Observe that in all this philosophy there is no dogma anywhere, no term whose definition you have to learn, no term which makes the lying claim that it can be used twice with the same connotation. Froebel had the instinct of a poet and knew his language was figurative. It was this that freed him from the Middle Ages and gave him to the future. He took theology as lightly as he took metaphysics. He did not impose them, he evoked them. He lived and thought in the spirit. If you turn from Froebel’s analysis of human nature to Goethe’s, there seem to be a thousand years between them. The one is scientific, the other is mediæval. The one has freed himself from the influences of the revival of learning, the other has not. The one is open, the other is closed. The one is free, the other is self-conscious. But Froebel has not yet set free the rest of the race, and of course the literature and practices of the kindergartners are full of dogmas. The terms of Froebel are a snare to those whose interest in childhood came later than their interest in education and whose attention is fixed upon the terms rather than upon the child. He is easy reading to the other sort. But more important than Froebel’s formulation of these great truths was his formulation of subsidiary truths. I do not mean his labored systems, but his practical suggestions born of experience as to how to help another person to develop. It was these methods, this attitude of the teacher towards the child, of the individual towards his fellow, that came at me in my own house unexpectedly, emanating from some unknown mind, which seemed so great as practically to include Christianity. “Do not imagine,” he says at every moment, “that you can do anything for this creature except by getting it to move spontaneously. You have not begun till you have done this, and remember that anything else you do is just so much harm.” He was never tired of suggesting devices for doing this. The following passage gives in a few words the answer to the most important practical question in life: how we ought to approach another human being. The thing is said so simply, it seems almost commonplace, yet it comes from one greater than Kant. “Between educator and pupil, between request and obedience, there should invisibly rule a third something to which educator and pupil are equally subject. This third something is the _right_, the _best_, necessarily conditioned and expressed without arbitrariness in the circumstances. The calm recognition, the clear knowledge, and the serene, cheerful obedience to the rule of this third something, is the particular feature that should be constantly and clearly manifest in the bearing and the conduct of the educator and teacher, and often firmly and sternly emphasized by him.”