Instead of ready-made faculties Froebel recognizes possibilities, conditions, which will remain possibilities if the necessary stimulus is not forthcoming, for in noting how the mother talks to her infant, though she is obliged to confess that there can be no understanding of her words, he says the mother’s instinctive action is right: “for that which will one day develop, and which must originate, begins and must begin when as yet nothing exists but the conditions, the possibility.”--_P., p. 40._ Elsewhere he asks: “Is it to be supposed that in the child the capacity for becoming a complete human being is contained less than in the acorn is contained the capacity to become a strong, vigorous and complete oak?”--_P., p. 62._ And he speaks of how the mother appeals to the infant as “understanding, perceptive and capable, for where there is not the germ of something, that something can never be called forth and appear.”--_P., p. 31._ It is true that in the same passage in which he speaks of “the tenderest growth of mind,” he does speak of mental powers (Geisteskräfte), as indeed every one does, but a few lines above he has spoken of “the cultivation of the mental power of the child in different directions.”[10] Besides, the mental powers to which he here alludes, and which are to be awakened and fostered in the infant, are the powers “to compare, to infer, to judge, to think.”--_P., p. 57._ Here, too, Froebel gives a description of what he means by memory, and it is clearly not a separate faculty considered apart from another faculty, viz. imagination: “The plays carried on with the ball awaken and exercise the power of the child’s mind to place again before himself mentally a vanished object, to see it mentally even when the outer perception is gone; these games awaken and practise the power of re-presenting, of remembering, of holding fast in remembrance an object formerly present, of again thinking of it; that is, they foster the memory.”--_P., p. 57._ So even the infant is to think, and the progress is well described in the Mother Plays as “from experience of a thing, joined with thought about it, up to pure thought.”--_M., p. 121._ In a lecture[11] given many years ago, Dr. Ward sought to drive home to teachers the futility of this hard and fast line between sense training and training to think. And there are some interesting parallels between Dr. Ward’s metaphors here and Froebel’s writing in “The Education of Man.” Dr. Ward said: