“This period is pre-eminently the period of the development of the faculty of speech. Therefore it was indispensable that whatever the child did should be clearly and definitely designated by the word. Every object, every thing, became such, as it were only through the word; before it had been named, although the child might have seemed to see it with the outer eyes, it had no existence for him. The name, as it were, created the thing for the child.--_E., p. 90._ “The object of giving names is not primarily the development of the child’s power of speech, but to assist his comprehension of the object, its parts and properties, by defining his sense-impressions.”--_P., p. 242._ Professor Stout also speaks of the casual naming of the object, by those around the child as “a means of fixing the attention of the child on the object when it would otherwise pass unnoticed,” and he guards against the misconception that the name at the outset is a name for the child. He calls it “merely a special sound associated with a special percept in a quite casual and indefinite way.” Froebel, too, is careful when he says: “A definite tone is to be connected with a definite perception, and the tone when heard again may recall the perception.” Though Froebel has little to say about the separate senses, and what little he has is worthless, yet on the other hand he has a great deal to say, especially in his later writings, about the child’s bodily activity, and the experiences and perceptions (Erfahrung-Wahrnehmen) he gains from it. Indeed he makes so much of this, and it is so essentially a modern way of thinking that it has been given a chapter to itself. CHAPTER V HOW CONSCIOUSNESS IS DIFFERENTIATED.--THE PLACE OF ACTION IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERCEPTION AND OF FEELING Once objects have begun to emerge, differentiated out of the formless indistinctness, comes what Froebel calls the “sucking-in stage,” where the child “makes the external internal.” Here, more than anywhere perhaps, Froebel shows his genius, his originality as a student of child psychology, in that he perceived that this mental sucking-in is not merely a matter of sense organs, but that it is also a muscular performance. Who, before Froebel, understood the importance of motor activity from the very earliest days, as a means of gaining ideas, or realized as we now begin to do, that this is the true explanation of the “endless imitation which is the child’s vocation”? In speaking of the “new-born child,” it is activity or action which is again and again repeated and emphasized as the outstanding characteristic, “an activity and action devoted to working with and prevailing over the outer.” “As rest appears to be the earliest requirement of the bodily life, so movement soon appears as the demand of the soul life.”--_P., p. 63._