“One may say with deep conviction that even this simple activity is inexpressibly important for the child, for which reason it is to be repeated as a play with the child as often as possible. What the little one has up to this time directly felt so often by the touch of the mother’s breast--union and separation--it now perceives outwardly in an object which can be grasped and clasped. Thus the repetition of this play confirms, strengthens, and clears in the mind of the child a feeling and perception deeply grounded in, and important to the whole life of man--the feeling and perception of oneness and individuality, and of disjunction and separateness; also of present and past possession.… The idea of return or recurrence soon develops to the child’s perception, from the presence and absence; that of reunion from the singleness and separateness; of future repossession from present and past possession, and so the idea of being, having and becoming, are the dim perceptions which first dawn on the child. “From these perceptions there at once develop in the child’s mind the three great perceptions of object, space and time, which were at first one collective perception. From the perceptions of being, having and becoming in respect to space and object, and in connection with them, there soon develop also the new perceptions of present, past and future in respect to time. Indeed, these ninefold perceptions which open to the child the portals of a new objective life, unfold themselves most clearly by means of his constant play with the one single ball.”--_P., p. 36._ Dr. Ward gives as the first step “in the psychological constitution of distinct things”--as opposed to what he calls “mere thingstuff”--“the simultaneous projection into the same occupied space of the several impressions, which we thus come to regard as the qualities of the body filling it.” Froebel writes: “We gave, therefore, to the mother the brightly coloured soft ball to make a unity of touch and perception through sight, for through the brightness it makes itself known to sight, and through warmth (softness?) to touch, as an objective phenomena, a thing in itself.”--_P., p. 65._ To reach unity and complexity, says Ward, “it is essential that objects should recur, and recur as they have previously recurred, if knowledge is ever to begin.” The constituent impressions must also “be again and again repeated in like order to prompt anew the same grouping,” and the constancy of one group must present itself “along with changes in other groups, and in the general field.… It is only where a group, as a whole, has been found to change its position relatively to other groups, and--apart from causal changes--to be independent of changes of position among them, that such complexes can become distinct unities and yield a world of things.”