“The first voluntary needs of the child, if its bodily needs are satisfied and it feels well and strong, are observation of its surroundings, spontaneous reception of the outer world (selbstthätiges Aufnehmen der Aussenwelt) and play, which is spontaneous expression, or acting out of what is within. This double expression (Diese Doppeläusserung) of taking in and expressing outwardly is necessarily grounded in its nature, as in human nature in general; since the child’s first earthly destiny is to attain by critical reception (durch prüfende Aufnahme) of the outer world into itself, by manifold inward impressions and outward expressions of its inner world, and by critical comparison of both, to the recognition of their unity.…”--_P., p. 29._ Professor Stout attributes this ignoring by certain psychologists of the constructive aspect of early mental process to a false view of the nature both of association and of construction, the fundamental fallacy of the associationists lying in their disposition to explain the nature and existence of a whole by reference to the nature and existence of the parts which are contained in it, so that “the parts must be supposed to pre-exist before they are combined, and to pre-exist in such a way that they need only to be in some manner externally brought together or associated in order to constitute the whole which contains them.” In like manner Dr. Ward accuses psychologists of having “usually represented mental advance as consisting fundamentally in the combination and recombination of various elementary units, the so-called sensations and primitive movements, or, in other words, in a species of mental chemistry.” That Froebel seems to have avoided the error thus pointed out by those two psychologists, is surprising enough, but it is even more surprising to find that this is probably due to the fact that his conception of the earliest possible consciousness is very much like theirs. In rejecting “the atomistic view,” Professor Ward maintains that “the further we go back, the nearer we approach to a total presentation, having the character of one general continuum in which differences are latent.” Froebel’s account, as given in “The Education of Man,” is very similar: “Although in itself made up of the same objects and of the same organization, the external world comes to the child at first, out of its void, as it were, in misty, formless indistinctness, in chaotic confusion, even the child and the outer world merge into one another.”--_E., p. 40._