The Home, The IfflMRGMiEi km MARY LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. Received j^N 6 1893 • '^9 Accessions No. 14Q^q(^ . Class No. LECTURES TEAINING SCHOOLS feintifrgaiten CcacOcrs, Digitized by tine Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/educationinhomekOOpeabrich EDUCATION THE HOME, THE KINDERGARTEN, AND THE PRIMARY SCHOOL. BT ELIZABETH P. PEABODY. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY E. ADELAIDE MANNING. __^ . J with our children. ' ' — Froebel. '^^ 0» THB (USIVBRSIT' ^rFOHl^^ LONDON: 5NSCHEIN, LOWEEY & CO., PATEBNOSTER SQUABE. 1887. H-^j?^^ Lb t i ^ INTRODUCTION. Among those who in the last twenty years have helped to spread a knowledge of the educational pnnciples of Froebel beyond the limits of his native country, Miss Elizabeth Pea- body's name deserves to be specially remembered. It is mainly owing to her enthusiastic efforts that the value of the Kindergarten was early recognised in the United States, and that its first American promoters were encouraged to main- tain, amid many difficulties, a standai'd of real efficiency for the teachers of Froebel's system. Miss Peabody had long occupied herself, theoretically and pi'actically, with educa- tional subjects. Not satisfied by merely intellectual method s of instruction, and impatien t o ^ the spp erfic iality which was too often approved, s^e niaSe it lur cri-cat aim to train character, and, by a simultaneous dcv* ]')[)tn<'nt of children's mental c:! (>ir moral iiaiuic, (o prepa re them for the i\ M . <'f life. It was not surprising that when Mi- y, li )1 ling such views of education, came in contact with the ideas and the work of Froebelj_she at once experienced the delight always attache Jtothe discovery that the problems exercising our own minds have been suc- cessfully solved by some one who has started from principles such as oui*s, and who has cultivated the same ideal. She found that Froebel had carried into practice that very kind of training of which she had realized the immense import- ance, and that he had placed in a clear light truths which she had already more dimly perceived. Eager to inform herself about the new system. Miss Peabody travelled, in 1868, to Europe, on purpose to visit in Germany the Kinder- gartens established by Froebel, who was no longer living, and by his best pupils. On her return to America, she vi INTRODUCTION. devoted herself for many years to the introduction and improvement of Kindergartens and of training institutions, and to enlightening, by her writings and addresses, mothers and educators respecting the value and simplicity of Froebel's methods. Miss Peabody has the satisfaction of witnessing a good measure of success from her generous exertions, in the increasing number of advocates of the Kindergarten in America, in its adoption as a first department of many State primary schools, and in the numerous private and charity Kindergartens founded from North to South, and from New York to San Francisco. Advanced now in years, this warm- hearted lady is engaged in other lines of philanthropic work, but she retains, and still manifests, her earnest interest in the educational progress which she has laboured so actively to secure. Ever since Miss Peabody 's zeal was kindled for Froebers ideal as to young children's education, her help and criticism have been sought by the trainers of Kindergarten students in America, and by all who, with serious purpose, have thus worked for the movement. Hence she has often delivered lectures at the opening of the session at Normal Colleges, and on other occasions when she saw an opportunity of exercising influence in favour of rational principles of educa- tion. This book, which appeared only lately at Boston, consists of a few of such lectures. It is now, with Miss Peabody's consent, published in England, where many parents and teachers will be glad to profit by the author's wise and loving study of little children, and her sympathetic insight into Froebel's methods for their development. During the last few years various thoughtful writers on education have drawn attention here to the subject of infant manage- ment, and it is remarkable how widely the principles of Froebel and Pestalozzi are now recognised and accepted. But books are still greatly needed which, especially addressed to those who have charge of children, urge in a convincing INTRODUCTION. Vll manner how essential it is that the first few years should be rightly guided, and indicate certain defined educational aims. I think that Miss Peabody's lectures are likely to prove very useful in this direction. Though her readers will perhaps contest some of her psychological deductions, they cannot fail to be impressed and benefited by the high tone of her reasoning, by her evidently tender and reverent love of children, and by her excellent suggestions in regard to their harmonious development. Amongst its other merits, this book tends to correct the still too prevalent notion, that the Kindergarten is a peculiar — an almost magical — institution, ' which provides a sure remedy for children's imperfections, apart from their home conditions. Doubtless, in the case of poor neglected little ones, the contrast between their treatment at the Kinder- garten and their ordinary experience, is necessarily striking and decided, because the parents are careless and ignorant. But Fix)ebers view of the Kindergarten was, that it should be a supplementary help to the loving and judicious mother, who, owing to her many household and other duties, might be unable to give, through the whole day, to her younger children the regular attention which their awakening facul- ties need. It was to be a portion of the home pattern and web of training, not a patch of a new texture. He saw that a child requires to have about it, as Miss Peabody says, ** love and thought in practical operation," and this not now and then, but always. And as the mother may have at times to transfer her children to the charge of others, he organised the Kindergarten — a higher nursery, under refined and motherly influences, for those that have passed out of baby- hood. There, on the same principles as at home, they may be gently tended for two or three hours of the day, and developed in body, mind, and character. Froebers object also was to provide companionship for these children, adapted to their age and attainments, which could only be done by Vlii INTEODUCTION. including some from outside the family circle. Bat again, lie desired to give the opportunity to inexperienced mothers of observing the patient and resourceful guidance carried out by even young teachers, vrho had been trained to study children, and had learnt how to occupy them suitably. Here we see another link with the home. Now Miss Peabody entered so much into Froebel's ideas that she helps to remove the Kindergarten out of its supposed exceptional sphere, and to show that the teachers represent temporarily the mother, doing that which the mother also aims, or ought to aim, at doing, for the children's good. These Lectures are also useful in presenting a high ideal of Kindergarten teaching. Miss Peabody sees that the work of educating requires special qualifications in those who undertake it, and that such as are not fitted for it, had better take up a different career. At the same time placing, as always, character above intellect, she considers that most women, whose religious and moral nature is well cultivated, and who take pains to develop their mental powers, may hope for success in devoting themselves to the training of young children. Her writings are calculated to inspire the teacher with hearty zest for her labour, and yet with an abiding feeling that even years of practice leave her far behind her ever advancing standard. Miss Peabody en- courages no exaggerated estimate of Froebel's thoughts and methods. She freely recognises that he gained many truths from fellow-students of children's nature and faculties ; but she claims for him the originality which belongs to those who with unselfish aims bestow close attention on a subject of deep human interest. To teachers, therefore, as well as to all who love children, she says — and with this quotation I will close my few introductory remarks — " You will not be wise if you do not look out of Froebel's window." E. A. MANNING. [UiriVBIlSITT) LECTUEE I. THE KINDERGARTNER. Whoever proposes to become a kiudergartner according to the idea of Frabel, must at ouce dismiss from her mind the notion that it requires less ability and culture to educate children of three, than those of ten or fifteen 3*ears of age. It demands more ; for, is it not plain that to superintend and guide accurately \\\& formation of the human understand- ing itself, requires a finer abilit}' and a profounder insight than to listen to recitations from books ever so learned and scientific? To form the human understanding is a work of time, demanding a knowledge of the laws of thought, will, and feeling, in their interaction upon the threshold of con- sciousness, which can be acquired only by the study of chil- dren themselves in their every act of life — a study to be pursued in the spirit that reveals what Jesus Christ meanly when he said : "He that receive th a little child in my name, receiveth me, and Ilim that sent me;" ^'Woe unto him who offends one of these little ones, for their spirits behold the face of my Father who is in heaven/' Not till children who have been themselves educated according to Froebers principles, grow up, will there be found any adult persons who can keep kindergartens without devoting themselves to a special study of child-nature in the spirit of devout humilit}'. For we are all suffering the igno- rance and injury inevitable from having begun our own lives in the confusions of accidental and disorderly impressions, without having had the clue of reason put into our hands by that human providence of education, which, to be time, must B 2 THE KINDERGARTNER. reflect point by point the Divine Providence, that according to the revelations of history is educating the whole race, and which may find hints for its procedure in observing the spontaneous play of children fresh from the hands of the Creator. The education of children by a genial training of their spontaneous playful activities to the production of order and beauty within the humble sphere of childish fancy and affec- tion, was a fresh idea with Froebel ; but, like every universal idea, it was not absolutely new in the world. Plato says, in his great book on Laws : — *'Play has the mightiest influence on the maintenance and non-maintenance of laws ; and if children's plays are con- ducted according to laws and rules, and they always pursue their amusements in conformity with order, while finding pleasure therein, it need not be feared that when they are grown up they will break laws whose objects are more serious." And again, in his JRepublic, he says : — " From their earliest years, the plays of children ought to be subject to strict laws. For if their plays, and those who mingle with them, are arbitrary and lawless, how can they become virtuous men, law-abiding and obedient? On the contrary, when children are early trained to submit to laws in their plays, love for these laws enters into their souls with the music accompanying them, and helps their develop- ment." You will observe Plato's association of music with the laws that are to regulate pla}'. Music, with the Greeks, had indeed a broader meaning than attaches to the word with us, who confine it to that subtle expression of the sense of law and harmony which is made in the element of sound, and addressed to the imagination through the ear. All knowledge and art inspired by the sacred Nine, they named music. Singing was no more music than dancing, drawing, THE KINDERGAIITNER. 8 the harmonizing of colors, plastic art, poetry, and science, which is nothing less than thinking according to the rhyth- mic laws of nature. To learn to commune with the Muses, daughters of Memory and Jove, who were led by the god Apollo, symbolizing the moral harmony of the universe, and expressing the mind of the Father of gods and men, by oracle, was learning music or how to live divinely ; a process which may commence before children leave the nursery, if their plays are regulated according to artistic principles. It is common to speak of the Greeks, as if they were of exceptional organization. I think their organization was only exceptional, because it was more carefully treated in infancy than ours is apt to be. I do not believe that in Greece, or anywhere in the world, there were ever more beautiful little children than there are in America ; and the beauty would not be so transient as it unquestionably is with us, if truly cultivated persons took our children in hand from babyhood for the care of their bodies and minds, in- stead of leaving this work to the most ignorant class of the communitj', such as the general run of the servants who have the education of them during their earliest infancy. Even many parents who take care of their own children do not make it an object to study physiology or psycholog}^, and seem to think that there is nothing in little children which requires special study, except indeed at the very first, when the child is put into the mother's arms more helpless than the lowest form of animal life (for the very insect is endowed by nature, as the child is not, with enough absolute knowledge — we call it instinct — to fulfil its small circle of relations without help of its parents) . It seems mysterious, at first sight, that the child, whose duty and whose destiny it is to have dominion over nature, should be endowed least of all creatures with any absolute knowledge of it. But the mystery is solved when we consider that the happiness which is distinctively human, is only to be found in the discovery 4 THE KIl!a)ERGARTNER. and GDJoyment of ever-widening relations to our kind, with the fulfilment of the duties belonging to them. It is the absolute helplessness of the human infant which challenges the maternal instinct to rush to his rescue, lest he should die at once. And to continue to stud}' his manifestations of pleasure and discontent with obedient respectfulness, is the perfection of the maternal nursing. But when the child has got on so far as to know the simplest uses of its own body, and especially after it has learned enough words to express its simplest wants and sensations, even parents seem to think it can get on by itself, so that children from about two to five years of age are left to self -education, as it were ; this virtual abandonment being crossed by a capri- cious and arbitrary handling of them — ^^mind and body — on the part of those around them, which is even worse than the neglect ; for when are children more unable, than between three and five years old, to guide their own thoughts and action? How would a garden of flowers fare, to be planted, and then left to grow with so little scientific care taken by the gardener, as is bestowed upon children between one and five years old? Froebel, in the very word kindergarten, proclaimed that gospel for children which holds within it the promise of the coming of the kingdom, in which God's will is to be done on earth as it is in heaven — a consummation which we daily pray for with our lips, but do not do the first thing to bring about, b}^ educating our children in the way of order, which is no less earth's than " heaven's first law,'' and makes earth heaven so far as it is fulfilled. A kindergarten means a guarded company of children, who are to be treated as a gardener treats his plants ; that is, in the first place, studied to see what they are, and what conditions they require for the fullest and most beautiful growth ; in the second place, put into or supplied with these conditions, with as little handling of their individuality as THE KINDERGARTNER. 5 possible, but with an unceasing genial and provident care to remove all obstructions, and favor all the circumstances of growth. It is because they are living organisms that they are to be cultivated — not drilled (which is a process only appropriate to insensate stone). I think there is perhaps no better way of making appar- ent what this kindergartning is, which makes such an im- portunate demand on your consideration, than to tell you liow the idea germinated and grew in the mind of Froebel himself ; for thus we shall see that it would be unreasonable to expect that it could be improvised by every teacher ; but that here, as elsewhere in human life, God has sent into the vrorld a gifted person to guide his fellows, according to the law enunciated by St. John in the 38th verse of the 4th chapter of his Gospel. AVe have the materials of this history on Frosbers own authority, in an autobiographical letter that he wrote to the Duke of Meiningen, whose interest in him was excited by an incident so characteristic of Froebel, that I will relate it. Having heard of a cruel and stupid opposition made to the ardent educator by the unthinking oflicials of a region where he was making a mart^T of himself, the duke made inquiries, which resulted in his offering him the situation of head-tutor to his only son. But Froebel astonished him with a refusal of the place, sending the duke word that it would be impos- sible to educate, in a perfect manner, a child so isolated by conventional rank and circumstances that he must inevitably conceive himself to be intrinsically superior to other children. The duke was so much struck that a poor man, struggling with every difficulty, should refuse one of the highest posts in a royal household, with all its emoluments, from a purely conscientious scruple of this kind, that his curiosity was piqued. He sent for Froebel, and they had a conversation upon the principles and spirit of a truly human education, by which Froebel convinced him that a noble moral develop- 6 THE KINDERGARTNER. ment was indispensable to a truly intellectual one, so that the duke was actually persuaded to send his son as an equal with other boys to a neighboring school. One day, some little time after, the boy came home roaring^ on account of a beating he had received from one of his playmates. The duke, in a transport of rage, asked the name of the offender, and said that he should be immediately expelled from the school. Then was Froebers advice justified. The young prince dried his tears, refused to tell the boy*s name, and declared that "the beating was all fair!" It is quite con- sistent with these facts, that the duke should ask Frcebel how his idea grew in his mind. Froebers answer is still ex- tant. I have not been able to get the original text, but I can give you the substance of it, as it was given to me. Friedrich Froebel was the son of a laborious pastor of seven villages in Thuringia. He lost his mother before his remembrance, and fell into the care of hard-worked domestic servants, with no light upon his infant life except what came from the love and sympathy of two older brothers, who cherished him when they were at home from boarding- school. The parsonage was in the shadow of the church, and into it no ray of sunshine ever came ; and the child was l^ept drearily in the house. He tells of seeing workmen building a part of the church that had become dilapidated, and how he longed to imitate them ; and traces to this desire of employing the time that hung so heavily on his hands, his discovery of the building instinct, so universal in childhood, and which he thought should always have simple materials afforded it with which to express itself. At last his father married again, and at first the stepmother petted the young child of her husband, and awakened in him a hope of a satis- fying love, which he reciprocated with all the energies of his long-starved heart. But when the merely instinctive woman had a child of her own, a certain jealousy arose in her, and she repulsed poor little Friedrich, and ''no longer" THE KINDERGARTNER. 7 — as he pathetically remarks — "called him thou** (du) which is an endearing expression in German, but he (er), whicli has a rough associatiou. It is plain that the child was en* dowed with an immense sensibility to, or more than ordinary presentiment of the Divine Order of Nature, and with the extreme tendency to reflection always involved in this gift. As he was so poorly developed physically, he became in his joyless early life perhaps morbidly nervous. Disappointed in his timid efforts to please, all the sweet bells of his nature were jangled, and he was miserable — he knew not why. He says he always found himself doing the wrong thing — the too much, or the too little — and was complained of to his father, who treated him as a naughty boy. But sometimes the pastor took him out of his stepmother*s way, to accompany himself in his parochial visits, in which Froebel says he seemed continually to be settling family quarrels. This made on the child's mind an impres- sion of things that was rather ludicrously expressed, when he one day asked of his oldest brother, who happened to come home from boarding-school, why it was that God had not made people all men, or all women, so that there should not be so much quarrelling in the world. In order to divert him from such premature consideration of social questions, the posed elder brother undertook to teach him botany ac- cording to the sexual system, revealing to him the law of contrasts conciliated with each other for the production of harmony and beauty. The child was delighted with what he was shown ; but still his exceptionally moral genius importunately asked, why may not human differences be thus harmonized, to produce happiness and goodness? The presentiment of the great truth which was felt in his heart, though not yet caught by his mind, was signalized by another anecdote that he tells of himself. There was a rumor among the peasants of North Germany (it was about the year 1792) that the world was coming to an end ; but Froebel declares 8 THE KINDERGARTNER. that he could not inake himself feel alarmed. He says he was sure it could not be true, because the will of God had not yet been brought about in human life. This extraor- dinary reflection of a child of ten years old was preceded, probably, by a happy change that came over him in conse- quence of the visit of his maternal uncle to his father's house ; who, seeing that the child was not happy, invited him to go home with him to live with his grandmother. His uncle's house was bright and sunny, and he was received by his grandmother with joy and tenderness. Immediately the freedom of the fields was given him, provided only that he should come home punctually to the meals. He soon be- came so healthy and happy, that his uncle put him into a day school in the neighborhood, to the child's great delight. The school was opened, the first day he went into it, with a little sermon of the master's upon the text: "Seek first the kingdom of heaven and its righteousness, and all other things shall be added unto you." It must have been a wise and good discourse, for it left a life-long impression upon the mind of the little Frccbel. There was a law then, for human beings as well as for plants ; human beings might consciously realize in happiness and virtue, the harmony and beauty unconsciously manifested by the vegetable world. For God was the Ever-present Friend and Lawgiver ! He tells the duke how happy he felt himself in his new circumstances and opportunities, and blessed with this inspiring faith. After school, he went out to play with his schoolmates ; but, alas ! poor starveling of nature as he was, he found he could not play with his athletic companions, and had to sit on one side and look on ; and then and there he distinctly came to a conclusion, which is a first principle of the kindergarten, that every child should have free exercise of his limbs in play, in order to get entire command of all the physical strength and agility they are capable of. After a few years of this happy home and school life, THE KINDERGARTNE71. 9 "which he continually reflected upon in contrast with what he had suffered for so many years, the good grandmother died, and he was sent back to his stepmother. The question now came up, whether he should study for the universit}', where his brothers had gone ; but the stepmother, in the interest of her younger child, opposed his father's spending the money, and he went to a farmer to learn practical agricul- ture. But he was physically so incompetent to the labor of a farm life, that it did not pay ; and being sent home by the farmer, he was finally apprenticed to a forester, where he found genial occupation in wood-lore, and in studying geome- try for the purpose of surveying. Here he became a thor- ough and ardent mathematician. But his friend the forester died, or was removed, which brought this occupation to a premature close. At that moment, however, a maternal relation died, and left him a little money, so that he went to the University of Jena, where he devoted himself princi- pally to the physical sciences ; and by and by we find him curator of the Mineralogical Museum of Berlin. Here he made a great impression on the mind of a young lady who frequented the museum, by the "sermons** that he found •* in stones,'* for he read them out to her, showing that in inorganic nature, so called, could be traced not only laws of decay, that threw into stronger light those laws of life that he had learned to see in vegetation, but those of crystalliza- tion. Everywhere he read God*s revelation of the processes of life and death, which also make human development and happiness, or its deterioration and misery. The trumpet call of patriotism, to rescue Germany from French despotism, made by the good Queen Louise of Prussia, called him from these peaceful studies to partake in the great national act of delivering his country ; and he obeyed it by volunteering his service. Though his regiment was never called into battle, he always rejoiced in the effects upon himself of learning the military drill, as well as in the hfe- 10 THE KINDERGARTNER. long friendships he made in camp. After the war was over, a legacy received at the death of his uncle Hoffman gave him the means to enter an architects office, to which he had a great attraction. He was boarding at Frankfort-on-the- Main, where Middendorf and other of his late military friends were boarding, who had just engaged themselves as teachers in the city, waiting to perfect this arrangement. It was a moment when there was a great uprising of educa- tion in Germany, and that system was beginning to germi- nate, which has turned out to make Prussia the effective power in Europe that she has lately proved herself to be ; and whose first principle is, that the primary is the most important stage of education. In connection with this gen- eral movement, there was about to be established a new school in Frankfort ; and Griiner, its principal, who was one of the boarders, talked over with Frcebel and the others the new plan. Whatever Froebel said was so striking and vital, that Griiner at last exclaimed : ' ' Plainly this is your vocation ! Give up the architecture, and come in with us, and help to build men." Strange to say, though Froebel had all his life been meditating upon the secret of human education, this was the first time it occurred to him to make it his own busi- ness. The more he thought of Griiner's suggestion, the more he liked it ; and the issue was, that he took one of the younger classes in the new school. Immediately afterwards he wrote to his brother that at last he had found his element — he "felt like a bird in air, a fish in water." But the teachers were hampered in their action by the proprietors of the school ; and after a season Griiner said to Froebel, "You should lead ; not be led. I release you from jour engage- ment. Set up independently, and carry out your own ideas unhindered." When his purpose of leaving was known, one of the par- ents who patronized the school, gave him his two sons to educate, just as he should think best ; and because he now THE KINDERGARTNER. 11 heard of Pestalozzi, be took them to Yverdim, where he remaiued as pupil with them, for a season. But he was not quite satisfied with Pestalozzi's methods. lie saw there was a process to be attended to, anterior to the observation of objects ; namely, to employ and discipline the activity of children yet too young to attend except to what they are themselves doing. Education was to begin, as he saw, in doing, and thence proceed to knowing. In returning from Yverdun, his elder brother, and his younger brother's widow, offered him their children to add to the two young Frank- forters ; and the widow offered, besides, a small house that she owned in Keilhau, if he would fit it up. He and Mid- dcndorf and another friend united together and accepted this offer ; and, with their own hands repaired the house, living in the outbuildings meanwhile and subsisting on rations most carefully economized. They then, for one thing, went to work on the land, which they taught the children to cultivate, and deduced their lessons out of the objects into which they were putting their life and labor. To these six children three cultivated men devoted themselves ; and Froebel also wrote to the lady that used to study with him in the Minera- logical INIuseum of Berlin, and she took her fortune, and left her rank, to help the poor schoolmaster in his life work, as the most devoted of wives. Working on the land was not all that they did. They began with it, because the children of the city had been rather starved of the gratification of that instinct to work in the earth, which very soon appears in all children — though, as Froebel says, it will die out by being left uncultivated. He found that his pupils bad been already injured by their artificial cit}' life, and in many ways the}' had things to unleara. It was not a perfectly easy thing to determine how much liberty to give to individual tendencies that had been exaggerated bv the reactions of disorder, or of an artificial order. Fra'bel thought the educator should give full play 12 THE KINDERGARTNER. to all that is universal in human nature without pampering human idiosyncrasy, to do which was the vicious point of Rousseau's system that Froebel has happily avoided. It was natural that he should first bring before his pupils the pro- cesses of vegetable growth, because it was in observing them that he had himself first found the laws of God. But he was older than any child in the kindergarten when he learned that lesson. Observation of anything outward is not the first thing in human development, but exertion of powers from within, which provokes the reaction of the outward and makes it known. I cannot follow out, in this introductory lecture, all his studies of the nature of man in these children, and all his experiments of cultivation. But I hope to do so in tliose which follow. The school founded in Keilhau exists to this day ; but Fro3bel ever found himself going back till at last he came to the infant in the mother's arms. Then he went into the huts of the peasantry to observe the mother's in- stinctive ways, reason upon them, purify them of her indivi- dual caprices and selfishness, and eliminate everything inconsistent with the divine idea and method of procedure, indicated by the instinct to the intelligence. He did not confine himself to Keilhau, where Middendorf steadily lived, though always keeping in relation with it ; but went at times to other places, and once, for a year or two, left all, to go to the University of Gottingen to study philology-. There he made himself acquainted with Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, studying out those laws of mind exemplified in the formation and decay of languages. For it was the secret of a perfect development that he sought, and how to keep his pupils at the height they " were competent to gain." After half a century of the study of childhood in the living subject, and elaboration of the means of discipline, he settled in his old age into the conviction, that the most important period of human education was before the child was seven years old. THE KLNDERGARTNER. 13 And his last years were spent in preparing teachers for kin- dergartens at Rudolstadt and at Hamburg — which he did by teaching before them as well as by lecturing to them. Now it is what he discovered and elaborated, and has left, not in logical formulas, though he has certainly stated principles in words and embodied them in songs, but in processes of work and play, that is to be taught in our training schools. It took a Newton to discover gravitation and other principles of nature, but men without genius can comprehend and apply these principles, which they could not, like him, discover. So it took a Froebers genius to discover the first principles of education, and his sensibility to apply them without mistake ; but intelligent and heartful youug women can learn them and apply them, if — and only if — they will study devoutly and faithfully what he has taught ; and in doing so they will find themselves — not becoming artificial, but more profoundly natural than ever ; for the true educational process is but the mother's instinct and*method, clearly understood in all its bearings, and acted out. To be a kindergartuer is the perfect development of womanliness — a working with God at the very fountain of artistic and intel- lectual power and moral character. It is therefore the highest finish that can be given to a woman's education, to be educated for a kindergartuer ; and it is from the most advanced classes of high and normal schools, public and private, that the pupils of our training schools should come, and from the most refined circles of private life — remember- ing that these are not identical with wealthy and fashionable ones, for in the latter we often find the vulgar and coarse. The refinement of feeling and thought which is always attended with gentle and courteous manners is a religious quality, that not seldom glorifies humble homes whose inmates escape the sometimes hardening effect of poverty by "seeing Him who is invisible," while those " the imagination of whose hearts are evil continually," and even the merely 14 THE KINDERGARTNER. frivolous, betray that they have "faculties that they have never used " though they dwell in palaces. Ever since the normal teaching of kindergai-tners was begun in America, in 18G8, letters have been received from teachers, already at work in the old routine of primary instruction, asking for knowledge of the plays and occu- pations invented by Froebel ; in order that, by means of them, they may give such prestige to their infant schools as the name of kindergarten ma}'. But this superficial, inappreciative use of FroebeFs processes, is as fatal to his reform as was judaizing to the primitive Christian Church. Froebel's method is a radical change of direction. It changes the educator's point of view. Instead of looking down upon the child, the kindergartner must clear her mind of all fore- gone arbitrary conclusions, and humbly look u|) to the innocent soul, which in its turn sees nothing but the face of the Father in heaven — (for thus Christ explains chil- dren's being "of the kingdom of heaven"). This is difficult for her to do, because — not seldom — a shadow has fallen on the original innocence of the children confided to her care, from those human beings in relation to them, who have not done for them what every human being needs by reason of the essential dependence of individuals upon their race. The child is doubtless an embryo angel; but no less t/ certainly a possible devil. If the immortal will, -impas- sioned by the heart, which never rests permanently satisfied till the mind recognizes God, be puzzled, it may be turned in a wrong direction by what it meets, and then the mani- festation will be ugly and more or less hateful. Evil is the inevitable effect of an ignorant, disorderl}^ action of the will ; of its not adopting the laws of order, by which God creates the universe, and of which the universe is the unconscious exponent. But knowledge of the laws of order must come to guide the will, from outside the child's conscious Individ- THE KiyDEliGARTNER. 15 uality^ through the human providence of education ^m which the heaveuly Father veils His infinite power, in order that the child uuiY be fiLC to make the choice of good, that shall lift him from the state, of merely instinctive being,, into that uoion of Love and Thought, which chai'acterizes a spirit creative^ i.e., causing effects. Perhaps you will say that if human influence must embody Divine Providence, in order to educate, then children never will be educated. Well ! Except in one instance I admit that children never have been educated up to the ideal stan- dard. But the one instance of the perfectly Divine Son of the perfectly holy Mother ; and the partial successes of such fitful good education as history and tradition report, forbid us to despair of making human education a worthy image of Divine Providence. To despair of this is want of the proper action of human free will, — Faith. The first qualification of the true kindergartner, then, is Faith, which can be based onl}* on the abiding conviction that God is with us 'Wo icill and to do,** if we will only have the courage to take for granted that if we are idlling, He will make of us divine guides to others. That He is calling them to be so, whoever feels a strong love of children, sj'mpathy with their life, and sensibility to their beauty, may have a reasonable assurance ; and that such as shall faith- fully qualify themselves for the work will not fail of the divine help. But observe my proviso. Their love must not be a passing emotion, grounded on the children's superficial beauty. It must be a love that involves patience, that can stand the manifestation of ugly temper, and perverse will, and never lose sight of the embrj'o angel that wears for the moment the devilish mask. In children, evil is actual, but always superficial and temporary, if the educator does not become party to it by losing her own temper and idea. Also she must have resources by means of a cultivated under- standing and imagination, to command the child's imagina- tion and heart. 16 THE KINDERGARTNER. It may be said that everj'body cannot Lave, at will, imagi- nation and culture. This is true ; but such persons should not undertake to keep a kindergarten. Let them do some- thing else ; keep shop, cultivate vegetables, work the sewing machine ; even . keep those schools for older children, in which books are the main teachers. There are multitudes of things to be done ; the greatest variety of functions to be performed in human life. But of all things to do, the culti- vation of human beings at that period of life when they are utterly at the mercy of those who teach them, is the most sacred. Why rush into that, impelled by any motive below the highest ? On the other hand, I do not wish to produce any artificial sentimentality on this subject. It is my belief that the average w^oman is sufficiently gifted by nature to make a good kindergartner, if she will give her nature fair play, by cultivating religious and moral sentiment ; and will take pains to develop her intellect by the stud}' of nature's laws in at least one department of science — that of vegetable physiology for instance, the materials of which are every- where. One who could not be educated to become a kinder- gartner, should never dare to become a mother ; for she would not know even how to choose the assistance necessary to her for the work that ought to be done for every child by somebody. While I would discourage, and if possible effect- ually frighten every one from professing kindergartning who is morally disqualified by sordid aims, or by making it a means to another end than itself, I welcome the young and ardent to this beautiful womanly work, which, to do well, requires of them to do the very best thing for their own intellect and heart, and which, more certainly than any- thing else, will give them the secret of Power and Beauty. It was my privilege, a year or two since, to pass a week in one of the schools of the feeble-minded ; and I there saw six women, some of them quite young girls, devoted to the THE KIXDERGARTNER. 17 terrible work of waking up Will and Perception in those poor prisoners of mal-organization, so many of them fright- ful to look upon. They were doing their work under the strongest sense of humanit}- and religion. It would have been impossible to do it at all, as they were doing it, had they had no other inspiration than the pay they were receiv- ing. The main reward was in their having some success in waking up the mind. In their countenances something an- gelic was dawning ; and this was not my fancy merely, for I heard the same remark made again and again, by persons who went there as I did. I do not think one of these women wished to leave the good work ; and if acting on a mind- cherishing principle was so interesting, and productive of such reactive effects, in such sad circumstances, how much more may be expected from working upon children fairly gifted! The charm of the sadder work was, that, like kindergartning, it stimulated to profound study of the laws of mental nature, in order to work reverently among them, instead of arbitrarily, in defiance or irreverence of them. To do this made these women feel that they were working with God ; and this made them practical saints. But why cannot we believe that God is present, and acting with us, and wooing us to act with Himself, in the J030US paradise of life, as well as in chambers of disease, and among the wretched? Is He not the God of the living and joyful, as well as of the dying and sad ? Why is the church-yard only a grave-yard ? Why should it not always be a kindergarten ? One of the pleasantest observations that I made of the kindergartens of Germany — and I went to the very best ones, those kept by the kindergartners whom Froebel had trained — was the happy absorption of the teachers in the children ; their sympathy with them ; the utter companion- ship between them. I never saw a punishment ; I never heard a Don't (or its German equivalent) ; but when any- thing went wrong, there was always a pause, and sometimes 18 THE KINDERGARTNER. questions were asked ; and all seemed to wait till the inward guide had been brought out into consciousness (whether the thing in hand was social action or artistic work) . Perhaps it might be harder work to govern American children. Their vivacious temperament, their lively energies, need *' con- scious law " as a curb, rather than as a spur. But all the more is it necessary for the American kindergartner to vivify the invisible guide; she should present order to the mind, by her genial questioning and conversation over the work in hand, rather than exert an arbitrary power which might stimulate the reaction of obstinacj^ or the subterfuges of cunning. To govern is not the whole thing. The question is Jioio we govern; whether we so govern as to make a cringing slave, a cunning hypocrite, or an intelligent, law- abiding, self-respecting, willing servant of God. I have seen a magnetic teacher produce a marvellous obedience, and apparent order, by his imposing presence and keen satire. He imagined that he governed by moral power ; but as soon as he was out of the schoolroom, the children were the vic- tims of their own impulses, to which seemed given a stronger spring by the enforced repression. There is no order which is more than skin deep, unless it be the free, glad obedience of the child to a law, which he perceives to be creative be- cause it enables him to do somethin^j real. Kothini? short of the union of love and thought can produce spiritual power, ^.e., oreativeness. It is only spiritual power that inaugurates order — the Eternal Beauty may be inaugurated in childhood and among childish toys. There is reason, on their own account, why we want our pupils, in this art of kindergartning, to be in their disposition and circumstances above merel}' pecuniary motive for enter- ing on the work ; and that is, because it will be long before the work will pay much in money. I need not adduce any other proof of this than our experience in Boston ; where, for four years, the rarely gifted, thoroughly educated, religiously THE KINDERGARTNER. 19 devoted Alma Kriege poured out her young energies on classes of less than a score of children ; bringing her a pit- tance so small that she had to fill up the rest of her hours, which ought to have been given to recreation and culture, with other work, in order to pay for rent and necessary bread. Our rich and cultivated people will not forego a lit- tle more upholster}' than is necessar}', or a style of dress that makes the laundry bill — to say nothing of the mantua- maker's and milliner's — larger than the school bill, in order to give the required remuneration to the kindergartner for spending herself on their children in exhausting stud}^ and labor. But the truth is, people do not really believe that anything better can be done for children than to kill the time between the mother's arms and the season when they are to be taught to read ; and so this precious interval, when the habits of thought and affection are forming, is given up to be filled by chance, risking life-long difficulties for the child. Now, what is to reform this state of things? Nothing but the self-sacrificing work of kindergartners, who, for the sake of enlightening these benighted parents, will do their work faithfully, steadily refusing to undertake the care of those whom their parents will not trust to Frcrbers system. The refusal will not seldom force the truth on the parents — who, when they know it, will be glad to know it. I do not say to any particular person, it is your duty to wear yourself out and half starve, for the sake of keeping a kindergarten. It is onl}' you who are sufficiently free from other obligations, to give yourselves the privilege and luxury of working with God, on the paradisaical ground of childhood, who should enter this field. If you can make it your object to study how to avoid offending those who are beholding the face of the Father in heaven, by not hindering, but bringing them to Christ, which means helping them to grow as He did, in grace as in stature, and in favor with God and man, till like Him they become redeemers of their brethren from bondage, 20 THE KINDERGARTNER. and can help to make earth the kingdom of heaven ; then you may hope, in your day and generation, to initiate kindergart- ning, and make the way smooth for those that follow. When the true thing is initiated, it will pay even in money ; for parents will