Thus, according to Froebel, a living, energetic, self-conscious unity is both the metaphysical reality and the human ideal, and “_Education consists in leading man to, ... pure and unsullied consciousness and free representation of the inner law of Divine Unity, and in teaching him ways and means thereto_” (5: p. 2). From the Living Unity of all existence, the living Unity of every human being is self-evident. And here lies the real foundation stone of his philosophy of education. He writes in his autobiography: “Mankind as a whole, as one great Unity, had now become my quickening thought. I kept this conception constantly before my mind” (7: p. 84). So each new-born child not only “should be viewed and treated as a manifestation of the Divine Spirit in human form,” but, “as a necessary essential member of humanity,” he should be viewed and treated “in his obvious and living relations to the present, past, and future development of humanity, in order to bring the education of the child into harmony with the past, present, and future development of humanity and of the race” (5: pp. 16-17). The germ of the evolutionary idea had already been floating in the air of the pedagogical world; we see it in Rousseau, in Kant, in Pestalozzi, but it found its richest soil in the mind of our incessant self-educator. Humanity, he says: “... should, therefore, be looked upon not as perfected and developed, not as fixed and stationary, but as steadily and progressively growing, in a state of ever living development, ever ascending from one stage of culture to another toward its aim, which partakes of the infinite and eternal. It is unspeakably pernicious to look upon the development of humanity as stationary and completed, and to see in its present phases simply repetitions and greater generalizations of itself. For the child, as well as every successive generation, becomes thereby exclusively imitative, an external dead copy--as it were, a cast of the preceding one--and not a living ideal for its stage of development, which it had attained in human development as a whole, to serve future generations in all time to come. Indeed, each successive generation and each successive individual human being, inasmuch as he would understand the past and present, must pass through all preceding phases of human development and culture, and this should not be done in the way of dead imitation or mere copying, but in the way of living, spontaneous self-activity. Every human being should realize in him these phases spontaneously and freely.... For in every human being ... there lies and lives humanity as a whole; but in each one it is realized and expressed in a wholly particular, peculiar, personal, unique manner” (5: pp. 17-18).