of the objectivity of nature is 
 his agreement with the insistency of Pestalozzi upon things before 
 words. Children are dejected by the inanities of a premature 
 technical nomenclature. A text-book' has profaned the sancti- 
 ties of the kindergarten with " tender violet voices " like this : 
 
 " Do tell me," whispered a violet bud to a violet close by, 
 " when will I be able to show my pretty blue dress ? It's non- 
 sense my wearing my green pinafore so long ! " " If you were 
 grown up enough to leave off your pinafore you would call your 
 pinafore a calyx, and your blue dress a corolla. From your child- 
 ish way of talking any one can see you are nothing but a baby." 
 " I wonder if I've got those little stems inside me with gold tops 
 like you have ? " went on the violet bud. The violet answered 
 hastily, " Of course you have ; but don't call them stems — stamens 
 is the right name for them. You're absurdly childish even for 
 your age ! " 
 
 One may leave such travesties with Froebel's patient comment 
 that the words may wait,* only adding that he had every sympathy 
 with the word in talk, and song, and story, if it were but the sym- 
 bol of power. At the same time, contrary to a prevalent impres- 
 sion, Froebel is distinctly for reality in education. Realising to 
 a greater extent than Fichte, or than Herbart, that nature is 
 real, and to a degree objective, Froebel took his material from 
 the near at hand, developed occupations from contact with visible 
 and tangible objects, and studied nature for what it is, as well 
 as for what it may symbolise. 
 
 3. The unity of nature. Nature, which to Schelling was an 
 Odyssey of the spirit," the spirit striving to return to its own 
 true inwardness through the form of outwardness in which it 
 is clad in nature, seemed to Herbart not deducible from a single 
 principle, but to be the phenomenal manifestation of a plurality 
 
 'Schelling, Werke. 1859. V. p. 314- 
 
 ^Menschtn Ertithung. hrsg. Seidel. 1883. p. 136. 
 
 ^Tht Kindergarten Room.-' By F. A. Fistram. Blackie and Son. 1006. 
 
 *lbid. p. 13 s. 
 
 'C/. HaffdinK. History of Modern Philosophy. II. p. 165. 
 
Philosophy of Froebel. 15 
 
 of independent reals. Yet if the unity be not conceived to be 
 such as excludes difference, if it be as it seemed to Froebel, 
 organic, then the unity of nature is an intelligible hypothesis. It 
 is the point of departure from which Froebel endeavors to explain 
 mind, nature, education, life and the absolute. His opening 
 words in the Menschen Ersiehung read like the opening words of 
 Krause in Das Urbild der Menschheit, and not unlike many 
 expressions of Schelling. For instance : " Nature in its very 
 essence," said Schelling,^ " is one ; there is one life in all things, 
 and one power to be, the same regulative principle through ideas. 
 There is no pure materiality in nature, but there is everywhere 
 soul symbolically represented in body, with a preponderance of 
 one or the other in phenomena. For the same reason there can 
 be but one science in nature." Mr. Bradley and others repeat 
 the same thing. " In reality there can be no mere physical 
 nature. The world of physical science is not something inde- 
 pendent, but is a mere element in one total experience."^ 
 
 For Froebel as for so many of the metaphysicians of his day, 
 the unity of the world was a consequence of its spirituality. In 
 one sense man is a part of this unity, since his physical being is 
 an atom in its immensity, and subject to all its laws ; in another 
 he is a higher unity, capable of making the whole world his own, 
 a bearer of its purposes for whom the stars fight in their courses. 
 He is a member, yet also a whole; a part, yet all-inclusive; a 
 Glied-ganzes. The desire to comprehend nature under intelli- 
 gible laws is by Froebel set down to the galvanisation of this 
 nature as a Glied-games by the fundamental instinct common 
 throughout the world, for each individual man, animal or plant 
 to actualise his own potentialities. The genuine boy, says Froe- 
 bel, when you show him the objects of nature, will soon ask about 
 their higher unity and causation.' There is a subtle distinction* 
 between the master, who controls the elusive details of experi- 
 ence by law, and the mere teacher who allows himself to be lost 
 in a bewildering manifold of isolated incidents. Fragmentary 
 study devitalises natural objects and militates against the vigor 
 of the human mind.^ 
 
 ^Werke, 1859- V. p. 32S. , ^ 
 
 ^Appearance and Reahty. London, 1903. p. 2S3. 
 
 ^Menschen Erziehung. p. 133- 
 
 *Ibid. p. 81. 
 
 ^Menschen Erziehung. p. 133. 
 
1 6 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 4. Nature and man. The unity of matter and mind, man and 
 nature was for Froebel not sameness but a Divine immanent will ; 
 intuitive perhaps, shot out of a pistol maybe, but not the night 
 in which all cows are black. It has even an empirical basis so far 
 as evolution is empirical. The nature that is akin to man cannot 
 be spiritless.^ To Froebel the kinship was close, so close that 
 the Christian, he who reads in nature her deepest sermons, is the 
 only true naturalist.^ The spirit of nature and the soul of man 
 are one, with the common ground and source, God.^ No differ- 
 entiation, it is true, appears to go deeper than between mind and 
 matter, but none is more surely confined within the limits of a 
 system. 
 
 The unity of man and nature, so close to the heart of poetry 
 and romanticism, so dear to Froebel and Wordsworth, might 
 easily lend itself to the gospel of Rousseau, education according 
 to nature. Froebel seems to be at times a little too enamored 
 of spontaneities, a trifle over-jealous of civilisation. We are 
 prone, he says, to cover the divine source of life in all our hearts 
 with rubbish, to dam it up with waste, to hedge it in with thorns.* 
 Not that the defect as it appears in Froebel is serious, or much 
 more than an aspect of the emphasis that he sets on self-activity. 
 When the idea of membership, of the Glied-ganzes, or of organ- 
 ism, prevails in Froebel, nature-worship in the Rousseau sense is 
 quite transcended. 
 
 5. Nature and development. Granted that the mystical con- 
 nections which Froebel postulated between the worlds of crystals, 
 animals and vegetables will not stand the test of scientific inves- 
 tigation, being at best a trespass of metaphysic upon fields that 
 are not its own, the fact remains that Froebel's intuitions of 
 evolution have endowed his educational theory with a certain 
 permanence and validity which otherwise it could hardly have 
 gotten, and in virtue of which it surpasses other systems, at least 
 in the quality of anticipating views now current. It is true that 
 since Darwin and Wallace we have a more definite idea of the 
 nature of the inner laws of natural development; and that 
 Froebel's deductions are subject to empirical revision, and occa- 
 sionally, as in crystallography and the psychology of language, 
 
 *C"f. Krause. Das Urbild der Menschheit. Dresden, 1811. p. 7. 
 ^Menschen Ereiehung. p. 96. 
 ^Menschen Brziehung. p. 144. 
 *lbid. p. 163. 
 
Philosophy of Froebel. 17 
 
 may find their appropriate rest in the wastepaper basket. But 
 among the truths that follow from the sanity of Froebel's main 
 positions, that is to say, that nature develops by inner laws, and 
 that these laws have a spiritual or teleological bearing, these 
 which follow are of validity for education. Firstly, an accurate 
 observation of natural laws in their evolution should lead up 
 to a logical basis for the school curriculum; and secondly, if 
 matter be really to us concrete spirit, this logical basis should 
 tend to be psychological also. In the gifts and occupations 
 Froebel endeavored to perfect such a logico-psychological sys- 
 tem. The task was well done. But, since the situation contains 
 a progressive factor, it involves a legacy of work, and is essen- 
 tially a social undertaking. Since the plays and occupations of 
 Froebel, admirable as is their tout ensemble, have no right 
 <iivine, since again their author pinned his faith to their felt neces- 
 sity rather than authority,^ and since they may be a little out of 
 touch with the environment of here and now, it seems to follow 
 that kindergartners might logically, in the light of the knowledge 
 and the needs of later generations, reinterpret the inner laws of 
 nature and retouch the curriculum for themselves. 
 
 6. Nature as symbol. If nature be spiritual, that is to say, 
 akin to the highest level of being ; if it have no pure materiality," 
 but be spirit somehow embodied; if man may have communion 
 with it, and may find in it the anchor of his purest thoughts ; then 
 it may well be supposed to convey a spiritual suggestion to man. 
 In other words, it may well have for man a meaning beyond 
 that of its external appearance, or in short, a force of symbolism. 
 Yet symbolism is a troublesome tool. Bridging as it does the 
 realms of things and conceptions, should it fall wholly within the 
 one, it becomes forced; within the other, fanciful. One never 
 knows where to halt. The lily may have its educational value 
 as a symbol of purity, and yet the sphere may be a failure as the 
 embodiment of moral unity. Either of them may have a symbolic 
 value for an adult only, just as a doll has enormous symbolic 
 value, but only to girls between definite ages. The same object 
 may have different symbolic values for different people. The 
 truth seems to be that symbolism is an organon more than usually 
 subjective. A black cat symbolises witchcraft to a superstitious 
 
 ^Kindergartenwesen. hrsg. Seidel. 1883. p. 283. 
 
 sgchelling, Werke. V. p. 325. And Bradley, Appearance and Reahty. p. 283. 
 
i8 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 man; but, one may believe, danger and death to a mouse. The 
 mind creates symbolic connections between things and principles, 
 just as it imposes its laws upon phenomena, but with- greater 
 freedom. Symbolism will therefore be valid in education in so 
 far as the children under the direction of the teacher make it so. 
 To fulfil this condition it should be natural, unaffected, appeal- 
 ing to all or nearly all, and adapted to age and mental develop- 
 ment. For a child, child symbolism; for an adult, adult sym- 
 bolism. There are many illustrations in Froebel's writings of 
 the lengths to which symbolism may innocently go. In crystals 
 he saw mirrored the whole life of man; in mathematics the 
 religion of the soul.^ Nor is there any doubt that to Froebel 
 crystals were a mirror of life, as mathematics " a fixed starting 
 point and a sure guide in the study of the inner connection of the 
 manifold of nature,"^ just as to Tennyson the flower in the 
 crannied wall was a symbol of what God and man is ; but to apply 
 such symbolism directly to education is to make the ill-grounded 
 assumption that children will discern universals in a compara- 
 tively isolated particular as easily as a Tennyson or a Froebel, 
 when in truth few grown men can be found to have done so. 
 
 It would not appear to be the root idea of symbolic education 
 that is in fault, namely, that man, the microcosm, finds a type 
 of his spirit realised in the macrocosm, nature.' The error, 
 if error there be, lies rather in the haste and enthusiasm with 
 which this general symbolism is applied to incommensurable 
 details. To such a haste, to such an enthusiasm are due Froe- 
 bel's a priori theories of crystalline forms, his bizarre knack of 
 establishing connections between words on the basis of mere 
 sound,* and his assertion that in language vowels represent the 
 inner, unity ; consonants the outer, individuality. For Froebel 
 and extreme romanticists such connections did exist; yet they 
 must be reckoned, because they obscure more legitimate laws and 
 unities, not only defective but false. 
 
 Symbolic education is the principle of the Froebelian gifts and 
 occupations, the common source of their strength and weakness. 
 Unfortunately the psychology of the gifts is not always and on 
 every side defensible. Holding as he did that the child mind is, 
 
 ^Menschen Erziehung. p. 140. 
 
 'Ibid. p. 137. 
 
 ^Cf. Education by Development, p. 174. 
 
 ^E. g. Meister and meist. Menschen Eretehung. p. 81. 
 
Philosophy of Froebel. 19 
 
 from the outset a unity, trailing universals like clouds of glory 
 from heaven, it is not wonderful that Froebel should have devel- 
 oped an overconfidence in the capacity of children to appreciate 
 the symbolisation of principles in a single concrete object. Even 
 Herbart, who in the main regarded symbols as an obvious bur- 
 den on instruction,^ was not far from this pitfall when he advo- 
 cated " marking out with bright nails on a board the typical 
 triangles, and placing them continually within sight of the child 
 in its cradle.'^ The sphere, thought Froebel, would make mani- 
 fest unity, and the holding of differences in unity ; the cube, while 
 not concealing unity, would emphasise variety; motions with the 
 ball would arouse contrast and self-distinction,' and so forth. 
 It is little to the purpose to offer this defence, that these philo- 
 sophical meanings are for the teacher, not for the child ; and that 
 it is the fact, and not the name, of unity, difference, etc., that is 
 apprehended. For, in the first place, the symbols are educa- 
 tively worthless unless their meaning is for the child; and in the 
 second place there is no reason to believe that the mere facts of 
 unity, difference, and other forms of life may be better conveyed 
 to children from a cube and a ball than a tree and a stone. It 
 may even be pointed out that a sphere will make manifest not all 
 unity but little more than the unity of a sphere, the cube empha- 
 sise not all difference but little more than its own differentiations, 
 and motions with the ball awaken contrast and self-distinction 
 practically only in relation to the ball. Not that the generali- 
 sations, unity, differentiation, self-distinction, are valueless; but 
 they are in the gifts inadequately grounded ; just as it is one thing 
 to hold with Tennyson that to know fully the flower in the cran- 
 nied wall is to know what God and man is, and quite another to 
 look for the data of such knowledge in the flower alone, apart 
 from the infinity of its relationships. 
 
 With all this, the weakness of the symbolism of Froebel appears 
 to be less than its strength. Symbolism is a law of human devel- 
 opment, whereby the child sees in his broomstick a horse, in his 
 bricks a palace, in all his games and plays a real life and a serious 
 society. Plays with dolls are the natural anticipation of house- 
 hold life and maternity ; with toy ships or soldiers, for the spirit 
 
 ^Allgemeine Pddagogik. Pad. Schrift. I. p. 176. 
 
 'Ibid. p. 183. 
 
 ^Friedrich Froebels Kindergartenwesen (Seidel). pp. 40-64. 
 
20 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 of the sea or war ; with other children, for social life. Where the 
 gifts are unsatisfactory, it is less for their symbolism as such 
 than its adult character. Thus the Mother Plays are successful 
 because theirs is a symbolism in accordance with the child's own 
 heart. Perhaps romanti-c better describes the child mind even 
 than symbolic. Children are naive, trustful to credulity, and 
 fancy free, with an imagination as it were not yet blighted by the 
 light of common day. If therefore childhood be a stage of 
 development to be lived out as such, then songs, games and 
 stories are a needful staple of its education. Even the just 
 reminder that what in children seems to us poetic may be com- 
 monplace to them, that the boldness of their metaphors may be 
 correlated with the limitation of their stock of ideas, and that 
 the life of common day may be ultimately more reliable than the 
 radiance of infancy, alters not the principle of full and free devel- 
 opment at every stage, and among other stages that of a joyous 
 and saltatory romanticism. Children bending their imagina- 
 tion upon the glowing future are unconscious vehicles of social 
 ends. The mother, the teacher, is to perceive this; and seeing, 
 she is to fill with a divine purpose^ the void of a boundless and 
 formless fancy.^ But symbolism has now carried us over from 
 the philosophy of nature to a philosophy of man. 
 
 II. 
 
 I. The primacy of mind in nature. Implied in the educational 
 theory of Froebel there seems to be a philosophy which may be 
 described as an objective teleological idealism. This need not 
 perhaps imply that nature moves to a predestined goal, whither 
 it cannot but arrive in the appointed way and at the appointed 
 time, wholly apart from the co-operation of man. But it may be 
 well to define this phrase, objective teleological idealism, as it 
 is here understood. By idealism is here implied that the world 
 is through and through rational; by teleological, that it is to be 
 interpreted in the light of ends or purposes, and that explanation 
 proceeds in a sense from the higher or more spiritual types to 
 the lower; and by objective, it is intended to convey that the 
 real world is not a mere subjective construction by individual 
 minds, but such as exists for an absolute spirit; and again, from 
 
 •Cf. £d«co<tOM by Devtlopment (International Education Series), p. 179. 
 2Cf. The song of the knights in the Mother Play. 
 
Philosophy of Froebel. 21 
 
 an ethical standpoint, that there is a best as well as a good. 
 It is a principle that has fairly stood the test of time, and the 
 inquisition of psychology, that consciousness, mind, some form 
 of spirit, is the constitutive principle of the universe.^ Man 
 lives, it is true, in a world of phenomena to which it is his duty 
 to conform. He may not wallow naked in December snows by 
 thinking on the summer's heat. He must turn experience to 
 account rather than defy it. And yet, how we regard facts 
 transforms them ; so that, for instance, a thunderstorm is differ- 
 ent to him who welcomes it and to him who fears. " For in 
 truth these independent facts, which we have only to acknowl- 
 edge, are a mere figure of speech."^ These facts owe their 
 meaning to our own interpretation. There are undiscovered 
 stars, but they do not yet exist for us ; or would not but for the 
 fact that we have reason to be convinced of their existence. To 
 us they cannot be facts until the human spirit shall have called 
 them forth into the reality of experience. The metaphysical 
 position that regards experience as given, and reason as an indis- 
 pensable factor in it, is corroborated by the evidence of a psy- 
 chology that affirms that the sense data — a. mere touch, an 
 impact of air waves upon the drum of the ear, a tiny flat inverted 
 image upon the retina — can be regarded as no more than the raw 
 material of experience, or at best only its germ. But, it may be 
 urged, as the germ explains the tree, so may the sense-datum 
 explain experience. But how does the germ explain the tree? 
 What would man know about a tree, having seen naught but 
 seeds? It is not the germ that explains the tree, but the tree 
 which explains the germ ; and it is experience which explains the 
 data of sense, not the latter which explain experience. Like- 
 wise it is not man's ancestry which explains man. The genetic 
 psychologist who explains man's ancestry is not explaining the 
 humanity of to-day so much as doing the important work of 
 interpreting primitive man and childhood in the light of the 
 highest achievements of the present. There is in the meantime 
 a reaction of genetic studies upon present ideals, as of knowledge 
 of the germ upon the conception of a tree ; but the understanding 
 of the former in each case is primarily dependent upon that of 
 the latter. Mind or spirit, it would appear then, is the constitu- 
 
 Kf. Chapter I. j. 
 
 'Personal Idealism. (London, 1902.) p. 62. 
 
22 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 tive principle of the universe, because only mind or spirit con- 
 tains the principle of meaning. It is to be admitted that idealism 
 presupposes the necessity of a value and meaning in life; pre- 
 supposes even the optimism of the doctrine that the best is the 
 true. Not whatever is, is right; but vi^hatever is right, is true. 
 This is evidently a restatement of teleology, or the doctrine that 
 explanation is from ends, or values, or final causes. Explanation 
 is from the truest that is known. If then the best be the true, 
 one must explain nature by what one recognises as best, to wit, 
 her higher, more spiritual levels, and especially man in his ideal 
 aspects. One must in short discern in what ought to be the 
 condition of what is. 
 
 2. Self-activity or development from within. All this is in 
 the spirit of Froebel,^ and is the philosophical groundwork of his 
 method. For observe the connection. That reality is spiritixal 
 means that it is always for some consciousness, immanent or 
 transcendent. My reality is for my consciousness; absolute 
 reality for the absolute consciousness; Froebel would say, for 
 God. " Pure truth is thine alone," as Lessing put it.^ Clearly 
 then, for the individual, only himself can be the constructor of 
 his own world-view ; and education, as to method, can only be the 
 actualisation of inner potencies,' the expedition of a real spirit, 
 and a mode of self-activity. It is self-activity, a manner of self- 
 differentiating unity, that sets human education on a plane of 
 its own; for though, as Kant admitted, the sensuous conscious- 
 ness of an animal is a kind of unity, it is not so for itself ; whereas 
 a man's mind is conscious unity, and preserves its continuity 
 throughout every modification.* That things are spiritual, 
 explanation teleological, and the best the true, are positions 
 which Froebel assumes, as when with a characteristic emphasis 
 upon intuition, faith and feeling, he says : "All things have come 
 from the divine Unity, from God, and have their origin in the 
 divine Unity, in God alone. . . . All things are only 
 through the divine effluence that lives in them. The divine 
 effluence that lives in each thing is the essence of each thing."^ 
 As this divine effluence becomes in man something autonomous, 
 education, as its realisation, is self-development. In it the indi- 
 
 •Cf. Chapter III. Teleology. 
 
 ^Eine Duplik. Werke (Leipzig, 1897). XIII-. 23, 34. 
 
 ^Cf. e. g. Kindergartenbriefe (wietx und Leipzig. 1887). 132-3. 
 
 <Cf. Caird. Critical Philosophy of Kant IfAasgovr. zSSg). I. 313- 
 
 ^Menschen Erziehung (Seidel). Einleittmg. p. 3. Trans. Hailmana. pp. 1-2. 
 
Philosophy of Froebel. 23 
 
 "vidual fulfils purposes that are not only cosmic, but his own. 
 Por Froebel, individuality in development is real, not phenomenal 
 only. " Rich is the life of the child growing to boyhood, but 
 we see it not ; living is his life, but we do not feel it."^ And yet, 
 it functions in a social, cosmic, divine whole. " In God's world, 
 just because it is God's, something is steadily expressed, and it 
 is an unbroken progressive development in all things."^ It will 
 be necessary to return upon the conception of education as evo- 
 lution at a later stage of the present analysis. In the mean- 
 time, one of its chief implications is the importance of activity 
 and morality. 
 
 3. The practical or moral life. Idealism, in the broader ethical 
 sense in which Kant, Herbart, and Schopenhauer may be said to 
 be idealists, is at bottom a social philosophy. For the guidance 
 of life by conscious moral principles, which is ethical idealism, 
 is of necessity, since moral principles are of social outgrowth 
 and bearing, social. It is perhaps a matter of opinion whether 
 there be a necessary logical connection between ethical and meta- 
 physical idealism. Although not all metaphysical idealists have 
 been ethically inclined ; although Schelling for one thought rather 
 in terms of art than morality ; and although certain realists, like 
 Herbart, have had strongly ethical sympathies ; it may be urged 
 that since only spirit or reason conveys meaning, ethical ideal- 
 ism, which interprets in terms of highest meanings, can only con- 
 sist with a metaphysical idealism, a view of the world as in some 
 sort spiritual or rational in its ultimate constitution. 
 
 Be this as it may, Schopenhauer, while something of a protes- 
 tant against the metaphysical idealism of Fichte, is in the 
 Fichtean and Froebelian spirit when he asserts the priority of 
 the will. " Will is first and original ; knowledge is merely added 
 to it as an instrument belonging to the phenomenon of the will. 
 Therefore every man is what he is through his will; and his 
 character is original, for willing is the basis of his nature."' 
 
 For Fichte also human life was a continuous exercise of will. 
 It was the clash of an infinite spiritual order with a finite sen- 
 suous order* like Tennyson's sense at war with soul, or rather, 
 soul at war with sense. It was primarily effort, not thought 
 
 ^Mensctun Ersiehung. p. 44. 
 
 ^Mutter tmd Kost-Ueder (Seidel). p. 158. Trans. P. and E. Lord. p. 154. 
 
 ^The World as Will and Idea (London 1883). p. 377- 
 
 ■*Pichte, Werke. II. p. 288. Also Adamson's Fichte. p. 196. 
 
24 Herbart and Froeb^l. 
 
 nor interest. Fichte blamed Rousseau for taking only into 
 account the sorrows of the human race, and not its powers of 
 self-help. His own constant exhortation was: "Act! Act! for 
 that reason are we here."^ For Krause also the practical or 
 moral side of life was of supreme importance. Krause based 
 social endeavor upon gratitude; for since the individual receives 
 according to his capacity and opportunity of the treasures of 
 social life, so should he thankfully lay his own offering upon the 
 altar of mankind.'' The significance of an active aspect in life, 
 an aspect of moral endeavour rather than acceptance of what is 
 regarded as inevitable, had been emphasised by the pathfinder, 
 Lessing. Lessing would prefer the ever-restless impulse towards 
 truth above the complete possession of the truth itself.' Thus 
 the emphasis of Froebel upon activity is wholly in the spirit of 
 German idealism during and prior to his time. Action was for 
 Froebel prior to all else, because it is the condition of develop- 
 ment, which for Froebel was the law of life. 
 
 To Froebel one thing only, self-sacrifice, appeared to stand 
 above development. Or rather, self-sacrifice appeared to be a 
 condition of development, and even a mode of self-realisation. 
 It is easy to illustrate this thought of Froebel from the philosophy 
 of Hegel. For Hegel, life is a process of dying to live. By 
 dying to desire and passion we live to morality, by dying to 
 morality we live to institutions, by dying to institutions we live 
 to self-realisation in the freedom of established observance.* 
 Fichte held a similar if less institutional theory. " We must," 
 he said, " according to the figure of a sacred doctrine, first die 
 unto the world and be born again, in order to enter the kingdom 
 of God."" And so, to the mind of Froebel, it is in education. 
 Each stage in education dies unto the next, and is taken up into 
 it so that it is no longer an end so much as a means. There is 
 no turning back, and no perpetuation of a transient stage. 
 Everything moves,* and the law of education as of life is pro- 
 gress by effort and self-sacrifice. The world of sense which lies 
 about and around us is therefore not to be thought of as a limit ; 
 but a means to self-realisation. So viewed, man is not its puppet. 
 
 ^Werke (Berlin, 1845). 344-5- 
 ^Das Vrbild der Msnsckhett. Dresden. iSii. p. 33. 
 'Bine Duplik. Werke (Leipzig, 1897). XIII. 23-24. 
 'Hegel's Sittlichkeit. 
 ^Werke, Berlin, 1845- II- P- '9'- 
 
 'Cf. Lessing: Die Erziehung dts Menschengeschlechts. Werke, Leipisig 1897. XIII. 
 P- 434- 
 
Philosophy of Froebel. 25 
 
 Believing as he does in the primacy of concrete activities, and 
 in the essential " purposiveness of our thought and the teleological 
 character of its methods,"^ Froebel is almost, in emphasis, a 
 pragmatist. Pragmatism, in addition to these implications, 
 appeals to utility, or rather to workableness. It appears to 
 involve a functional psychology; it will make no truce with the 
 so-called " pure " thought ; it spurns the doctrine of knowledge 
 for the sake of knowledge; and it rejects ethical principles that 
 do not seem to actually affect conduct. That Froebel inclines 
 to a pragmatic emphasis appears to be indicated by his romanti- 
 cist appreciation of emotion as a factor in life and education, by 
 his voluntaristic psychology, and his preoccupation with con- 
 duct. Perhaps, for instance, Froebel is pragmatistic in the 
 attempt to replace the analytic processes of abstract thought by 
 a methodology of the constructive arts. " In th'e cultivation of 
 the child for creative drawing," he urges, " consists the nature 
 of the kindergarten."^ But Froebel probably did not conceive 
 of such an opposition between theory and practice, or between 
 philosophy and life, as perhaps the modern pragmatist tends to 
 assume, and gallantly endeavors to heal. 
 
 The ultimate separation of theory and practice, or thought and 
 action, is inconceivable. The pragmatist emphasises not only 
 practice, but theory in relation to practice. The idealist empha- 
 sises the same relation, and not merely theory. Indeed, for the 
 purposes of the present analysis, pragmatism may be regarded 
 as one aspect of idealism. For the pragmatistic leanings of 
 Froebel are to all appearance organically related to his idealistic 
 philosophy of life. Human life may be viewed as an inter- 
 action of knowing and doing. From this point of view, then, 
 it was not mere doing that commended itself to Froebel, so much 
 as the socialised activity that tends to convey to the individual 
 a spiritual mastery in both the intellectual and the practical 
 spheres. Indeed, it seems to follow from the notion of life as 
 an interaction, that whether it be approached from the more 
 theoretical, or from the more practical side, is largely a matter 
 of methodology. In this broad sense, the emphasis of Froebel 
 upon self-activity is a principle of method ; and may not be wholly 
 inconsistent with the emphasis of Herbart upon ideas. 
 
 ^Cf. Humanism. F. C. S. Schiller, p. g. 
 
 ^Kindergartenwesen (Seidel). p. 329. Or Education by Development, p, 88. 
 
26 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 As a principle of methodology, Froebel preferred education 
 through concrete activities to education through abstract ideas. 
 This principle involves, firstly, the preparation for thoughts by 
 activities; and again, the application of thoughts in activities. 
 
 Secondly, it involves a concrete treatment of song and story, 
 which are to be such as the child may make as it were into 
 vehicles of his own feeling. Therefore they involve, in addition 
 to self-expression, social appreciation. Stories, where possible, 
 are to have an outlet in action ; and are to preserve the pleasur- 
 able realism of infant drama.'- 
 
 Thirdly, Froebel would emphasise the constructive arts, less 
 with Rousseau from industrial motives, than because he per- 
 ceived in the creative activities something divine, as God him- 
 self is primarily creator. " In order to understand the Creator, 
 man must be in a position to create after him, man must himself 
 .be relatively a creator."^ 
 
 Fourthly, education by doing implies at least a respect for 
 what may be called the natural methodology of the child. 
 " Watch, only watch, the child himself will teach you."' Or 
 again : " Let us learn of our children, let us hearken to the 
 gentle admonitions of their life, and the unvoiced demands of 
 their spirit."* Only upon the surface do such expressions, fre- 
 quent as they are in Froebel, imply an education according to 
 nature, where nature means mere origin as with the genetic psy- 
 chologist, mere primitivism as with Rousseau. Their real func- 
 tion, it may not be too much to say,"* is to assert a neglected 
 factor in the education process, the ground and promise of indi- 
 viduality, the child with his instincts and impulses. The teacher, 
 then, is not just concerned with the child's individuality, or with 
 the needs of society alone; but rather with the process in which 
 both the child and society function. He is neither to appear 
 before the child as the champion of a relentless society, and its 
 mysterious demands, clad in the terrors with which it has invested 
 him ; nor is he contrariwise to lackey the child's perfections. He 
 is not as one set over dead materials. He is set over a living 
 process, a process which he directs as best he can, by here a 
 
 'Cf. Menschen ErziehutK (Seidel). p. 196. 
 
 *From Froebel's Essay (Erfurt, 1821). Cf. Hanschmann. Friedrich Froebel. p. 170. 
 
 'Menseiun Erziihung. p. 46. 
 
 'Ibid. p. 56- 
 
 'C/. note on p. 11. 
 
Philosophy of Froebel. 27 
 
 •touch, there a suggestion, yonder an exercise, according to the 
 •opportunities with which his Hving trust may furnish him. 
 
 Fifthly, it accords with the method of activity, that a teacher 
 need not answer every question as it arises, if he but put the 
 ■child in the way to answer it for himself.^ Felt problems are a 
 storage battery of educational power. Indeed Froebel woul^ 
 suggest that they are more, as it were the leaven that leavens the 
 -whole lump. " In all instruction," he says, " we should start 
 from an inner need of the boy." Froebel adds the charge, that 
 we are prone to this fault, " to teach and instruct our children 
 without having awakened the want of it, yes, after we have 
 •destroyed whatever was already in the child."^ From these few 
 corollaries of Froebel's method, then, this much at least may be 
 taken as certain, that for him the school is no spot set apart for 
 the learning of lessons, but an institution pregnant with social 
 life. 
 
 4. The reign of law. It is implied in what has been said of 
 the morallife, that idealism demands a reign of law, a moral 
 order, a more than subjective standard of self-realisation. A 
 reign of law seems implied both in ethical idealism, which sees 
 life as guided by its idea; and by metaphysical idealism, which 
 regards the world as constituted by spirit. For apart from law 
 in the constitution of the world there can be neither truth nor 
 agreement ; and apart from law in the moral sphere there can be 
 no goodness, because no standard of virtue; the choice is there- 
 fore only between law and a self-destructive scepticism, such as 
 is prone to assume a standard of truth and right in order to 
 prove that none exists. Froebel began and ended with the 
 notion of law.' In the natural world, indeed, the reign of law 
 is sufficiently proven. But so-called natural laws have a spirit- 
 ual aspect; since they exist only to a reflective being, and are 
 indebted for their intelligibility to the impress of spiritual activi- 
 ties. They are valid of course for animals, but not to them; one 
 can only say that they are valid for them to us. But man has 
 ■made nature a realm of law to himself, though willy-nilly it 
 would be so for himself. While law indeed reigns, he endeavours 
 'by reformations and occasional rebellions to transmute its despot- 
 ism into the endurable form of a limited monarchy. Personal 
 
 ^Mtnschtn Eriiehung. hrsg, Seidel. p. 55. 
 
 'Ibid. p. ISS. 
 
 ^Cf. Hanschmann, Friedrich Froebel. p. 165 and p. 168. 
 
2& Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 autonomy may be actualised to the extent of one's self-conscious- 
 ness, with which comes a measure of freedom, a quantum of 
 control, an element of responsibility, and the necessity and intel- 
 ligibility of the moral sense. 
 
 According to the notion of the reign of law, though there be 
 many forms of self-activity, many modes of self-expression, there 
 is in geaeral only one right form, only one best mode, in any 
 given set of circumstances that may be said to have a moral 
 bearing. This principle is perhaps the root of the social influ- 
 ence of idealism. The idea that guides our lives is to be the 
 best, the right idea, so far as we can locate it; and normally 
 such an idea is likely to be socially beneficial, because it can- 
 not but be socially constituted. And, although Kant had 
 established the ethics of idealism on the basis of a categorical 
 imperative, or a call of duty needing no other justification than 
 itself, yet, to all intents and purposes, his canons of ethics gave 
 the reasons, the necessity for which he had repudiated, for the 
 individual to fulfil his social duty. The individual is to act 
 always as though he were both legislator and subject in a republic 
 of ends. And certainly for Froebel the moral law was not merely 
 a superposed divine injunction. Without losing its divine 
 authority, it was for Froebel an inner law, a mode in which the- 
 divine immanence is actualised. " The exercise, the development 
 of man as an intelligent, thinking, self-conscious being to the 
 pure, unimpaired manifestation of the inner law . . . and 
 the production of the way and means thereto, is the education 
 of man."* 
 
 5. Freedom. For Rousseau, who struck a chord to which all 
 Europe responded, freedom was on the whole absence of fetters, 
 and the way to it the removal of them. Be the shackles of 
 whatever kind, whether political, ecclesiastical, or social, to the 
 mind and to the principles of Rousseau they were unendurable. 
 Social habits were detrimental, social institutions retrogressive, 
 social conventions baneful, social influences uneducational. The 
 American Declaration of Independence, the poetry of Robert 
 Burns, the utterances of the French revolutionaries, the storm 
 and stress movement in Germany, and in a way romanticism 
 itself, all were more or less dominated by conceptions of freedom 
 derived from these. Such conceptions to a degree suggest the 
 
 ^Menschen Ersiehung (Seidel, 1883). Einleitung. p. 4. 
 
Philosophy of Froebel. 29 
 
 iundamental fallacy that individuals and society are somehow 
 separable. To the romanticist the individual, if he were but 
 individual enough, was the all in all ; and the genius a law unto 
 himself. Yet there were in romanticism saving elements of 
 sociality. Especially, romanticism emphasised that common and 
 <lemocratic aspect of life, feeling; and it cherished an esthetic 
 appreciation that is often not far from sympathy. These motives, 
 strengthened as they were in his case by a Fichtean sense of 
 duty and by Christianity, may have sufficed to carry Froebel 
 over from Rousseau's position to a more positive ground. For 
 Froebel, freedom is the willing fulfilment of imperative ends 
 that are at once divine and human.^ 
 
 It has to be admitted, not indeed that wrongdoing is or can 
 be freedom, but that freedom involves the possibility of wrong- 
 doing. Children may be so shielded, every burden of responsi- 
 bility so assumed for them by parents, that never having truly 
 willed they lose the normal capacity for willing. They submit 
 themselves to an external authority without the opportunity of 
 identifying themselves with it, or making it their own ; and here 
 is illustrated Rousseau's contribution to a true notion of freedom, 
 that it is too much to expect a rational being to manifest slavish 
 obedience to laws regarded as externally imposed. Fichte even 
 -adds that the law should say to the student : " So far as I am 
 concerned, thou mayest leave the path of right and follow after 
 «vil, no other harm shall overtake thee but to be despised and 
 scorned, despised even by thyself when thou turnest thine eye 
 inward. If thou wilt venture on this peril,, venture on it with- 
 out fear.'"' 
 
 Even when the doctrine of implicit obedience, which has been 
 a pretext for the ready and easy way of corporal punishment, has 
 been rejected, the educator is still in a dilemma, to escape which 
 he must make up his mind upon the question of the freedom of 
 the will. If the will be in some sort free, then one should 
 develop it with Froebel; but if not, then one may try to build it 
 up, with Herbart, by deliberate presentations. 
 
 On the one hand every man has a consciousness of freedom. 
 He determines to do a thing, and he does it. Evidence of this 
 kind is as abundant, and perhaps as valid, as the contrary evi- 
 
 ^Cf. e. g. Mtttter und Kose-Lieder. Schlusslied. 
 
 ^Werke. Berlin, 1845. VI. p. 409. or Popular Works. London, 1873. p. 193. 
 
30 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 dence for the " inertia of matter."^ It would seem to be the 
 Case that man may drift along as flotsam and jetsam idly tossed 
 on the surface of a sea of being ; but that he is free to the extent 
 to which he uses his freedom. His potential freedom, as such, 
 is a vain thing; made kinetic, it is the dearest treasure of his 
 inheritance. 
 
 Freedom was for Kant and Fichte transcendental, capable of 
 giving a veto to the whole world of sense and the desires origi- 
 nating out of it. To this view Herbart found himself unable to 
 subscribe.'' Given certain circumstances, it seemed to him that 
 a man must act in a particular way. Between these views the 
 truth may lie. Perhaps given certain circumstances and a cer- 
 tain character a man will act in a particular way, but what of 
 the play of self-determination in the formation of the character 
 itself? The character also, says the determinist, is determined 
 by past combinations of circumstances. Still, in each act that 
 made the character there was from the beginning a reaction of 
 mind in its own way. To account for the origin of mental 
 reactions the determinist refers to heredity. Even this can only 
 mean that until the child becomes self-conscious he is determined, 
 as an animal is determined. To this argument the rejoinder is, 
 that even an animal has an inner principle of independence; and 
 that, with self-consciousness, there is given the possibility of 
 emancipation in the power of setting up ideals. It is not per- 
 haps in the purely transcendental sense, the Kantian sense of 
 sheer independence, that man is free, so much as by progressive 
 achievement. According to this view, there is in man a capacity, 
 or the germ of a capacity, for transcending the fierce compul- 
 sions of external nature. If not free, man is in process of 
 becoming free, and as such by no means a slave. 
 
 One of the arguments for free will is that morality presup- 
 poses the possibility of achieving it. In Kant's phrase, thou 
 canst because thou oughtest. What ought is not consequent on 
 what is, but what is upon what ought. Morality thus bears its 
 own warrant ; it is autonomous. " Whatever number of motives 
 nature may present to my will, whatever sensuous impulses — the 
 moral ought it is beyond their power to produce."^ Moral con- 
 
 *Cf. Gibson, The Problem of Freedom. In Personal Idealism. London, 1902. pp. 139— 
 193. 
 
 ^Pddagogische Schriften. krsg. Sallwurlc. 1891. 11. p. 203. 
 ^Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Berlin, 1889). pp. 446-447. 
 
Philosophy of Froehel. 31 
 
 trol is therefore self-control. Freedom, the ideal freedom after 
 which man struggles, is self-limited only ; though in dealing with 
 his fellows, as Fichte suggests, the voice of conscience utters the 
 command : " Here set a limit to thy freedom ; here recognise 
 and reverence purposes which are not thine own." 
 
 It was Hegel who got furthest away from the notion of free- 
 dom which was implied in Rousseau's doctrine of the relatioa 
 of the individual to society. For Rousseau, freedom appears 
 to have consisted fundamentally in the absence of institutional 
 control. But Hegel conceived the principle of freedom by insti- 
 tutions. For Hegel, man rises not so much in spite of his limi- 
 tations as by them. Those limits of which at times he complains, 
 his body and the world of sense, are the means of actualising his 
 capacity for freedom. The world of nature which constrains 
 him becomes by degrees his servant. Krause had claimed that 
 finitude is no evil, limitation not an imperfection; and that it is 
 just in order that men may participate with individuality in the 
 being and all-perfectness of God, that they come to exist in 
 determinate form, bound, and limitation.^ In the same spirit, 
 though in the field of poetry, Browning would have the bodies 
 of men to be none other than they are, organs for the fulfilment 
 of natural destinies, perverted by no " mad wings." And if the 
 body be the vehicle rather than the fetter of the mind, in just 
 the same way, from this point of view, are institutions not the 
 limits of freedom so much as the means of realising it. Institu- 
 tions transmit to individuals a certain social control over experi- 
 ence. Indeed, we realise ourselves not in so far as we are not 
 interfered with by family, school, church or state, but in so far 
 as we endeavor to utilise these and other institutions for the 
 moral reconquest of nature. Froebel was fully of opinion that 
 man becomes free by the elevation of physical necessity into 
 moral law," and he is so far, as it were, Hegelian and institutional, 
 rather than a mere advocate of spontaneities. 
 
 In the few cases, indeed, where Froebel appears to be no more 
 than a disciple of Rousseau, and to think of spontaneities as 
 freedom,' all that he means may be that law is not something 
 alien or external to man. Froebel believed in law as an inner 
 thing, an element in man that is primary and divine, a repro- 
 
 ^Das Urbild der Menschheit (Dresden, iSii). p. 6. 
 
 ^Cf. SchlussUed, and Hanschmann, Friedrich Froebel, pp. 165-8. 
 
 'jE. g. Menschen Etziehung. p. 46, p. 56, and p. 152. 
 
32 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 duction in some way, or an emanation, of the absolute spirit, and 
 therefore such as finds its other self in nature, and recognises 
 truth and satisfaction there. And if law does exist, though it 
 be inner, the will is not as it would seem out of the reach of 
 education, just as though it obeyed no law at all. According 
 to this conception, though the will be viewed, as many prefer to 
 view it, as a divine endowment, it may remain subject to develop- 
 ment by use, or atrophy by neglect. It may even be advanced 
 that, holding such a view, Froebel may be said to have met, not 
 wholly without success, the challenge of Herbart : " We may 
 hope that the first transcendental philosopher who is interested 
 in education may be able to show for it an appropriate basis."^ 
 For it had not unnaturally seemed to Herbart, that if the will 
 were purely transcendental, having its kingdom where time and 
 space are not, utterly superior to circumstance, it could not be 
 amenable to education. This objection only ceases to apply, if 
 the will be becoming transcendental, if its very transcendentalism 
 be less a gift than a discipline, so that its doors lie ever open to 
 the influence of the occasion. 
 
 Of the consequences of the principle of freedom for education, 
 one of the first is respect for individuality. " We have nothing 
 else to do but to let live the individual nature of the child, and 
 to carefully remove whatever might involve its destruction."* 
 Perhaps a prerequisite for this attitude is faith in the possibilities 
 of man as man, possibilities human, social, and as Froebel would 
 add, divine. 
 
 A somewhat democratic tone in the school seems to be another 
 implication of the doctrine of freedom. Froebel's ideas and those 
 of democracy have as it were a common basis, in that they rest 
 upon the conception, which is the debt of both to Rousseau, of 
 the worth of man as such, or if you will of the sacredness of 
 individuality. And if their ethical basis be thus identical, so also 
 is the logic of their method, which may be said to depend upon 
 the principle that the development of a power can only be 
 secured by using it. The child has to exercise determinations, 
 though he make mistakes in so doing; and the voter needs the 
 opportunity to vote, and claims it, imperfect though his judg- 
 
 ^Pddagogische Schriften (Sallwurk, 1891). II. p. 203. 
 ^Menschen Eriithung (Seidel). p. 152. 
 
Philosophy of Froebel. 33 
 
 ment may be, that he may learn in its exercise to use it to the 
 best advantage. 
 
 A third implication of freedom is perhaps, in the light of the 
 previous discussion, pragmatically truest of all for education. 
 It is exercise in the voluntary discharge of obligations. For 
 there is little manner of doubt as to the kind of individual to be 
 developed. He is to be the socialised individual, the function- 
 ing individual, the individual whose point of view is not that of 
 a self located in the body alone, but of a corporate situation ; and 
 especially he is to be all this not by virtue of an external com- 
 pulsion, but by free choice and a good will nourished by the 
 assimilation of many opportunities. And so the boy is to be 
 trained to take up his future calling, not in gloom and compul- 
 sion, but rejoicing in its prosperity, and securing in the circle 
 of his activity, contentment.^ 
 
 Fourthly, freedom in the school lends itself to national influ- 
 ences. In Prussia, kindergartens were suppressed by a reac- 
 tionary government in 185 1 on the ground that they expressed 
 revolutionary tendencies. And, although it is true that an ele- 
 ment of misunderstanding had entered into the edict, to a certain 
 extent kindergartners may be justified in looking back at the 
 occurrence with pride. From their standpoint of contemporary 
 security, they may be entitled to regard it as an admission of a 
 genuine democratic principle in the kindergarten. The govern- 
 ment of Prussia objected to enthusiasm, objected to freedom of 
 development, and preferred methods of authoritative tutelage 
 to principles of self-activity. What has the spirit of autocracy 
 in common with the burning words of one of Froebel's mani- 
 festoes? "Now, therefore, we hereby invite all German wives 
 and maidens to unite with right German enthusiasm in founding 
 and developing a General Institution for the complete culture of 
 child life up to school age. We claim their help, in a genuine Ger- 
 man spirit, in one common effort to found and develop the German 
 Kindergarten."^ Indeed, any appeal to the democratic element 
 of social feeling is apt to have a national and political bearing. 
 
 Fifthly, freedom in education seems to mean that instincts 
 and impulses are to be utilised, not eliminated. For these are 
 the obvious contributions of the self to the educative process. 
 
 Wenschen Entehung (Seidel). pp. 163-4. , 
 
 'Friedrich Froebels Ktndergarten-Brwfe (Wien und Leipzig 1887). pp. 132-3. Trans- 
 lated N. Y. 1896. 
 
 3 
 
34 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 If they be not respected, or in some way maintained, it is diffi- 
 cult to see how there should be talk of freedom. Yet it is one 
 thing to respect instincts and impulses, and another to admire 
 them as they blindly perform an unassisted work. But, if free- 
 dom may be defined in terms of the realisation of an inner prin- 
 ciple, so that it nowise contradicts law, but harmonises with it 
 in the principle of development ; then instincts and impulses may 
 be thought of not as the opposites to ends, ideals or values, so 
 much as the possibilities and cravings for these very realisations 
 and satisfactions.^ The educational situation ought then to be, 
 not impulses versus the curriculum, but impulses for it. And, if 
 freedom be definable as self-control, or even the control of the 
 experiential process in which the self is a terminal factor, it 
 will be even possible to speak of educating impulses to freedom. 
 
 Sixthly, so far as this point may be differentiated from the 
 last, the notion of a psychological method seems bound up with 
 the principle of freedom. Psychology is developing a genetic 
 tendency to look trustfully to original instincts and impulses, 
 and to let them have free sway. If one may be permitted to set 
 up a temporary methodological distinction between the curric- 
 ulum and method of the school, as it were between social 
 demand and individual channels of supply, then the method of 
 the school tends to recognise freedom by catering to individual 
 impulses and modes of agency. 
 
 Again, since freedom has nothing in common with force or 
 fear, it means finally that in the schoolroom love is to preside. 
 It is a message of Froebel to teachers that the great formative 
 influence is love. Love never violates the sanctities of freedom, 
 has no machine methods, scorns the mere equipoise of intellect 
 without emotion, discloses personality, and imparts that vital 
 touch of the divine which is all that is needed to sound the 
 strings of the harp of character. This is why Froebel's mes- 
 sage is principally to women, in whose hands the destiny of 
 nations is said tO- lie. " The minors must come of age in our 
 time, and they are above all the women and children, whose 
 human worth has hitherto not been recognised in full measure."^ 
 The love of Froebel for humanity as such was founded upon 
 his religious views, and his faith in the Absolute Spirit. 
 
 ■Cf. Menschen Erciehun^ (Seidel). p. 4, p. 152, etc. 
 
 'Erinnerunetn an Friedrtch Froebel. BiUow. Kassel, 1876. p. 4. Said to be Froebel'i 
 words. 
 
Philosophy of Froebel. 35 
 
 III. 
 
 German Idealism led up to an Absolute which was somewhat 
 differently conceived by the founders of various philosophical 
 systems, although the differences may have been more in emphasis 
 than perhaps in essence. All the founders of systems were 
 agreed that the Absolute was spiritual, that is to say on the 
 highest level of being; that it was self-conditioning, and con- 
 tained in itself the principle of its own explanation ; and that it 
 was constitutive of life and nature, and manifested in them. 
 For Schelling the Absolute was a ground of Identity^ of mind 
 and things, an almost esthetic unity. For Fichte it was rather 
 an universal Moral Grder,^ for Hegel unifying Will or person- 
 ality,' and for Froebel the Christian God, regarded as there is 
 reason to believe theistically, rather than pantheistically as was 
 alleged against him in his lifetime.* 
 
 I. God, as absolute ground of all things. For Froebel, God, 
 up to whom Idealism may be said to lead by no uncertain path," 
 is the absolute ground of all things.* Idealistic philosophy used 
 the phrase, the Absolute, to express the unconditionally real 
 spirit. The Absolute is often identified with God, although there 
 are those who would with some show of reason include in the 
 Absolute all spiritual individualities ; while others prefer to regard 
 the absolute spirit not as perfected, so much as working itself 
 out in the processes of the natural world. Possibly, in as much 
 as the term Absolute seems so liable to a diversity of interpreta- 
 tions, it may be preferable, at least in relation to an educational 
 issue, to substitute for it the name of God. 
 
 From Kant to Hegel there is a development in the apprecia- 
 tion of things divine. Kant's conception of God was largely 
 deistic or dualistic. In other words, it would seem that for his 
 metaphysic, in which right and good were autonomous,' God 
 was somewhat externally postulated. But for Fichte, God may 
 perhaps have stood in a closer relation to humanity, at least if 
 any reliance is to be placed on the terms Moral Order, consti- 
 
 'Cf. «. g. Werke. Stuttgart und Augsburg. 1859. IV. p. 103. 
 'Cf. e. g. Werke. Berlin, 1845. II. p. 299. 
 'Cf. Caird's Hegel, pp. 127-8 
 
 *Erinnerungen an Friedrich Froebel. Bulow. Kassel, 1876. p. 4. 
 'Cf. Wallace, Kant. Edinborough and London, j886. pp. 120, 189. 
 'Cf. Menschen Erziehung. Opening paragraphs. 
 
 ^Cf. MacVannel, Educational Theories of Herhart and Froebel. 1905. p. 85. In Teachers 
 College Contributions to Education. 
 
36 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 tutive and combining Energy, the only true Self,"^ the Will that 
 " binds me in union with himself," that " also binds me in union 
 with all finite beings like myself, and to the common mediator 
 between us all."- The Romanticists thought of God often as 
 the great artist, indwelling or immanent in his work. Possibly 
 even this view may have a certain suggestiveness when set over 
 against a dualistic deism that opposes God to nature. If so, 
 ScheUing's pantheism may be more than a system of perversions. 
 Certainly, at every point it influences Froebel, above all in the 
 notion of the unity of nature, and of God as the bond of unity.* 
 And yet, in Froebel there seem to be suggestions of the divine 
 transcendence as well as immanence; as though in his heart he 
 were seeking a thdstic s>Tithesis, or a transcendental-immanental 
 reconciliation of his pantheistic leaningfs with the Hegelian notion 
 that the Absolute is not substance but subject. For H^d, God 
 was not so much an immanent Feeling, as for Schelling; but 
 much more Will, a ^Man of war, a Spirit that is not only unity, 
 but unit}" holding in itself all differences, and for ever active 
 in their interpretation.* 
 
 2ilany have thought that Froebel failed to sufl&ciently discrim- 
 inate his philosophy, reUgion, and education. Perhaps what at 
 first sight seems to be confusion may reward the careful student 
 by manifesting itself as an efficient harmony. Doubtless Froe- 
 bel's bias was mystic, probably his syntheses were at times based 
 on inadequate analyses; but of what constructive mind can this 
 not be said, and is the word confusion applicable? At any rate 
 it seems doubtful whether a few critical defects should be 
 allowed to obscure the vigour and efficiency that are the fruits 
 of a unitar}- organisation of the attitudes of the soul. In other 
 words, Froebel may have been a better educator because he 
 knew how to harmonise his jMosophy and his religion. And 
 therefore, if the comparison may be made without odium, to 
 whatever extent Froebel may have been weaker than Herbart 
 on the side of the critical reason, it was much that he should 
 have been the stronger in faith, feeling and intuition. Critically, 
 philosophy and religion may lie far asunder; vitally they can- 
 
 •Cf.TRovce. Sftrit of iloJem PhUosopky. Boston. 189J. p- i6». 
 'Sammtliikt RCT-fe*. Berlin. i54S. 11 p. 399. 
 
 •"This Unity 13 God." See opening paragmihs of the EdwcaliOH of itax. 
 •Compare the conclusion of Hegers Logic. Harris. C3iicagD, 1890. 
 
Philosophy of Froebel. 37 
 
 not. Philosophy, says H^d, only unfolds itself while it unfolds 
 religion; and whfle unfolding itself it unfolds religion. 
 
 Froebel's system of education was all bound up with religion. 
 True, he had little concern with the problem of teaching children 
 of diverse religious denominations, although few educators, per- 
 haps, have passed through more bitter experiences of sectarian 
 rancour. Yet this modem problem, delicate as it is, seems to 
 have only an indirect bearing upon Froebel's thesis that religion 
 should pervade the school curriculimi; nay, that it should begin 
 at the mother's knee. Meaning by religion anything but dogma, 
 Froebel entertained no fear that it might unduly perplex even 
 the yoimgest child. On the contrary, he maintained, it is 
 because we do not instruct on inner things that they might under- 
 stand, but only on outer things that they do not understand, that 
 the life and soul of older boys tend to be as empty as they are.^ 
 " Inner "' things seem to mean things after which the soul him- 
 gers, among them the love and the will of God. Rousseau would 
 have kept Emile for many years ignorant of God's name. But 
 for Froebel it was the task of instruction, in his own words, '" to 
 bring into the consciousness of the scholar the unity of all things 
 and the repose, being and life of all things in God, so that in 
 time he may be able to act according to this consciousness.'- 
 
 2. Pantheism. Possibly for the purposes of the present analy- 
 sis almost enough has already been said about the pantheistic 
 leanings of Froebel.* He did not consider himself to be a pan- 
 theist* It may none the less be true that in these matters the 
 individual is not his own best critic, and that Froebel's categorical 
 repudiation of the tenet a^-ails little in a dispassionate analysis 
 of his creed. And yet perhaps it may serve, in conjtmction with 
 the tenor of his teaching, to indicate that if his faith may have 
 been pantheistic, it was not with the attenuated pantheism that 
 societ}' hcJds in reproach. Froebel may have been pantheistic 
 to the extent of an ample breadth of realisation of the divine 
 immanence in nature, without sacrificing much of the intensitv" 
 of the Christian notion of a personal God. He may have seen 
 no more reason against a combined immanence and transcendence 
 in the deity than in the nature of the human consciousness. If 
 
 ^Menscken Eniektmg (Sddel 1883). pp. 169-jo. 
 
