It is beyond dispute that this is the kind of work that Froebel desired for all humanity, so it is not surprising if he drew no hard and fast line between work and the “_play_” which he insists “_is not trivial_,” and which he urges parents to protect and guide. Of play at the stage of boyhood he writes: “Joy is the soul of every activity at this period.”--_E., p. 304._ And in reference to the right kind of instruction he says: “The union of school and life is the first and indispensable requirement … if men are ever to free themselves from the oppressive burden and emptiness of merely extraneously communicated knowledge, heaped up in memory, if they would ever rise to the joy and vigour of a knowledge of the real nature of things, to a living knowledge of things.… Mankind is meant to enjoy a degree of knowledge and insight, of energy and efficiency, of which at present we have no conception; for who has measured the limits of God-born mankind! The boy is to take up his work which has now become his calling, not indolently in sullen gloom, but cheerfully and joyously.”--_E., pp. 230-233._ One distinct line of division is that drawn by Groos when he says that with young animals and probably with children “their first manifestation of what is afterwards experimentation, fighting and imitative play, etc., is rarely conscious, and therefore we cannot assert with assurance that it is pleasurable.”[38] In this case he says the biological but not the psychological germ of play is present. Froebel never lost sight of the psychological point of view in so far as his desire always was to see what the action meant to the actor, what the child’s play meant to the child, and also in that he desired all the activity to be joyous, to be performed for its own sake. But it was really the biological view that he endeavoured to reach and to set forth. Coming now to the Theories of Play, it seems clear that, if he had ever heard of them, Froebel would have endeavoured to combine those of Recapitulation and Preparation. He states quite plainly that these are not incompatible, recognizing that in any work or play, by which the child retraces past stages of human development, he gains what is most necessary for his own future life, control over his surroundings as well as over himself, something after the manner in which these have been gained by the race. “The observation of the development of individual man and its comparison with the general development of the human race show plainly that, in the development of the inner life of the individual man, the history of the mental development of the race is repeated, and that the race in its totality may be viewed as one human being, in whom there will be found the necessary steps in the development of individual man.”--_E., p. 160._