“As the duckling hastens to the pond and the chicken scratches the ground, so will the human being, still young, still, as it were, in the process of creation, though as unconsciously as any Nature product, yet definitely and surely desire what is best for him. We give plants and animals time and space and freedom to develop, but the young human being is to man a piece of wax, a lump of clay, from which he can mould what he will. O man, who roamest through garden and field, through meadow and grove, why dost thou close thy mind to the silent teaching of Nature?”--_E., p. 8._ Surely we have here a plea to “suffer (leiden) little children,” to bear with the little one, still, as Froebel describes him, “still, as it were, in the process of creation,” nay, more, a plea for the actual recognition and fostering of these instinctive tendencies which Professor Dewey calls “the foundation-stones of educational method,” rather than a recommendation to “gratify every youthful impulse,” or to stand aside altogether. For the context, the whole, is not yet complete. Froebel goes on to say that if we are certain of any tendency to unhealthy development we are to interfere with full severity (so tritt geradezubestimmende, fordernde Erziehungsweise in ihrer ganzen Strenge ein). And now comes a sentence apparently quite overlooked by Mr. Graham Wallas, who blames Froebel for underestimating the environment. In the mean-time, until we are sure that our interference is justifiable, “nothing is left for us to do but to bring the child into relations and surroundings in all respects adapted to him.”[52]--_E., p. 11._ In many other passages Froebel shows plainly that he had no thought of the “gratifying of every youthful impulse” in the sense of individual caprice. In his plea for monetary help to establish Kindergartens and training establishments connected with them, he complains that in existing institutions children are either “repressed and their energies crippled, _or else we are confronted with the wild and uncontrollable character which results when children are uncared for and are left altogether to their own impulses_.”--_L., p. 159._ “Life has no room for wilfulness and whims,” he says in his Mother Songs; “Boyhood is the age of Discipline” he states in “The Education of Man.” But, as he himself sums up this discussion: “All true education is double-sided, prescribing and following, active and passive, positive yet giving scope, firm and yielding.… Between educator and pupil should rule invisibly a third something to which both are equally subject. The third something is the right, the best … the child, the pupil has a very keen apprehension whether what father or teacher requests is personal and arbitrary or the expression of general law and necessity.”--_E., p. 14._