Reflex and instinctive acts which the child brings into the world with him, says Mr. King, are unconscious, as are reflex and habitual activities to the adult, but “the checking of a movement must make the child more definitely conscious of it … it is no longer mere movement, but movement-stopped-by-something. As soon as movement stands out, as soon as the consciousness of it is interwoven with something that is not movement, we have the basis for indefinite advance.” Froebel says the same thing in the first of the Mother Songs, where he takes as the point of departure for all future training this movement-stopped-by-something, to which Mr. King refers as the earliest beginning of consciousness. The mother is told that when her baby “strikes out with his small arms, as he kicks with his feet,” it is a challenge, to which she instinctively responds by giving him her hand or her chest, “against which he tramples with alternate feet and so measures and increases his strength.” So, he reaches “that first consciousness of self, which is born of physical opposition to and connection with the external world.”--_P., p. 171._ Every one knows that Froebel laid much stress on the necessity for what is usually called “expression,” which he called _Darstellung_--often translated “representation.” One of his reasons for this emphasis is, however, by no means always understood, viz. that it “induces clear perception.” It is in discussing and criticizing Professor Baldwin’s description of imitation as a circular process, that Mr. Irving King brings out two points of view from which we may regard imitation, that of the observer and that of the so-called imitator. Imitation, he says, is a term for the observer only, and not a term for psychology at all. Baldwin says that “real or persistent imitation is the reaction that will reproduce the stimulating impression and so tend to perpetuate itself.” But as Mr. King shows in the case of the child who imitates his mother’s poking of the fire, “the response of the child to the copy does not reinstate the original stimulus.… What the child gets is not a reproduced stimulus, but a new experience.” In “The Education of Man,” written years before his whole attention was given to the young child, Froebel had emphasized the necessity for “representation” which “induces and implies clear perception.” “For what man tries to represent or do, that he begins to understand.”--_E., p. 76._ As we have seen that Froebel sets before himself the self-same task which Mr. King states as the business of the genetic psychologist, so it should be no surprise that he gives virtually the same answer to the question: What do the imitative activities mean to the child?