“In answering the question, What is the purpose of education? I relied at that time on the following observations: Man lives in a world of objects, which influence him and which he desires to influence; therefore he ought to know these objects in their nature, in their conditions and in their relations with each other and with mankind.… I sought, to the extent of such powers as I consciously possessed at that time, to make clear to myself the meaning of all things through man, his relations with himself, and with the external world … it seemed to me that everything which should or could be required for human education must be necessarily conditioned and given, by virtue of the very nature of the necessary course of his development, in man’s own being and in the relations amidst which he is set. A man, it seemed to me, would be well educated when he had been trained to care for these relationships and to acknowledge them, to master them and to survey them.”--_A., p. 69._ In the very beginning, then, of his educational career, Froebel emphasized rather than overlooked “the relationships amidst which man is set,” but he was to learn more yet about development. Six years later he is back at a university, and “just at this time,” he says, “those great discoveries of the French and English philosophers became generally known through which the great manifold external world was seen to form a comprehensive outer world.” The English writer may have been Erasmus Darwin. The French writer was no doubt Lamarck, to whom belongs “the immortal glory of having for the first time worked out the theory of Descent as an independent scientific theory of the first order and as the philosophical foundation of the whole science of Biology.” From some such source, at any rate, Froebel must have gained “the key-note of development,” viz., that it is always from the undifferentiated to the differentiated. We have already seen that he applied this to mental development and so gained his modern conception of the earliest infant consciousness, “an undifferentiated unorganized unity.” In “The Education of Man” he speaks of “the all-pervading law of Nature according to which the general gives rise to the particular,”--_E., p. 167._ and in the Mother Songs he says: “Whether we are looking at a seed or an egg, whether we are watching feeling or thought, what is definite proceeds everywhere from what is indefinite.”--_M., p. 121._ Or, again: “In the child as in the grain of seed, there begins a development proceeding towards complexity.”--_P., p. 172._ Such quotations fully exonerate Froebel from belief in any “pre-formation” theory, whether physical or mental, as indeed Mr. Cooke made abundantly plain. It is in one of his later papers[56] that Froebel generalizes and states very plainly how everything is developed under the influence of its environment.