guage upon mind will always be powerful. Through it the whole past presses upon the present, and the thought of all who have preceded us contributes to the shaping of our thought. That its constraint may not be destructive of our freedom, we must come into personal contact with the simplest ideas and the commonest experiences.

The great problem of education is to effect the necessary mediation without destroying originality, and this can only be done by organizing experiences which shall conduct to a preconceived end. This truth is now widely realized, and everywhere we find increasing demand for experiments in natural science and illustrations in all branches of study. But only Fröbel has seen that this same method should be applied to the youngest children and to the most familiar facts, and by a series of objects in which essential qualities are strongly contrasted, aims to excite the mind to conscious antithesis.

It may be urged that if this process of comparison is natural to the mind, the mind may safely be trusted to follow it out. We might as well argue that because the law of gravitation has been discovered, each generation should, unaided, discover it anew. The contrasts of nature are so blended into harmony that their opposition is lost, yet this very opposition must be felt before their harmony can be realized. Fröbel simply accelerates the natural tendency of thought by carefully abstracting from material things their essential qualities, and then so arranging his gifts that each one shall throw some distinctive attribute into relief. Thus in the first gift he presents contrasts of color; in the second, contrasts of form; in the third, contrasts of size; in the fourth, contrasts of dimension; in the fifth he offers both contrasts of angles and contrasts of number; while in the sixth he repeats, emphasizes and mediates the contrasts of the preceding gifts. Passing to the plane in the seventh gift he offers subtler contrasts of form, while the connected and disconnected slats render these still more striking by showing how they are produced. The sticks and rings which, properly speaking, are one gift, contrast the straight and curved line, and offer striking perceptions of position and direction. And finally the solids, planes and lines are mutually illustrative, and the child learns both clearly to distinguish the different parts of his solids and to connect his planes and lines with them, identifying at last his stick, the embodiment of the straight line, with the axis of the sphere, the edge of the cube and the side of the square, and the ring which embodies the curve with the circumference of the sphere and the edge of the cylinder.

These contrasts of color, size, form, number, dimension, relation, direction and position illustrated in the gifts are applied in the occupations, and supplemented in the games and songs by contrasts of smell, taste, movement and sound. There is no salient attribute of material things which is not thus thrown into light, and as a consequence sharply defined and firmly grasped by the mind.

We realize the significance of this result more fully when we reflect

that by the perception of analogies between the material and spiritual world, the words designating the acts, objects, qualities and relations of the one have been adapted to express the acts, powers, states and relations of the other. There is no single word of our intellectual or moral vocabulary which was not originally applied to something apprehensible by the senses, and many of the most important of them refer to physical facts and qualities with which the child gets acquainted in his earliest years. When, for instance, we speak of great men, great actions, greatness, the analogy is obviously to size; when we call a man straightforward, allude to crooked dealings or describe a character as angular, we borrow from the language of lines and their relations; when we talk of lives rounded into completeness and actions that are fair and square, we are debtors to analogies with form; when we speak of high station, deep truths, broad views, we refer, however, unconsciously to the "threefold measure which dwells in space;" and when we mourn over dark sorrows and black crimes, we steal our words from the vocabulary of color. It was part of Fröbel's idea to make the child sensible of these relationships by connecting his first perception of the moral force of words directly with the physical fact to which they stand in analogy. To give only a single illustration, in the game of the joiner the child alternates long and short movements while imitating the act of planing. The long and short of movement is then connected with the long and short of sound, the long and short of form, and the long and short of time; and finally, through the story of Goliath and David, in telling which the contrast between the tall giant and the stripling who defied and conquered him is emphasized, the distinction between physical and moral greatness is foreshadowed to the mind. The mark of the true Kindergarten is the all-pervading connection between the things of sense and the things of thought.

II. It is an admitted law that the mind moves from the known to the unknown. Nothing charms us more than the recognition of the old in the new. The man who hurries through a foreign city indifferent and inattentive to the passing crowd feels a quick thrill of pleasure when in the midst of all this strangeness he recognizes a familiar face. Let our minds become keenly conscious of a single thought and the whole world glows with illustrations of it. It was insight into this truth which led Fröbel to make the "archetypes of nature the playthings of the child." "Line in nature is not found," says Emerson. but unit and universe are round." The ball illustrates the ideal form towards which the universe strives. This then is Fröbel's starting point and he follows it up with the other forms which underlie the works of nature and of art. The cube gives us the basis of classification for mineral forms and is the fundamental type of architecture. The cylinder, which nature shows us in the trunks of trees and the stems of plants and in the bodies and limbs of animals, is also the basis of the ceramic art. In short, in geometric forms we have a key to all

the beauty and variety of material things, whether works of God or works of man, made in the image of God.

The effect of these normal types in developing observation, classification and creative activity is quite remarkable. The shelves of the well conducted Kindergarten groan under the spools and buttons, the marbles and apples, nests and eggs, bottles and blocks which the eager children bring in morning after morning saying they have found something more like their ball, cube or cylinder. I remember well a little girl five years old who after playing for some time with her ball began to count over the different round objects she could remember, and after naming apples, grapes, cherries and peaches, suddenly exclaimed with a flash of quick pleasure in her face, "Why all fruits are round," and, she added after a moment's thoughtful pause, "so are all vegetables." A little boy of the same age came one morning with a particularly eager face to the Kindergarten and begged "for a lump of clay to make his mamma's preserve dish." "How are you going to make it?" I asked as I handed him the clay. The answer was prompt and decided. "First I'll make a ball and flatten it to get a circle, on top of that I'll stand a long narrow cylinder, and above that I'll put a hollowed out half-ball." In the field flowers and the leaves of the trees, in dew drops and jewels, in the patterns of carpets and oil cloths, in the figures on wallpaper, in architectural decorations, in the varied reflections of the sunlight and the shifting figures of the clouds, the wide-open eyes of the Kindergarten child rejoice in the revelation of familiar forms, and the heart made for unity detects it with a thrill of gladness under the infinite manifoldness of the external world.

III. There is a growing belief among educators that the mind should be kept in constant relation with all the essential branches of knowledge, but that the method of study should vary with the progressive stages of mental development. Thus they would present the sensible facts of any given science to the perceptions of the child, the relations of these facts to the understanding of the youth, and the synthesis of these relations to the reason of the mature student. By this method there is secured continuity of thought, and the ultimate inclusive principle is made to register the results of a vivid personal experience.

While the evolution of moral truths has been less distinctly formulated, it is I think widely felt that they must be rooted in the sympathies and fostered by exertion of the will. As we present knowledge successively to perception, reflection and pure thought, so we may present the same moral relationships successively to feeling, conscience, and spiritual insight and match our intellectual spiral of facts, relations and principles with a spiral of moral presentments, intuitions and comprehensions.

The Kindergarten deals with the first stage of this double development and offers to the mind perceptions, and to the heart presentiments. Moreover it deals not with special branches of study, but with primal

facts, not with special moral obligations, but with fundamental moral relationships. And finally it appeals not separately to the mind and heart, but through the same objects and exercises touches both at once. In all this the Kindergarten is in accord with the nature of the child. No person can be thrown with children without noticing their religious aptitudes and sympathies, their strongly developed sense of analogy, and their aversion to analysis. The youth is analytic and investigative, ambitious to work out his own purposes, prone to question and to deny. But the little child is happy in the felt though uncomprehended unity of life, and the sage finds rest at last in a unity which he comprehends. Thus the end of life meets its beginning. At sunrise and at sunset we rejoice in the sun, though in the glare of the noonday we forget the glory of the light in the beauty of the things enlightened.

It seems to me, therefore, quite reasonable when Frobel claims that the deepest and most universal truths should determine what we do for children and how we do it, and that precisely these deepest truths are the ones that the child will most readily recognize, though of course only under limited forms and applications. The deepest of all truths to Fröbel is that self-recognition is effected through self-activity, and the practical outcome of this insight is that education should from the beginning occupy the child with plastic material which he uses in subservience to organic law. As he uses this material he is constantly illustrating the truths that all development begins in separation,-that through separation there is attained a higher union,-that every part is necessary to the whole and the whole is necessary to every part,-that deepening power is restricting power, and that, advancing from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, a higher harmony results from a constantly increasing variety. These were the thoughts which ruled in Fröbel's mind, and he organized his gifts to give them material expression. First the undivided solids stamp themselves as wholes upon the child's mind. With the divided cube the child begins to transform and create, while by the repeated reconstruction of the original form, the relation of the parts to the whole is kept prominently in view. As the divis ions of the cube increase in variety and complexity he finds he can produce more and more perfect forms, and when, through the constant association of the individual parts with the units from which they were derived, the idea of organic connection has become the regulator of his instinctive activity he advances to a gift which offers him not an object to transform, but independent elements which he combines in varied wholes.

Fröbel would be the weakest of educators if he claimed that children could understand these truths. But it is a very different thing to claim that they may, nay, that they must obey them and that activities regulated by these insights prepare the way for comprehension. The child who in perceptible things has been led to see the ordering of parts to a whole must as his mind develops grasp logical relations in the world

of thought, and will, in a certain sense, be constrained to infer from visible effects their invisible causes. For there can be no connection without an underlying law, and it is impossible that there can be two systems of logic, one applying to the material and the other to the spiritual world. There is vast distance between the child's perception that he cannot rebuild his cube without using all the cubes into which it is divided and the man's recognition that he is an essential element of the great whole of humanity,-between the child's experience that the most beautiful forms he produces are those in which he most completely emphasizes individual elements and the man's glad certainty that his organic connections demand the rich fullness of his personality, yet if there is continuity in life distance cannot abolish relation, and the full stream of the man's thought may be surely traced to the little springs of the child's perceptions.

Evidently these results will not come of themselves by simply playing with the Kindergarten gifts. Fröbel's material must be quickened with Fröbel's spirit, and she who aspires to guide a living mind must herself be regenerated by the truth. Only as she sees the end can she make the right beginning, and without violating the child's freedom wisely direct his steps. The mustard seed grows into a great tree, the leaven hid in the meal leavens the lump. Let a single vital truth, in however crude a form, be stirred to life in the mind, and straightway it both re-creates the mind in its own likeness and becomes prolific of related truths.

IV. All the features of the Kindergarten thus far alluded to are simply results of a single ruling thought,-flowers and fruit of one hidden root. When we comprehend this prolific thought we comprehend Fröbel. Until then we can only see in the Kindergarten a system of more or less valuable detail. Briefly stated this root thought is that as God knows himself through creation so must man, or in other words that to truly live we must constantly create, and that the condition of a complete self-consciousness is a complete reflection. The life of the soul is a struggle towards self-knowledge, and self-knowledge comes only through self-externalization. As Fröbel puts it, "The inward as inward can never be known, it is only revealed by being made outward. The mind like the eye sees not itself but by reflection." What we want is to know ourselves, and we learn to know ourselves not by taking in but by giving out. God "for His own glory" makes man in His own image, or differently stated, completes His self-consciousness in the consciousness of the creature, and man too can only realize himself by producing his image.

Fröbel's merit lies not in the recognition of this truth, but in its application. Many thinkers have stated it more clearly than he, and other educators have traced it in the ceaseless bubbling over of the child's speech and in the ardor of his play. But Fröbel alone, with insight into the end the child blindly seeks, has aimed to aid the instinct