Froebel as a pioneer in modern psychologyMurray, E. R. (Elsie Riach)
Science
Froebel as a pioneer in modern psychology
Murray, E. R. (Elsie Riach)
Fröbel, Friedrich, 1782-1852; Psychology
“the fall, or, since the result is the same, the ascent of
the mind of man, from simple, uniform, emotional development,
into the development of externally analytic and critical
reason.”--_E., p. 194._
Not Stanley Hall himself insists more that the development of the
individual shall follow the development of the race, and this in 1826,
two years before Baer, and four years before Comte, to whom Herbert
Spencer attributed the doctrine. “Humanity,” he says, “lives only in its
continuous development.”
“Each successive generation and each successive individual
human being, inasmuch as he would understand the past and
present, must pass through all preceding phases of human
development and culture, and this should not be done in the way
of dead imitation or mere copying, but in the way of living
spontaneous self-activity.”--_E., p. 18._
There is certainly no ground for assuming that Froebel held any such
pre-Darwinian views as a special creation of each species, for there
is no point on which he insists more emphatically than that in Nature
development is continuously progressive.
“In God’s world, just because it is God’s world, by Him
created, one thing constant is expressed to which we give the
name of unbroken progression of development in all and through
all.”[58]--_M., p. 154._
“God neither ingrafts nor inoculates, He develops the most
trivial and imperfect things in continuously ascending
series and in accordance with eternal self-grounded and
self-developing laws.”--_E., p. 328._
Mr. Winch makes merry over Froebel’s sentence:
“As Man and Nature have one origin, they must be subject to the
same laws,”
and remarks that “this conception is almost completely given up.… Our
view now rather is one in which God and Nature are at strife, in which
the ethical interest overcomes Nature.…”
But Froebel is far ahead of this. The great law to him is the Law of
Development to which Man and Nature, which includes Man, are subject. The
ethical interest is not, as Mr. Winch intimates, something transcending
Nature, but is itself evolved. Morality, Froebel distinctly tells us, is
“rooted” in Instinct, and “human development means spiritual development.”
Professor O’Shea says of the doctrine of Unfoldment which he attributes
to Froebel that it “regards man on his spiritual side as an entity set
apart from everything in the universe.”[59]
Froebel, however, writes:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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