Froebel was bound to watch for early developments of self-consciousness, because his whole philosophy and pedagogy are based on his firm belief that while everything in the universe is an expression of the Divine, man alone is “destined” to express the God within “with self-determination.” So, of the little child, he writes: “Because the child himself begins to represent his inner being outwardly, he imputes the same activity to all about him, to the pebble and chip of wood, to the plant, the flower, and the animal. And thus there is developed in the child at this stage his own life, his life with parents and family, and particularly his life in and with Nature, as if this held life _like that which he feels within himself_.”--_E., p. 54._ As the child grows older, the mother, Froebel continues, tries to teach him to feel the complexity of his own body, “Give me your arm,” “Where is your hand?” she says, and she “playfully leads him to a knowledge of the members which he cannot see,” and the passage ends: “The aim of all this is to lead the child to self-consciousness, to reflection about himself in the approaching period of boyhood. Thus, a boy ten years old, similarly guided by instinct, believing himself unobserved, soliloquized: ‘I am not my arm, nor my ear; all my limbs and organs I can separate from myself, and I still remain myself; I wonder what I am; who and what is this which I call myself?’”--_E., p. 56._ Nor does Froebel forget the idea of the self as the boy grows older. Once the activities of running, jumping, etc., are familiar, the boy’s play takes on a new complexion. His games are now “trials of strength,” or “displays of strength.” “The boy tries to see himself in his companions, to feel himself in them, to weigh and measure himself by them, to know and find himself by their aid.”--_E., p. 114._ “The life of the boy has, indeed, no other purpose but that of the outer representation of his self: his life is in truth but an external representation of his inner being, of his power, particularly through plastic material. In the forms he fashions, he does not see outer forms which he is to take in and understand; he sees in them the expression of his spirit, of the activities of his own mind.”--_E., p. 279._ Surely it is another touch of genius that makes Froebel spring to the nascent idea of self as _the_ reason for the child’s craving for tales of all kinds.