“I am firmly convinced that all the phenomena of the child world, those which delight us, as well as those which grieve us, depend upon fixed laws as definite as those of the cosmos, the planetary system and the operations of Nature; it is therefore possible to discover them and examine them. When once we know and have assimilated these laws, we shall be able powerfully to counteract any retrograde and faulty tendencies in children, and to encourage, at the same time, all that is good and virtuous.”--_L., p. 91._ Nor was Froebel in any doubt as to how these laws are to be discovered, and his order of investigation is very similar to that prescribed by Professor Stout. The latter, though regarding genetic psychology as “the most important and most interesting,” considers that it should be preceded by:--1, A general analysis of consciousness, analytic and largely introspective; 2, An investigation of the laws of mental process, “analytic also, inasmuch as we endeavour to ascertain the general laws of mental process by analysis of the fully developed mind.” Froebel, too, regards the analytic as a necessary preparation for the genetic, and says that parents and teachers, who wish to supply the needs of the child at different stages of development: “are to consider life _firstly_ through looking into themselves, into the course of their own development, its phenomena and its claims--through the retrospection (Rückblick) of the earliest possible years of their own lives, and also the introspection (Einblick) of their present lives, that their own experience may furnish a key to the problem of the child’s condition (den Zustand des Kindes in sich zu lösen). _Secondly_, by the deepest possible search into the life of the child, and into what he must necessarily require according to his present stage of development.”--_P., p. 168._ Professor Stout adds later that anthropology and philology may ultimately yield results as important as those yielded by physiology. Froebel could have no idea of the physiological parallel to mental process, but he did not omit the anthropological inquiry, for in another passage he enlarges his first point, declaring that: