Commenting upon the phrase “We are only conscious as we are conscious of change,” Dr. Ward remarks that the word change does not sufficiently explain what happens in differentiation, for this implies that the increased complexity is due to the persistence of former changes; such persistence being essential to the very idea of growth or development.… At the same time he is careful to point out that neither in “retentiveness” nor in assimilation is there “any confronting of the old with the new,” any “active comparison.” Without change of impression consciousness would be a blank, but “a difference between presentations is not at all the same as the presentation of that difference. The former must precede the latter; the latter, which requires active comparison, need not follow … we must recognize objects before we can compare them.” Froebel says that: “All the development of the child has its foundation in almost imperceptible attainments and perceptions … the first perceptions, in the beginning almost imperceptible and evanescent, are fixed, increased and clarified by innumerable repetitions, and _by change_.”--_P., p. 38._ Froebel, too, goes back to this very earliest stage, the stage when a baby “begins to notice.” He says that this indication of an intellect (Seelenaeusserung) begins when the child is a few weeks old, and is occasioned at first by the movement, that is change in position, of a bright object, “in and by means of the motion the child first perceives the object.”--_P., p. 64._ In another passage Froebel speaks of change as “a dim conception of sequence, and thus of dim comparison.” “These first impressions come to the child by means of perception and seeing, and by means of coming, staying and vanishing (of the ball); _by means of change_, thus also, in a certain point of view by means of early dim conceptions of sequence, of foundation and result, of cause and effect, and thus of dim comparison.”--_P., p. 65._ A change or difference which does not imply active comparison, and a change or sequence which does imply dim comparison are not very far apart, and Froebel makes his meaning clearer still by using the words “unconsciously comparing” (unbewusst vergleichend). “By this play his attention is called to the precise shape of the cube; and he will look at it sharply, unconsciously comparing it with the hand, to which his eyes were first attracted.”--_P., p. 84._ Nor does Froebel omit to notice the necessary close connection of the new with the old, which Dr. Ward emphasizes.