It certainly passes my comprehension how anything can symbolize an idea not yet acquired, however much it may help in calling up ideas already more or less clearly gained. The crown may symbolize power to an adult, but not to the child, who when told that Stephen and Matilda fought for the crown, innocently inquired: “Couldn’t they have had another one made?” The Union Jack may symbolize British nationality or British freedom, or even British Jingoism to adults who already possess these ideas, but not to a little child. On the other hand, any kind of celebration appeals to children, as to more primitive people, and to be allowed to march round the playground on Empire Day carrying a flag arouses a joyous emotion, which will later be interwoven with patriotic ideas of various kinds. It is decidedly open to question whether as regards the child Froebel himself intended much more than this, whatever his followers may have done. Professor Thorndyke gives us to understand that Froebel says a child plays with a ball because it symbolizes “infinite development and absolute limitation.” Now it is true that Froebel wrote in his “Aphorisms”--quoted in a footnote to Hailmann’s “Education of Man”--“The spherical is the symbol of diversity in unity and of unity in diversity.… It is infinite development and absolute limitation.” But the “Aphorisms” were not written for children, and Hailmann quotes the passage in speaking of Froebel’s philosophical doctrines as to the ultimate nature of force and matter! To Froebel, Spirit is everywhere striving for utterance. The Universe--the Manifold--is the revelation of one great mind, and everything in Nature, “though soundless it be to the ear, a message can give emblematic (sinnbildlich) but clear.” Certainly, he would have the boy study Nature, “the writing and book of God,” but it is not to the boy that he says: “The works speak, by the form the Spirit manifests itself. By that which has been produced and created, the nature and spirit of the producer and creator make themselves known. The world must therefore necessarily manifest the nature of its original cause--the spirit of its Creator.” For Froebel as for Goethe, the Time Spirit “weaves for God the garment we see Him by.” He calls “the temporal an expression of the eternal, the material a manifestation of the spiritual.” He speaks of “the Power which reveals itself by uniting all things, in Nature in the Universe as weight, in human life as Love,” and it pleases him to put into the hand of the boy--in that picture of a family group by which he typifies Humanity--a ball hanging by a string, and this he calls an emblem or symbol (Sinnbild).