“Is there really such importance underlying the mere name of a system?--some one might ask. Yes, there is: … It is true that any one carefully watching your teaching would observe a new spirit … you would strike him as personally capable, nay, as extremely capable, but you would fail to strike him as priestess of the idea, and of the struggle towards the realization of the idea--education by development--the destined means of raising the whole human race. For, after all, what do we mean by ‘Kindergarten’?… No man can acquire fresh knowledge beyond the measure which his own mental strength and stage of development fits him to receive. But little children have no development at all.… Infant schools are nothing but a contradiction of child nature. Little children ought not to be _schooled_ and taught, they merely need to be developed. It is the pressing need of our age, and only the idea of a garden can serve to show us symbolically the proper treatment of children. This idea lies in the very name of a Kindergarten. … How much better had you been able to call your work by its proper name, and to make evident by that expression, the real nature of the new spirit you have introduced.”--_L., p. 290._ There is no gulf between the Kindergarten, and “The Education of Man,” with its appeal to educators to follow instead of interfering with Nature’s methods, to foster instead of repressing the “instincts of activity and of construction,” to foster play, which though “merely natural life,” yet holds “the seed leaves of all later life.” Froebel’s gardener is “skilled and intelligent,” and a skilled gardener is supposed to have scientific knowledge of his plants, of the conditions of soil, exposure, etc., best suited to them. Professor Adams says that “to call a child a plant does not advance matters much, and it certainly does not account for the use of the cubes, spheres and such like.” This, however, it does most certainly if these cubes and spheres are the right food material for the child’s mind, as Froebel at any rate believed. All the employments of the Kindergarten, all the varied materials, the sand and clay, the pencil and paint brush, the building blocks, cardboard, sawdust, moss, nut-shells, etc., for constructive or “representative” play are definitely mentioned and definitely commended in “The Education of Man.” They are commended because they are the employments and the material which children everywhere find for themselves; because Froebel had sufficient knowledge of biology to know that instinctive action must somehow benefit the individual and the race; and also because he had psychological insight enough to see that by such activities children gain not merely skill, but clear ideas and “firmness of will.”