There is no doubt whatever that Froebel laid much stress on what is innate. In his generation, he tells us the child was looked upon “as a piece of wax, or lump of clay, which man can mould into what he pleases.” Because Froebel was a student of biology he knew better. He knew, as we have seen, that human beings have instincts, innate tendencies or dispositions differing from those of the lower animals chiefly in their indefiniteness. We are not so afraid of the word “innate” nowadays, when both innate ideas and innate faculties are safely buried, and that Froebel had no dealings with these has been amply shown. But that this stress on innate tendencies implies that the child is to unfold from within, the educator standing by passive[50], or that Froebel imagined that the developing process could go on with little or no reference to the environment, is quite another matter. Few of Froebel’s critics have taken the trouble to look up the original German before pronouncing condemnation, and this explains part of the injustice that has been done to him. The passage upon which much, perhaps most, of the adverse criticism is based is the one in which Froebel applies to education the term “leidend,” translated “passive” in both the English, or, rather, American editions of “The Education of Man.” The translation of “leidend” as “passive” is not a happy one. Moreover, the translators have endeavoured to help the reader by dividing the text into numbered sections, a proceeding which though often helpful, sometimes tends to break the continuity of Froebel’s thought. This effect is heightened in Hailmann’s translation by the interpolated notes, however valuable as some of these are in themselves. This passage, however, opens with “_therefore_,” and those who take exception to it ought to have considered the preceding argument. Fair criticism looks back to see why and under what circumstances education is to be “passive or following,” as opposed to “dictating and limiting.” In the first place, absolutely passive education is a contradiction in terms. Froebel begins by stating that: “Education consists in leading man as a thinking, intelligent being, growing into self-consciousness, to a pure, conscious and free representation of the law of his being, and in teaching him ways and means thereto.” He defines the _Theory of Education_ as “the system of directions derived from the knowledge and study of that law to guide human beings in the apprehension of their life-work”; and the _Practice of Education_ as “the self-active application of this knowledge in the direct development and cultivation of rational beings towards the attainment of their destiny.” To go on from this to say, on the next page but one, that the educator is to do nothing, to stand aside and be truly passive, would be absurd.