Professor Stout’s account of how the unconscious mental activity of early childhood becomes transformed into the definite and conscious activity of fully developed will is, stated briefly, something to this effect. It is of the essence of conation to seek its own satisfaction, and this is only possible as the conation becomes definite. “Blind craving gives place to open-eyed desire,” as the original conation tends to define itself. So “the gradual acquisition of knowledge through experience is but another expression for the process whereby the originally blind craving becomes more distinct and more differentiated.” The grouping of cognitions is not produced by the conscious needs: “It is the way in which the conation itself grows and develops.” For this account we can find a wonderfully exact parallel in one of Froebel’s less well-known papers, that on “Movement Plays.” “All outer activity of the child has its ultimate and distinctive foundation in his inmost nature and life. The deepest craving of this inner activity is to behold itself mirrored in some outward object. In and through such representation, the child himself grasps and perceives the nature, direction and aim of his own activity, and learns also further to regulate and determine his life, that is his activity, according to these outward phenomena.”--_P., p. 238._ This craving for outward representation, by satisfaction of which the child gains knowledge of the ends of his activity, is an exact equivalent of Stout’s blind craving which gives place to open-eyed desire as it tends to define itself. Froebel’s conclusion, that only as this unconscious or blind craving for action is satisfied does the child become “conscious of the nature, direction and ends of his own activity,” is but another way of stating Professor Stout’s conclusion, that the grouping of cognitions, which is the gradual acquirement of knowledge through experience, is “the way in which the conation itself grows and develops.” So, cognition and conation are developed simultaneously, or, to repeat Froebel’s own phrase, “Thought forms itself in action, and action resolves and clears itself in thought.” Professor Stout goes on to say that in this defining process one conation springs out of another, whereby as one conation is satisfied and so comes to an end, another becomes in its turn the end of activity. He takes as illustration the child learning to walk, saying, “The mental attitude of the child learning to walk is one of conscious endeavour. When he has become habituated to the act, he performs it without attending to his movements, his mind being fixed on the attainment of other ends.” Froebel proceeds in the same way, using the very same example. He has already said that at first the child: