We have seen that according to Froebel the earliest consciousness is a kind of self-consciousness. Mr. Irving King says that the very beginning of consciousness is “movement-stopped-by-something,” and Froebel says that when the baby kicks out or tramples with his feet and the mother responds by giving him her hand or chest to push against, the child reaches that “first consciousness of self which is born of physical opposition to and connection with the external world.” Here again we come to a point in which Froebel’s insight shows well in comparison with a typical modern genetic psychologist. “Many writers,” says Mr. Irving King, “have tried to select out certain kinds of activity as peculiarly connected with the development of the infant’s sense of self.” Preyer, for instance, connects this development specially with painful sensations; Baldwin, with experience associated with people, as contrasted with experience of things. His own conclusion is that “it seems more correct to say that all the child’s activities are factors of very nearly equal importance for developing the sense of self, as distinct from things and other people,” and it is this view that we find in Froebel’s writings. Even in “The Education of Man” we find: “If man, in accordance with his destiny, is truly and thoroughly to know each thing of the surrounding world; if _with the aid of each thing he is truly and thoroughly to know himself_.…”--_E., p. 92._ And among his later writings, in connection with the child’s play with bricks Froebel says: “True and early knowledge of Nature and of the outer world and _especially clear self-knowledge_ come to the child by this early dismembering and reconstruction and perception of real things, though not as yet, by any means, through verbal designation of the various productions of childish activity.”--_P., p. 123._ “Self-consciousness,” says Mr. King, “is essentially a relative and variable term for all of us. It stands for a process of definition, that, strictly speaking, proceeds till maturity, or even later.” And Froebel, writing about how, through the mother’s play with a ball, a child may gain his earliest perceptions of object, space and time, says that by the coming and going of the ball, etc., “there goes forth to the child the object, recognized as such by the mind and so held fast, the consciousness of the object, and so consciousness itself awakens in the child.” And without a pause he goes on: