“Similarly in each child there is repeated the deed which marks the beginning of moral and human emancipation, of the dawn of reason--essentially the same deed that marked the dawn of reason in the race as a whole.”--_E., p. 41._ It must have been a somewhat unorthodox view in 1826, but some pages further on Froebel speaks even more boldly of “the fall or--since the result is the same--the ascent of the mind of man from simple emotional development into the development of externally analytic and critical reason.”--_E., p. 193._ Professor James goes on to state two other principles which make for non-uniformity of instinct. The first of these is that instincts are inhibited by habits, and the second that instincts are transitory. The physiological fact of “plasticity” in which these principles are grounded, was of course quite out of Froebel’s ken. Nevertheless, the principles themselves do not escape his shrewd observation. Mr. McDougall points out that even acquired habits of thought and action, so important as springs of action in the developed human mind, are in a sense derived from and secondary to instincts. He goes on to say that “in the absence of instincts no habits could be formed,” so it is interesting to find Froebel arguing that the phenomena of habit is a proof of the existence of what in the infant he calls the impulse to activity or to self-employment. “The helplessness of the new-born human being in regard to all outer things is the opposite of his future ability--since life is a whole--to help himself through the enhancing of his will-power.… Helplessness and personal will, therefore, become the two points between which the child’s life turns, and the fulcrum is free activity. Herein lies for the educator a key to phenomena of child-life which seem to contradict each other. For out of the impulse to activity (Thätigkeitstriebe) and to free self-employment, or rather out of the united three--helplessness, personal will, and self-employment--soon proceed custom and habit, often indolence and too facile yielding. “Consideration of custom, and of the spontaneous acquiring of habit in the child, especially in regard to what causes it, and to its effect upon the child, is just as important for the educator, as is the consideration and guidance of his instinct of activity. This very phenomenon that the child so early accustoms and inures himself to something, this early phenomenon of child life, the growing together and becoming one, as it were, with his surroundings, is a proof of the existence and inner working, even thus early, of the impulse for activity or employment, even where the child appears outwardly inactive and passive: in that the child accommodates himself to outer surroundings, relations and requirements in order to provide more scope for his inner activity.”--_P., p. 27._