The laws he discovered may be stated in a paragraph. The child is a growing organism. It is a unity. It develops through creative activity. It is benefited by contact with other children and is happy in proportion as it is unselfishly employed. Let us assume for a moment that these things are true, that they are the most important truths about the child; and let us see how they must affect our views of life, of politics, sociology, art, religion, conduct. There is of course no moment at which the child ceases to be a child. The laws of its growth and being are not at any discoverable time superseded by any new laws. Man as a creature, as an organism, has here by Froebel, and for the first time in history, been ingenuously studied, and the main laws of him noted. With the discovery that he is a unity, there vanishes every classification of science made since the days of Aristotle. They are convenient dogmas, thumb rule distinctions, useful as aids in the further pushing of our studies into the workings of this unity. Take up now a book of political economy, a poem, a history: this thought of Froebel’s runs through it like quicksilver. The scheme of thought of the writer is by it dissolved at once into human elements. You find you are studying the operation of the mind of some one, whom you picture to yourself as a man, as a unit; you are interpreting this by your own experience. It is all psychology, you are pushing your analysis. The universe is receiving its interpretation through you yourself. We are thus brought to the point of view of the mystic, as the only conceivable point of view. “That the organism develops by creative activity.” This might have come as a deduction from Darwin. It is an expression in metaphysical language of the “struggle for life.” Froebel discovered it independently. The consequences of a belief in it are so tremendous, that no man who is not prepared to spend the rest of his life completely dominated by the idea, ought even to pause to consider it. Your capacities, your beliefs, your development, your spiritual existence are the result of what you do. Active creation of some sort, occupation which takes your entire attention and calls upon you, merely incidentally and as a matter of course, for thought, resource, individual or original force; this will develop you and nothing else will.