It is in “The First Action of a Child” that we find Froebel contrasting the instincts of the lower animals with those of man. Here curiously enough, Froebel, according to Professor Stout, is almost more correct than Professor Lloyd Morgan himself, whose statement “that animals do not perceive relations” Professor Stout regards as misleading. His correction is, “unless an artificial restriction is put on the meaning of the term _relation_, this statement would imply that animals cannot perceive the position of objects in space or their motion.… Hence we should say, not that the perception of relation is deficient in animals, but only that definite perception of relations is deficient which depends on comparison.” Now it is this very point of comparison which Froebel takes as the essential intellectual difference between the animal independent from birth thanks to fully developed instinct, and the child helpless and apparently inferior at first, yet destined for progress “self-active and free.” He writes: “The animal whose life impulses, powers and abilities, whose instincts as they are called (dessen Lebenstriebe, Kräfte und Anlagen, dessen Instincte wie man es nennt) are at once so definite and strong, that in natural conditions it never fails, indeed cannot fail to overcome every hindrance within its life’s reach, the animal just on this account can never arrive at a knowledge of its powers, its qualities, its nature … _for it lacks all points of comparison. It lacks all points of comparison, which, in the case of man proceed from the fact that the weakest output of strength meets with obstacles_ which increase as the strength increases, and which will only with difficulty be conquered or overcome and annihilated. “It is quite different in the life of man, in the beginning of which practically nothing can be accomplished without help from without. Nothing especially can be accomplished through a preponderance of inner power such, for example, as the newly hatched duckling shows on the water. Thus everything external must, by Man, with his preponderance of helplessness, be overcome as an obstacle solely through inner advancing, and outer strengthening and increasing of power through free activity of the will.”--_P., p. 25._ With this passage from “The First Action of a Child” we can compare the following from Stout’s “Analytic Psychology”: “The peculiar feature in the life of animals which prevents progressive development is the existence of instincts which do for them what the human being must do for himself. Their inherited organization is such, that they perform the movements adapted to supply their needs on the mere occurrence of an appropriate external stimulus.… In man, a blind craving has to grope its way from darkness into light in order to become effective; in the animal the means of satisfaction are provided ready made by Nature at the outset.”