 *Ibid. p. 80. 
 
 'See preceding section. 
 
 *Erinnentngefi an Friedrich Froebel. Bulow. Kassd. 1S76. pp. 2S-9. 
 
38 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 this were so, perhaps he may have had the right to emphasise 
 immanence or transcendence at will. If it be possible to arrive 
 at a narrower definition, it is not improbably this; that when 
 Froebel thinks of humanity, God appeals to him rather as trans- 
 cendent but sympathetic spirit; and when he thinks of nature, 
 then God appeals to him chiefly as immanent spirit. It is in 
 somewhat different terms that Froebel himself is reported to have 
 repudiated the doctrine of pantheism. Pantheism, said he, 
 practically views the world as God's body. Personally he dis- 
 claimed such an opinion. God is not in the world, he maintained, 
 but the world is in God.^ In a word, Froebel's position was 
 that which Krause used to call panentheism. That the world is 
 somehow in God does not seem gravely unorthodox; it may be 
 a sort of reconciliation between pantheism and transcendentalism ; 
 and if it be an essentially pantheistic position, it is also more than 
 pantheistic. 
 
 So fundamental is the notion of the divine immanence to 
 Froebel's thought, and so vital to his educational theory, that 
 it would have to be treated at much greater length had not this 
 been already done in the section upon Froebel's theory of 
 nature. But, as the case stands, it may suffice to recall by mere 
 phrases certain educational implications to which attention has 
 already been given. Perhaps these are especially (a) the culti- 
 vation of a human sympathy with nature, (b) the recognition 
 of the unity of her processes in all her kingdoms, (c) the sub- 
 jection of nature to spiritual laws, and all that this involves 
 for conduct and method, and (d) the partial justification of an 
 emphasis upon universal laws, even in the kindergarten. Per- 
 haps only the last of these points demands a more specific 
 explanation. A divine immanence means at least that all things 
 are related; that the Absolute, the whole, is somehow involved 
 in every part; and that consequently there may be a certain 
 philosophic basis for symbolism in education. 
 
 3. Teleology. Froebel's theory of the divine element in edu- 
 cation, broadly viewed, presents another aspect for discussion, 
 that of teleology. Teleology, perhaps, may fairly be identified 
 with ethical idealism, and again with the Aristotelian concep- 
 tion of final cause.- In a way it is the supreme factor in ideal- 
 
 'Erinnerungen, etc., v. 28 as above. , . _ , 
 
 'Aristotle, Physics. Books I and II. MetaphysKS. I. 111. i. 
 
Philosophy of Froebel. 39 
 
 ism, because of the bond which it establishes between the ideal 
 and the real, between realised and struggling spirit, between 
 the divine and human, between Plato's pattern laid up in heaven 
 and the Aristotelian process of becoming on earth. Teleology 
 ventures to affirm that it is only the end which can explain the 
 process that moves toward it ; and that true cause is not so much 
 the sum of pre-existing necessary and sufficient conditions as 
 the purpose or end which calls forth the whole process. Accord- 
 ing to Idealism one may even expect a necessary connection 
 between the notions of efficient or scientific, and final or tele- 
 ological, cause. For the efficient cause of any change, which is 
 the sum of all the relevant pre-existing conditions, seems ulti- 
 mately to become indistinguishable from the constitution of the 
 universe at large. How many thousand factors in the universe 
 enter into the constitution of man? But if then the universe 
 be structurally the efficient cause, so also must it not be the 
 effect? It would seem to follow, as the doctrine of the con- 
 servation of energy more clearly indicates, that true change is 
 less in matter than in meaning. But the notion that change, 
 or if one may put upon the word change an optimistic interpre- 
 tation, progress, is a growth in fulness of meaning, would appear 
 to imply that explanations should come rather from ends than 
 origins, simply because the ends or realisations manifest the 
 major significance. And this again is teleology. The stuff, as 
 possibility, remains; but progress is through new forms, ideas, 
 meanings and relations.^ Teleology perhaps implies the postu- 
 late of healthy optimism, that the best is the true. It will decline 
 to interpret man by the brute that he may have sprung from, 
 preferring to interpret the brute by a supplementary reflux of 
 light from man. It will affirm that Rousseau was mistaken in 
 his appeal to nature in the sense of origin, because man is more 
 true, more real, more valid than nature, in the sense that he is 
 relatively her most significant realisation. As against all appeals 
 to primitivism, teleology involves an unequivocal faith in pro- 
 gress and a dynamic theory of life." God, said Froebel, has not 
 
 'Cf. Bosanquet's characterisation of cause as "change in the permanent," in the 
 concluding chapter of his "Essentials of Logic." 
 'Expressed by Schiller in his ;3oem, Hoffntmg: 
 
 'Es ist kein leerer, schmeichelnder Wahn, 
 Erzeugt im Gehime des Thoren, 
 Im Herzen ktindet es laut sich an: 
 Zu was Besserm sind wir geboren; 
 Und was die innere Stimme spricht, 
 Das ta.uscht die hofEende Seele nicht." 
 
40 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 placed man on the narrow path of imitation, but on the broad 
 road of development.^ It may fairly be admitted that Froebel's 
 theory of development is teleological throughout, both because, 
 on the one hand, he is confident that the free unfolding of the 
 activities of the self will tend to the realisation of ideal or divine 
 purposes ; and also for this further reason, that he finds in these 
 purposes a standard for the interpretation of the education pro- 
 cess. Education aims at bringing the soul into conscious har- 
 mony with the development in which it functions and lives. The 
 well-educated man, it might be submitted, is literally the man 
 who has entered as a conscious determining agent, or as a free 
 co-operative partner, into this development; who has in a sense 
 taken over his own evolution, and achieved personal freedom 
 along with the recognition of personal responsibilities. Morality, 
 as the endeavour to transform the is into the ought, may possibly 
 be described as the practice of teleology. Theoretically accord- 
 ing to teleology, practically according to morality, the end to 
 which all things are relative is a spiritual, divine nature, con- 
 sciously achieved and realised.^ According to the doctrine of 
 teleology, men as self-conscious beings are no longer merely 
 impelled from behind, but also attracted from before; and even 
 though their ideals may be in a sense the products of a past, 
 this is made possible because their past itself stood in an organic 
 relation to spirit, and is only explicable in the light of a present 
 and future. 
 
 Teleology is almost in itself a philosophy of education. It 
 connects, as education must, two terminal aspects of a unitary 
 process. It indicates a vital relation between possibilities and 
 realisations, between powers and values, between instincts and 
 thoughts, between impulses and freedom. It shows dimly, per- 
 haps, but still it shows, what the child is to man, what man to 
 the child. As an aspect of evolution, it seems to reconcile the 
 Pestalozzian standard of the development of given powers with 
 more obviously social and vicarious ends. But teleology is not 
 only the condition of the possibility of education ; it is also a 
 ground of the activity of the teacher in the educative process. 
 One may none the less freely grant a sense in which education 
 is passive, following, because the natural impulses of the child, 
 
 ^Menschtn Eniehung, krsg. Seidd. 1883. p. n. 
 'Menschen Eniehung, hrsg. Seidel. 1883. p. 23. 
 
Philosophy of Froebel. 41 
 
 possibly by their pre-natal education in the race and in the 
 species, clamor on the whole for social satisfactions, and are 
 only wayward in their marginal vagaries. And yet the principal 
 message of teleology to education is to be positive. If conscious- 
 ness have any pragmatic validity, any use, if it be more than a 
 mere " epiphenomenon ; " then the teacher, representing the social 
 consciousness, will have to interfere and keep on interfering rela- 
 tively to a consciously conceived end. To the realisation of 
 this end everything else, even development, is subordinate. Thus 
 a teleological theory of education, to be rational, may be said to 
 subordinate and subject development itself to the idea of devel- 
 opment. This is precisely what Froebel would do in his attempt 
 to make family education consciotts; and to raise it from the 
 level of an instinctive process to that of scientific method. 
 
 Indeed, the moment reflection comes into play, to make devel- 
 opment itself the end is meaningless. For the question is at once 
 asked, what is this development that is made the end, and the 
 answer is necessarily in terms of an idea of it. Man cannot 
 well escape from the use of his reason; he must think, and in 
 thinking set up a standard of what he conceives the true nature 
 of development to be. This is as true for a metaphysical realist 
 like Herbart as for a metaphysical idealist like Froebel. Ethic- 
 ally, Herbart is perhaps as good an idealist as Froebel, in aiming 
 as he does at a many sided interest and a good will. But there 
 are those who find a greater discrepancy between the metaphys- 
 ical and ethical positions of Herbart than those of Froebel. For 
 Froebel the origin is God, and the end God ; so that for him the 
 whole process of life has a spiritual, and one may almost say a 
 religious, character. For Herbart the origin is independent 
 reality, and the end phenomenal morality — a difficult transition. 
 
 The final word in this preliminary interpretation of Froebel 
 is that his central tliought was guidance. Sometimes he seems 
 to say with Rousseau, follow nature; sometimes with Hegel, con- 
 trol nature. " Follow nature '' means witli Froebel not only to 
 foreswear force and to remove hindrances; it means also that 
 there is a positive social and " divine " tendency in instincts and 
 impulses themselves. " Control nature " means tliat this mere 
 tendency to the good is to be consciously cherished, guided, and 
 improved. To follow nature is as it were to look at education 
 from the side of origin, or genetically. But Froebel saw values 
 
42 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 too, and set them above origins. " Without rational, conscious 
 guidance," he is reported to have said, " the activity of the child 
 degenerates into idle games (Spielerei) , instead of preparing for 
 the tasks of life unto which it is destined."^ 
 
 It would almost seem from the above analysis that, since 
 Froebel, we have not so much to add to his teaching, or even to 
 correct it, as to evolve from it a completed philosophy of educa- 
 tion. Yet there is perhaps in his teaching at times an ambiguity, 
 at times a hyper-symbolism, at times an imperfection. The way 
 to escape the dangers of these and the Uke faults, which are in 
 general rather tendencies than faults properly so called, is to 
 study another philosophy of education, the philosophy of Her- 
 bart. This will be found to be largely antithetic to Froebel's, 
 and yet in such a way that the two philosophies are to a large 
 extent the complements of one another. 
 
 Before turning to Herbart, one may perhaps pay a final tribute 
 to Froebel's contribution to a philosophy of education. His chief 
 ideas, of self-activity as the force operative in education, of 
 development as the process of education, of freedom as the path 
 of education, and duty or service as the standard of values for 
 education, these have all stood the test of time unchanged except 
 in their development to a richer concreteness. Accordingly it is 
 difficult for an idealist to read Froebel without feeling himself to 
 be fundamentally a Froebelian. Let his philosophy savour as it 
 will of eclecticism from Kant, Schelling, Fichte and Krause, let 
 his practical recommendations fall short as they must of the 
 counsel of perfection, still it is impossible not to perceive a 
 fundamental unity in his philosophy and a fundamental truth in 
 his practice. His voice is the voice of a prophet and a reformer. 
 His theory may be said to center about that maxim of idealism, 
 or rather if you will of teleology, the best is the true, as his prac- 
 tice lives in his own motto. Come let us live for our children. 
 
 ^Erinntrungen an Frtedrich Froehel. Bulow. Kassel, 1876. p. 45. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 The Philosophy of Herbart. 
 
 It may be said of Herbart that, unlike Froebel, he stepped out 
 of the line of development from Kant to Hegel in order to fashion 
 a link in another and a divergent chain. For it is possible to 
 distinguish two modes of the post-Kantian philosophical devel- 
 opment. The idealism of Kant was developed by Fichte, Schel- 
 ling, and Hegel ; and his realism by Herbart, Beneke, and Lotze. 
 It may be indicated how logical and perhaps inevitable this bifur- 
 cation was. To go back to the beginning, Kant had discovered 
 a new mode of approach to the fundamental problem of reality. 
 Instead of accepting the external or sensational as the basis of 
 the interpretation of mind, he preferred as it were to reverse the 
 problem; and, beginning with mind, to inquire how its a priori 
 activities may be possible. He found that sensation can do no 
 more than to furnish the raw material of thought, upon which in 
 all knowledge the mind has to impose a contribution of its own. 
 In this way, so far as the world of conceptions goes, Kant became 
 an idealist. At the same time, he regarded his analysis as valid 
 only for thought, and not for things as such. In this distinction 
 lay the germ of a dualism which idealists have ever since endeav- 
 oured to transcend and realists to make intelligible. There are 
 those who would not think it unfair to maintain that in spirit 
 Kant was an idealist, and only by reservation a realist. Others, 
 among whom must be reckoned Herbart, held that the Kantian 
 dualism between the real and the rational is fundamental and 
 metaphysically irreducible. Ultimate reality consists for this 
 school in a plurality of independent reals, unknowable, because 
 ■other than the phenomena registered or capable of being regis- 
 tered by consciousness. To this position Herbart stood faithful, 
 unable to subscribe to the idealistic construction which Fichte 
 based upon Kant's Critique of Judgment. " In one word," as 
 Herbart declares in the preface to his Allgemeine Metaphysik, 
 " the author is a Kantian ... if however of the year 1828, 
 and not of the times of the Categories and the Critique of Judg- 
 ment, as the diligent reader will soon observe."^ 
 
 ^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Kfinigsberg. 1828. Vorrede, pp. xxvi. — xxviii. 
 
44 Herbert and Froebel. 
 
 The realism of Herbart has nothing in common with mate- 
 rialism. The reals, the things-in-themselves, that for Herbart 
 underlie the phenomenal world, may even be psychically inter- 
 preted; Herbart leaves this indeterminate. Certainly Herbart 
 is ethically an idealist, if idealism, ethically interpreted, mean 
 the guidance of life by an idea. Further, even in the more onto- 
 logical sense, Herbart is perhaps not wholly debarred by his 
 realism from accepting spirit as a constitutive principle in the 
 universe. For to Herbart as to Kant, time and space are sub- 
 jectively determined rather than externally given. Again, Her- 
 bart's reals, whether psychic or no, can by no means be materially 
 conceived. Matter to Herbart is mere appearance ; and the reals 
 behind it are according to Herbart's whole argument something 
 heterogeneous to it, its unknown noumenal origin. The realist 
 is then so far from being the materialist that he does not even 
 hold matter to be real. In a sense only the idealist is a true 
 believer in its reality. To put the matter in another way, 
 the metaphysical question between idealism and realism may be 
 said to center about the word merely, as employed in the follow- 
 ing context. To the realist, the world as known is merely 
 appearance. To the idealist also it is appearance; but not 
 appearance merely, because to the idealist in a sense there is 
 nothing else, save appearance and its potentiality. For idealism 
 reality is nothing save as related to some consciousness ; and 
 again, if anything does appear to any consciousness, it must have 
 reality in some way and to some degree. For a realist a thing 
 is flatly real or not real, for an idealist it is real to the extent of 
 its relations, for a pragmatist it is real to the extent of its func- 
 tions. An idealist would say that the fact that the existence of 
 the world, for a thinking subject, can only be explained on the 
 basis of the rationality of nature, is not to be interpreted as 
 making the world unreal, but as making its reality conceivable. 
 The world that is mere appearance to Herbart is to Froebel real 
 appearance. 
 
 This characterisation of the realism of Herbart, in contrast 
 with the idealism of Froebel, is merely introductory. In the 
 present chapter, the attempt will be made to treat, firstly, the 
 philosophical relations of Herbart; secondly, the principles of 
 his metaphysic ; and thirdly, the foundations and the fundamental 
 implications of the Herbartian psycholog}-. 
 
Philosophy of Herbart. 45 
 
 I. 
 
 I. Herbart and Leibnitz. In the Allgemeine Metaphysik, 
 Herbart begins with the remark that if he were looking for a 
 stately entrance to the realm of metaphysical speculation, he could 
 find it nowhere more conveniently given than in the philosophy 
 of Leibnitz. For to Leibnitz the world was a thoroughly inter- 
 related whole, endlessly extended, without empty space, and in 
 every smallest part infinitely full of monads or individual real 
 existences. It may be held therefore to consist of an infinite 
 number of real parts, each monad among which is possessed of 
 an incessant activity, so that according to Leibnitz no substance 
 can be perfectly at rest, and no soul utterly dormant. A kind 
 of perception and striving goes on, even in unreasoning monads 
 or reals. For Leibnitz, again, each monad has a capacity for 
 reproducing the whole in detail. Each monad is in fact a mirror 
 of the world, conformably to its own status. And yet, with all 
 this fulness and greatness, the real world is not regarded as 
 exhausting the law of possibilities. God chose it, thought Leib- 
 nitz, as the best of all possible worlds. By a single undivided 
 and indivisible fiat, He raised it into reality out of the realm of 
 potentialities. This metaphysic has the merits of completeness 
 and suggestiveness ; and, as Herbart remarks with a touch of 
 mild satire, there remained for the school of Leibnitz only one 
 arduous task, such a doctrine — to prove. 
 
 Herbart considered that the school of Leibnitz had by no means 
 succeeded in establishing the principles of the Monadology. 
 Even Kant's reform did not satisfy him, much less the culmina- 
 tion of that reform in the idealism of Reinhold, Fichte and Schel- 
 ling. All this was to Herbart as it were a period of storm and 
 exhaustion, duly to be followed by renewed efforts at rehabilita- 
 tion. One such effort he himself inaugurated. He believed 
 that in the rehabilitation, or reconstruction, of philosophy, monads 
 might well reappear, but hardly following the method or views 
 of Leibnitz. Rather must the monads be reinterpreted in the 
 light of the " spiritualism "^ of the newer^ psychology and the 
 atomism of the newer^ chemistry. Herbart adds that contempo- 
 rary idealism has served its purpose as the embodiment of a 
 
 ^Der Spir-itualismus. 
 H. c. in 1828. 
 
46 Herbert and Froebel. 
 
 method of transition to clearer insight.^ Possibly this may be 
 granted, and yet there may be no unanimity as to what consti- 
 tutes the clearer insight; whether Herbart's solution, or that of 
 Hegel. 
 
 2. Ethical views. It was Herbart's contention that the older 
 metaphysic, for want of determinate bound and form, had sur- 
 rendered to the comparatively external influences of the empi- 
 rical detail of psychology, and the science of esthetics, " especially 
 its most important part, ethics."" Ethics, as belonging to the 
 world of appearance, had for Herbart no metaphysical validity, 
 except in the looser sense in which the esthetic judgment may be 
 called metaphysical. On the other hand with Fichte and Froebel, 
 and in a sense Kant, ethics is fundamental to metaphysics, in that 
 Fichte, Kant and Froebel explain and warrant that which is only 
 by that which ought to be. 
 
 Severing as he did the ethical from the metaphysical, Herbart 
 could not consider the freedom of the will a strictly metaphysical 
 problem, with the idealist. For Herbart, to attribute freedom 
 or servitude to the will is a purely esthetic judgment; and to 
 hold it to be more than this is to fall into the error of regarding 
 the esthetic judgment, which concerns only the will, as if it 
 indicated also the hidden ground of the will, with which it really 
 has nothing to do. Herbart illustrated this so-called confusion 
 from the controversy of Leibnitz and Clarke. Leibnitz said: 
 "A will without motive is like the chance of Epicurus, a contra- 
 dictory fiction, incompatible with the idea of will." Clarke 
 replied : " The principle of action is quite separate from the 
 motive." Herbart acutely pointed out that to deny motivation 
 is to abolish the standard of moral worth, because the morality 
 of an action could no longer be determined by the difference 
 between good and evil.^ Again, Clarke insisted that nothing 
 is worthy the name of action unless it may have proceeded from 
 a power that was also a power not to act. To this Leibnitz 
 responded that the mind that sets the weaker desire above the 
 stronger is acting against itself. If Herbart inclines to one side 
 or the other in this discussion, it is probably to the side of Leib- 
 nitz ; but it is his feeling that Leibnitz and Clarke alike have 
 failed to distinguish between the will itself, as esthetic judgment, 
 
 ^Attgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 25. 
 ^Alleemeine Metaphysik. Par. 30. 
 'Ibid. Par. 31. 
 
Philosophy of Herbart. 47 
 
 and its ultimate metaphysical ground. Herbart grants the will 
 as it were an esthetic freedom, of the nature of a harmony 
 between desire and satisfaction, but this freedom is for him noth- 
 ing transcendental, nothing metaphy|Sical, nothing real. The 
 relation of will to motive, which Leibnitz and Clarke disputed, 
 was not a real problem to Herbart. His ethical problem was 
 merely the relation of will to judgment. 
 
 To Froebel, on the contrary, morality and freedom were real 
 metaphysical problems centering about the question of motiva- 
 tion. It may seem hardly fair to set Froebel, with his mere 
 intuition, backed by a philosophical reading and training inferior 
 to Herbart's, although not to be despised, over against one of 
 the keenest and subtlest of metaphysicians in a discussion con- 
 cerning freedom. Indeed it is not fair unless Froebel be sym- 
 pathetically interpreted. This done, Froebel seems to say: yes, 
 the will is motivated, but because it makes the motive its own 
 through self-identification with one of its desires, one may say 
 that it is free just because it is motivated. It is ruled in a way 
 by desires, but the desires are also its own. It is impelled in a 
 way by circumstances, but these circumstances are so far from 
 external that in the process of being converted by the self from 
 apparent masters to real servants they become instrumental to 
 self-realisation. 
 
 3. The relation of Herbart to Kant. " The possible indicates 
 the idea, but the real indicates the object and its position."^ 
 This was the distinction by which, according to Herbart, Kant 
 succeeded in effecting a revolution in metaphysic. In denying 
 that the idea is the reality, Kant became the founder of modern 
 realism, just as he is the founder of modern idealism by virtue 
 of his demonstration that the idea is the real for us. Kant had 
 held that the idea is the same, whether of a hundred real dollars 
 or a hundred possible dollars, and yet the reality is different. An 
 idealist might deny that the idea is the same ; but from this dis- 
 tinction, such as it is, Herbart takes his departure. He believed 
 it to involve a true theory of reality. But how, he asks, did 
 Kant apply this theory ? What has Kant posited as being f This 
 is a question to which the Kantian metaphysic is dumb ; and it is 
 the question which Herbart devoted himself to answer. Herein 
 Herbart would supplement Kant, he would analyse the true 
 
 'Kant. KriHk der reinen Vermmft. Par. 627. 
 
48 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 nature of reality, of noumenal being, as opposed to mere appear- 
 ance, or that which is changeable and phenomenal. Thus 
 whereas idealism has no use for the Ding-an-sich, the imchange- 
 able and unknowable kernel of reality beneath or behind the 
 phenomenal world, it is to Herbart the principal feature of the 
 Kantian dialectic. Herbart only regrets that Kant has not 
 analysed or explained this " true " notion of being. 
 
 It is not to be thought that Herbart would set things on one 
 side, thought on the other ; and then try to get the things some- 
 how into an alien mind. He did not sever objects from thought; 
 he severed objects and thought alike from true being or reality. 
 He was glad to think that Kant had done away with the older 
 form of the metaphysical problem, so that the question was no 
 longer, how do objects become intelligible to us? After the 
 Kantian Critiques, says Herbart, it can no longer be held that 
 things are just there, and admit of comprehension " by the onto- 
 logical predicate."^ In future one may take ideas just in the 
 same way as things, according as one finds them, since both the 
 one and the other are for us, in us, and through us. After Kant, 
 in short, the notion necessarily developed, that thought and 
 things cannot except in an abstract way be separated; that they 
 are not given the one without and the other within the self, but 
 both in a unity, and this unity consciousness. This would have 
 been a solution grateful to Leibnitz, for whom the soul appeared 
 to bring forth all ideas from an inner activity subject only to the 
 regulation of a pre-established harmony. So Herbart say^, and 
 adds that the true difference between Kant and Leibnitz con- 
 sisted in this, that the Kantian theory continued to admit the 
 possibility of a sense-receptivity, without being impaled upon 
 either horn of the dilemma of dualism. But Kant's work had 
 been essentially critical, and had not essayed a theory of being. 
 " Kant's work was intended to form a Critique, but not a sys- 
 tem. He did not try to accomplish, what rightly 
 forms the central task of metaphysics, namely to elucidate what 
 is matter, and what spirit.''- That this is a fair characterisation 
 is shown not only by Kant's usage of the word critique, but 
 much more by the sjTithetic activity of both realists and idealists 
 after his day, to whom he had at least as it were propounded a 
 
 'Allgtmtine Melaphysik. Par. 33. 
 'AUgemnnt Metophysik. 1838. Par. 30. 
 
Philosophy of Herbart. 49 
 
 set of questions that could only be adequately answered after 
 decades, if ever. 
 
 Herbart agrees that the theory of Kant offers two ostensible 
 advantages, an explanation of matter and an account of the free- 
 dom of the will. Passing reference has already been made in 
 this chapter to Herbart's repudiation of transcendental freedom.^ 
 Nor is he more content vAih Kant's opinion that the substantiality 
 of matter is only a form of thought, which Herbart dismisses as 
 a fallacy characteristic of Kantian demi-idealism. Here it may 
 be clearer to quote Herbart's OAvn argument. " The whole 
 difficulty of the idea of matter lies in this, that it should be real 
 and in space.* As real, it must consist of monads; as in space, 
 it must needs be a continuum. But these two demands are abso- 
 lutely incompatible. Kant sacrificed the former; and he could 
 do this easily, because according to his opinion the substantiality 
 of matter is only a form of thought. The advantage of this 
 ^^ew seemed very great; for now nothing stands in the way, we 
 can throw ovusdves into the arms of geometrj' and mathematical 
 idiysics without reserve, without closer criticism. How should 
 anyone, who esteems mathematics aright, fail to be deeply 
 rejoiced? . . And yet the advantage was nothing but an 
 
 illusion; Kant's doctrine of nature is false from beginning to 
 end."' Herbart admits the monads and denies the continuimi, 
 which he none the less uses as a methodological postulate. 
 
 As to the post-Kantian philosophers, it seemed to Herbart 
 that they had only made confusion worse confounded. They 
 had in his opinion inextricably and disastrously commingled ideas 
 that to his mind were almost disparate, the ideas namely of the 
 possible, the real and the necessary. Kant had done well, 
 thought Herbart, to definitely sever the notions of being and 
 duty ■* but only to have them confused over again in the systems 
 of his idealistic followers. Herbart agreed that Kant had also 
 done well to suggest the iration of a harmony between the law 
 of dut}' and the activity' of the will. This very harmony is what 
 Herbart calls inner freedom." So far as this definition goes, an 
 idealist might agree to it, were it not that his characterisation 
 
 ^Section a. 
 
 ^Ikiss sie ein rjumiiches RttUts srin soil. 
 
 \A.Ugcmsi9is yietaphysik. Par. 39. 
 
 *S*in and SolUn, 
 
 KAUifmrm* Metaphysik. Konigsberg, 1828. Par. 30 (I. p. 116) 
 
50 Herbert and Froebel. 
 
 of the activity of the will would differ materially from that of 
 Herbart. 
 
 Kant however probably never intended his distinction between 
 Sein and Sollen to be ultimate. At any rate, having separated 
 them in the Critique of Pure Reason, he brought them once more 
 into a single teleological process in the more synthetic, more 
 idealistic. Critique of Judgment. With the latter Critique, to 
 Fichte the most inspiring of all Kant's works, Herbart had but 
 little sympathy. " It refers to an ideal world wherein reality 
 and duty coincide to such an extent that the first condition of all 
 esthetic judgments, namely the entire severance of two members 
 of a relation, and consequently the value of the harmony between 
 insight and will to which reference has already been made, must 
 vanish. But an ideal world, wherein moral values are reduced 
 to nothing, is not for us."^ To the latter sentence an idealist 
 might give in his adherence, but hardly either to the antithesis 
 or rather divorce of reality and duty, or the identification of 
 morality with an esthetic harmony. Meantime Herbart's argu- 
 ment may perhaps be stated in the following terms. Morality 
 consists in an " esthetic " harmony between knowledge and will ; 
 but if the is and the ought in any sense coincide, then knowledge 
 and will become identical and morality disappears. At the root 
 of this reasoning seems to lie Herbart's inclination for rigid 
 antitheses. For him the is and the ought are either one, or not 
 one ; and he will not see with the idealist a unity in difference, or 
 a good in error. Thus Herbart recognises in symbolism only a 
 burden on education ; nor has he much of Froebel's faith that 
 what is will naturally tend to become what ought to be. 
 
 4. The relation of Herbart to Spinoza and Leibnitz. Herbart 
 looked for inspiration not only to Kant, but beyond him to 
 Spinoza and Leibnitz, chiefly the latter. Spinoza had begun 
 with the Cartesian view of substance, as that which exists uncon- 
 ditioned by anything else. This substance is not only the cause 
 of all finite things, it also is them; and to it Spinoza gives the 
 name of God. It is defined as causa sui, because the essence of 
 it involves existence. This divine substance then is invested by 
 the human understanding with the two attributes of matter and 
 spirit, which are however merely contingent. But what of the 
 specific forms in which substance is particularised? These 
 
 ^AHeemeini Metaphysik. Kcnigsberg. i8a8. Par. 39. 
 
Philosophy of Herbert. 51 
 
 Spinoza calls modi. Man is a modus. Modi are to Spinoza no 
 more than temporary expressions of substance, even as waves 
 of the sea. They have no freedom, and only a borrowed reality. 
 Mere matter, as Herbart insists, is therefore no more real to 
 Spinoza than to Leibnitz or Kant. " Leibnitz arrived at monads ; 
 the merely extended was not to him the true. Spinoza explained 
 substance as indivisible, therefore to him also that which is 
 divisible is not the true. Both united thought to the true 
 (reality) ; Leibnitz set it in every individual monad, Spinoza 
 in the whole. Kant . . . explained matter as mere 
 appearance."^ 
 
 Whatever then the Herbartian metaphysic may seem to imply 
 for education, it turns away from materialism. For Herbart as 
 for Spinoza, Kant and Leibnitz, matter is not itself real. The 
 Kantian metaphysic appealed to Herbart even more than that of 
 Leibnitz or Spinoza ; for it was Herbart's belief that Kant alone 
 had the true idea of being or reality, which the older school had 
 constructed out of essence and existence. This theory of the 
 older school, because it explained reality as though reality itself 
 were constituted by something behind it, was inconsistent with 
 Herbart's view of reality as mere position, that is to say, as 
 something merely posited, although a form of the older theory 
 was not without its contemporary champion in Jacobi. The meta- 
 physic of Spinoza, which lends itself so readily to an idealistic 
 construction that it became an invaluable source of inspiration 
 to the post-Kantian idealists, admitted of varying degrees of 
 reality. The more pregnant the potentiality, the richer the 
 causa immanens, the greater would the fulness of reality be. 
 " Everywhere one can see the notion peeping through, that reality 
 primarily reveals itself in its manifestations, in its effects ; and 
 therefore if it did not so show itself, it would be nothing ! "^ 
 False as this Spinozistic theory may be to the principles of the 
 Herbartian metaphysic, for which reality has neither degree nor 
 quality, it may appear to the modern reader to anticipate in a 
 remarkable way one of the fundamental positions of contemporary 
 pragmatism. 
 
 Herbart had more sympathy with Leibnitz than with Spinoza. 
 Even what seemed to be errors in Leibnitz were attributed by 
 
 ^AUgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 57. 
 ^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par, 72. 
 
52 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 Herbart to the misfortune of the former in living before the 
 development of a new chemistry and physics. Had Leibnitz but 
 lived in post-Kantian times, he might have lost all desire to 
 develop the germ of idealism, der Keim des Idealismus, that lay 
 enveloped in his theory of a pre-established harmony. The ideal- 
 ism of Leibnitz was hidden from himself, or at least so thought 
 Herbart; and had Leibnitz lived in a later age, his own scientific 
 sympathies might have at the least alienated him from the 
 romanticist school. As against Spinoza, yet conformably to the 
 view of Herbart, Leibnitz ventured to be a pluralist. For him 
 reality did not cleave together in an indivisible substance; but 
 consisted of independent monads following their own destinies.^ 
 Powerfully influenced as he admitted himself to be in his pluralism 
 and realism by the atomic theory which was then supreme in chem- 
 istry, Herbart believed it to imply that the independence of the 
 monads might be less absolute than Leibnitz had in his own day 
 imagined. In that case the pre-established harmony might have 
 been dispensed with, and a better understanding might have been 
 reached on the subject of the relation of mind and body. Mind 
 and body according to Herbart interact, but have not the parallel- 
 ism suggested by the Leibnitzian pre-established harmony or the 
 Spinozistic doctrine that the order and connection of ideas is the 
 same as the order and connection of things.' 
 
 5. The relation of Herbart to Fichte and Schelling. To Fichte 
 and Schelling the unknowable residuum of reality, or the thing 
 in itself, which Kant had postulated in order to explain cognis- 
 able phenomena, and which Herbart had welcomed as perhaps 
 Kant's chief contribution to metaphysical theory, seemed little 
 more than an aberration from a truer idealism. They belonged 
 to a period of which it was said that metaphysic had died heir- 
 less, and the things-in-themselves had been put to auction.* 
 
 Fichte seems to have commanded Herbart's respect; but not 
 his adherence. Of Fichte's Wissenschaftlehre Herbart writes : 
 " It is a wild landscape, but the landscape is nature."* To intro- 
 duce a new problem into metaphysic, this is no small achievement, 
 and this in a way is what Fichte did. His new problem was that 
 of the self or Ego. Fichte held the self to be absolute. For 
 
 ^Allsemeine Metaphysik. Par. 70. 
 
 ^Ordo el connexio idearum idem est ac ordo el conntxio rerum. 
 
 'Da die Metaphysik vor Kurzem unbeerbt abging, Werden die Dinge-an-sich jeta sub hasta 
 verkauft. 
 
 *Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 96. 
 
Philosophy of Herbart. S3 
 
 him there was no place for things-in-themselves, because the 
 outer world was but a Nicht-Ich, a non-Ego, a self-set limitation. 
 To Herbart on the contrary the Ego is not the whole problem 
 of metaphysic. The Ego is given, is therefore possible; and 
 the object of enquiry is merely its condition. " My whole 
 impulse," wrote Fichte in the Wissenschaftlehre, " is derived 
 from absolute independence and self-sufficiency; before I have 
 recognised it as such I have not completely determined myself, 
 nor, in contradistinction to myself, things."^ Fichte's meta- 
 physical system mystically concludes in the complete annihila- 
 tion of the individual, and his blending or merging in the pure 
 absolute pattern of reason. Freedom may be said to be the 
 cardinal principle of Fichte ; for if phenomena themselves be 
 self-determined, it follows that determination by phenomena is 
 only a veiled self-determination that in no wise may limit the 
 transcendental self. Fichte spoke of the self as though no 
 problem existed outside of it. The modern idealist is content 
 to claim that no problem exists for the self which is unrelated 
 to it. 
 
 For Schelling, as a romanticist and almost a mystic, Herbart 
 seems to feel less regard than for Fichte. Ever since Kant, he 
 thought, philosophy had in a sense degenerated, but with Schel- 
 ling came the deluge. " The most perverted counted now for the 
 best, and Kant's authority served to fortify attempts that were 
 as immature as they were visionary."^ Yet, admitting the diffi- 
 culty of interpreting Schelling aright, admitting his trick of 
 leaving the common paths of reason for the by-ways of romanti- 
 cism, and even admitting the consequent barbarity of his scientific 
 deductions, it remains true that not only does Schelling write 
 as one inspired, but also that his doctrine of nature may be 
 regarded as a wholesome corrective to Fichte's subjectivism. 
 Those principles which Herbart called the Schellingian preju- 
 dices, that philosophy must be monistic, and that the principle 
 of knowledge must be the principle of reality, are not only vital 
 to Froebel's educational theory; but probably, if rightly inter- 
 preted, to idealism. Again, though to Herbart none of Schel- 
 ling's principles was less welcome than unity in plurality, there 
 are now few principles as assured, especially since the doctrine 
 
 ^Cj. Herbart, Alleemeine Metaphysik. Konigsberg, 1828, Par. 96 (I. p. 282). 
 ^Allgemeitie Metaphysik. Par. 39 (Vol. I. p. 122). 
 
54 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 of organic evolution, as ideal unity in a manifold of parts. " One 
 would think that with Schelling everything is possible. . 
 Unity in the manifold is with Schelling by no means impossible ; 
 since unity is postulated, and the manifold is given."^ This is 
 for Herbart a contradiction. The unity itself would have to be 
 manifold, and therefore no unity. It might however be replied 
 that the contradiction is verbal and logical only; that, further, 
 it is transcended even in thought in the category of organism. 
 Here the educator needs to choose between Herbart and Schel- 
 ling ; for the notion of the one in many, unintelligible to Herbart 
 but vital to Schelling and Froebel, is the principle of symbolic 
 education. The argument for symbolism, very briefly recapitu- 
 lated, is that the world is a system, such that the whole is implied 
 in each part, and in such a way that the implication is dis- 
 cernible at least for the man of genius. Possibly one may set 
 over against this theory, without destroying it, the guarded 
 empiricism of Herbart's attitude towards nature. " The true 
 nature-seeker," Herbart writes, " is accustomed to be anxious 
 for fear that his notions may not be able to attain to the heights 
 of nature. Schelling is anxious, for fear that nature may not 
 reach up to his own notions. And he has reason to be so! For 
 what particular attains to the whole? But, according to Schel- 
 ling, what particular can fail to be the whole? Where, where 
 is the unity of his bond, if nature will not obey, if it will not ful- 
 fil the expectations of the man of genius ? "^ 
 
 H. 
 
 Having now an idea of the philosophical relations of Herbart, 
 one may proceed to an analysis of his metaphysic. For the psy- 
 chology and the educational theory of Herbart are not ultimately 
 intelligible apart from his theory of reality and his theory of 
 knowledge. The theory of knowledge, or epistemology, will be 
 found to be connected not only with the theory of reality, or 
 ontology; but also, and that in an intimate way, with the Her- 
 bartian psychology and education. 
 
 I. The methodology of Herbart. The terminology of the 
 metaphysic of Herbart may require a brief word of explanation. 
 
 ^Atleemeint Metaphysik. Par. 104. 
 ^Jbid. Par. 107. 
 
Philosophy of Herbart. 55 
 
 The subject falls, he would say, into two classes, general meta- 
 physics, and applied metaphysics. The scope of applied meta- 
 physics includes cosmology, psychology, and natural theology. 
 Ontology, in the large sense, involves the treatment of method- 
 ology, ontology proper, synechology, and eidolology. Of these, 
 methodology is the treatment of principles and methods. Ontol- 
 ogy proper comprises the doctrines of being, becoming, substance, 
 and cause. Synechology is literally the doctrine of the contin- 
 uum, including space, time, motion, and the most general appli- 
 cation of these ideas to life and nature. Finally eidolology, or 
 the doctrine of phenomena as such, comprises attempts to dis- 
 cern how far ideas may be able to furnish us with a true cogni- 
 tion. Eidolology is the virtual equivalent of epistemology. 
 
 Herbart begins the Methodology with the remark that the dif- 
 ference between the scholar on the one hand, and the teacher or 
 independent thinker on the other hand, is that the former is con- 
 tent to see nature taken to pieces and put together again, like a 
 machine, before his eyes; but not so the latter. He, the inde- 
 pendent thinker, seeks to know how one may begin to find the 
 real. First of all, then, he asks what is given. Is the unity of 
 all things given? Yes, Froebel seems to say;^ but no, answers 
 Herbart. " Neither the whole, nor the one, is given."^ But 
 what then is given? Why, answers Herbart, that which is given 
 is experience. Things are brought before the mind by the psy- 
 chological mechanism natural to man. They appear as com- 
 plexes of attributes,' apparently extended in space, changeable, 
 doing and suffering things done. Metaphysic has to investigate 
 the validity of these common sense views. To this investigation 
 Herbart would attach almost a pragmatic significance. In other 
 words, metaphysic is to be not only reflection ; but reflection with 
 power, or comprehension. 
 
 Philosophical reflection has at all times, says Herbart, seen 
 the given, that is to say experience, as matter and form. What 
 then are the matter and form of experience, and to what extent 
 may they be subject to philosophical criticism? "The matter of 
 the given is feeling. This was never an object of doubt, and can 
 never become so."* But, adds Herbart, the form is an object of 
 
 •As in the opening paragraphs o£ the Education of Man. 
 ^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 165. 
 ^Complexiontn von Merkmalen. 
 *AUgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 169. 
 
56 tierbart and Froebel. 
 
 doubt, because it is not immediately given in the way that feeling 
 is immediately given. Kant therefore did well to criticise the 
 forms or categories of experience ; and this, Kant's procedure, is 
 also Herbart's. None the less would Herbart admit that ulti- 
 mately the categories of experience are given, only not immedi- 
 ately. It was his conviction that he who considers the series of 
 ideas, the laws of their reproduction, and the results of their 
 tendencies to complication and fusion, will come to think " that 
 those systems overlook a great deal, which, bowing to idealism, 
 would persuade him that the forms of experience must be deduced 
 from original forms of the possibility of knowledge."^ 
 
 Whether or no the forms or categories of the mind be an orig- 
 inal factor in experience, Herbart was as convinced as Kant that 
 they should be subjected to a critical investigation rather than 
 be accepted at their face value. Space appears to be a merely 
 relative limitation. Time is a measure of change. Causality 
 itself can hardly be explained as the mere succession of ante- 
 cedents and consequents. But if time, space and causation are 
 not what they seem, may not this be equally true of reality ; and 
 therefore, may not the current valuation of reality be subject to 
 a similar discount? 
 
 The idealists, as Herbart not unfairly suggests, must have 
 reality in the soul, in consciousness. Here only, in self-con- 
 sciousness, if anywhere at all, is certainty, reality and truth. 
 Cogito, ergo sum. Yet, to Herbart's way of thinking, it is an 
 error thus to posit one element of experience as the reality which 
 explains it all. Everything that is given in experience counts 
 originally for real, and its claim to reality is only suspended, not 
 denied, when we find that we cannot think of it in the form in 
 which it was first given. Accordingly all that is needful is that 
 the notion of reality should be separated from the quality which 
 is ascribed to it by the common-sense intuition. The question 
 is no longer what is reality, but what sort of reality, and this is 
 the problem of Herbart's Ontology.' In fairness to Herbart it 
 may be repeated that he would begin with experience, and end 
 with experience, and that his reals or monads are no more 
 designed to express the meaning of the world than a scaffold 
 the meaning of a building. 
 
 'Ibid. Par. 170. 
 
 'AUgemeint Metaphysik. KSnigbserg, i8»8. Par. loj. 
 
Philosophy of Herbart. 57 
 
 2. The ontology of Herbart. The Ontology opens with a 
 logical criticism of the term real.^ A ship sails by the shore. 
 From her deck the trees upon land seem to move, but their 
 movement is not real, while the movement of the ship is real. 
 Again, paper is different from flax. The diflference is real, and 
 yet the paper is really one and the same with the flax, the linen, 
 from which it is made. In these illustrations three realities are 
 typified, those namely of a movement, and of a condition, and of 
 a substarice. But again, one may differentiate between a thing 
 being real and being reality. If a man discover new properties 
 in a thing, is it correct to say that he has discovered more 
 reality? According to Herbart, it is hardly so. All that can 
 be said is that he has learned to know reality in a new way. The 
 reality is the thing itself, and not its properties ; which are called 
 indeed real, but not reality.'' Thus perhaps even the vulgar use 
 and wont of speech, pressed into the service of philosophic argu- 
 ment, might have exposed the " error " of Spinoza, that how 
 many attributes a thing has, so much has it of reality.^ Only in 
 appearance, thinks Herbart, do attributes measure reality. The 
 so-called " real " movement of a ship, the " real " difference of 
 paper and flax, and the " real " identity of both, for Herbart 
 belong alike in the last analysis to the world of mere phenomena. 
 
 Therefore for Herbart true reality has nothing in common 
 with these ostensibly real happenings. The reality that is the 
 ground and source of all phenomena must be sought outside of 
 the phenomena themselves. It must exclude change, which as 
 the specious concurrence of irreducible atoms cannot have meta- 
 physical reality. It is true that this conclusion was favoured and 
 probably suggested by an atomic theory of chemistry that is not 
 so well accredited at the present day. 
 
 But perhaps, if change be not real, there is nothing real. 
 " Therefore we will utter the dictum ; Nothing is ! There is no 
 reality,"* Yet not for long is this scepticism conceivable; it 
 barely flits across the path of the Herbartian dialectic and reap- 
 pears no more. " Let a man plunge into nothingness as he will, 
 the course of the world goes steadily on. Now a man may very 
 easily find the way from the world to nothing, but then he finds 
 
 H. e. wirklich. 
 
 'Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 19S. 
 ^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 197. 
 */6«o. Par. 190. 
 
58 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 the path of return closed to him. He cannot return again from 
 nothingness to the world! Of every thing, of every event it 
 may be said, you are nothing, and you do nothing. But things 
 go on appearing; and involve us in the question, whence then 
 can the appearance come? For it is clear that if nothing is, 
 then nothing must appear."^ 
 
 So there is something real, and yet it is not appearance. " We 
 have now the given, as the actual appearance, whether it be of 
 things, or conditions, or movements, as opposed to the red, 
 which lies at its foundation."* All that is so far ascertained 
 of this real is that it is positive. An effectual appearance can- 
 not be explained by a negative reality. " The quality of the real 
 is entirely positive or affirmative, without admixture of nega- 
 tion."^ Also the real must be einfach, simple. For suppose it to 
 be manifold, and to contain two determinations, A and B. Then 
 these cannot by our hypothesis be reducible to a unity, or else 
 this unity, and not A and B, would be the true quality of the 
 real. But then, A and B would each without the other be insuffi- 
 cient to constitute the real; they would be merely relative, and 
 reality would lose its absolute, positive character. Reality is 
 then positive and simple. Unto these conclusions Herbart would 
 add two others. " The quality of the real is absolutely inacces- 
 sible to all ideas of quantity," for a manifold real would con- 
 tradict simplicity. " How much, or how many, is, remains quite 
 undetermined by the idea of the real."* In other words, though 
 each real be necessarily simple, there may be many reals. The 
 distinction is between manifold in reality and manifold of reality, 
 of which the former only is forbidden, and the latter admissible. 
 
 Having now arrived at a more definite notion of reality, as 
 something made up of positive and simple reals, Herbart turns 
 to the venerable problem of inherence. For him the common 
 sense theory of reality as somewhat in which different attributes 
 inhere is quite contradictory. Indeed the phenomenon of inher- 
 ence is the indication of a plurality of reals. For suppose that 
 a thing, A, have several attributes, a, b, c, etc. Then, according 
 to the common sense view, A is their seat and substance, and is 
 a real. But if a real, A is simple, and so must be equal to a, b, c, 
 
 ^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 190. 
 
 ^Ibia, Par. aoo. 
 
 >lbid. Par. 206. 
 
 *Al!gemeint Mttaphysik. Par. ao8. 
 
Philosophy of Herbart. 59 
 
 etc., separately, rather than to a+h+c+etc, which would make A 
 a complex. We have now this contradictory result, that A, 
 which is absolute, is equal to a, to b, to c, etc., which are merely 
 inherent in it. This is surely a contradiction, unless it be that 
 a, b, c, etc., are as it were contingent aspects of A, just as the 
 square root of 64, or 2 raised to the third power, are contingent 
 aspects of 8. But this is evidently not the case. The only solu- 
 tion of the difificulty is to posit several As. It does not neces- 
 sarily follow that any one of these will be equal to a, or b, or c. 
 All that can be said is that the attributes a, b, c, etc., arise out 
 of the combination of several As ; or in other words, that sub- 
 stance is the index or witness of a plurality of reals.^ 
 
 And now the dilemma of inherence is circumvented. Sub- 
 stance is for Herbart " not a thing with many attributes, and it 
 alone does not lie at the root of these attributes, but a manifold 
 of reals must be postulated for every one of them."" For 
 the attribute a may be understood the combination of reals 
 A.'+A'+A'-\-etc., for the attribute b, K"+K"+A."+etc., and so 
 on, v/here the sign + is used to indicate mere connexion and 
 not addition. It remains to account for the unity of attributes 
 in one substance. This difficulty Herbart meets by the hypothesis 
 of the identity of the first real in each combination. " It is 
 understood of itself that the first term in all these series must 
 be the same; and that the series should radiate as it were from 
 the one center."' In conclusion, what now is the thing of com- 
 mon sense? For Herbart it is not a sum or a system of attri- 
 butes, as idealism tends to insist, but it has these attributes, only 
 that which has these attributes is not the indivisible substance 
 of a Spinozist metaphysic but the connection of a plurality of 
 reals. 
 
 It follows from Herbart's ontology that there is no real change. 
 Education is not real, character is not real, life itself is not real 
 if one has the will to believe Herbart. The horror of these 
 thoughts is mitigated by the recollection that for Herbart the 
 real is not the valuable. For him the real has no value; life, 
 education, character, the highest. 
 
 The common sense view of change is that a substance varies 
 its attributes. A, that was once a, b, c, etc., is now a, b, d, etc. 
 
 ^AUgemeine Meiaphysik. Par. 215. 
 
 nbid. Par. 218. 
 
 'Allgemeine Meiaphysik. Par. 218. 
 
6o Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 On reflection this proves unthinkable. According to Herbart, 
 the real situation is that a arises out of the connexion of reals 
 A'+K'+K'+etc., b from the connection A"+A"+A"+etc., c 
 from the connection A"'+A"'+A"'+ etc., and d from the con- 
 nexion A""+A""+A""+etc. Then the apparent change of A, 
 from a, b, c, etc., to a, b, d, etc., really means that A has no 
 longer its original connexion with the series A"'-^A!"-\-A"'+etc., 
 but has entered into a connexion with the series A""-l-A""+A""-l- 
 etc. Reality is the same as before. 
 
 But the question now arises, what is the nature of this mys- 
 terious connexion^ of the reals? In other words, now that being 
 has been explained, how is it possible to explain happening? It 
 was from happenings, from experiential phenomena, that Her- 
 bart took his departure, and it is these which he is vitally con- 
 cerned to explain. What can happen to the qualities of simple 
 reality, or what can happen beyond them? Or how does that 
 which happens in connexion with them lend itself to an interpre- 
 tation of experience? The answer to this question is the key 
 to Herbart's epistemology and his psychology. 
 
 Whatever happens when the reals come into connexion must 
 be regarded as ultimate causation. Now let two reals A and B 
 be represented b)'^ contingent aspects, as A by a+j8 + y and B by 
 m+n—y. When A and B come into connexion, there will then 
 be left only a+^+m+n as perceptible contingent aspects of 
 A and B. The reals are unchanged ; but their contingent aspects 
 are alterable. " But then nothing happens ! Everything stays 
 just as it is ! How can anything happen, when the real merely 
 remains like itself ? "" The only outlet is in the condition of the 
 apparent happenings. In the illustration, the reals A and B may 
 be regarded as differing in the quality of their contingent aspects 
 to the extent y, so that on coming into connexion they tend to 
 disturb one another to this extent y. But A and B as unchange- 
 able reals must preserve themselves against the tendency to a 
 disturbance. A has still to be equal to a+^ + y and B to 
 m+n—y, in order that apparently A-l-B may be equal to 
 a + p+m+n. Thus A and B have preserved themselves to the 
 extent y. 
 
 ^Zusammensein. 
 
 'Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 335. Lotze {Mttaphysics, Book I. Chapter II.) repeats 
 this question and rejects the solution which Herbart has to offer. 
 
Philosophy of Herbart. 6i 
 
 It is now possible to summarise the argument of Herbart con- 
 cerning change. It is the resultant of the contact of two or more 
 reals which differ in the quality of their contingent aspects. 
 Acts of self-preservation are performed by the reals to the extent 
 of their difiference in quality, and out of these self-preservations 
 as manifested in the alteration of contingent aspects is generated 
 the appearance of change. 
 
 And now, how does man stand in relation to phenomena 
 and to reality? Herbart is ready with the following answer: 
 " Granted that a spectator should stand at such a point that he 
 should not know the simple quality, but should be himself 
 involved in the different relations of A to B, C, D, and so forth ; 
 then all that remains visible to him is the peculiarity of the indi- 
 vidual self-preservations, not the constant similarity of their 
 origin and their result. This is the standpoint of Man.^ So 
 Herbart comes to regard feelings as the self-preservations of the 
 soul, which is ignorant at once of its own nature, and of the 
 fact that its experiences, all-important as they are to itself, depend 
 upon happenings in connection with reals outside of it, of whose 
 own self-preservations it can know nothing. 
 
 3. The Cosmology of Herbart. In the Synechology or Cos^ 
 mology Herbart reverses the analytic procedure by which in the 
 Ontology he has arrived at the fundamental doctrines of his 
 realism. Arduous is now the task before him, no less than 
 to reconstruct from his reals, and from the theory of their 
 self-preservations, the world of human experience. Few will 
 maintain that Herbart has succeeded here. In order to 
 explain the appearance of matter he introduced what he re- 
 garded as a fictitious category, that of a continuum, or of 
 partially overlapping points, precisely as the mathematician 
 employs so imaginary a quantity as \/— i. The use which 
 Herbart makes of this methodological device is ingenious. 
 For although in the case of two reals A and B the reals 
 must disturb one another to the extent of their difference 
 in quality, yet, do we suppose three or more reals in con- 
 nexion, we are obliged to conceive a preservation that 
 appears no more than partial. In reality the preservation 
 must be complete, because the reals, are unalterable, but it 
 will appear to be incomplete. For B as against A and A' 
 
 ^Allgemeine Mttaphysik. Konigsberg, i8s8. Par. 236. 
 
62 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 must appear to preserve itself only in part or else to have 
 a doubled self-preservation which is inconsistent with our 
 hypothesis. The rest is easy. Out of a tendency to complete 
 the self-preservation will arise the notion of attraction. Re- 
 pulsion will arise from a tendency to hinder the complete- 
 ness of the self-preservation.* Several As and Bs, armed 
 with their specious attractions and repulsions, form aggre- 
 gates that convey the idea of a corporeal mass. So matter 
 has been reconstructed from the reals, if possibly with a 
 certain disregard for concreteness. 
 
 Like matter, time and motion may be explained by the 
 fiction of a continuum, in which the reals appear to lie, 
 although they do not. Changes in motion are not real, and 
 yet they are the objective appearance of the contacts of 
 reals; and, further, to the human observer they appear as 
 in time, and even, because they partly overlap, as in con- 
 tinuous time. Thus, although to the real in itself the cate- 
 gories of space and motion do not apply ; yet for the observer, 
 the real is to be regarded as at rest in its own space, but 
 moving in the spaces of other reals.^ The real is timeless, 
 yet out of its meetings with other reals there arises the 
 notion of time. The real is immaterial, yet out of these 
 meetings there comes also the notion of matter. 
 
 In all this argument the objection perhaps holds, that the 
 more ingenious, the more elaborate, the more mathematical 
 it is, the more does it commend itself alike to our admira- 
 tion and our unbelief. At least this tends to be true of 
 persons of the concrete type of mind, whose feelings and 
 will rebel against the abstractions of its intellectualism. 
 
 4. The epistemology of Herbart. That part of his meta- 
 physic which Herbart calls the Eidolology deals with the 
 epistemological problem of how man may be able to act 
 as a spectator of the objective semblance of the interaction 
 of reals. Its problem then is the problem of thg. self, and 
 covers the determination .. of .the origin and_ possibility of 
 ideas, the process of knowledge, and the general founda- 
 tions of psychology. 
 
 ^AUnemeine Metaphysik. Par. 270. 
 ^AUgemHne Metaphysik. Par. 283. 
 
Philosophy of Herbart. 63 
 
 In general, idealistic solutions of the problem of the self 
 have rested upon the assumption of an identity between the 
 self as knower and the self as known; in more technical 
 terms, of the subjective and objective Ego. As Spinoza 
 expresses it, if any man know anything, then he also knows 
 that he knows it, and he knows again his knowledge of 
 the knowledge and so on to infinity. Yet between the sel f 
 as knower and as known , though there may possibly not be 
 a diiiference, there is clearly a valid distinction. For Herbart 
 the distijactign_is_ absolute. "If the known be a certain A, 
 then the knowledge of A is not A itself; and the sum, A 
 plus the knowledge of A, is no Ego."^ 
 
 What solution is offered by Herbart for the problem of 
 the Ego? Whatever it be, it must affect his educational 
 theory. For Herbart in the first place the Ego, being a 
 subject and real, as such remains unknown like other reals. 
 This however is only true of the metaphysical soul. The 
 empirical Ego, or the Ego as object, is to be regarded as a 
 CQ mglex.- ,Qf,,attri.bates. ~an3"~so~"falls under the catgggix_2f 
 inherencf which Herbart has been at pains to analyse. Not 
 the real Ego therefore, but the Ego as known, is a resultant 
 of forces taking their rise in the self-preservations of reals. 
 T he in v estigatio n of these forces is the task of 2§Z£!l2l°SiZ- 
 " The soul is not originally a power of reflection, an impulse 
 and the like. Neither is it constructed out of real and ideal 
 activity, as Fichte would have it. Rather must its whole 
 spiritual diversity be supposed to consist in an adequate 
 number of determinations of a manifold connexion with 
 other and again other reals. "^ 
 
 But if man cannot know reality itself, and if thus the 
 real soul be past his ken, he has the consolation of knowing 
 actual happenings. His sensations, the material of all his 
 knowledge, are themselves the preservations of his soul 
 against other reals. Sensations, as the resultants of the meet- 
 ings of reals, compel him to posit these reals. 
 
 5. Certain implications for education. Upon the metaphysic 
 4e£ends the psychology o f Herbart, and upon the psychology, 
 the_ education.__^ But it is seldom remarked that the theory 
 
 ^Allgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 323. 
 ^AUgemeine Metaphysik. Par. 364. 
 
64 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 of education of Herbart is dependent upon a metaphysic. 
 One would imagine that its utmost genesis were in psychol- 
 ogy as such. And yet on maturer consideration it may be 
 doubted to what extent psychology, as descriptive and ex- 
 perimental, may alone and unaided give even a tentative 
 answer to any fundamental educational problem. In the case 
 of the education al theory of Herbart, at least three of its 
 rtiajor principles see m to merely filter through a psycholo gical 
 medi um in the course of their derivation from a rarer meta- 
 physical source. For methodological reasojis these principles 
 may be stated in-uegative form. They are, that education 
 i^ not real, that education is not free, and that it does not 
 proceed by an organic or evolutionary unfolding of the human 
 s pTfitT TTiis~Bald and negative formuTation, though in itself 
 it may do Herbart less than justice, may temporarily sub- 
 serve the antithetical method because of its almost absolute 
 contrast with the foregoing analysis of the educational theory 
 of Froebel. 
 
 For Herbart education is not re al. Realitv is unchang e- 
 able,_ and the educator can only manipulate the iridescent 
 colors on its surface. It is true that forJHprbart jaforths are 
 constitute d by these, cjaloxs and not by reality, as the worth 
 of a diamond may be said to reside in its fires. Yet some 
 will think it degrading that education should be mere appear- 
 ance. It is not a satisfactory hypothesis for the educator that 
 the essence of things is not amenable to moral predication, 
 and can never be a whit the better or worse for all his efforts. 
 
 And again, for Herbart ideas arise out of an interaction 
 of reals over which the self has no power. Freedom exists 
 as an externally produced harmony, but it is admitted that 
 such freedom is only a specious pretence of moral autonomy, 
 and is not real. It is not even in process of becoming trans- 
 cendental. 
 
 Finally, for Herbart education is strictly not a development. 
 According to the fundamentals of his metaphysic it should 
 be an aggregation of ideas, due to undirigible self-preserva- 
 tions of reals. It is true that in the psychology Herbart 
 gets far away from so untenable a position, that he introduces 
 fusions and blendings of ideas, and subjects these processes 
 to a mathematical regime. But ever at the root of these 
 
Philosophy of Herbert. 65 
 
 changes there lurks the atomism of the metaphysic. It seems 
 to be a fundamental and consistent assumption of the mathe- 
 matical psychology of Herbart that the ideational units 
 remain true throughout every fusion to their isolation, inde- 
 pendence, and mutual externality. 
 
 But although he may sympathise with the Herbartian 
 psychology, no modern educator will subscribe to the meta- 
 physic of Herbart. For the crucial transition from a set 
 of originally unrelated reals to a phenomenal world of rela- 
 tions is too severely unintelligible to win permanent adher- 
 ence even from sympathetic minds.^ If indeed it were really 
 thinkable that all relations may be external to their terms, 
 then surely it should follow that relations are pure illusion." 
 But in the assumption of self-preserving activities among the 
 reals Herbart has smuggled into his system as it were a core 
 of idealism; and while it is true that his psychology and 
 educational theory have never lost the impression of their 
 pluralistic origin, it is conceivable that this core of idealism 
 may be sponsor to some part of their validity. 
 
 HI. 
 
 I. The so-called faculties. It is now possible to turn to 
 the psychology of Herbart. In the judgment of Beneke, the 
 two chief advances of modern psychology were made respec- 
 tively by Locke and Herbart, in that the former dealt a mortal 
 blow to the theory of innate ideas, and the latter to the 
 theory of innate faculties. Herbart found that the so-called 
 faculties are no more than classifications of mental phenomena.*^ 
 To make them prior to such phenomena is to lapse into 
 the fallacy of the physician who argues that a certain draught 
 produces sleep because it is possessed of a soporific faculty. 
 Even as classifications, the faculties seemed to Herbart to 
 be unreli^hlsjnjhe_absence of the^needful empirical data of 
 psychology, although in'So^Tar ai present cdhditiohs are con- 
 cerned, it would seem that the validity of this objection to 
 the faculties has been diminished in proportion to the suc- 
 cessful activity of the recent period of psychological research. 
 
 'Cf. Lotze, Metaphysics. Book I. Chapter I. 
 
 'Cf. A. E. Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics.' London, 1903. p. 148. 
 
66 Herba/rt and Froebel. 
 
 But a " faculty " psychology offers yet another difficulty. Its 
 basis is in introspection, and introspection alters its own 
 object. " Self-observation mutilates the facts of consciousness 
 in the very act of seizing them."^ Upon these three grounds, 
 then, Herbart would reject the psychology of the faculties. 
 First, it offers an explanation which is no explanation; sec- 
 ond, its forms are ill grounded in empirical fact; and third, 
 of its own nature it deceives itself. 
 
 Only one classification suggestive of the faculties retains 
 the respect of Herbart. Usage compels him to adopt the 
 terminology of conception, feeling and desire. Even these 
 are unscientific terms, and to add to them other supposititious 
 faculties, and to erect upon these a weighty superstructure, 
 is to build an aerial castle on a mythology of the mind. 
 
 As the destroyer of causal faculties Herbart reaches 
 psychological greatness. But he may have harried them 
 beyond necessity. Though there be no original cut-and-dried 
 faculties, there may be original mental tendencies. Such 
 tendencies, though they may do violence to the Herbartian 
 metaphysic, are indicated by the a priori mental categories 
 of Kant and the mental predispositions of heredity. Here in 
 a sense is visible the fundamental psychological antithesis 
 in Herbart and Froebel. For Herbart the mind is ideational 
 content; for Froebel it has from the outset a unity of form. 
 Only perhaps from an evolutionary point of view may the 
 unity and polarity of the mind be duly co-ordinated and 
 synthesised. 
 
 2. Ideas as dynamic. If there be no p rincipl es of unity in 
 the mi nd, no faculties, no forms, and no original ^tendencies 
 to faculties, principles of~ forms,- then the mm3 must be some 
 sort of aggregate of isolated ideatrdrial forces. For Herbart, 
 ideas are atomic foreesT^Tiich are false to their atomism 
 only to the extent of fusions and blendings that mask their 
 plurality without reducing it. In chemistry one is familiar 
 with the notion of irreducible and disparate elements behind 
 every compound. In like way Herbart, with the whole school 
 of associationists, seems to assume that the most complex 
 thought may be resolved in the limit into a plurality of un- 
 related ideas. For Herbart in particular these ideas are con- 
 
 'Lehrbmh lur Psychologic. Kfinigsberg. 1834. Par. 3. 
 
Philosophy of Herba/rt. 6y 
 
 stant enough, independent enough, self-identical enough to 
 be amenable to mathematical treatment. But although it 
 may be needless to follow him into a statics and dynamics^ 
 of the mind that are based upon a vague analogy of mental 
 tensions to physical forces, yet it may not be wasteful, and 
 it may not be superfluous, to refer merely to the centraLtitUJU^ht 
 of Herbart in this theory, the thoug ; -ht nf iHpag-ag-<3ynamiV 
 
 For^ Her^bart_con£^.S_b£Ca3nie-foi«es-wben JJi^^ 
 another. They are independent of original mental unities. 
 The min£^self is a series of masses-oL-them, each mass 
 rising or falling, from the„thresh.Qld_of consciousness ac cord- 
 in g to its groupin g s and consequent train s nf association. 
 It is true that in the most recent psychology the association 
 of ideas is a less prominent category than stimulus and re- 
 action. But the category of association, and-_tli£ _theory o f 
 ideas as independent forces upon which it is built, retains a 
 limited'~validit7: — FoF—a -moment, then, one may take the 
 point of view of Herbart. What_happeris^ when concepts 
 resist onp another? Experien ce finds t hat they are not 
 dest"ro3rea",'""nQr'left— unchanged; they are s ubjec t~~to' "chlmge, 
 but not'anmliilation. "fl he real concept is chaligecTTnto an 
 effort to presenFTtself."^ Therefore only remove hindrances, 
 and concepts will tena to reproduce themselves. Here is 
 evidently the principle of involuntary memory. For Herbart 
 the metaphor of tensions between concepts is a pretext for 
 a statics and dynamics of the mind to treat respectively of 
 equilibrated and disturbing concept-forces. On the aptness 
 of this metaphor depends much of the validity of the educational 
 system of Herbart. 
 
 Let us attempt to subject the metaphorical theory of 
 Herbart to an empirical verification. The mind is to be a 
 product of independent forces called ideas. Now the phe- 
 nomena of experience which seem to corroborate this view 
 include especially dreams, reverie, the facts of abnormal 
 psychology, habit and the feeling of inhibition in attention. 
 
 In dreams, when the reference to ends in which the unity 
 of consciousness perhaps consists is laid aside, it would 
 seem that the mind is resolved into a chaos of irresponsible 
 
 ^Lehrbuck eur Psyckologie. Konigsberg, 1834. Par. 13. 
 ^Lthriuch zur Psychologie. Par. 11. 
 
68 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 notions which rise and fall and make combinations by virtue 
 of the arbitrary independence of each. And if there be a 
 continuity in dreams, it is at best fantastic. It appears to 
 be purely associative, and subject to no guiding process of 
 discrimination. Yet it remains not only true that the inde- 
 pendence of ideas in dreams is apt to be relative, and to this 
 extent conditioned by some unity of purpose, however fan- 
 ciful it may be ; but it also remains true that the large amount 
 of independence which ideas may be said to possess is essen- 
 tially of a secondary and derivative character. The ideas 
 ot the dream consciousness, like those of habit, appear to 
 have originated out of the stress and strain of a mental re- 
 action upon specific stimuli. In that case the interaction 
 of independent ideas is inadequate as a category for the 
 explanation of dreams. The basis of association appears to 
 be less one of subjective cohesion than objective teleological 
 reference. 
 
 As in dreams, so in reverie, the mind seems to function 
 sometimes more by compartments than as a whole. The 
 mind as will seems dormant, while concepts mass themselves 
 as best they may. Yet reverie may hardly be more than 
 a recapitulation and reorganisation of genuine teleological 
 thought. Therefore ultimately it would appear to make less 
 for an atomism of ideational forces than a purposeful mental 
 unity. 
 
 Most of all in hypnotic suggestion, and more generally in 
 the facts of abnormal psychology, is there evidence for sup- 
 posing the soul to be at the mercy of its states. Such evi- 
 dence seems indisputable so far as it goes. But again, 
 it would appear that the phenomena of suggestion in hyp- 
 notism only point in a secondary way to an atomism of ideas. 
 Primarily they are only made possible through a previous 
 unitary experience belonging to the hypnotic subject. To 
 illustrate, the hypnotic subject who is told to raise a finger 
 can do so only because he knows what a finger is and how 
 to raise it. The polarisation of his ideas is then made pos- 
 sible by their previous organic relation, and hardly points 
 to the original independence of conceptual forces. As in 
 dreams, and reverie, and abnormal psychology, so in 
 habit also is there evidence of the independence of ideas 
 
Philosophy of Herbart. 69 
 
 in relation to the unity of the normal mental process. It 
 is probably fair t o say thjtt Ab£. HfiJbar-tiarL -^sa^chglo^ is 
 befcJre all things a psychology of habit For it is in hlbit 
 ,that-i4e a s- be camtr^xea in theiF'assDCiations,"and IFYs in 
 hatit'that they appear to be moiFmciependent inTKeir activi- 
 ti^'"ms true that there is something mcongruSns about 
 the notion of an association of atoms. On the other hand, 
 however incongruous it may be, it is not only fundamental 
 to the Herbartian metaphysic, but it not unsuccessfully in- 
 terprets the facts of psychology in so far as these are chosen 
 from the realm of habit alone. /If consciousness were no 
 more than habit the psychology of Herbart might be an 
 acceptable account of its phenomena^ 
 
 But habit is only the static side of consciousness, the 
 primary nature of which is dynamic. Genetically and biolog- 
 ically, the office of consciousness would appear to be the 
 performance of imperative readjustments. Perhaps the early 
 development of the human consciousness may have been cor- 
 relative with the need of an increased wariness against ani- 
 mals stronger than man, or with the necessity for an increased 
 wisdom in the search for food. In any case, consciousness 
 would be genetically and primarily not a number of clear 
 ideas, but a subjective response and awakening to the stress 
 and strain of critical situations. Itj§__out- of conflict and 
 confusion, anjd— often_Qul.j)f haziness and^YSgueness. thai" 
 ideas arise,.^-Apparently the cleariiess" and immediacy of 
 ideas m habit, illustrated by the almost reflex obedience of 
 a trained soldier to the command " attention " or " halt " 
 even though he be off duty, may be explained by the cumu- 
 lative effect of a recurrence of approximately the same solu- 
 tions to approximately the same problems in experience. It 
 is then out of the problematic situation that ideai~aiT5e. 
 But the problematic situation qr_, crisis^Js.._a-£ase where the 
 combine~d~energies-t>fHrhcr'self are brought into requisition 
 for a single end. In other words, in the ultimate limit the 
 being of ideas is evidence of a unitary, teleological, mental 
 process. 
 
 Concepts however may be forces, without being inde- 
 pendent forces. The phenomenon of inhibition in attention 
 
70 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 seems to point to an inner striving, and an inner striving 
 should imply something to strive against. Ideas are at vsrar 
 among themselves apparently in the spirit of the Herbartian 
 psychology. And yet it is conceivable that the strife of ideas 
 may be within and for a purposive self. Though the ideas 
 be a divided and rebellious section of the self, yet they seem 
 to be affiliated to the self in a sort of constitutionally indis- 
 soluble union. 
 
 3. Reason and will. In the, p sychology of Herbart, Jhe 
 em phasis i s on apperceived content and not apperceiving 
 activity. More simply, it is upo n ideas and not will . Even 
 desires are regarded as the appetitive tendencies of concepts 
 and conceptual masses. And the will, t he apperceiving act iy- 
 ity jyh j£h pl n y q p n large a par ^TInllEelpsycho logical theory 
 of Wundt^s for H er b art only a kind of desire. " The facu lty 
 of desir e, together with those of representation and feeling, 
 should furnish an exhaustive classification oi th€ mental 
 faculties."^ For Herbart the- wiH-is-JJi at kind of desire wit h 
 which is cnupled the idea of the attaimnpnt of its object. 
 But it is possible to discriminate the will diiterently, as the 
 whole personality consciously functioning in a situation, and 
 for such an activity desire is an unconvincing name. 
 
 For Herbart the will is not free. It is not dependent upon 
 the formal or categorical reason. "Reason is originally 
 neither commanding nor law-giving; above all, it is not the 
 source of willing. It is quite as little a source of knowledge. 
 Nevertheless it is regarded as such; indeed it is thought to 
 be the highest judge and authority, which is a very natural 
 result.'"" But the reference of Herbart is to the forms of 
 thought and not to mental content or ideas. According to 
 the psychology of the tension of concept masses, the will 
 cannot fail to be dependent upon presentations, concepts, 
 ideas, if not upon reason formally as such. The will is not 
 primary, not original. In Herbartian education it will not 
 be evolved by constructive occupation and practical endeavour 
 so much as erected by the intellectual reinforcement of satis- 
 factory groups of concepts. Character will be constructed 
 from without, to the disregard of those developmental forces 
 
 ^Lehrbuch zur Psychologic. Kflnigsberg, 1834. Par. 107. 
 'Ibid. Par. 115. 
 
Philosophy of Herhart. 71 
 
 of spiritual evolution upon the cooperation of which Froebel 
 for his part did not fear to rely. 
 
 Little is said in this chapter of apperception and interest. 
 It is true that these shibboleths in a way summarise the 
 permanent contributions of Herbart to psychology, but for 
 this very reason it seems unnecessary to afford them a pre- 
 liminary analysis, so well-known are their chief implications. 
 Interest and apperception will presently receive a compara- 
 tive and synthetic treatment. 
 
 4. Another interpretation of the psychology of Herbart. A 
 revolutionary interpretation of the psychology of Herbart 
 has been recently advanced by Dr. Davidson of Edinburgh 
 University.^ The psychology of Herbart, we are told, is 
 founded on the metaphysic of Leibnitz, and its implications 
 are those of the " functional " psychology of Professor Adam- 
 son and Professor James.^ 
 
 It is customary to regard the psychology of Herbart as 
 obsolete in other fields than that of education. In education 
 it is charged with the validity and invested with the authority 
 of an empirical law. It is found to work fairly well, though 
 to what extent its practical value may have been overrated 
 or underrated by certain common sense departures of teachers 
 from its implications, or possibly, by the rebellious workings 
 of the minds of pupils according to unorthodox mental laws, 
 is a question not easy ta decide. Still, the pragmatically 
 minded will sympathise with the following argument of Dr. 
 Davidson. " If the Herbartian theory of education ' works,' 
 then^ this very fact implies that the practice of Herbartian 
 education involves a psychological theory which must be 
 true." The Herbartian psychology really seems to work too 
 well not to have a quantum of validity. But our thesis as 
 against Dr. Davidson is, that it is only valid for habit, and 
 for mental phenomena allied to habit, that it gives no satis- 
 factory account of attention, and that therefore it falls short 
 of the relative completeness of a modern functional 
 psychology. Incidentally, let it be remarked that there is a 
 danger in deducing the psychology of Herbart from the phil- 
 osophy of Leibnitz. Herbart not only knew Leibnitz but 
 
 ^A new Interpretation of Herbart's Psychology and Educational Theory. Edinburgh'and 
 London. 1906. 
 ^Ibid., p. 41. 
 
72 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 criticised him;^ and assuredly his own metaphysic, the obvious 
 and acknowledged source of his psychology, is far from the 
 mere result of a late recrudescence of the Leibnitzian school. 
 There is also a danger of confusing interpretation with jus- 
 tification. A metaphysic may interpret, but experience alone 
 justifies. 
 
 It is difficult to believe that either Leibnitz or Herbart had 
 a psychology essentially functional. In Leibnitz the logical 
 tendency is to a subjective idealism. For him reality is 
 reducible to monads, simple, self-active, spiritual, independent 
 beings, each a mirror of the universe, but each except God 
 an imperfect mirror, each unfolding from within, and having 
 no windows, and only controlled by a pre-established har- 
 mony. Matter is for Leibnitz the confused perception by 
 a monad of other monads. And, although the perceptions 
 of the monads differ in quality, the monads enter into no 
 relations, but the world appears by the unfolding of the 
 monad itself. It is difficult to make more out of this than 
 a subjective idealism. 
 
 " When Professor James sums up by saying that ' the 
 knowing of many things together is just as well accounted 
 for when we call it a functioning of the soul state as when 
 we call it a reaction of the soul,' he is only expressing in 
 positive terms what we have tried to show is implicit in 
 Herbart's theory of the reaction of soul."^ Let us examine 
 this as a crucial passage. First of all, what is the gist of 
 the quoted corroboration from Professor James? It is that 
 for certain definite psychological purposes the substantial 
 unity of the soul is superfluous. " Herbart, as we have tried 
 to show, considered it superfluous ; and any theory of educa- 
 tion that bases on such a principle is not entitled to rank 
 as scientific."' In limitation of the validity of this argument 
 at least four considerations may be taken into account. The 
 nature of the soul is rather a metaphysical than a psycholog- 
 ical question, and the soul may be as metaphysically 
 necessary as perhaps it is psychologically irrelevant. 
 The abstract science of psychology merely as such adopts 
 
 ^Cf. Chapter 11. a. 
 
 ^Davidson, A new Interpretation, etc.. p. 64. 
 
 s/iirf. p. 66. 
 
Philosophy of Herbart. 73 
 
 an attitude of thorough-going .duaHsm^ which is ultimately 
 almost unthinkable. In any case, the word substantial almost 
 begs the question of a soul unity, for all real unity is prob- 
 ably purposive rather than substantial, as the pragmatic 
 philosophy of Professor James virtually asserts. Finally, 
 Herbart himself did believe in a real metaphysical soul. This 
 alone would suffice to end the matter, were it not true that 
 the real soul of the Herbartian metaphysic is a barren ab- 
 straction unrelated to the mind as known, and not an in- 
 telligible principle of unification. 
 
 Our general conclusion is that the psychology of Her- 
 bart is not equivalent to a psychology of function, if only 
 because the latter theory will have none of the traditional 
 Locke-Humian permanence and independence of ideas. For 
 this very reason Professor James has criticised Herbart as 
 one of the victims of the " psydiologist^jfallacy." " The 
 thought of the obiect's recun^gnt^id^JltJtXJ^ i^egar4ed- as the 
 identity oT its recurrenT" thought; and the perce^JQns. of 
 mulipircit'y7"of co-existence, ptsiiccession, are severally con- 
 ceived to Jbe brought , about .,QtUx through a multiplicity, a 
 co-existenipe, a succession, of perceptions. The continuous 
 flow of the tneiital stream is .sacrificedj and in its place an 
 atomism, a brick-bat plan of construction,- is preached, for 
 the existence of which no good introspective grounds can be 
 brought forward, and out of which presently grow all sorts 
 of paradoxes and contradictions, the heritage of woe of stu- 
 dents of the mind. These words are meant to impeach the 
 entire English psychology derived from Locke and Hume, 
 and the entire German psychology derived from Herbart, 
 so far as they both treat ' ideas ' as separate subjective en- 
 tities that come and go."^ 
 
 In something like a functional psychology there is shadowed 
 a certain synthesis of Herbart and Froebel, in that there 
 is room both for the emphasis of Herbart upon mental con- 
 tent and habit, and for the emphasis of Froebel upon will 
 and progress. According to a psychology of function, habit 
 and attention work into and out of one another as severally 
 the retrospective and prospective sides of a dynamic process 
 
 'C/. James, Psychology. New York, 1890. I. pp. 21S-220. 
 'Psychology, 1890. I. p. 196- See also I. pp. 353-354. 
 
74 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 in which the organism readjusts itself to imperative crises. 
 But it is not to be imagined that such a concrete psychology 
 is the only or the fundamental ground of a synthesis of the 
 educational theories of Herbart and Froebel. It is pur- 
 posed to indicate other such grounds, here novel and there 
 familiar enough, in the hope that here and there they may 
 support the educator more safely, more stably, and even on 
 a higher level of interpretation than the more subjective 
 opinions of individual reformers, however great. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 The Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 
 
 The attempt has been made to analyse firstly the philosophy 
 of Froebel, and secondly the philosophy of Herbart. It may 
 now be possible to adopt a more synthetic standpoint, from 
 which an estimate may be made of the relative validity of 
 the theories of Herbart and Froebel. Accordingly the earlier 
 part of the present chapter is devoted to an attempt at a 
 psychological synthesis; and the latter part to an indication 
 of the possibility of an ethical and metaphysical synthesis. 
 
 I. The soul and the concept. It has been admitted that 
 associationism may be one terminus of a valid psychology. 
 In dreams, in habit, in reverie, and in the phenomena of 
 abnormal psychology, ideas manifest a disconcerting self- 
 sufficiency and independence. No doubt this independence, 
 this self-sufficiency, are relative and iii a sense derivative 
 from a unitary activity of the soul. And yet derivative may 
 be too strong a word; for if there is no idea in vacuo, neither 
 is there any soul known to experience without ideas. It 
 would seem that the original activity of the soul may be 
 conceived as a tendency at the same time to a spiritual unity 
 and an ideational dififerentiation. If so, neither Herbart 
 nor Froebel completely satisfies. Froebel thinks of the unity 
 of the mind as something given, and in a sense from its 
 origin fully mature; Herbart ascribes to the original soul 
 no more power than an incomprehensible reaction to pre- 
 serve itself, which changes its appearance without stirring 
 the depth of its reality. For Herbart the unity of the mind 
 is a product of apperceptive processes in which the forces 
 are ideas. There would seem to be a sense in which the 
 unity of the soul, the self or Ego if you will, is achieved 
 ratWer than given; and yet also a sense in which it is 
 implicit as a tendency from the first. Thus the category 
 
76 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 of evolution offers a working psychological synthesis. The 
 mind at birth may be regarded as the elementary germ both 
 of a unified personality and differentiated ideas; and yet in 
 such a way that the character and individuality of an adult 
 are essentially things to be developed and achieved. 
 
 While it is not pretended that such a synthesis is authori- 
 tative, it has at least this value for a philosophy of education, 
 that it suggests a reasonable theory of free will. Does the 
 self function as a unity? Then it may be free. Is it swayed 
 by independent wills called concepts? Then it is not free. 
 For if mental activity be merely a phase of the tension of 
 concepts, regarded as more or less independent, although 
 capable of fusions and blendings, then the self is no more 
 than a product of circumstances over which it has no control. 
 Herbart is therefore a determinist, and education is for him 
 wholly a matter of external stimuli to which mechanical 
 responses are expected and assumed. But the logical corollary 
 of the psychology of Froebel is transcendental freedom. Ideas 
 are not taken seriously as independent activities; but the 
 soul is looked upon as superior to any or all of them, and 
 to any or all of the desires and actions that may be at the 
 back of them. This dignified and happy view is not quite 
 warranted by fact. The will appears to be not so transcen- 
 dental but that it may be jeopardised, not so transcendental 
 but that it may never be achieved. 
 
 What light is thrown upon this antithesis by the recon- 
 ciling category of human evolution? Essentially this, that 
 freedom appears no more to be a static thing, given once 
 for all, or once for all withheld. Freedom may be viewed 
 as a potentiality becoming actualised. Man may not begin 
 with transcendental freedom, but he moves toward it. He 
 is not wholly superior to mundane circumstance, to time, 
 place, and opportunity; and yet he may more and more 
 become so, not in the sense of dispensing with them, but 
 in the sense of making them instrumental to his purposes. 
 If he is in a sense at the mercy of his concepts, still, they 
 are his concepts. It would seem to be a very practical and 
 inspiring notion, that freedom lies in a process of becoming, 
 in which man gradually emancipates himself from the deter- 
 
Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 77 
 
 minations of external agencies, not by disregarding such 
 determinations, but by giving them a value, and controlling 
 them in relation to that value. The self is not concerned 
 to suppress the activities of ideas, but to relate and guide 
 them. Again, according to this view the self is not one thing, 
 and the ideas another thing; but the self is the purposeful 
 unity of its ideas, and the ideas are differentiated attitudes 
 of the self. What is desired, is therefore not merely, as the 
 Froebelian psychology might suggest, the conquest of ideas 
 by the soul, and not merely, as Herbartianism implies, the 
 formation of concept masses that are likely to combine to 
 good effect; rather it is on the side of the unity of the soul, 
 a will capable of controlling habitual ideas, and on the side 
 of mental content, ideas at once ready to be precipitated into 
 action and amenable to the guidance of the concrete self. 
 The Froebelian psychology with its stress upon unity tends 
 to be formal, the Herbartian, with its stress upon content, 
 tends to be mechanical; and the truer psychology may be 
 one in which form and content, soul activity and idea activity, 
 come to be regarded as normal correlatives functioning to- 
 gether. Then morality may be based on environment as 
 to its origin, but on freedom as to its value and goal. 
 
 2. Mental forms and mental content. The emphasis which 
 Herbart seems to set upon permanence and mental equilibrium 
 is connected with the fundamental, and, as it stands, insuper- 
 able difficulty of passing over from the soul as an independent 
 and unchangeable real, without parts or diversity, and lack- 
 ing even the activity which Leibnitz had ascribed to it, to 
 the active mind of human experience. Between these two 
 conceptions there is a gap that Herbart would none too suc- 
 cessfully fill by the assumption of real happenings to the 
 extent of self-preservations of the reals against one another. 
 If there be some real happening, then why hold the reals 
 to be unchangeable at all? If reality change at all, even in 
 respect of happening and not in respect of being, then it is 
 perhaps as well to hold the changing phenomena of our 
 experience to partake of the nature of reality, as to invent 
 an hypothetical occurrence equally irreconcilable with a 
 hypothesis of pure being without becoming. 
 
78 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 " The soul," says Herbart, " has no innate natural talents 
 nor faculties whatever, either for the purpose of receiving 
 or for the purpose of producing. It is, therefore, no tabula rasa 
 in the sense that impressions foreign to itself may be made 
 upon it; moreover, in the sense indicated by Leibnitz, it is 
 not a substance which includes in itself original activity. It 
 has originally neither concepts, nor feelings, nor desires. It 
 knows nothing of itself, and nothing of other things; also 
 in it lie no forms of perception and thought, no laws of 
 willing and action, and not even a remote predisposition to 
 any of these."^ This is not the soul as known, only Her- 
 bart's theory of the metaphysical soul. The significance for 
 life and education of such an hypothesis appears to be that 
 the soul as a unity, or as natural tendency, in general the 
 formal soul, is negligible though existent; only the content 
 of the soul is an object of knowledge and a source of 
 morality. 
 
 The Herbartian psychology becomes consistently a polemic 
 in favor of content; hence its value, and hence its formless- 
 ness. According to the synthetic psychology already indicated 
 in this chapter, no mental content that is merely content is 
 competent to create the forms of mental action, any more 
 than such forms could of themselves realise a content. Froe- 
 bel approaches the other extreme from Herbart, and makes 
 given mental unities hew out a content for themselves after 
 the fashion of their own inwardness. A less abstract view 
 is that form and content are inseparable aspects of the mental 
 process, to such a degree that the question of priority may 
 have to be abandoned. 
 
 If it be true that Froebel tended more nearly to such a 
 synthetic view than did Herbart, it may be attributed to 
 the fact that he virtually adopted a category of evolution — 
 development from within — as Herbart did not. "All human 
 investigation," wrote Herbart, " must recognise the funda- 
 mental source of vital forces by referring them to that provi- 
 dence according to whose designs they were originated. No 
 metaphysic and no experience reaches further. Every theory 
 as to the probable creation of higher organisms from those 
 of a lower order, can be refuted." To this Froebel might 
 
 ^Lrhrbuch zur Psychologit. Konigsbersr, 1834. Par. 1S2. 
 
Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 79 
 
 have in part agreed, but he would have insisted upon some 
 kind of unity and development throughout nature. Herbart 
 did not conceive, with evolutionary idealism, that life may 
 be evolutionary and yet divine; that the development of a 
 higher from a lower order does not degrade the former but 
 ennobles the latter; that even the conceivable derivation of 
 organisms from comparatively inorganic matter need only 
 show that matter is spiritual and significant in a way not 
 hitherto suspected; and that things are to be adjudged less 
 according to their origins than their worths, or ends, or satis- 
 factions. It will now be apparent that the opposition of 
 mental forms and mental content has resolved itself into the 
 opposition of the soul and its ideas, and that the synthesis 
 suggested is that of an evolutionary psychology, where the 
 category of evolution is intended to carry genetic and biolog- 
 ical interpretation up to the level of spirit, by orientating 
 them to future possibilities. 
 
 3. Habit and attention. The antithesis between the psychol- 
 ogy of Herbart and that of Froebel is manifested anew as a 
 relative stress upon habit and attention. When Herbart 
 makes the claim that the Ego, even should it exist as tran- 
 scendental, could as such have no value for education,^ he 
 appears to have in mind that the function of education is 
 to cultivate habits of thought and character. When the school 
 of Froebel, or rather of Kant, proclaims the soul to be 
 transcendental, what is implied for education is the suprem- 
 acy of will over habit, since the self is to be hailed as 
 superior to any or all of its desires. In the synthesis, it may 
 be possible to admit that the Herbartian cult of ideas may 
 be a valuable account of the operations of habit, at the same 
 time that progress may demand a Froebelian art of exercising 
 the will in selfactivity, where selfactivity means action coupled 
 with or hinged upon attention and initiative. For the Froe- 
 belian psychology of selfactivity seems to strengthen the 
 psychology of Herbart just at its weakest point, which is 
 that it expects too much from ideas when it seems to imply 
 that they alone and in their intellectual nature will induce 
 morality. Froebel seems to remember better than Herbart 
 that good or bad is to be predicated of our thoughts not 
 
 'Cf. e. g. Herbart, Pddagogische Schrifttn. hrsg. Sallwurk. I. p. aji. 
 
8o Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 after the matter but the manner of them. And yet Herbart 
 has psychology so far on his side, that each idea tends 
 somehow to be realised in motor activity, undirected or 
 misdirected though the tendency may be. There is even a 
 sense in which all effort is directed towards the supremacy 
 of some idea. If ideas had no relative objectivity, or, what 
 means the same thing, if habit had no force, then there would 
 be no check upon the momentary vagaries of the self, and 
 no truth better than a doubtful structure reared upon 
 momentary subjective impulses. In a synthetic psychology, 
 in a psychology of function, there is place then for the 
 emphases of Herbart and Froebel alike. The mind in atten- 
 tion goes out to an object as with Froebel, and the resultant 
 idea returns upon the mind as with Herbart.^ And again, 
 what becomes of the opposition of attention and habit, if 
 habit be funded attention, and attention be accommodatory 
 habit? The opposition no longer appears to inhere in the 
 facts, but only in the point of view. 
 
 4. An evolutionary psychology. There are those whose func- 
 tional psychology does not carry them the length of the 
 category of evolution. These may accept a reconciliation of 
 the psychology of Herbart with that of Froebel, so far as 
 concerns the functioning of the habit and attention of an 
 agent in a given situation. But those who would go further 
 with mental evolution, and, without interpreting mind merely 
 from a genetic standpoint, still find it an ever-developing 
 factor in the experience of the child and the race, may take 
 their point of departure with Mr. Bosanquet, from '' a con- 
 tinuous presentation, to be described either as feeling, or 
 as others would say, as having the three aspects of feeling, 
 conation and sensation (or cognition)."- The original con- 
 tinuous presentation is not to be viewed as mere form, a 
 pure Ego; nor as content only, a mass of independent ideas. 
 As it functions, form and ideas will develop together. The 
 unity of the self may be regarded as original, but as capable 
 of higher expression ; and ideas will be present as possibility, 
 but their actualisation will be a gradual development. We 
 are now as it were between Locke and James. For Locke, 
 
 ^Cf. A Synifusts of Herbart ami Froebel. Welton. In Educational Review, Sept. 1900. 
 ^Ps^-chohgy of the Moral Self. London, 1897. p. 33. 
 
Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 8i 
 
 ideas may vary not at all ;^ for Professor James, no two ideas 
 are ever the same.'' We are adopting a view^ of the mind 
 quite reconcilable with the latter statement, as though its 
 identity were a persistent ideal, or purposeful, unity in 
 change. 
 
 Such a view of identity seems necessary to an interpretation 
 of the category of evolution. One is compelled to abandon 
 a block unity, a mere sameness, for a unity of purposeful 
 reference. But a unity of purpose and function is very real; 
 and perhaps in the last resort no other unity remains in- 
 telligible. Therefore it is only with a certain reservation 
 that one affirms with Herbart, " every individual is and 
 remains a chameleon." It is only possible to dismiss every 
 form of mental unity from one's psychology, if one be pre- 
 pared to dismiss with it the entire range of human purposes 
 and values. The conception of the unity of the mind as 
 purpose may perhaps involve a truer notion of the so-called 
 transcendental will. Thus the will may be regarded as 
 transcending circumstance not absolutely or with a given 
 finality, but to the extent that the purposeful unity of the 
 mind may be capable of subjugating side issues like the 
 minor and subsidiary sensuous purposes. Transcendentalism 
 is from this point of view less an endowment or even a 
 possession of the will than a potentiality which may be 
 starved or stifled as well as developed. Thus considered, the 
 will is competent to regulate any presentation, or any train 
 of ideas, only to the extent that it is exercised in doing so. 
 Freedom exists more or less in proportion to the effort to 
 guide rather than eradicate habitual and critical activities and 
 ideas. The fugitive and cloistered will, unexercised and un- 
 breathed, that never sallies out to meet its adversary, and 
 that Milton cannot praise,* loses, or never wins, its " trans- 
 cendental " efficacy. 
 
 5. Mental structure and mental function. Viewed structur- 
 ally, the mind appears to consist of ideas ; viewed functionally, 
 it seems to act as a unitary will. Will and ideas are then 
 terminal aspects of a single process; and, as a matter of 
 
 'Essay on the Human Understanding, Book II. Chapter 17. 
 ^Psycholo^y. Nevi^ork, 1890. I. p. 23s- 
 ^Areopagttica. 
 
82 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 methodology, there is little to be said against placing an 
 emphasis upon either. Psychology perhaps has to choose 
 between two modes of procedure. The one mode is static; 
 the investigator analyses the mental " content " at a given 
 time. By this method one attains a sort of science of mental 
 anatomy, or one gets as it were a cross section of conscious- 
 ness. The alternative method is dynamic; it emphasises 
 processes, and seeks to retain a reference to concrete vital 
 conditions which the static or anatomical procedure has 
 rigidly and even deliberately excluded. It assumes that the 
 " anatomical " procedure is as inadequate to explain the 
 living mind as anatomy itself to explain the physiological 
 organism. After all, anatomy has the artificiality of an 
 abstraction, and its purpose is to subserve something more 
 functional and concrete. In a sense then, over against an 
 anatomical view of the mind, a figuratively physiological 
 view may be given a certain kind of priority; or at the 
 least, the notion of mind as a process, as a dynamic func- 
 tional principle, is to be taken into account, even when a 
 deliberate methodology pursues the static and cross-sectional 
 treatment of mental content. It is indeed clear that process 
 without content, or change without permanence, or func- 
 tion without a structure that functions, is meaningless. Con- 
 versely content without process appears to be a fictitious 
 abstraction, and so permanence does without change, and 
 a structure without function. In the case of the mind, while 
 content, permanence and structure suggest habit as the mode, 
 and ideas as the units of its life, it is equally true that 
 the categories of process, change and function suggest atten- 
 tion as mode, and character as unit. A view of the mind 
 as essentially habit is the result of looking immediately at 
 the structure of its content. It comes from a retrospective 
 seeing, from looking at what is already there ; from admiring 
 the organisation of consciousness, from the revelation of its 
 miracles of harmony alread}' achieved and its record of 
 already established control. One of the results for psychology 
 of this emphasis upon organisation and habit is that ideas 
 come to be expected to discharge all needful functions by 
 virtue of a peculiar process of mutual association. In this 
 
Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 83 
 
 way the English associationists and Herbart accounted for 
 the major part of the phenomena of conscious life. 
 
 The psychology of Froebel, so far as it goes, has the con- 
 trary emphasis. It is processive, dynamic, attentive, readjus- 
 tive and readaptational. From its very origin the soul is 
 active. " The newborn child, like a ripe kernel of seed-corn 
 dropped from the mother plant, has life in itself."^ From 
 the psychological standpoint, Froebel cares perhaps less for 
 habit than will, and from the ethical standpoint, less for what 
 has been achieved than what may yet be done. Froebel 
 is ever preoccupied with processes, and with what alone make 
 processes intelligible, purposes. 
 
 It is not difficult to synthesise structure and function in 
 theory, and to remark that they are mutually essential aspects 
 of a life process. It is not difficult to add that habit and 
 will react upon one another, and that what has been done 
 becomes a datum for what there is to do. But it is not 
 easy in practice to dynamically adjust the convenient post 
 mortem investigation of the mind by Herbart to the attempt 
 at a natural history of it which distinguishes Froebel. For 
 the educator is asked to cease to think of an Herbartian 
 psychology, or of a Froebelian psychology; and to think in 
 their stead of an Herbartian contribution to psychology, or 
 a Froebelian emphasis in it. 
 
 To summarise, the Herbartian account of mental phe- 
 nomena may be approximately valid for the past, for habit, 
 and possibly for physiological psychology. This last is 
 added because it is in the nervous system that habits are 
 formed and perpetuated. On the other hand the Herbartian 
 psychology suffers from its unduly structural emphasis; it 
 is abstract, in so far as it ignores the functional, accommo- 
 datory, and prospective view. It may be synthesised to 
 advantage with what Hegel might have called its Other, its 
 residual complement in psychological emphasis, that which 
 insists with Froebel on a self-activity, or with Wundt on 
 an apperception which partakes of the nature of an ultimate 
 volitional function. Again, the Herbartian phase of psychol- 
 ogy, as a psychology of the association of ideas and of habit, 
 
 ^Fritdrich FroebeVs Kindergartenwesen. hrsg. Seidel, 1883. p. 33. Or Ptdagogics of 
 tht Kindergarten, 189s, p. 23. 
 
84 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 may be connected with physiological psychology and may 
 therefore be suggestive, not to say valid, for the explanation 
 of the primitive growth of consciousness; while Froebel's 
 psychology, emphasising the forward tendency to ends, may 
 seem to subordinate origin to value. But a synthetic or a 
 functional psychology looks at the process of origin growing 
 into value. 
 
 6. The self and the situation. What has been said of habits 
 and attention, of origins and value, of stable and dynamic 
 mental elements, and of the tensions of ideas and self-activity, 
 implies a theory of the self and the situation. A theory 
 like that of Herbart, which explains mental activity as a 
 tension of concepts, appears to disregard the phenomenon 
 of the consciousness of self, and to attribute an overweening 
 influence to environment. Nay, it is rejoined, does your 
 evolutionary interpretation of the mind complain of a stress 
 on environment? What is evolution but the outcome of 
 environment? Does the evolutionary pot call the associative 
 kettle black? And yet the alleged inconsistency may not be 
 real. Evolution seems to mean more than situations, for 
 it is not easy to see how any amount of mere environment, 
 lacking a principle of inner activity, could produce anything. 
 
 So far as Froebel's educational system emphasises the self, 
 and that of Herbart the situation, there is need of a synthesis. 
 Modern psychology looks upon the agent and the situation 
 as two sides of a process of experience. The self is a sort 
 of focus of the situation, as the latter is in turn an objective 
 manifestation of the agent self; and there is a sense in which 
 each may be said to determine the other. Progress is the 
 tale of a continuous struggle between their mutually deter- 
 mining forces in which the self, as conscious spirit, gradually 
 gains the upper hand. 
 
 It needs to be added that the evolutionary psychology 
 which has been suggested as a possible ground of synthesis 
 may be interpreted from the side of idealism. Idealism inter- 
 prets evolution, in the first place, as a process of possibility 
 becoming realisation. The evolution is interpreted by its 
 end, although it may not be necessary to conceive this end 
 as perfect in the sense of static or finished. In the second 
 place, idealism notices a modification in the methodology of 
 
Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 85 
 
 evolution. Man tends to take over the control of his own 
 evolution from the hands of his mother nature, without deny- 
 ing the fundamental wisdom of her "precepts." And finally, 
 idealism interprets evolution as grounded in the absolute, 
 although this phrase may be taken to imply the common 
 travail in all things of an universal spirit, rather than the 
 transformation of the universe into an ingenious mechanical 
 toy. 
 
 II. 
 
 In turning from the attempt at a psychological synthesis 
 to the suggestion of a metaphysical and ethical synthesis, it 
 will be convenient to make the transition through a dis- 
 cussion of the problem of freedom. 
 
 I. Freedom. If action be prior to thought, then ethics may 
 possibly be prior to metaphysic . At least, one cannot go 
 far in philosophy without adopting some attitude to the 
 ethical problem of freedom. On the one hand, as with Froe- 
 bel, freedom may be a divine endowment, and real; on the 
 other, as with Herbart, it may be an inner harmony of ideas, 
 the creation of circumstance. . But there even seems to exist 
 a possibility of reconciling these apparently diverse positions. 
 That is to say, the quantum of truth in each may be mani- 
 fested in a theory which will explain the facts better than 
 either. For instance, the will may be neither free nor deter- 
 mined, but struggling out of determinism into freedom. 
 
 Herbart cannot reconcile himself to the notion of a transcen- 
 dental freedom. How then does he include morality? For 
 morality seems to stand or fall with responsibility, as re- 
 sponsibility stands or falls with the freedom of the will. 
 Nay, seems to be the rejoinder of Herbart, although man is | 
 not free, he acts none the less under the consciousness of 
 freedom. He therefore attributes to himself responsibility, 
 as others attribute it to him and he to others. But responsi- 
 bility stops with the actor, no matter what may be the ultimate 
 causes or occasions of the will. " However, if it be found 
 that the will had an earlier will as its source, the responsi- 
 bility begins again anew. The depraved man, after he has 
 become entirely bad, will be held to be completely responsible 
 for his crimes, but these again may be laid as a burden 
 
86 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 upon his corruptor, and so on backward as long as some- 
 where a will may be pointed out as the originator of those 
 crimes."^ This view appears to have the validity of origin, 
 but not of end. The will is not what it was, it is not its 
 own past causes and occasions, rather perhaps it is what it 
 is becoming. Herbart makes freedom an illusion, because 
 he finds causality behind it; but it may be regarded as a 
 reality, because it has power of transcendence before it. 
 
 Herbart agrees that there exists a self-control, in the sense 
 of capacity to repress our desires in the light of considera- 
 tions of good, and that this may be properly called freedom. 
 The stronger a man's self-control, the freer he is. " But, 
 whether such a strength can be increased ad infinitum, cannot 
 be determined by existing cases, for these indicate only a 
 limited power."^ Yet, it may be answered, if freedom as 
 self-control be capable of ever greater advances, then it 
 may be supposed to imply a leaven of the transcendental, 
 or a tendency to overcome the limits of circumstance and 
 time. 
 
 2. Progress and equilibrium. There would seem to be that 
 in the temperament of the individual which afltects the mode 
 of his metaphysical thought. He may gravitate towards 
 notions of rest, being, and permanence; or again to becom- 
 ing, progress and change. It would seem that a metaphysic 
 of unchangeable being marches with a notion of mental 
 equilibrium, and a metaphysic of becoming with the idea of 
 mental progress and evolution. Herbartianism tends on the 
 whole to the notion of mental equilibrium as the end. Many- 
 sided interest means equilibration. Indeed, many-sided in- 
 terest includes also an element of progress; but there is a 
 difference between its equable expansiveness and the passion- 
 ate self-activity of idealism. This difference is perhaps largely 
 of emphasis. An idealist will admit the need of mental bal- 
 ance, but will set greater store upon mental activity and the 
 tendency to self-expression. On the other hand, the follow- 
 ing description, by Herbart, of the normal condition of the 
 mind, may serve to illustrate his emphasis upon equilibrium. 
 "As the opposite of mental delusion and of passions, the 
 
 'Lehrbuch cur Psychologi*. Konigsbers, 1834. Par. 118. Note j. 
 ^Lehrbuch tur Psychologic. 1834. Par. 119. 
 
Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 87 
 
 sound mind involves mutual determination of all concepts 
 and desires through one another, or freedom from fixed ideas 
 and fixed desires. As the opposite of madness and emotion, 
 it involves repose and equanimity. As the opposite of 
 dementia and distraction, it involves coherence and concen- 
 tration of thought. As an opposite of idiocy and indolence, 
 it involves excitability and sprightliness."^ Only the last 
 sentence emphasises progress, and its terms are hardly satis- 
 factory to the idealist. To Froebel, to idealism, a sound mind 
 is an organised system of tendencies making for expression. 
 If these have due freedom, an adequate equilibrium should 
 follow of itself, but it will not be an all-sided equilibrium, 
 the same for all. 
 
 A synthesis seems to be requisite and conceivable. One 
 may regard the mind as normally in equilibrium, but it 
 must be a moving equilibrium; or one may regard it as a 
 force, but it must be an equilibrated force. Perhaps a 
 teacher may lean a little to the side of equilibrium, or of 
 progress, according to the demands of his own disposition. 
 
 3. Possibility and actuality. If the notion of an equilibrated 
 character be not static, perhaps it is comparatively so, over 
 against the idea of character as a development in which 
 inner potentialities are to realise their utmost value. The 
 former, the notion of Herbart, is almost Platonic; the latter, 
 the view of Froebel, distinctly Aristotelian." Consider for 
 a moment the teleological theory of Aristotle. All develops 
 from potentialities, which in themselves are neither non-being 
 nor actuality. Origin is to be regarded as that which in 
 actuality is not, but potentially is; its final cause is its 
 validity, its form, spirit, or meaning. But, so far as present 
 conditions are concerned, the development of potentialities 
 to actualities is a process never complete. To us, therefore, 
 potentialities are always in excess of actualities, though it is 
 conceivable that they may not necessarily and eternally be 
 so. For such a conception as that of God, as a Being in 
 whom potentialities are realised, and in whom activity is 
 not dead but equilibrated, may suggest a reconciliation be- 
 tween being and becoming, permanence and activity, and 
 
 ^Lehrbuch zur Psyckologie. i*34- Par. 140. „ , „, „, „», 
 
 'Aristotle. Metaphysics. Books VII. and VIII. and Book IV. Chap. XII. 
 
88 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 ideals as static and dynamic. It might be argued that the 
 Herbartian ideal of a manysided interest involves such a 
 reconciliation. 
 
 The teleological emphasis of Aristotle is in line with the 
 thought of evolutionary idealism. Life is seen as a process 
 of becomng, from the not-yet to the shall-be, and then from 
 the shall-be, which in the act of realisation becomes ipso 
 facto another not-yet, to the higher shall-be, and so forward. 
 For Aristotle, potentiality is that which possesses a principle 
 of development. It is that which under suitable conditions 
 will of its own inner self become. Evidently, applied to 
 education, the Aristotelian concept of becoming involves a 
 dynamic principle, universal and endless for human experi- 
 ence. And yet, the progressive ideal of the here and and 
 now may have its perfect pattern viewed sub specie eternitatis. 
 If so, there is no ultimate contradiction between the chang- 
 ing and developing aim of Froebelian education, and the per- 
 fectly equilibrated and all-sided ideal of Herbart. 
 
 4. Being and becoming. Though it be admitted that the 
 educational theory of Froebel is primarily concerned with 
 potentialities, and that of Herbart with actuality as such, it 
 remains true that the distinction is largely one of emphasis, 
 and the opposition to a degree abstract. Herbart is further 
 than Froebel from a concrete principle, because he will endow 
 the soul with no original potentialities. Possibly the view of 
 Froebel may be so given the benefit of the doubt as to clear- 
 ness and consistency as to be brought into line with the 
 suggested Aristotelian synthesis. To this synthesis may be 
 ascribed both a metaphysical and an ethical side. On the 
 ethical side, one has potentialities making for actualities, 
 which again become potentialities for progress. In such a 
 way, with Froebel, do instincts and impulses rise to the level 
 of the social mind. But progress may be a mere illusion, or 
 according to the suggestion of Rousseau, a real retrogression, 
 unless there be a summiim bonum conditioning it. Such a 
 highest good, such a perfect ideal, may be held to pervade 
 progressive ideals much as permanence pervades change in 
 the physical world. Change is inconceivable without perma- 
 nence, because if the result of change have no identity with 
 the ground of it, then there could have been nothing to be 
 
Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 89 
 
 changed. Change then is logically necessary only for the 
 finite. Physically, it seems to be within a self-identical 
 system. There is according to science an ultimate ground 
 of permanence in the universe, which becomes in all its parts. 
 What changes, is not substance but meaning. So it may 
 be held in the moral sphere, not unintelligibly, that the ulti- 
 mate ground of progressive ideals is a permanent and perfect 
 ideal. This ideal may conceivably be ours to the extent of 
 the lights in which we learn to see it, and according to the 
 meanings which we may become able to attribute to it. And 
 again, the underlying permanence of the universe need not 
 be dead, nor the summum bonutn motionless; but it may be 
 coming towards realisation in the finite, and this realisation 
 may be conceived less as dull satisfaction than perfected 
 activity. 
 
 From this point of view the perfect or Platonic idea, to 
 which Herbartian educators may logically turn, may have 
 an objective and real validity, and may be the standard to 
 which concrete individuals approximate. The " concept " boy 
 may be a real far oflE, divine event. Then the progressive 
 ideals that are dear to the educator " by development " may 
 be regarded as the filtrations of eternal truths, whose " white 
 radiance " is in part disguised in the medium of life, as by 
 " a dome of many-colored glass." And so this attempt at 
 an ethical and educational synthesis may be offered, that 
 although the immediate concern of the educator is with the 
 " percept " or individual child of Froebel, he should cling 
 to the belief that the " percept " child is a " concept " or 
 universal child at heart. It may be added, that so far as 
 class instruction in the schools is collective, it is addressed 
 necessarily to the " concept " child. Herbartianism has con- 
 tributed much that is valuable to the principles of class 
 teaching,^ without recognising so fully as does the kinder- 
 garten the worth of the individual. But the synthesis of 
 collective and individual teaching is hardly to be summar- 
 ised in an abstract phrase; it consists in the dynamic con- 
 crete readjustment, by the teacher, of the emphasis in given 
 situations. 
 
 ^Cf. e. g. Findlay, Principles of Class Teaching, London, 1904. passim. 
 
90 Herbart and Proebel. 
 
 The ethical reconciliation of being and becoming, or of 
 perfect and dynamic ideals, may suggest for those who are 
 willing to accept it a similar modus vivendi in ontology. It 
 may be argued that the fundamental problein in this branch 
 of metaphysic is causation. Something is, and something 
 happens; and causation, if it exist, is that which connects 
 the thing that is and the thing that happens. But the pre- 
 ceding discussion of being and becoming seems to suggest 
 that evolution may be a more helpful category than causa- 
 tion. For causation is a highly contradictory category. It 
 must be continuous, and yet continuity appears to annihilate 
 the distinction between cause and effect. Again, cause must 
 be and yet cannot be prior in time to effect. It involves 
 an indefinite regress from cause ^o cause ad inHnitum. Prac- 
 tically, causes are treated as a plurality, and yet the notion 
 of a plurality of causes is logically absurd.^ Apparently 
 then the most tenable view of change and of causation is 
 that in which the category of evolution is involved. In short, 
 there is need of a permanence to give an aspect of con- 
 tinuity, simultaneity, and unity to causation, as well as a new- 
 ness which gives it an aspect of change, temporal sequence 
 and plurality. Apparently it is the element of permanence 
 in change and causation which lies at the root of the ontology 
 of Herbartian realism. The other element, qualitative change, 
 is, except in certain closed and dogmatic systems, a principle 
 of idealistic ontology. It should follow that even the meta- 
 physical theories of Herbart and Froebel need not be wholly 
 excluded from the synthesis of an evolutionary theory of 
 reality, teleologically interpreted. The permanent being of 
 Herbart, and the becoming of Froebel, seem to be abstracted 
 aspects of this more concrete principle. But the suggestions 
 for a synthesis in this section are confessedly speculative. 
 
 5. Intellectualism and voluntarism. In the field of ethics, the 
 opposition of Herbart and Froebel may be illustrated not 
 only in relation to the problems of freedom and the ideal, 
 but also in relation to the question of how to educate char- 
 acter. It is true that Herbart no less than Froebel aims 
 at the good will as the end of education. Since Kant, repeats 
 
 'Cf. The Elements of Metaphysics. A. E. Taylor. London, igoj. 
 
Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 91 
 
 Herbart, nothing else can be called good but the good will.^ 
 Character then is the thing desired. Notwithstanding, within 
 this consensus, it would appear that Herbart and Froebel 
 respectively emphasise intellect and feeling. If now the in- 
 tellect and feeling be set obstinately over against one another, 
 or if the will be regarded as a third coordinate factor with 
 them, and no more, then there does not seem to be a tenable 
 ground for a synthesis. But it is perhaps preferable to 
 regard feeling and intellect as the content of the mind at 
 a given plane of intersection. Then the will is the mind 
 in action, or in the exercise of its function of controlling 
 experience. From this point of view, thought as distinguished 
 from feeling will refer to the focus of mental strain; and 
 the marginal element in consciousness will be present essen- 
 tially as feeling. Such a psychological analysis may pave 
 the way for a synthesis of the emphasis of Herbart upon 
 thought with the emphasis laid by Froebel upon feeling. 
 The psychological ground of the synthesis will be, that the 
 mind is only concrete as will; that thinking is teleologically 
 conditioned with reference to willing, or more simply, that 
 it functions as a means to the control of activities; and that 
 feeling may be regarded as a dynamo, which provides a 
 " head " or motive power for thought and action. 
 
 For Herbart the will depends upon ideas, which in turn 
 are externally provided. Herbart experienced a difficulty 
 in reconciling the determinism of this hypothesis with the 
 moral sanction of personal responsibility. In order to escape 
 from this dilemma he advanced a doctrine as it were of 
 two wills. He distinguished sharply between character as 
 objective and as subjective.^ The will before reflection differs 
 from the will after reflection. In accordance with this change, 
 educational methodology has to effect a transition from the 
 appeal to external control to a reliance upon inner self- 
 discipline.' In a word, the will before reflection is deter- 
 mined; after reflection, free. The self before reflection is 
 a product; after it, an agent. The distinction is not only 
 significant; but within limits acceptable. But by what magic 
 
 'Herbart refers to Kant, Grundlegtmg tur Metaphysik der SiUen. Section i. 
 ^Cf. Pad. Schirfl- hrsg. Willman. Leipzig, 1880. II. pp. 457-8. 
 ^Ibid. II, p. 524. 
 
92 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 can there be a transition from a purely objective to a sub- 
 jective will? Can freedom and self-control rest upon a 
 basis of mere determinism? Nay, one is compelled to answer, 
 the objective will must have contained in itself the implicit 
 principle of selfhood. But this is evolutionary idealism, and 
 not the philosophy of Herbart. 
 
 The contradiction that is involved in a rigid distinction 
 between the subjective will and the objective will is reflected 
 in Herbartian educational theory. Herbart himself attacked 
 only transcendental freedom; and not inner freedom or 
 freedom in general.^ But the educator qua educator is to 
 be a determinist. " The freedom principle," writes Hayward, 
 " sounds well in university class-rooms, and may, indeed, 
 represent a fundamental philosophical truth; but as an edu- 
 cational maxim it is useless if not pernicious." And again: 
 " We must be, in so far as we are educators, determinists."" 
 But for Froebel, education is a process of liberation, and 
 even of the exercise of freedom or selfactivity. The notion 
 that freedom may be a fundamental truth, and yet obnoxious 
 in education, is worthy of a science of casuistry. But the 
 Herbartian who is willing to admit, in the objective will, 
 an implicit principle of conscious self-control, is virtually on 
 the way to the suggested teleological and evolutionary 
 synthesis. 
 
 The relation of the will to thought and feeling was dif- 
 ferently conceived by Herbart and by Froebel. Herbart 
 as well as Froebel would have the child to be an active agent.* 
 For Herbart: "Action generates the will out of desire."* 
 Action, that is, is the immediate ancestor of the will; but 
 action itself depends upon desire, which in the Herbartian 
 psychology is essentially a product of ideas. Herbart adds: 
 " But^ca£acity_ and opportunity are necessary to action."^ 
 To this Froebel would have~agreed, though he might have 
 wished to add that action is a factor even in the making 
 of opportunities. For Herbart, thought is essentially prior 
 to action ; for Froebel, action is rather prior to thought. Her- 
 
 'Piidagogische Schriften. (Sallwurk). II. p. aa?. Note. 
 ^The Secret of Herbart. 1904. p. 30. 
 
 ^Pddagogiiche Schrijten. iSallwiirk], I. pp. 233-4. Or see Felkin, The Science of Edu- 
 cation, p. aiQ. 
 *lbid. I. p. aaS. 
 
Possibility of a Philosophical Synthesis. 93 
 
 bart practically deduced the will out of thought through desire. 
 Froebel, on the other hand, preceded from inner desire to 
 thought by way of action and will. So far as Herbart may 
 over-emphasise ideas, or Froebel feeling, in relation to will, 
 a synthesis has already been suggested. For the will has 
 been regarded as the concrete and dynamic mind of which 
 intellect and feeling are sectional phases. 
 
 From the point of view of an evolution interpreted in the 
 light of ideals, the synthesis may be somewhat differently 
 expressed. Feeling then appears to constitute the terminus 
 of origin, and selfconscious activity to characterise the goal. 
 Feeling and thought are then not opposites but co-laborers 
 in personal activity. In the evolution from mere feeling 
 to a higher form of self-consciousness, feeling, as motive 
 power, is not lost ; but persists along with thought, the guid- 
 ing hand. But evolutionary idealism may suggest a synthesis 
 that runs deeper still. It may suggest, on the side of origin, 
 that thought can only have arisen out of a feeling whose 
 ultimate nature and basis is rational. And again, the thought 
 that enters into the goal of feeling, while it does not eradi- 
 cate sense, really does attempt to reorganise sense upon a 
 higher plane. So the naturalness, the sympathy of Froebel 
 may be reconciled with the clear mental vision of Herbart. 
 If both reason and feeling function in activity, then reason 
 is not for the elimination of feelings, or even of passions; 
 but rather for their location, adaptation and control. 
 
 6. The education of character. The intellectualism of Her- 
 bartian, the voluntarism of Froebelian education aim alike 
 at the goal of character. But if there be any validity in the 
 Aristotelian distinction between goodness of intellect and 
 goodness of character, of which the former is declared to 
 be of time and teaching, and the latter of habit, then Her- 
 bart and Froebel may be said to respectively represent these 
 abstract terms of the mental series. Herbart represents 
 goodness of intellect, and the formative aspect of time and 
 teaching upon such goodness. Froebel represents goodness 
 of character, born of the habit of moral activity. This good- 
 ness is equally amenable to education, so far as education 
 is content with the guidance of inner activities, though it 
 is of a kind liable to rebel against dogmatism. But the anti- 
 
94 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 thesis is imperfect, and largely a tribute to emphasis. Per- 
 haps so far as one may look at goodness in a quasi-Platonic 
 way, that is to say, as an intellectual possession, it is Her- 
 bart who indicates how education may promote it. But, 
 when the question is of the good in use, or when one's 
 attitude is Aristotelian, then Froebel may become the more 
 helpful. Herbart, regarding the mind as it were in cross 
 section, justly emphasises the ethical import of the mental 
 content which a cross section appears to reveal; just as 
 Froebel, seeing the mind as process, prefers to lay stress 
 upon the tenor of its activities. Herbart may be right to 
 the extent that even a transcendental will can hardly act 
 without a content; Froebel to the degree that no content, 
 which is merely a content, or merely objective, can possibly 
 give birth to a subject mind. 
 
 If indeed the case stand so, then Herbart and Froebel 
 may correct one another where there is direst need of recti- 
 fication. Herbart has contributed to moral teaching an 
 emphasis upon the power of ideas in the making of char- 
 acter.^ It may also be well that he should have treated 
 morality as a thing not given, but produced in the process 
 of living. And yet, each time that the educator would put 
 into practice the recipe of Herbart for man-making, let 
 Froebel remind him that he is dealing with a personality 
 having potentialities as unfathomable as his own. If the 
 educator can establish no sympathetic communion with this 
 cognate will, his house of moral instruction is built on a 
 foundation no better than sand. 
 
 ^a. Padagogische SchrijUn. (Sallwurk). pp. 114-5. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 An Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. 
 
 In the course of the preceding chapters, attempts have 
 been made to anticipate to a degree the synthesis of Her- 
 bart and Froebel in the field of education. And chiefly, the 
 problem of the education of character, the problem of freedom 
 in education, and the problem of the nature and possibility 
 of knowledge have received explicit attention. It now appears 
 to be necessary to devote a chapter to the synthetic treat- 
 ment of more technical educational categories. 
 
 I. Society and the curriculum. Both for Herbart and for 
 Froebel, the curriculum is a system of social values. By 
 its agency, or rather by the agency of the pTocess of educa- 
 tion to which it ministers, the individual is to be socialiagd. 
 In a relatively static society, such as that of the Chinese 
 tradition, the attempt may be made to promote an adjust- 
 ment of the individual to his environment with a finality 
 that is foreign to the spirit of western civilisation. But in a 
 democracy, the curriculum will be formulated with the aim 
 of adjusting individuals to social ideals rather than to any 
 state of society that has been fully actualised. It will be 
 in a manner sensitive to the progressive reorganisation of 
 individual and social functions. Its value_j5dll_be to pro- 
 niote_cooperation,— tb€~possifeili4y-ef— an— adequate-speciaHsa- 
 tion.J3i-functions, ,aiid,jyie._due .relation of the theoretical to 
 thf; practical life Its tendency is to divide into two sections, 
 of which the sciences, industries, and sundry processes form 
 one, and that the democratic section, while the humanities 
 form the other section, which tends to be intellectual and 
 aristocratic.___.TJie Herbartian ten4eft€y-'is~t«— eSpSasise^the 
 latter aspect of the curriculum. The Froebelian bias, at 
 least in the occupations and gifts, is rather towards processes. 
 But a synthesis may be conceived, wherein the humanities 
 may become practical, and science and the manual arts 
 human. Indeed it would appear that for a synthetic educa- 
 tional system art and industry, or rather the cultural and 
 
96 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 the occupational side of the curriculum, represented in a 
 way by Herbart and Froebel respectively, should go hand 
 in hand. There are obvious anticipations of this view in 
 Ruskin and Morris, and in the whole movement of the arts 
 and crafts. 
 
 Herbart appears to draw nearer than Froebel to the com- 
 mon-sense view of education, as the attempt to get a curric- 
 ulum of facts into the minds of the less mature members 
 of society. The element of truth in this view may be the 
 principle, that the curriculum is not accordinz to nature in _ 
 any primitive or original sense; but rather according to 
 culture,, or xSiniaSes7~or if you will, nature teleologically 
 interpreted. The Herbartian analysis of the curriculum is 
 distinctively cultural. Indeed, the followers of Herbart have 
 relied so much upon the achievements of the race, that in 
 their anxiety to recapitulate these achievements, in extreme 
 cases they have almost closed their eyes to the necessity 
 for further progress. For epochs of culture can tell of little 
 more than historic fact, so far as even this is known; and 
 value can only be attributed to such fact in the light of the 
 needs and aspirations of the present day. Not only Herbart 
 but Froebel also has the social ideal. It will be indicated 
 that Froebel, for his part, may at times have wavered between 
 the standards of civilisation and original nature, and so 
 between the normative and genetic methods. He may have 
 been justified in his many concessions to original nature, to 
 the extent that education is a process of the liberation as well 
 as the guidance of the human spirit. At least, so far as 
 Froebel may have emphasised original activities, and Her- 
 bart cultural values, the following adjustment of emphasis 
 may be offered. Genetic method may criticise, illustrate, 
 amplify, and interpret; but only out of civilisation are born 
 the fundamental standards of the valuable. The genetic 
 method is itself unintelligible apart from a supplementary 
 reflux of light from the zone of adult achievement. 
 
 It may be desirable to add, that to a certain degree both 
 Herbart and Froebel attained to the reconciliation of a norma- 
 tive with a genetic methodology. The method of Froebel 
 may be said to have been the guidance of a .socialising 
 process, by means of material drawn from what the child 
 
Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. 97 
 
 at each successive stage of his development may be able 
 to see as at unity with himself. The criterion of Herbart 
 may be even more normative, and less genetic; yet these 
 two aspects may be discriminated also in it. It is the body 
 of racial experience, therefore an ulterior end; and yet this 
 end is to be attained by a sort of genetic process of the 
 recapitulation of culture epochs. Thus both Herbart and 
 Froebel have attempted, each in his own way, to reconcile 
 genesis with aim. 
 
 2. Educational values. The school of Herbart represents 
 to a degree a theory of the gradation of culture values. It 
 sets for example the humanities above the study of nature. 
 There appears to~be a species of validity in the stress upon 
 culture, which man has achieved, over against such a nature, 
 say, as Rousseau had posited in his curriculum for the educa- 
 tion of Emile. Yet ultimately the sciences, which some have 
 opposed to culture as if they were original and given truths 
 of nature, are as truly human achievements as the humanities. 
 
 With Froebel, nature might seem to be preferred above 
 culture. But his standard of value in the occupations and 
 gifts is social. And, even were this not so, his spiritual 
 interpretation of nature would bestow a human significance 
 upon the study of it. Thus the possibility of a reconciliation 
 between Herbart and Froebel is suggested. But what form 
 shall the synthesis take? Have all subjects of the curriculum, 
 rightly methodised, an equal educational value? Not so, if 
 equal means the same, and any other sense of the word is 
 here unintelligible. Manual training, however treated, can 
 hardly have the same educational value as poetry. Rather, 
 for practical purposes, their values are not wholly commen- 
 surable. But the following suggestion for a synthesis en- 
 deavours to allow for what is valid in the views of both 
 Herbart and Froebel. It seeks to preserve the theory of 
 Herbart, that the subjects of the curriculum have different 
 and graded values, without a denial of Froebel's principle 
 of the essential unity of man and nature. The suggestion 
 is this, that while there are subjects in the curriculum which 
 possess specialised and to a degree graded values, yet the 
 very existence of these subjects is determined by human 
 7 
 
98 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 needs. Thus the values of the subjects of the curriculum 
 are not the creation of independent compartments of original 
 fact. They are indeed determined by the indispensableness 
 of the relationships that may be established between the ideal 
 set up by society, and the needs and aspirations of the indi- 
 vidual life. Then, if this be so, the subjects of the school 
 curriculum are logical divisions imposed by the social spirit 
 upon the material of knowledge for the realisation of human 
 purposes. The value of a school subject is essentially the 
 extent to which it may be made to minister to those purposes. 
 3. Correlation and concentration. Just as the subjects of 
 the curriculum are related as to their value by a common 
 reference to human purposes, so it seems reasonable to 
 correlate them as to their content in the process of teach- 
 ing. Correlation is one of the practical recommendations of 
 the school of Herbart. Froebel also related the activities 
 of the child to a central object; but correlation is not the 
 same conception with Froebel as with Herbart. For Her- 
 bart, correlation is based upon a theory of associatr6n~of 
 ideas j^n _th£jjidivM»;Ei^imn^^ life oljhought be 
 
 not sporadic^ jdeas^mus^^^ accordiagL to, a pjocess 
 
 directed by the teacher from .without. Without instruction 
 to complete the organisation of ideas, the house of thought, 
 and thence of will, might be divided against itself so that 
 it could not stand. To Froebel, however, correlation is just 
 the recognition of the fundamental oneness of the individual 
 with society. For the curriculum is a systematised sum- 
 mary of civilisation, held in the social medium. The indi- 
 vidual, however, is in purpose and function social. Correla- 
 tion, then, is from this point of view a process of carrying 
 over the inward unity of the self to the field of its mani- 
 festation or liberation. Froebel's is perhaps the truer notion 
 of correlation, in that correlation is not of and among ex- 
 ternals, but of social norms and the individual life. Even 
 so, Herbart has done more than Froebel, on the technical 
 side, for the recognition of correlation as a principle. To 
 the extent of the validity of his psychology of the blendings 
 and fusions of ideas he has given an invaluable account of 
 its educational functions. It is not to be forgotten that the 
 curriculum itself exists in a medium of thought, that thought 
 
Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. gg 
 
 to be worthy of the name must be organised and vital, and 
 that in the curriculum must be preserved at once the vitality, 
 the reality of the outer world, and of the child also. The 
 correlation which tends to externality, including that which 
 forms the essence of the Herbartian methodology, has to be 
 fitted together with the methodology of the little child. 
 Probably indeed the feasibility of so delicate a task may hinge 
 upon an hereditary harmony of the child with society. 
 
 So far as concentration means technically a particular 
 variety of correlation, it is opposed in principle to the co- 
 ordination of a number of equivalent groups. In concentra- 
 tiqn there is one m ain, tnpir. .abautjKhich others ai£gESBped. 
 In co-ordination there.. may -hs^s. jnarobsr-jQi_.su£k_top,icSi. as 
 with Dr. Harris, five.^ Froebel's correlation is of the con- 
 centric type; now all centers about the ball, and anon about 
 another and yet another gift or occupation. Perhaps there 
 is something lacking about almost all formulations of the 
 principle of correlation. Even that which relates the school 
 to life,^ and reflects the life unity in the school curriculum, 
 may be open to misinterpretation. For it would seem that 
 the true life unity is an ideal or teleological unity; and that 
 the true correlation is not after all a mere unity of reference 
 to the life of the moment, so much as a unity of application 
 in a system of ends. 
 
 4. The formal steps of method. Thus far, little has been 
 said of method as such. At the same time, it has been 
 suggested that curriculum and method are after all the same 
 thing considered in different aspects. T he curriculum is an 
 organisation o£-cldIisa.tijQii,,.an_.instit.utinnal .aSaJr^ Like_all 
 instituiions,-.iJLisLibexrffire„iales.seiK;e_ajne^^^ 
 are the meth ods throu gh ajid_i^ which society coiiyeys to 
 indivi35als-its,. social-norms. The curriculum may be viewed 
 as such a means pr„,iiielhod»- It seems to follow that the 
 current distinction between curriculum and method can only 
 refer to a given something viewed statically or habitually, 
 and the same thing viewed dynamically^. _Method^_if_,you 
 will, is dynamic curriculum.- Curriculum itself is crystallised 
 method. 
 
 ^Psychological Foundations of Education. In International Education Series, p. sas- 
 'Cf. The School and Society. Dewey, p. 107. 
 
100 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 A' serious consequence of the stated relation of matter 
 to method is that no formal method should aspire to uni- 
 versal validity. For if method be the subject matter as 
 dynamic, it cannot be uniform, unless the subject matter 
 be so. Yet modern Herbartians tend to assume a uniformity 
 of method in educational operations. For instance, they would 
 begin each set recitation with a period of review, according 
 to the routine engendered by the mechanical tendency of a 
 psychology of mere associationism. It might be more scientific 
 in principle to regulate reviews by the demands of the par- 
 ticular situation. The function of reviews may be less to 
 secure knowledge, or clearness, than power. In that case, 
 the ultimate criterion of the necessity of reviews may be the 
 need of energising an achieved mental content. 
 
 This illustration may suggest a further argument against 
 the uniformity of the method of the recitation. The first 
 argument was, that method cannot be uniform, because it is 
 dynamic subject matter, and subject matter is not uniform. 
 Now by dynamic subject matter is meant, the curriculum 
 as functioning with the mind of the child. Two causes 
 evidently preclude the uniformity of this functioning. In the 
 first place, as has been said, the subject matter varies; and 
 in the second place the mind of the child varies. Method 
 ought then to concede somewhat to individuality ; for to make 
 it uniform is to explain away something of the concreteness 
 of life. 
 
 Finally, it is to be said of the five formal steps that ulti- 
 mately they are not logical divisions of a lesson period so 
 much as principles of a psychological process. Clearness, 
 association, system and method^ are types of mental activity, 
 although even as such it is difficult to regard them as at 
 all uniform or final. 
 
 It may not be clear that what has been said of the formal 
 steps has much to do with a synthesis of Herbart and Froe- 
 bel. But the individual psychology of Froebel, his endeavour 
 to get at the inner life of each child, makes as decisively 
 for diversity of method, as the more mechanical psychology 
 of Herbart makes for uniformity. And something like a 
 
 •Herbart, Pddagogische Schriflen. Sallwiirk. I. p. 157. 
 
Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. loi 
 
 synthesis has been indicated, inasmuch as the formal steps 
 of the school of Hcrbart are valid, to the extent that they 
 may be seen to assist, in many concrete cases, the function- 
 ing together of the curriculum and the child. But this will 
 neither uniformly nor always be the case, according to the 
 principles of the foregoing analysis. 
 
 5. The theory of culture epochs. What has been said of the 
 formal stq^s of method may suggest some remarks upon the 
 f ormal theo ry of epochs of culture. Apparently, the child 
 comes to scFiooJ with a system of needs, conditioned by a 
 genetic process through which he has inherited his civilised 
 estate. This thought has led to such conclusions, as that 
 the child is to run rapidly yet freely through recapitulatory 
 stages about which hangs the aroma of a past of primitivism, 
 perhaps even of arboreal and piscatorial life. Early child- 
 hood has been regarded as a period in which these phases 
 of origin may be worked out and worked oflf, especially in 
 play. I'lay in this sense, as spontaneous, is opposed to work. 
 This antithesis is at variance with Froebel's thought of play, 
 that it is, or should be, an anticipation of social function. 
 Without doubt the child mind is apt to behave in a manner 
 that suggests many typical primitive activities. If this be 
 an evolutionary recurrence, or any kind of atavistic phe- 
 nomenon, it is probably more desirable to guide such mani- 
 festations than to obstruct them. For recapitulatory activities 
 that are in line with social evolution may be expected to 
 be amenable to a measure of social control. 
 
 The older Herbartians used to dogmatise about culture 
 epochs, lacking either a standard of value for the alleged 
 primitive activities, an analysis of what these may really 
 be, a reasonable historical perspective of the order of their 
 recurrence, or a notion of where to begin or end with them. 
 Should one begin with, or educate for, the aquatic stage, 
 if ever one existed? Or should education first take cog- 
 nisance of simian activities, or those of primitive man; or 
 if first of the latter, of what kind or stage of him? Accord- 
 ing to Sallwurk, the error of Ziller, Staude and Rein is that 
 they have omitted to establish a real correspondence between 
 individual and racial development. " Lack of the historic 
 
102 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 sense is above all a characteristic of the Zillerian school."^ 
 But though the fact of correspondence be admitted, it affords 
 no standard of educational values. It becomes for education 
 a mere emphasis on the significance of impulses as such, 
 apart from their quality, and apart from their desirability. 
 Indeed, it may also be held to affect the order in which 
 parts of the curriculum should be presented to the child. 
 But the question of the priority of subject to subject in time 
 appears to be in part determined by the interests appealed 
 to and the methods employed. 
 
 It might be possible for Herbart and Froebel to agree that 
 genetic epochs of culture matter to education only at second 
 hand. That is to say, even if the historic culture of the race 
 were fully known and understood, its worth would have to 
 be estimated in terms of the standards erected by modern 
 intelligence. For example, the hunting instinct as such is 
 not to be cultivated merely because at one time it may 
 have been vital to human subsistence. It is only to be 
 cultivated in so far as the hunting activity retains a value 
 in the present constitution of society. And so, just as 
 Froebel appreciated play not merely as impulse, but also as 
 something implicitly social, Herbart may have really empha- 
 sised the Odyssey less for its mere priority in human experi- 
 ence than for its social value. Thus it does not seem im- 
 possible to reconcile what is reasonable in a theory of epochs 
 of culture, and the recapitulation of them, with twentieth 
 century standards of worth. 
 
 6. Technique. The formal steps, and certain " culture 
 epoch " curricula, are among the indications of the strength 
 of Herbartianism on the side of technique. This does not 
 appear to be accidental, but a natural consequence of the 
 Herbartian tendency to centralise the education process rather 
 as it were in the teacher than the child.^ Herbart himself, it 
 is true, did not emphasise technicalities so much as his school 
 has done. " I am not such a fool," he wrote, " as to imagine 
 that the salvation of mankind depends on such trifling aids, 
 which may more or less lighten the burden of instruction."' 
 
 ^Sallwurk. Handel undWandelderPddagogischerSchitleHerbarts. Lan^nsalza, x885,p.39. 
 ^Cf, Pddagogische Schriften. hrsg. SEulwiirk, 1. p. 183. Or Felkin, Science of Educa- 
 tion. Boston 1902. 13. 159. 
 
 ^Pddagogische Schriften. hrsg. Sallwurk. I. p. 183. 
 
Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. 103 
 
 Yet the mathematical and mechanical bias of the psychology 
 of Herbart has lent itself to a high degree of technical elabora- 
 tion. Froebel, for his part, seems to care less for technique 
 than for the spirit of instruction. For him, the mother is 
 the queen of teachers. It is quite a question whether indeed 
 the teacher should rely more upon settled devices, or upon 
 initiative, charged as it should perhaps be from the dynamo 
 of feeling. The teacher of zeal and enthusiasm may make 
 his curriculum dynamic, and therefore self-methodising. On 
 the other hand, mere enthusiasm without technique is lack- 
 ing in economy. If it be conceivable that the very science, 
 the very technique, the very habit of education may be 
 informed by passion, then in such a temper do I conceive 
 the reconciliation of the spirit of Herbart and Froebel to 
 lie. According to this view, formal devices, formal methods, 
 are apt to be valuable in proportion as they are or become 
 the teacher's own. They need to be energised and animated 
 by an adequate force of will and feeling. 
 
 7. Instruction. For Froebel, the activities of the child 
 ! appear to regulate the method of instruction. But, accord- 
 ing to Herbart, it is better to leave method in the hands of 
 the teacher. There is a sense in which one cannot but 
 adopt the view of Herbart. The teacher, not the child, 
 reflects upon the method of instruction; therefore the teacher, 
 not the child, is able to control it' Moreover, Herbart 
 believed as fully as Froebel that the teacher should defer 
 in his instruction to psychological modes of activity. But 
 Herbart conceived these modes differently from Froebel. For 
 Herbart they were mathematical, for Froebel rather " divine ;" 
 for Herbart typical, for Froebel individual ; for Herbart plas- 
 tic, for Froebel to a degree elastic. Now if the mind be 
 mathematical, uniform and plastic, it is clear that instruction 
 will be for education, like motley for Jacques, " the only 
 wear." " I admit," confessed Herbart, " having no notion 
 of education without instruction, just as conversely I can 
 imagine no instruction that does not educate."^ 
 „ But_for_ FroebeL.edacatiorLJa-.as- mu£k_hy_a2ESti±ion as 
 instruction^- Jt-4s--4J©tj--as-k-4s-with-JHerbaTt^^^_a^ of 
 
 '■Alleemeine Padaeoeik. X. Par. ii. , _ . , „ 
 
 ^Padagogische Scnnften. hrsg. Sallwurk. I. p. aio. Or Felkin, Sctence of Education. 
 Boston, 1902. p. 192. 
 
I04 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 fillingthe mind from without. For the child cries_put^ for 
 education. In a certain sense, and from a certain point of 
 view, the child is his own instructor. It may not be difficult 
 to reconcile in some measure this mode of emphasis upon 
 inner activity with the emphasis of Herbart upon instruction. 
 Writers like Linde have conceived a synthetic " developing- 
 presentative method."^ The problem may resolve itself into 
 this form: does the environment fashion the child, or the 
 child the environment? If the former, then education is 
 instruction merely; if the latter, it resembles the develop- 
 ment of a Leibnitzian monad, as a process moving entirely 
 from within outward. But in this extreme form neither 
 hypothesis is tenable. If life be of the nature of an inter- 
 action of organism with environment, then neither can be 
 ultimately conceived as static. In fact, the environment 
 unbends to the child, and so far as may be accommodates 
 itself to him, from birth to maturity. Conceive education 
 then as interaction; and the antithesis between instruction, 
 and development from within, loses its absolute character. 
 For the teacher will still instruct, without depriving the 
 child of freedom. He will not create men according to his 
 will, as Herbart would almost suggest,'' neither will he abstain 
 from interference with " nature." But his function, in a word, 
 will be guidance. The possibility of guidance may depend 
 upon the communion which the teacher enjoys on the one 
 hand with the child, and on the other hand with the environ- 
 ment with which the child interacts. In any case, into guidance 
 there enter two factors, whether we know them as nature 
 and culture, or origin and value, or the child and the curri- 
 culum, or the individual and society. To emphasise the 
 former in each pair of categories is to emphasise freedom; 
 to lay stress upon the latter in each case indicates pre- 
 occupation with control. Freedom is perhaps the more Froe- 
 belian principle; but into it enters social control. Control 
 ■, is the message of Herbart; but freedom is smuggled into it 
 , through the gate of interest. In a synthesis, what is needed 
 appears to be a redistribution of the balance of emphasis. 
 Such a redistribution may be suggested by the term guidance. 
 
 ^Cf. Linde. Der darsttUende Unterricht. p. 49. 
 
 *C/. p. g. Pddagogische Schriften, Sallwurk. L p. 173. 
 
Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. 105 
 
 It is true that guidance is interference ; but it is not so much 
 interference with activities, as interference for activities. 
 
 8. Education for vocation. Herbart and Froebel are agreed 
 that the purpose of instruction, is. to promote . character. B ut 
 it J^s desirab le to give to characte r a v ery definite content. 
 For instanceTls cEaracter a possession of the individual, or 
 the mode of his functioning? In concrete cases this ques- 
 tion generally takes a narrower form. Is education, in the 
 narrower sense of the word, cultural; or is it essentially 
 vocational? Thus on the one hand, some cu lture seems_ due 
 
 to the^inrliviHiial as. th/?: hi'rthn'ght nf Viis map )if> oH J Fj^mati 
 
 has a higher nature, higher possibi lities, it is ultima tely for 
 these possibilities and f or this natu re that education is^ Her- 
 bart there forg_feTt""nTat""education should prodijfce many-sid'ed 
 and cultured m ^^I^^EdtfCatiuu, irtJ"5aid, du ea" not work f or the 
 calling, the vocatio n, in "llfe.^ But everything depends upon 
 the irTferpretatiorToT vocation so-called. With Froebel, edu- 
 cation is for vocation, but not for any trade or superficial 
 occupation merely. Vocation according to Froebel is a 
 " divine " calling to make the best of one's possibilities. But 
 vocation in this ethical sense is not inconsistent with the 
 Herbartian definition of the end of education. The difference 
 is perhaps this, that for Herbart it is an outer voice that calls ; 
 an inner voice for Froebel. And again, the principles of 
 Froebel, unlike those of Herbart, are not very definitely 
 opposed to education for vocation in the more utilitarian 
 sense. The soul, thought Froebel, can find freedom and 
 realisation not only in history, and literature, and mathe* 
 matics, but again in the trivial round of daily opportunity. 
 
 Indeed, in a modern society there needs to be education 
 for specialised function. For consider society as a member- 
 ship, or as an organism, if " organism " be interpreted not 
 merely on a biological plane, but psychically. Society then 
 appears to be a " vicarious " system, an association of men 
 to bear one another's burdens, an organisation of innumer- 
 able functions, an attempt at an equilibration of many dif- 
 ferentiated occupations and pursuits. This is the character 
 of society in Plato's ideal republic, where men are to be 
 counsellors, artists, soldiers, according to innate fitness and 
 
 ^Pddagogischt Sckriften. (Sallwurk). I. p. 233. 
 
io6 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 public training. It persists not only in ideal communities, 
 such as More's Utopia and the New Atlantis of Bacon; but 
 in all historical societies and states, in republics, monarchies, 
 oligarchies, and conspicuously in feudal organisations. In 
 certain respects regard for the highly specialised organism 
 of twentieth century society appears likely to swell the cry 
 for an education for vocation to an irresistible clamor. 
 Science has already been forced into the curriculum by social 
 needs, so that the literae humaniores are no longer without a 
 rival. Manual training is said to have many values; but 
 perhaps ultimately it is in an industrial bias that its strength 
 in public opinion lies. Indeed, the two facts that have done 
 more than anything else to establish a vocational emphasis 
 in education are probably the development of public opinion 
 as a social force and the industrial character of the present 
 age. Industry has strong claims upon the patience if not 
 devotion of an educator. It has come to color the literature, 
 the science, the art, the politics, and the whole life of the 
 present. It has reorganised society on a commercial basis. 
 It has made factories instead of families the units of work. 
 It has made actual a broad culture and a high standard 
 of luxury such as were previously only possible to the lim- 
 ited few. It may soon afford to all workers an unprecedented 
 margin of leisure. It would seem therefore to be a social 
 duty to educate for the transmission and development of the 
 processes of industry that have done so much for the higher 
 values of life, and may do so much more. And, again, the 
 case for industry is prima facie a case for vocational training, 
 if only because specialised vocational functioning is the 
 chief principle of the organisation of modem industrial 
 development. 
 
 Therefore, at the present day, one dare hardly sever edu- 
 cation from vocation so sharply as did Herbart. Herbartians 
 may be fundamentally right in attributing, say to the Odyssey, 
 a greater culture value than to manual training. And yet, Greek 
 is only for the few, and if manual training be culturally 
 treated, it may be possible to atone for a conceivable loss 
 in intensity by the wider extension of educational influence. 
 Such a plea, did they stand in need of it, might also justify 
 the place of nature study and science in the school cur- 
 
Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. 107 
 
 riculum. The vocational, the industrial, tends to be scientific 
 and physical. The aim of the teacher then will be, to 
 humanise science and to idealise nature. So far as this may 
 be done, Herbart and Froebel at their best are reconciled. 
 For now, first, in industrial training there will be a basis 
 for ultimate vocational efficiency. Second, in its idealisation, 
 there will be a foundation for reconciling the work with the 
 personality. Third, in industrial training for all, there will 
 be laid the groundwork of a social sympathy even between 
 classes whose interests at present almost lack a point of 
 contact. Fourth, the traditions of a democratic society will 
 be so far respected, that without abandoning the notion that 
 each man has a place, the set and rigid distinctions of a 
 caste system may be avoided, and the opportunity be left 
 to each individual to make a place for himself according 
 to the potentialities of his nature and' the quality of his 
 energies. 
 
 II. 
 
 Thus far, the attempt has been made in this chapter to 
 indicate the possibility of a synthesis of Herbart and Froebel 
 in the direction of curriculum and method. Without 'alto- 
 gether forsaking these topics, the second part of the chapter 
 will center about the traditional opposition of nature and 
 culture. In a sense, Froebel stands for the emphasis upon 
 nature; and Herb art f or_tha omptiagj;^ npnn mltiirp Is it 
 possible to reconcile the principle of education according to 
 nature with that of education for an institutional life? 
 
 I. Nature and civilisation. Rousseau appears to have mis- 
 taken the stagnancy of the institutions of his day for sheer 
 degeneracy. He even came to consider civilisation as a fall 
 from a better and happier state of nature. To him, then, 
 it logically seemed better for education to follow nature 
 rather than to follow civilisation. Thus for Emile, at least 
 so far as common sense would tolerate such a doctrine, 
 instincts and tendencies were to be everything, curriculum 
 nothing. Back to nature lay the path of man. This note 
 helped to stir Leasing and Herder, Kant and Pestalozzi, 
 Goethe and Schiller, Froebel and Herbart. It tended to lib- 
 erate thought and to emphasise feeling. With Pestalozzi 
 
io8 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 it found part and lot in educational theory and practice. Fol- 
 lowing nature, becoming a child with the child, is one aspect 
 of the doctrine of Froebel. But to Froebel and Pestalozzi 
 there was no ultimate opposition between nature and culture. 
 Herbart was even convinced that culture or civilisation is 
 prior to nature in education. He may be said to have led 
 a distinct reaction against the educational views of Rousseau. 
 " To leave man to nature, or even to wish to lead him to, 
 and train him up in, nature, is mere folly. . . . We 
 know our aim, nature does much to aid us, and humanity 
 has gathered much on the road she has already traversed; 
 it is our task to pin them together."^ But before we proceed 
 to pin them together, there is a question to be answered. 
 What is nature? There is perhaps no other category so 
 ambiguous. At the least, the following senses of the term 
 are distinguishable and vital to the present topic. To the 
 scientist, nature is an externality to be accurately described. 
 To the poet, nature is a background to human emotion. To 
 the idealist, nature is the expression of spirit or reason. To 
 Rousseauists, nature is primitivism or origin. And to the 
 moralist, nature is that which ought to be. To Froebel 
 nature tends to mean a sort of combination of all of these. 
 In the last analysis, as nature is to him something social 
 and divine, he is not very far from Herbart. 
 
 The opposition of nature and culture is sometimes expressed 
 as an og£ositiqn of heredity an.dj£nYir.onjm£nt^_ofJjaiiiure.and 
 nurture.. In Huxley and Matthew Arnold the antithesis, 
 r\AU-ire. jierxux cilltnrp , leads tr> a respective emphasis upon the 
 sciences-aad- -the -htmianities- as factors in— tb«~«d«€attonal 
 curriculum^, " The distinctive character of our own times," 
 said Huxley, " lies in the vast and constantly increasing part 
 which is played by natural knowledge."" And again; "For 
 all those who mean to make science their serious occupa- 
 tion; or who intend to follow the profession of medicine; 
 or who have to enter early upon the business of life; for 
 all these, in my opinion, classical education is a mistake."' 
 This reads not unlike a criticism of the type of curriculum 
 suggested by Herbart. It raises the question, for instance, 
 
 ^Pidagogische Schriften [Sallwurk], I. p. 164. 
 'Science and Culture. New York, 1888. p. 31. 
 M^Ibid. p. 13. 
 
Attempt at cm Educational Synthesis. 109 
 
 whether the Odyssey is a suitable center for a modern curric- 
 ulum. Its reality is not quite a modern reality. Froebel, 
 for his part, preferred to begin with the near at hand.' He 
 seemed to prefer, even in song and story, an idealised actuality 
 to an imported mythology. But over against Huxley, Mat- 
 thew Arnold has a word to add on behalf of culture. What, 
 he asks, is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, 
 and lose himself, forfeit himself?'' For nature is indeed what 
 he works from and with, but dare he neglect art and litera- 
 ture, or the wealth of emotional exercise in poetry and elo- 
 quence? Even for the sake of science, it cannot be. 
 
 Synthetically then, the educator will endeavour to find 
 nature in culture, and culture in nature. He will seek to 
 combine nature and culture, if not like Froebel in a poetic 
 or romantic way, then like Herbar t in a reasona bl^co nfide nce 
 that the achievements of the race, which constitute the objects 
 of culture, are in the truest sense, natural. In education, 
 natu?eTs to be civilised, humanised, idealised; and culture is 
 not to be confounded with artificiality, or attributed merely 
 to one selected kind of subject matter. The knowledge for 
 the sake of knowledge of the scientist, the art for art's sake 
 of the humanist, are for education, if taken alone and of 
 themselves, equally inadequate categories. There could only 
 be an ultimate antinomy between nature and culture if by 
 some means an individual were born outside of society, and 
 suddenly dragged within it. 
 
 2. Education by institutions. Although culture is ultimately 
 an appeal to social values, mere literary culture is not 
 socialisation. For this reas on Herb art, with all his appre- 
 ciation of literature, conceived a less social process of educa- 
 tion than did Froebel. He did not care primarily for educa- 
 tional institutions ; but even _ retained a ~'pf efereHTig for 
 individual tuition. "But for Froebel", the school was insti- 
 tiifioMT." It wasan evolution out of the home and vocation. 
 Especially in the Mother Plays are there many glimpses of 
 an adapted institutionalism.' The institution.,. pX.. the kinder- 
 garten was looked upon by Fjoehel-iess as a, private enter- 
 prise than a permanent social factor contributinf'^o the 
 
 'Cf. t.e. Ptdatogies of thi Kindtrgarttn. New York, 1895, p. aa. 
 'Cf. Discoursts in America. London, 1889. LtUratw and ScuHce. 
 Kf. •■ g. Dir kUint Ziichner. 
 
no Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 higher li fe of the German _people. In a speech made in his 
 old age at the opening of the first Burghers' Kindergarten 
 in Hamburg, Froebel never once abandoned " the thought 
 of a uniting education satisfying the individual in all his 
 relations."* But with the Herbartians, and notably Ziller, 
 there is n o such e m phajus upon thp needs of the social wiu^le^* 
 And again, the desperate endeavours of Froebel to found 
 educational institutions had no parallel with Herbart himself. 
 From one point of view, the several basic institutions, 
 including the home, the school, the state, the vocation and 
 the church, are methods by which society convej's to indi- 
 viduals an adaptative and controlling power in experience. 
 Through institutions, again, individuals are admitted into 
 partnership with larger social groups. But although insti- 
 tutions have these general functions in common, their oflBces 
 in the social economy are in a measure delimited. The state, 
 indeed, has a station among them that is legally rather than 
 actually unique. On paper the state is omnipotent. In a 
 way it supervises the endeavours of its fellow institutions, 
 and is the residuary legatee of such of their functions as 
 remain unfulfilled. In this way certain states and cities are 
 coming to employ the kindergarten to supplement the de- 
 ficiencies of educational influences in the family. This is 
 wholly in the spirit of Pestalozzi and Froebel. " You shall 
 do for your children what their parents fail to do for them," 
 are the words of Gertrude to the schocJmaster.' " The 
 primary, indispensable requisite of education at this period," 
 wrote Froebel, "is the union of the school and the family."* 
 But unto Herbartians, for whom the teacher rathe r creates 
 than trains the mind, the_family is a disturbinpr element. 
 At-this'day7 many "scientific teachers, whose inclinations are 
 Herbartian, look upon the parents of their pupils as inter- 
 lopers in the work of education. Perhapg,. jf^d ucation w ere 
 for culture merelj', or for the indiNndu al merely, t hen the 
 teacher would be its absolute center, and the pedagogical 
 works of Herbart might be its sufficient book of method. 
 
 'Cf. Th* Third Voltoiu of Froebtrs Ptdagogics. 1904- Translated by Josephine 
 Jarvis. p. i8. 
 
 Vf. Padagogisdi* Str.}mmiittn oh drr WrmU dts Jak-^inuUrts im GMtU drr VaftnctaUr. 
 Hanschmann. Leipzig. 1806. p. j6, 
 
 'See Pestalozzi. Lnmard tt$id Gtrtmdt. In foacatwiKU Ciassia. p. 118. 
 
 'Kftnsdim Ertuhnrng. hrsf. Seidel. iSSj. p. i6t. 
 
Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. iii 
 
 But if education be rather for socialisation than individual 
 accomplishment, then the home, or the spirit of the home, 
 is still as central as it was for Froebel. This distinction 
 to a degree conveys a synthesis, if it should suggest that 
 the educator may seek to guide the moving balance of schol- 
 astic and domestic functions. 
 
 3. Individuality/ In_§Q_far.jas_it js^consistent with the psy- 
 chology of Herbaft, education is wholly a plroc'e§iS'Of~T5ontrol. 
 It cannot, ;bel' conceivjed- aparLJramJnsttUCtipn.- I£i s as i t 
 were the man ipulation of c lay-l):K_-th£„hand of a sculptor 
 -of-Hien. It is a process motiv ated from wit ^out^ It is the 
 study-of'arpEilosopher or a scientist, rather than a mutual 
 commerce of satisfactions, in which the child repays the 
 adult in full measure for the boon of his own socialisation. 
 Unlike Froebel, Herbart could not consistently value educa- 
 tion as a reciprocal process in which the privilege is partly 
 on the side of the adult. One result of this difference in 
 attitude between Herbart and Froebel is that Froebel had 
 a more vivid intuition of the worth of the individual. But 
 it has been already urged that Herhartian pHiir.atinn tend s 
 toJndividuaJism bx_v^irlaie-^^ leanings. Indi- 
 
 vidualism, however, is not individuality. Individuality is a 
 social matter. One cannot be individual without being social, 
 inasmuch as it is only the process of socialisation which 
 confers that harmony with environment which is the essential 
 condition of freedom. Butjaccprding to an jlerbartian psy- 
 chology, education makes not only for sociality but for 
 uniformity. It makes for a set type of sociality, many- 
 sidedness. The psychology of Froebel, on the other hand, 
 by attributing to the soul an original character, admits of 
 greater concessions to brotherly dissimilitudes and varying 
 degrees of hereditary capacity. The social chord is to sound 
 in harmony ; not in mere unison. But it may be that Froebel 
 tends to overestimate the power of freedom which resides 
 in the individual. For although, as Froebel in effect main^ 
 tained, the individual is not to be regarded as the product 
 of facts which are foreign to his own spirit, neither is he 
 so far aloof from the facts of experience as to be utterly 
 independent of laws of causation. Therefore, in the attempt 
 to synthesise the views of Herbart and Froebel that concern 
 
112 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 individuality, the educator will need to bring together the 
 emphasis of Herbart upon causation in the sphere of mind, 
 and the emphasis of Froebel upon freedom. With Herbart, 
 education will construct and instruct; and with Froebel, it 
 will at the same time endeavour to secure the co-operation 
 of the will of the pupil as the indispensable condition of 
 success. 
 
 4. Interest. Interest may be defined as the hedonic aspect 
 of thought. There persists an emotional element in the 
 background of the mind. Of course thought proper, which 
 in its characteristic form partakes of the nature of a stress 
 or crisis, holds the foreground. What is called interest seems 
 to be the background of feeling which shades into the more 
 critical phases of consciousness . Interest cannot be_said to 
 be prior to att ention , as Hprhart hel d it to he., if it is the 
 pleasure-pain aspect of attention. Yet, if it be regarded 
 also as a background of which any part may upon occasion 
 come into the focus of militant thought, interest would seem 
 to play a part in motivation. It appears to assist the agent 
 in securing a sufficiency of power to do something. 
 
 According to this account of interest, it can hardly be 
 as it was for Herbart a product of the blend and fusion of 
 ideas. Interest is perhaps rather a true psychic activity, 
 an aspect of self-expression, a part of the efficient cause 
 of man's realisation of himself in a world of objects. As 
 descriptive of a state of mind, it involves a two-fold ref- 
 erence, to a natural tendency and an ideal for attainment. 
 Usually pleasure is regarded as the end of interest. In so 
 far as pleasure is a by-product of the realisation of the self 
 in a world of objects, this may be dismissed as a psycholog- 
 ical error. For if pleasure be a by-product, then to seek 
 pleasure defeats its own end. Thus it seems to be an object 
 rather than a feeling that is sought. Interest, then, would 
 not seem to be something external which is set up as a 
 standard to be achieved, so much as an original tendency 
 accompanying activity. It is indeed the self-activity of Froe- 
 bel regarded emotionally. 
 
 The psychology of Herbart is a psychology of ideas. Froe- 
 bel's is less so, than a voluntaristic psychology. If this 
 
Attempt at an Educational Synthesis. 113 
 
 broad distinction be maintained, a more synthetic statement 
 may be made of the place of interest in a theory of educa- 
 tion. Interest may be described as the hedonic aspect of 
 the functioning of the self with a situation. This functioning 
 is two-sided; it is conditioned by a past as with Herbart, 
 and yet it is a primary impulse to realisation as with Froebel. 
 Mental content is perhaps less the source than the aliment 
 of interests. In the process of education, interests have less 
 to be created than fed and controlled. It seems to follow 
 that the ideal of a numy-sided interest should give way in a 
 measure to best-sided interest. For, on the side of origin, 
 interests are impulses of which neither good nor bad is to 
 be predicated. How then should they be at all indiscrim- 
 inately or even equally developed? They are rather to be 
 developed for the sake of the social situation. However, 
 since interests are in the first place unmoral rather than 
 immoral or moral, it is possible to make their very existence 
 an argument for their cultivation. For even original powers 
 and tendencies bear the stamp of a previous endorsement 
 by the race; and the presumption is that few if any of them 
 are mere excrescences in the contemporary social situation. 
 Over against education by interest has been set education 
 by effort, or the disciplinary theory. Yet it is needless, 
 and inconsistent with the facts, to oppose effort to interest. 
 A synthetic attitude would only be debarred if effort implied 
 distaste, or interest ease. But effort and interest are rather 
 complementary. Perhaps there is no interest without effort. 
 The prevalence of a contrary opinion may be due to a con- 
 fusion of effort with the disagreeable. Probably, again, there 
 is no effort without an interest, either mediated or imme- 
 diate. It is commonly to be found that an interest at first 
 external tends to become by effort more vital to the self. 
 Thus if an Herbartian system of education pays too little 
 attention to the developmental powers as such, a disciplinary 
 system makes the error of disparaging mental content. But 
 one does not train the will separately, nor the interests merely 
 as such. Both are developed as related aspects of a unitary 
 personality, and grow together as inseparably as control 
 and freedom. 
 8 
 
114 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 Finally, it may be well to summarise the conclusions which 
 have been reached in the course of our attempt at a synthesis. 
 The following tabulation may serve to recapitulate the line 
 of thought that has been followed. But such is the nature 
 of the present endeavour, that, taken of itself and apart 
 from the previous context, a summary may prove to be 
 neither intelligible nor convincing. Indeed, although at this 
 stage, for the sake of greater clearness, the terminology of dog- 
 matism may be employed, all that is said is intended only as 
 the nucleus of a working hypothesis. 
 
 1. For Froebel, the mind is a unitary activity. For Her- 
 bart, ideas are independent activities. But it is possible to 
 regard the ideas as dynamic, yet normally subject to a 
 unitary will. 
 
 2. The psychology of Froebel is a psychology of will and 
 attention. That of Herbart is a psychology of habit. But 
 habit is essentially funded attention; and attention is habit 
 accommodating itself to a " crisis." 
 
 3. The emphasis of Froebel is upon mental forms or unities ; 
 that of Herbart upon content. An evolutionary theory of 
 the mind, which may be teleologically interpreted, may afford 
 a synthetic interpretation of the unitary process from which 
 these aspects have been abstracted. For, in the concrete, 
 content and form are inseparable. 
 
 4. For Froebel, the Ego is a given principle or soul. For 
 Herbart, the self is a construction. Froebel may be in the 
 right to the extent that selfhood is implicitly given; and 
 Herbart to the extent that it is not g^ven explicitly. 
 
 5. The educational theory of Froebel emphasises the self; 
 and that of Herbart the situation. But the self is a focus 
 of the environment; and again, the environment is an objec- 
 tive manifestation of the agent self. 
 
 6. For Froebel, the will is free. For Herbart, the will is 
 determined. But the synthetic hypothesis is tenable, that 
 the self is in process of winning its way out of determination 
 into freedom. 
 
 7. In his metaphysic, Herbart emphasises the unchange- 
 able character of reality. On the other hand, the philosophy 
 of Froebel assumes the reality of change. But for an ontology 
 
Attempt at an Edutational Synthesis. ii$ 
 
 of evolutionary idealism, reality involves change in the perma- 
 nent, and permanence in change. 
 
 8. For Froebel as well as Herbart, character is the end 
 of education. But Froebel aims at character in progress 
 and Herbart at character in equilibrium. The true aim in 
 education, from the standpoint of the individual, is a char- 
 acter of moving equilibrium or equilibrated progress. 
 
 9. The ideal of Herbart is a static perfection. That of 
 Froebel is a progressive betterment. But while, from the 
 standpoint of humanity, ideals are dynamic, yet viewed 
 sub specie aeternitatis they may be perfect and complete. 
 
 10. Both Froebel and Herbart find that there is nothing 
 good but the good will. But in the development of the 
 good will, Herbart emphasises the intellect, and Froebel the 
 emotions. The will, however, is the concrete mind, viewed 
 as dynamic, of which feeling and intellect are the sectional 
 phases. Emotion may be regarded as the periphery of 
 thought, and thought as the focus of emotion. 
 
 11. For Herbart, ideas make the character. For Froebel, 
 the development of potentialities makes the character. But 
 character is less a product than a process; and potentialities 
 and ideas are functional aspects of that process. 
 
 12. Herbart emphasises culture; Froebel, to a degree, 
 nature. But nature, teleologically interpreted, is cultural. 
 Nature, as origin, is not opposed to culture, as value; but 
 these are terminal aspects of the education of man. 
 
 13. To a certain extent, Herbart emphasises curriculum 
 the more; and Froebel method. But method is the curri- 
 culum as dynamic. 
 
 14. Herbart to a degree emphasises the technique, and 
 Froebel the spirit of instruction. Technique should be in- 
 formed with an aspect of subjectivism, or made one's own. 
 
 15. Herbart would educate by instruction, Froebel by 
 development. But development and instruction are simply 
 the subjective and objective aspects of the educative process. 
 
 16. Herbart does not educate for vocation; Froebel edu- 
 cates for " spiritual " vocation. Perhaps vocational training 
 may be made both cultural and spiritual. 
 
ii6 Herbart and Froebel. 
 
 17. Herbart educates for indi vidual perfection; Froebel for 
 religious and institutional lite. But a synthesis is possible, 
 for true individuality implies institutionalism. 
 
 18. Froebel emphasises freedom in education; and Her- 
 bart, control. But the only trustworthy control, and the 
 only effectual freedom, are synthesised in self-control. 
 
 19. For Herbart, education moves towards a socially de- 
 termined pattern. For Froebel, it attempts to liberate the 
 divine element in the individual. But, pragmatically, social- 
 isation and liberation are one and the same. 
 
 20. Herbart aims at many-sided interest as a mental type. 
 Froebel is more concerned with best-sided interest. Syn- 
 thetically there are reasons for regarding the existence of 
 interests as an argument for their development; but not for 
 their fortuitous or even equal development.