Expression, of course, of which speech is but one form, is to Froebel all-important. “Speech,” he says, is “required and conditioned by the attainment to consciousness,” and as self-consciousness is the characteristic of humanity, so speech is “the first manifestation of mankind.” In his “Autobiography” Froebel writes: “Mankind as a whole, as one great unity, had now become my quickening thought. I kept this conception continually before my mind. I sought after proofs of it in my little world within and in the great world without me; I desired by many a struggle to win it, and then to set it worthily forth. And thus I was led back to the first appearance of man upon our earth, and to the first manifestation of mankind, his speech.”--_A., p. 84._ In talking of the mother’s play with an infant he says that she accompanies every action with words, “even if obliged to confess that there can be no understanding of the spoken word,” as “the general sense of hearing is not yet developed, still less the special sense of hearing words.” Froebel says she is right: “for that which will one day develop and which must originate, begins and must begin when there is as yet only the conditions, the possibility thereof. Thus it is with the attainment of the human being to consciousness, and the speech required and conditioned by consciousness.”--_P., p. 40._ Words, says Froebel, first separate the child from the world outside him. “Up to this stage (the beginning of speech), the inner being of man is still an unmembered, undifferentiated unity. With language, the expression and representation of the internal begin; with language, organization, or a differentiation with reference to ends and means sets in.”--_E., p. 50._ Both in the earlier “Education of Man,” and in his later writings Froebel uses the strong expression that “the word creates the thing” for the child, and in one passage he adds that by language the idea is defined and retained. “This period is pre-eminently the period of the development of speech. Therefore in all the child did, it was indispensable that what he did should be clearly designated by words. Every object, every thing became such, as it were, only through the word; before it had been named although the child might have seemed to see it with the outer eyes, it had no existence for the child. The name, as it were, created the thing for the child; hence the name and the thing seemed to be one.”--_E., p. 90._