“I have already said that this little game arose because people felt that a child’s love of activity, and his striving to get the use of his limbs, ought to be carried on in such a way as to lift him at once into the complexity of the life which surrounds him.… Pray do not disturb them in their ingenious charming play (saying grace over the dolls’ feast), but rather avoid noticing it if you cannot identify yourself with its charm.… For how is your child to cultivate in himself the feeling of what is holy, if you will not grant that it takes form for him in all its purity in his innocent games.”--_M., p. 148._ “What man tries to represent he begins to understand.”--_E., p. 76._ Representation, however, may be carried out in many ways, by the use of material, as well as by bodily action so that the constructive instinct also subserves that of investigation. “To grasp a thing through life and action is much more developing, cultivating and strengthening than merely to receive it through the verbal communication of ideas. Similarly, representation of a thing by material means, in life and action, united with thought and speech, is more developing than merely verbal representation of ideas.”--_E., p. 279._ “The child must perceive and grasp his own life in an objective manifestation before he can perceive and grasp it in himself. This law of development, prescribed by Nature and by the essential character of the child, must always be respected and obeyed by the true educator. Its recognition is the aim of my gifts and games apprehended relatively to the educator.”--_P., p. 38._ Here Froebel has plainly stated the main object of his specially selected play-material. The ordinary parent not being “the man advanced in insight,” who “makes clear to himself the purpose of playthings,” Froebel often saw children supplied with expensive but unsuitable toys, toys which would not bring the child any nearer his destination, “to have power and understanding, to become ever more and more self-conscious and self-determining.” “Here, then, we meet as a great imperfection in ordinary playthings, a disturbing element which slumbers like a viper under roses, viz. that it is too complex, too much finished. The child can begin no new thing with it, cannot produce enough variety by it; his power of creative imagination, his power of giving outward form to his own idea is thus actually deadened. When we provide children with too finished playthings, we deprive them of the incentive to perceive the particular in the general (_P., p. 122_).… What presents are most prized by the child? Those which afford him a means of unfolding his inner life most freely and of shaping it in various directions.”--_P., p. 142._