From what he does say there is little doubt but that Froebel would willingly have subscribed to Professor Stout’s dictum, “that to be mentally active is identical with being mentally alive or awake,[63] though in degree the activity may shade off gradually from that “involving a sense of strain, to that of almost passivity.” But just as Professor Stout rejects the idea of purely passive consciousness, so, too, does he reject “pure” mental activity. “It is impossible to find any bit of mental process which is determined purely from within.”[64]… “At the same time it is equally true that no change within is entirely determined from without.”[65] Mr. Stout does not say that pure activity--a purely self-determined process--cannot exist, for “we should, by parity of reasoning, be bound to reject the second law of motion.”[66] “But it rests,” he says, “with the advocates of pure activity, if there are such, to adduce a case of it, and until such a case is brought forward we must assume that there is none.… No portion of matter can be, even for a moment, outside the sphere of influence of other portions.” We have seen that Mr. O’Shea practically accuses Froebel of being an “advocate of pure activity,”[67] nor is he the only one of Froebel’s critics who does so. If, however, it be considered an accident that Froebel should in one passage put “conscious self-determination” at the highest point of life development, and in another passage give this place to “activity” which Mr. Bradley and Mr. Stout tell us is to be regarded as self-determined, is it also an accident that in the very same passage Froebel should state that “everything in Nature develops and forms itself under the total collective influence of all other things”? If these correspondences are not accidental, then it must be allowed in the first place that Froebel attached a fairly definite meaning to the word “activity,” including self-determination in its connotation; and in the second place that the grounds on which he is charged with being a believer in “pure activity” are very insufficient. When Mr. Stout says that even if it is allowable “as an illustrative hypothesis” to regard the physical universe as an internally complete system,[68] it is clear that “the stream of individual consciousness is no such self-contained unit,” but “the merest fragment of universal reality, as its correlated brain process is the merest fragment of the material world[69]”; is this anything but a statement of that unity, on which Froebel insists in season and out of season--which appears on almost every page of his writings, so that the word has become the veriest “cant” of the half-trained Kindergarten teacher[70].