“The institution will be fundamental inasmuch as in training and instruction it will rest on the foundation from which proceed all genuine knowledge and all genuine practical attainments; it will rest on life itself and on creative effort, on the union and interdependence of doing and thinking, representation and knowledge, art and science. The institution will base its work on the pupil’s personal efforts in work and expression, making these, again, the foundation of all genuine knowledge and culture. Joined with thoughtfulness these efforts become a direct medium of culture; joined with reasoning, they become a direct means of instruction and thus make of work a true subject of instruction.”--_E., p. 38._ Knowledge of his surroundings is however not the only knowledge that the child gains through action; this is his only way of gaining knowledge of himself, of his power and of his weakness. It is through outward activity that, as Froebel says, he “comes to self-consciousness and learns to order, determine and master himself,” and it is in connection with the earliest Impulse to Activity that Froebel writes: “The present effort of mankind is an effort after freer self-development, freer self-formation, freer determining of one’s own destiny.… Therefore the more or less clear aim of the individual is Consciousness, the attaining of clearness about himself and about life in its unity as well as in its thousand ramifications, to attain to _comprehension and right use_ of life.… That this highest aim may be accomplished, the present time lays upon the educator the indispensable obligation--to understand the earliest activity, the first action of the child, the impulse (Trieb) to spontaneous activity, which appears so early; to foster the impulse (Trieb) for self-culture and self-instruction, through independent doing, observing and experimenting.”--_P., p. 15._ “The first spontaneous employments of the child are noticing his environment, and play, that is, independent outward action, living outside himself.… The deepest foundation of all the phenomena, of the earliest activity of the child is this; that he must exercise the dim anticipation of conscious life, and consequently must exercise power, test and thus compare power, exercise independence, test and thus compare the degree of independence.”--_P., pp. 29-31._