see that it is invaluable. It is twenty- two years since Frcebel died. He had made a band of kindergartners, and set them at work. They all be- gan with small pecuniary reward. It was at first a starving business. In Europe it is more difficult than it is here, to induce women of culture and position to undertake any work which is paid for with money. Froebers genius had over- come this prejudice in a few instances. The ladies of one wealthy family in Hamburg became his pupils, one of whom introduced it into England, though under some great disad- vantages. The Baroness Marenholtz-Biilow is the most im- portant person inspired by Froebel ; and the circumstances of her introduction to him are even picturesque. Being in fee- ble health, she went into an obscure village for rest and retirement; and one day asked the woman with whom she boarded, if anything interesting was going on among the villagers. The woman replied that there was ''one queer thing, a natural fool who played about among the children, who followed him, and were very much taken up with him." The Baroness hardly heeded this singular assertion ; but some time after, being abroad for exercise, she saw a white- haired man under a tree, with a group of children around him; and, thinking this might be the "natural fool," she drew near, and was soon arrested by what she heard, and joined the little throng herself. Subsequent interviews with Froebel — for it was he — made a new era in her life, and she corresponded with him closely till his death. She has since been his chief apostle. After years of earnest work, with tongue and pen, she succeeded in getting rid of the injunc- tion against his schools, made by the Prussian Government, which was jealous of what claimed to be an improvement on THE KINDERGARTNER. 21 their world-renowned Reform. Since this injunction was taken off, she has worked, by means of a normal school which she helped to found in Berlin, in which she lectured gratuitously many years, fighting earnestly against just such deteriorations of the system as have alread}' begun to appear in this country. Some of the pseudo-kindergartens use the plays and occupations there, as here, in the most superficial way. When children work b}' patterns, or are shown — in- stead of being told in words — how to do things, they merely imitate, with as little accompaniment of intellectual action as I monkey; and neither the mind nor the character will be developed, but rather dissipated and weakened. Others, especially in this country, use the plays in the intervals be- tween lessons or reading, — which, being taught before the mind has been regularly developed by success in doing things, and before the meaning of words has been learned in an adc- jiiate manner, are confused with a chaos of unrelated partic- ulars, that it will take years of self-education, by and by, to grow out of ; and, in short, only a few vigorous natures for- tunately situated ever surmount the difiiculty. But the work of the Baroness has not been in vain ; and she writes in a late letter that a government decree has just been made in Austria, ordering that all the children between four and six years of age should be sent to kindergartens ; and that; every normal school must give kindergarten train- ing, and every teacher, whether of that or the following stages of education, must be made acquainted with Froebers principles and practices. This great step is the final result of the agitation of the subject for the last few years in Europe, which began in the first Philosophers* Congress at Prague, in 18G7. The dying out of the teachers instructed by Froebel himself was manifestly producing a deteriorating effect in the quality of kindergartners ; and his most intelli- gent and devoted disciples proposed to the Congress an effort for the revival of his science and art in its pristine purity and power. 22 THE KINDERGARTNER. It is most desirable that such falsification and deteriora- tion do not get ahead in America. But there is impending danger of it, and it can only be prevented by establishing and keeping up adequate training-schools, and so informing public opinion, that it shall not be tolerated in the community to call by the sacred name of kindergarten anything short of it. There will necessarily be infant schools of an inferior quality for a long time, because it will take time to make common an adequate education in the art of kindergartning ; but let such be called play-schools. Pretenders in this pro- fession should be frowned upon by all good people, as pre- tenders in the clerical profession are. They do more harm than bad clergymen can, because the subjects of their teach- ing are more helpless and undefended, and can do nothing for themselves. The experience I have had in my apostolate in this cause, has brought me to the conclusion that in America the best way to proceed is, to induce the public authorities to have kindergartning taught in the State and city normal schools, and to open public kindergartens as fast as there are ade- quate teachers for them. Everything depends on the quality of the first kindergart- ners we train — their spiritual, moral and intellectual quality — which must be such as to operate in two ways : first, to do for the children the right thing ; secondly, to educate the community to require it done as a general thing. Many characteristics of America give great encouragement. We are not dragged back, as they are in F.urope, by old customs, whose roots are intertwined with the heart-strings of in- herited sentiment. Our patriotic hearts fasten themselves on the great future that our fathers died to inaugurate. We must justify their ideal of universal equality, by an equal education, an equal opportunity for development of all our people. " The spirit that makes all things new," as the heart of childhood craves, and its hand is eager to enact, is THE KINDERGARTNER. 23 " every word that proceedcth out of the mouth of God," to make alive the human heart. Therefore we leave behind us — more and more — those conventions of the Old World that have made even the great work of educating rank as infe- rior to tliat which wields the sword of war. Some people groan at seeing how the growing facilities of getting money, which our institutions give to every man and woman of energy, is effacing the old distinctions of rank. But if our Culture may be made universal, by employing part of this money in making public education adequate, what ground will be left for distinction of rank? "What pretext for exclu- sion will there be, when there are none rude and uncultivated to be excluded? That any distinction of ranks came among the children of God is incidental to free agency. Children know nothing of them — till wc profane their golden age of innocence by revealing them. (Appendix, Note A.) >*^ OF THR^^ [UFI7EE3IT7) LECTUEE IL THE NURSERY. It is my object to inspire, if I can, an enthusiasm for edu- cating children strictly on FrcEbePs method, and no other; and I wish to justify myself by giving reasons for this ; for I know that, at first sight, Americans start back from putting faith in any leader ; immediately exclaiming, that they must be free to follow the light of their own minds. This sounds large and liberal, certainly; and no one sees t!ie dangerof yielding to any individual authorit}^ more than 1 do ; but it is certain that nothing may make us so narrow, as a bigoted adherence to the rule of following the light of our own mind condignly. The light of our own individual mind may be darkness ; it must, in any case, be that of a far- thing candle, compared with Eternal Reason, "the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world." The ques- tion is, do we distinguish between that greater light and our own idiosyncrasy, with a becoming and discriminating hu- mility ? I once heard a lady, whose name was Gurley, say to a witty gentleman, that she believed "in the total de- pravity of human nature from the experience of her own heart." Ah I but that is not quite fair, he replied, " for how do you know what is human nature and what is Gurley- ism ? " Here is tersely suggested the danger of the indi- vidualistic philosophy, which has developed itself into a new kind of bigotry in these later days, not less denuncia- tory in its animus than any other ; and which shuts up its votaries in a dungeon from the light of Universal expe- rience. I acknowledge the legitimacy of the philosophy of 26 THE NURSERY. individualism, as a protest against the glittering generality which theological philosophy had become, at the time when it arose ; and as affirmation that God makes every man sepa- rately an eye, and if he would see into the Infinite Over- soul, he must look with it out of his own window. But this is only the way to begin to search for truth. If he is not self- intoxicated, every man soon learns that his window does not command the whole horizon, that God not only has given a ivindow to him, but to every other man ; that we are all free to look out of each others' windows, some being higher up in the tower of the common humanity than our own, commanding wider views ; in fine that it is with all the sons of man that "wisdom dwells," and they must inter-communicate with mutual reverence if they would know her well. Froebel had not been so wise, had he not, with reverent humility, sought what God says immediately to mothers and babes. You will not be wise if you do not look out of FroebePs window. The story I told you, in my last lecture, of the growth of FroebePs mind from his boyhood, suggested the fact that the common motherly instinct, purified of individual passion and caprice, and, understanding itself as the presence of the Liv- ing God overshadowing her, is the social atmosphere neces- sary to be breathed by every child who is to grow in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. Froebel learned this primal fact or truth, first negatively, as it were, by lacking it in his own childish experience ; and he verified it positively afterwards, by studying the method of unsophisticated mothers, at that earliest period of their children's lives, when, in order to keep them alive merely, the nurse must take the rule of her nursing from the needs which her heart divines, aided by the nursling's own expres- sion of want and content — its tears and smiles. Let us then determine first, as he did, the nursery art, which is preliminary to that of the Kindergarten. By the primal miracle (i. e., wonder working) of nature, the THE NURSERY. 27 mother finds in her arms a fellow-being, who has an im- measurable susceptibility of suffering, and an immeasurable desire of enjoyment, and an equally immeasurable force in- lent on compassing this desire, already in activity, but with no knowledge at all of the material conditions in which he is placed, to which he is subject, and by which he is limited in the exercise of this immense nature. As I have said before, every form of animal existence but the human, is endowed with some absolute knowledge, en- abling it to fulfil its limited sphere of relationship as uner- ringly as the magnetized needle turns to the pole, and, even with more or less of enjoyment ; yet with no forethought. But the knowledge tiiat is to guide the blind will of the hu- man being, even to escape death in the first hour of its bodily life, exists substantially outside of its own individuality in the mother, or whoever supplies the mother's place. And throughout the existence of the human being, the forethought that is to enable him to appreciate his ever multiplying relations with his own kind, and which grows wider and sweeter as he fulfils the duties they involve, is essentially outside of himself as a mere individual ; being found first in those who are in relation with him in the fam- ily, afterwards in social, national, cosmopolitan relationship ; till at last he realizes himself to be in sonship with God, in whom all humanity, nations, families, individuals, "live and move and have their being.'^ There is no absolute isolation or independency possible for a spiritual being. This is a truth involved in the very meaning of the word spirit, and revealed to every family on earth, by the ever recurring fact of the child bom into the arms of a love that emparadises both parties, on which he lives more or less a pensioner throughout his whole existence, so far as he lives humanly, finding fullness of life at last in the clear vision and con- scious communion of an Infinite Father, who has been re- vealing Himself all along, in the love of parent and child, 28 THE NURSERY. brother and sister, husband and wife, friend, fellow-citizen and fellow-man. Christ said, that little children see the Father face to face, but surely not with the eyes of the body or of the understanding! They see him with the heart. And is it not true, that we never quite forget the child's vision in turning our eyes on lower things ? for what but remem- brance of our Heavenly Father's face is hope, " that springs eternal in the human breast ?" What but this remembrance are the ideals of beauty, that haunt the savage and the sage ? the sense of law that gives us our moral dignity, and in the saddest case, what but this are the pangs of remorse, in which, as Emerson has sung in his wonderful sphinx song, "lurks the joy that is sweetest? " Froebel has authority with me, because, in this great faith, making himself a little child, he received little children in the name (that is, as germinating forms) of the Divine hu- manity, with a simple sincerity, such as few seem to have done since Jesus claimed little children as the pure elements of the kingdom he came to establish on earth ; and exhorted that, as they were such, they should be brought to him as the motherly instinct prompted, and declared that they were not to be forbidden (that is, hindered as all false edu- cation hinders.) As an American then, and more — as a human being, I ac- knowledge no authority except the union of love and thought in practical operation. But whenever 1 see this union in any one, to a greater degree than I have it in m^'self, I bow before that person, and feel (which is the subtlest kind of know- ing) that I am larger wiser, freer, more effective for good, by following and obeying him as a master for the time being. Therefore, after the study I have made of Froebel, and of the method with little children that he was fifty years dis- covering and elaborating into practical processes, whose ra^ tionale and creative influence I perceive ; I feel, as it were, THE NURSERY. 29 Dimnehj authorized to present him to you as an authority which you can reverently trust ; and so be delivered from the uncertainties of your own narrow and crude notions, inex- perienced and ignorant as you undoubtedly are, however talented. It is quite necessary for me to say, and for 3^ou to accept this now, or our short time together will be wasted. There 13 a time for criticism undoubtedly, and nothing is true that can not make itself good against " honest doubt." But as Sterne has said, ''of all the cants that are canted in this cant- ing world, though the cant of hypocrisy may be the worst, the cant of criticism is the most provoking. I would go fifty miles on foot to kiss the hand of that man, whose gen- erous heart will give up the reins into his author's hands, for the time being, and let him lead him where he will." I am quoting from memory, and may forget the exact words ; but the idea is, that the mood of self-surrendering reverence is the mood for profitable study, for it is to "become a little child," which Christ told his disciples was the condition of any one's becoming the greatest in the kingdom of Divine Truth. Let us begin, then, with reverently considering the new born child, as Froebel did ; for that is to be "the light of all our seeing." A child is a living soul, from the very first ; not a mere animal force, but a person, open to God on one side by his heart, which appreciates love, and on the other side to be opened to nature, by the reaction upon his sensibility of those beauteous forms of things that are the analysis of God's creative wisdom ; and which, therefore, gives him a growing understanding, whereby his mere active force shall be elevated into a rational, productive will. For heart and will are, at first, blind to outward things and therefore in- eflBcient, until the understanding shall be developed accord- ing to the order of nature. 80 THE NURSERY. But during this process of its development, adult wisdom must supply the place of the child's wisdom, which is not, as yet, grown; that is — an educator must point out the way, genially, not peremptorily ; for in following the edu- cator's indications, the child must still act in a measure from himself. As he is irrefragably free, he will not alwa3^8 obey ; he will try other paths — perhaps the contrary one — by way of testing whether he has life in himself. But unless he shall go a right way, he will accomplish nothing satisfac- tory and reproductive ; and it is FroebePs idea to give him something to do, within the possible sphere of his affection and fancy, which shall be an opportunity of his making an experience of success, that shall stimulate him to desire, and thereby make him receptive of the guidance of creative law, which is the only true object for the obedience of a spir- itual being. To the new born child, his own body is the whole uni- verse ; and the first impression he gets of it seems to come from his need of nutriment. But it is the mother, not the child, that responds to this want, by presenting food to the organ of taste, and producing a pleasurable impression which arouses the soul to intend itself into the organ, which is de- veloped to receive impression more and more per fee tl}', by the child's seeking for a repetition of the pleasure. For a time, whatever uneasiness a child feels, he attempts to re- move by the exercise of this organ, through which he has gained his first pleasant impression of objective nature. Therefore is it, that his lips and tongue become his first means of examining the outward world into which he has been projected by his Creator. The ear seems to be the next organ of which the child be- comes conscious, or through which he receives impressions of personal pleasure and pain ; and here it is noticeable, that rhythmical sound seems, from the very first, to give most pleasure ; and is wonderfully effective to soothe the nerves, THE NURSERY. 31 and remove uneasiness. All mothers and nurses sing to babies, as well as rock them, (which is rhythmical motion,) and this pleasant impression on the ear diverts the child from intending himself exclusively into the organ of tasting. He now stretches himself into his ears, whose powers are developed by gently exercising their function of hearing. The child seems to taste and hear, before he begins to see an3^thing more definite than the difference between light and darkness. B^^ and by a salient point of light, it may be the light of a candle, catches and fixes his eye, and gives a distinct visual impression, which is evidently pleasurable, for the child's eye follows the light, Bhowing that the soul in- tends itself into the organ of sight. Soon after, gay colors fix its gaze and evidently give pleasure. The eye for color is developed gradually, like the ear for music, by exercise, which being pleasurable becomes spontaneous. The whole body is the organ of touch ; but as the hands are made convenient for grasping, to which the infant has an instinctive tendenc}', and the tips of the fingers are espe- ciall}^ handy for touching, they become, by the intension of the mind into them, the special organ for examining things by touch, and getting impressions of qualities obvious to no other sense. When, as it sometimes happens, by malforma- tion or maltreatment of them, the eyes fail to perform their functions, it is wonderful how much more the soul intends itself into the special organs of touch, developing them to such a degree, that a cultivated blind person seems almost to see with the tips of the fingers. This fact proves what I have been trying to impress on your minds, that the soul which spontaneously desires and wills enj.oyment, takes pos- session and becomes conscious of its organs of sensuous perception, partly by an original impulse, given to it by the Creator, and partly, (which I want you especially to ob- serve,) by the genial, s^-mpathetic, intelligent, careful co- working of the mother and nurse j who, by what we call 32 THE NURSERY. nursery play, gives a needed help to the child to accomplish this feat in a healthy and pleasurable manner. And we shall he better convinced of the virtue of this nursery play, if we consider the case of the neglected children of the very poor, so pathetically described by Charles Lamb. See es- says on Popular Fallacies, No. 1 2. Madame Marenholtz-Bulow has happily remarked, in her preface to Jacob's Manual, Le jardin des Enfans^ that " to develop and train the senses is not to pamper them.'' The organs of tasting and smelling do not require so much exercise by the duplicate action of the mother, as those of seeing and hearing. The former have for their end to build up the body ; the latter to lead the child's mind out of the body, to that part of nature which connects him with other persons. The functions of both are equally worthy ; but those of the latter belong to the child as a social and intel- lectual being. It is the mother's office to temper the exer- cises of each sense, so that they may limit and balance each other. And in order to limit those which are building up the body, so that they shall not absorb the child, the action of the others must be helped out. " Our bodies feel — where'er they be — against or with our will ;" but to see and hear all that children can, requires exertion of will and this is coaxed out by the sympathetic action of others. Yet the functions of tasting or smelling are not to be banned. The Creator has made them delightful ; and if others do their proper part, their exercise will never become harmful. To enjoy tasting and smelling is no less innocent than to enjoy seeing and hearing. There is no function of mind or body but maybe performed Divinely. Milton shows insight into this truth by making Raphael sit and eat at table with man in Paradise ; and he says some wonderful things upon the point, which will bear much study. And have we not in sacred tradition a symbol, still more venerable, of the truth, that the fire of spirit burns without consuming, and THE NURSERY. 33 may transform the body without leaving visible residue? There are in Brown's philosophy (which does not penetrate into all the mysteries of the rational soul and Immortal spirit) some very instructive chapters on the social and moral re- lations of the grosser senses, (as taste, smell and touch are sometimes called.) It is the part of rational education to understand all these things thoroughlj^, and adjust the spon- taneous activities by subordinating them to the end of a harmonious and beneficent social life. The Lord's Supper may be made to illustrate this general human duty. There is doubtless marked difference in the original en- ergy of life, in different children. Young — but not too young, happy, healthy, loving parents, have the most vigorous, lively and harmoniously organized children ; but in all cases, the impulse of life must be met and cherished by the tender, attractive, inspiring force of motherly love ; which with ca- ressing tone and invoking smile, peers into the infant's eyes, and importunately calls forth the new person, who, as her instinctive motherly faith and love assure her, is there; and whom she 3'canis to make conscious of himself in self- enjoyment. The time comes when the little body has be- come so far subject to the new soul, that an answering smile of recognition signalizes the arrival upon the shores of mortal being of "that light which never was on sea or land," another immortal intelligence 1 It is only the smile of the intelligent human face, that can call forth this smile of the child in the first instance ; but let this glad mutual recogni- tion of souls take place once, and both parties will seek to repeat the delight, again and again. Few persons, indeed, get so chilled by the sufferings and disappointments, and so hardened by the crimes of human life, but on the sight of a little child, they are impelled to invoke this answering smile by making themselves, for the moment, little children again ; seeking and finding that communion with our kind which is the Alpha and Omega of life. D 34 THE NURSERY. Do not say that I am wandering, fancifully, from the serious work which we are upon : I am only beginning at the beginning. We can only understand the child, and what we are to do for it in the Kindergarten, by understanding the first stage of its being — the pre-intellectual one in the nursery. The body is the first garden in which God plants the human soul, "to dress and to keep it." The loving mother is the first gardener of the human flower. Good nursing is the first word of FroebePs gospel of child-culture. The process of taking possession of the organs, that I have just described, is never performed perfectly unless children are nursed genially. If bitter and disagreeable things are presented to the organ of the taste, they are rejected with the whole force of a will, which is too blind in its ignorance to find the thing it wants, but vindicates its irrefragable freedom of choice by uttering cries of fright, pain and anger, as it shrinks back, instead of throwing itself forward into nature. If the cruel thing is repeated, the nerves are paralyzed, or at least rendered morbid, especially when rude untender handling outrages the sense of touch. When rough and discordant sounds assail the ear, or too sharply salient a light, the eye, these organs will be injured, and may be rendered useless for life. The neglected and mal- treated child is dull of sense, and lifeless, or morbidly impulsive, possibly savagely cruel and cunning, in sheer self-defence. The pure element and first condition of per- fect growth, is the joy that responds to the electric touch of love. Underlying and outmeasuring all this delicate develop- ment of the organs of the five senses, is the whole body's instinct of motion, which is the primal action of will. The perfectly healthy body of a little child, when it is awake, is always in motion — more or less intentionally. When asleep, tbere is the circulation of the blood, and pulsation of the Bolids of the body, corresponding to the act of breathing. THE NURSERY. 35 which is involuntary ; and any interruption of these produces disease — their suspension, death. But the motion which makes the limbs agile, and the whole body elastic, and gradu- ally to become an obedient servant, is voluntar}^, intentional, and can be helped by that sympathetic action of others, which we call playing with the child, FroebePs rich sug- gestions on this play are contained in his mother's cosset- ting songs; and I am glad to tell you that two English ladies, a poet and a musician, have translated and set to music this unique book; and that just now it has been published by Wilkie, Wood & Co., in London. It suggests all kinds of little gymnastics of the hands, fingers, feet, toes and legs, for these are the child's first play things ; and also the first symbols of intelligent communication, giving the core and significance to all languages.^ I think that a baby never begins to play, in the first in- stance, but responds to the mother and nurse's play, and learns thereby its various members and their powers and uses ; and when at last it jumps, runs, walks by itself, which it cannot begin to do without the help of others, it is pre- pared to say /, with a clear sense of individuality. In analyzing the process of a child's learning to walk, we see most clearly the characteristic difference between the human person and the animals below man in the scale of relation. The little chicken runs about of itself, as soon as it is out of the shell ; but the human child, even after all its limbs are grown, and though he has been moving him- self on all fours by means of the floor, and supporting him- self by means of the furniture to which he clings, does not walk. He will only stand alone, unsupported, when he sees that there are guarding arms round about him, all ready to catch him if he should fall. He seems to know instinc- tively, that all the force of the earth' s gravitation is against him. He does not know that he may balance it by his per- sonal power. His body weighs upon his soul like a moun- 1 An American translation has been published by Lee & Shepard, Boston. 36 THE NURSERY. tain, precisely because he is intelligent of it as an object, loves it as a means of pleasure, and dreads its power of giv- ing pain to him. The little darling stands, perhaps between the knees of his father, whose arms are round about him ; the mother opens her loving arms to receive him, and calls him to her embrace ; the way is short between, and three steps will be sufficient, but where is the courageous faith to say to this mountain of a body, "be removed to another place ?'' It is not in himself; he cannot produce it any more than he can take himself ujj by his own ears. It is in the mother ; for it is she, not he, who has the knowledge of the yet unexerted power which is flowing into the child from the Creator. Only by the electric touch of her faith in him does his faith in himself flash out in answer to her look and voice of cheer, and he rushes to her arms. It is the doing of the deed which gives to himself the knowledge of the power that is in him. He repeats it again and again, seem- ing to wish to be more and more certain of his being the cause of so great effect. Thus cause and effect are discrim- inated, and "to him that hath" a sense of individuality, " shall be given," forevermore, a growing power over the body, to which no measure can be stated. Even on the vulgar plane of the professional tumbler, a man's power over his body seems, sometimes, to be absolute and mirac- ulous. But the annals of heroism and martyrdom are full of facts that go to prove to all who consider them pro- foundly, that the immaterial soul is sovereign, when, by re- cognizing all its relations, it subjects the individual to the universal, and becomes thereby entirely spiritual, (which is man reciprocating with God ; becoming more and more con- scious forever.*) ■^=' Since this lecture was written and delivered in Boston, I have received from Europe a French version of the Baroness Crombrucr- >^ OP THR ^s^ [UHI7BRSIT" 60 DISCIPLINE. excess by over-indulgence, but above all things, never wound- ing nor frightening his heart, nor repressing the simple and healthy expression of his feelings and thoughts. For en- forced repression tends to produce ugly temper, baseness, or subtlety, according to the child's temperament, which is also in imperfect social harmon}^, if not absolutely quarrel- some. It must be her work, therefore, not only to complete the child's organic education, but to take him, as it were, into her own affectionate spirit by using the methods which Froebel has suggested to the mother for the discipline of her infants. (I use this word discipline in its true sense of teaching ; not in the sense of punishment. That the word discipline should ever have come to mean punishment is a severe commentary on the ideas and modes of education that have hitherto prevailed in Christendom.) The kindergartner, as well as the mother, must be thoroughly grounded in the faith that God has done His part in the original endowment of children ; and that He is truly present with her, helping her to remedy the effects of the mother's shortcomings. She will certainly succeed in her work if she studies His laws with an earnest purpose to carry them out, first in the government of herself, and then in leading the children to self-government. "Wordsworth in his Ode to Duty, sings : — " There are who ask not if Thine eye Be on them, who, in love and truth, Where no misgiving is, rely Upon the genial sense of youth. Glad hearts ! without reproach or blot, Who do Thy work, and know it not! And blest are they who in the main This happy faith still entertain, Live in the spirit of this creed, Yet find another strength according to their need. May joy be theirs while life shall last, And Thou, if they should totter, teach them to stand fast.'* DISCIPLINE. 61 Little children certainly, of all persons, are oftenest found in this condition when ** Love is an unerring light, And joy its own security." And that " other strength," which must come by reflection on and study of the unfolding nature of the child in the felt presence of the Inspirer of Duty, will certainly be needed by the kindergartner who will receive children not always from the hands of natural and faithful mothers, but of uncultured servant-maids. (It is but justice to the latter to say that there are occasionally found among the Irish nurses those who could teach many mothers. The Irish nature is not altogether bad material for the production of good motherly nurses ; but it must not be left wild; it needs a great deal of discipline ; and I hope the time may come when schools for the education of children's nurses, such as Froebel established in Hamburg, which still exist, ma^' be founded in all our cities. Though I think the education of mothers is still more important and the first thing to aim at, as it would render nursery maids comparatively unnecessary. It is so short a period of a mother's life when she has young children, and the book of nature which these few years open to her is so rich^ that, for her own being's sake as well as for the children's, it seems to me a terrible loss for her to delegate her maternal cares to others during the nursery period. On the other hand, when the age for the kindergarten comes, the mother needs to be relieved of the increasing care ; and children, in their turn, need other influences than can be had in a family, especiall}' in families where parents have work to do outside of their homes. It is, indeed, '' a consumma- tion devoutly to be wished," that the time may come when labor may be so organized that no mothers may be obliged to leave their children's souls uncared for in order to get the wherewithal to sustain their bodies 62 DISCIPLINE. The deepest reason why a child should be taken care of in its earliest infancy by its mother rather than by a person comparatively uninterested in its personality, is this, that only a mother can respect a child's personality sufficiently. All others regard the child for its manifested qualities ; but with the mother, it is the child itself that she loves, quite irrespective of any qualities that he manifests. Phenome- nally, a little child is a complex of self-assertion and generosity (or a desire for union with its kind) ; a desire or a feeling of finiteness in strange contrast with that instinct to "have dominion'* which gives vitality to self-assertion. We call this primal desire for union his heart, and this primal self-assertion his will. The will expresses itself in efforts to change its environments, putting what is at rest in motion, knocking down, tearing up, because it does not yet know how to put in order, or to change things artistically. The child acts without external motive, — doing things merely because it can. Even after a child is old enough to think and talk, and has done some act for which you see no reason or motive, when you ask him why he did it, he not unfrequently will say, '''•because,'' I remember when I was a child of six or seven, that I would give this answer with a perfect sense of satisfaction that it was an answer; and when it would sometimes be said, " because is no reason," or " because is an old woman's reason," I recollect my feeling of surprise. I seemed to myself to have given the most substantial reason. The word meant to me a great deal. And I now think I was truly philosophical in this, for I affirmed the primal truth, that a self -determining person in spontaneous action, if only of some instinct, is a first cause^ — an absolute cause — to the extent of consciousness. It was an intuition. Now to retain the sense of this causal personality is at the ^ See Hazard's Man a Creative First Cause. A book published since this lecture was first given. DISCIPLINE. 63 root of all stability of character, all nobleness of manifesta- tion. But self-assertion in an ignorant child is more apt than otherwise to be disorderly, discordant, and perhaps destructive ; it therefore provokes resistance in the unthink- ing, but challenges the thoughtful to give guidance. It is of life-and-death importance to the child whether this force shall meet mere hard resistance, which shall utterly crush it or increase it by reaction, or whether it shall meet with a genial sympathetic guidance to which it will voluntarily and gladly surrender itself. A mother loves this little ignorant force of self-will and wants it to have free course. She can- not help desiring to have her child have its own way. She does not want it to be opposed by others. She will, as far as possible, further or humor it, as we say. And when she finds it necessary to control it, she will try to do it by awakening the child's affectionateness, and so captivating its fancy as to make it feel it is doing as it likes, though it be something different from what it was impelled to do at first ; in short, she inspires him to will the better thing, and so educates the blind instinct of self-assertion into a harmoniz- ing and beneficent power, and preserves the child's dignity and nobleness instead of crushing its personality. We hear of " breaking the child's will." A child's will should never be broken, but opened up into harmony with God's will through a lower harmony with the will of its loving and loved mother or kindergartner. But a mother will be more sure than any one else to bring about this result, because she acts from an impulse of the heart deeper than all thought, while the kindergartner by thought must cultivate in herself the impulse. There are those who deprecate motherly indulgence as if it were the greatest evil. Doubtless it will become a great evil if it be not properly subordinated to the wisdom which appreciates the divinity of order, or if it is alternated with capricious severities; in short, if the indulgence proceeds 64 DISCIPLINE. from indolence or self-love instead of love of the child. The indulgence that really comes from the last is a recogni- tion (unconscious, it may be) of the divine possibilities of the child, — a spark of the divine creativeness ! Of the two evils, extreme indulgence is not so deadly a mistake as ex- treme severity. Indulged children return from afar. The prodigal of the Gospel story may have been over-indulged, perhaps, in being allowed to take his portion of goods, and go off by himself, out of the reach of his father's counsel and authority, and left to his own uneducated self-will. But the sinner, when he came to Jiimself (observe that expres- sion) , recognized the self-forgetting, fatherly love in that very indulgence ; and it was the immeasurableness of that love that revived his self-respect and hope, and saved him ; for the hope was not disappointed. Love giveth, *' upbraiding not." The one fatal thing is to wound the child's heart. It is better to give up the point of controlling its will to righteous- ness for the moment, than to do that ; and a parent is the least likely of all persons to wound his child's heart. When nothing can be done without wounding, the parent who trusts his own heart will leave the rebel to the conse- quences which God holds in his gracious hands for the final salvation of every one of his children. Besides, to choose to give up one's own will is the only complete and salutary giving up, enabling the soul to mount up spiritually like the eagle and renew its strength. There are families in which the act of disobedience is absolutely unknown, in earlier or in later life ; where there is no necessity for uttered commands, because expressed wishes are enough. The most perfect, if not the only real, obedience I have ever seen, has been that of strong men to an unexacting, tender mother. This is a subject on which I feel very strongly, for it seems to me that the greatest social disorders that exist in DISCIPLINE. 65 the nations among which the ' ' order that reigns in Warsaw " ^ is foremost, is the consequence of unreasoning obedience to wills 710^ infinitely wise and good. The worth and duty of obedience is precisely in ratio with the validity of the com- mand ; and a command is valid only so far as it is inspired by a disinterested and proper respect for the being who is com- manded. Children should only obey their parents, in the Lord; and parents should never " provoke their children to wrath." I may be told that the important element of self-assertion (which gives strength to character) may be weakened by being always disarmed, and killed by the mother's sympa- thy ; and that to provoke it into conscious strength, direct antagonism is necessary. But the best antagonism is that quiet, inevitable one, that comes from the inexorableness of material nature which the child must needs feel, the more disorderly he is, but which he sees is insensate and imper- sonal ; whose antagonism, therefore, does not grieve his heart, and disappoint his hope as human oppression does, making him sad or bitter, but stimulates his mind to conquer and subdue it, or develops a dignified patience. The appointed domain for kingly man is not the brotherhood, but material nature ; and gradually he is to learn that nature's inexorable laws are the expression of a Supreme Personality as benignant as it is august, who takes up His human child into Himself, not without his concurring will ; for mankind mounts on the nature which he gradually sub- dues into a stepping-stone, by knowledge, and the use of it. The mother must remember that though the first, she is not the only instrumentality by which the Divine Providence works. The time comes when she is compelled to deliver her cherished darling up to other influences ; when the child bui*sts out of the nursery, not only self-asserting and 1 " Order reigns in Warsaw " was the form of words in which the Bubjugation of the Poles to Russians in 1849 was announced in France. 66 DISCIPLINE. affectionate, but putting forth energies, and seeking satisfac- tion of sensibilities that cannot be met within that narrow precinct. The kindergarten must, then, succeed by complementing the nursery; and the child begin to take his place in the company of his equals, to learn his place in their companion- ship, and still later to learn wider social relations and their involved duties. No nursery, therefore, not even a perfect one, can supersede the necessity of a kindergarten, where children shall come into cognizance of the moral laws which are to restrain and guide their self-assertion, and quicken and enlarge their social affections, leading them to self- denials for the sake of opportunities for themselves of useful and creative art, beneficence, and heroism. The time for transition from the nursery to the kinder- garten is definitely indicated by two facts. Firstl}', Divine Providence has so arranged general family events that every mother must give up having the child live, as it were, entirely within her life, because she has other children to nurse, or other social duties to do. And, secondly, every child's growth in bodily strength and conscious individuality makes him too strong a force of will for so narrow a scope of rela- tion as is afforded by one family. While hitherto, to be out- side of the single family influence was an evil, it would now be an evil to confine the child entirely to it, narrowing his heart and mind, and deforming his character. He needs to be brought into relation with equals who have other personal characteristics, other relations with nature and the human race than his own family. The instinct of the growing child, at this period, to get out of doors to play with other children, is unmistakable. To check it vexes or depresses him. In get- ting possession, first of his body, and then of his personal and social consciousness, he has become an object to himself, and feels himself a power among other powers affecting each other. But he is still more or less consciously a prisoner (if DISCIPLINE. 67 not a slave) of nature, by reason of his ignorance of the laws of the universe, — that body outside of his own body, — which he is destined, in alliance with others, to take posses- sion of, by action upon and icithin it, giving him knowledge of it, and enabling hiiu to make it into instrumentality for the expression and embodiment of great ideas and a noble wUl. All government worthy of the name begins in self-govern- ment, a free subordination of the individual in order to form the social whole. Subordination is something higher than subjection. We subject mere animals ; intelligent moral agents must be subordinated. It is still the mother's part rather to inspire ; the kindergartner's part is to subordinate, not to check childish, spontaneous talk, though, of course, it must be regulated so far as not to let the children interrupt each other impolitehj^ and to keep it to some main subject. Some kindergartners begin the session by asking each in turn what is interesting to him. Mrs. Kraus-Boelte generally receives each one as he or she comes in. They go to her for the morning kiss, and have something to say, in which she expresses due sympath}', and later recurs to and connects with what others say, and thus produces general conversation. Mrs. Van Kirk is very happy in her introductory conversa- tions. In playing with the gifts, the teacher dictates certain move- ments and arrangements, for the purpose of the children's getting into the habit of listening and quickly catching the directions given ; and the children should be encouraged to follow her words in what they do, rather than to imitate each other. In their spontaneous work they often make a new symmetrical form, which is really beautiful ; and then it is well to call on the child to direct his companions how to make it ; for children delight in the dignity of directing, and learn to be very precise in the use of all the words expressing relation of all kinds, — prepositions, adjectives, and adverbs, 68 DISCIPLINE. — precisely as well as nouns and verbs. Language does not merely transfer the outward inward, but soon begins to transfer the inward outward. Love, and other sentiments of the soul, good and bad, are named, as well as sensible objects. Even the instinctive search after proximate causes leads chil- dren to infer the substantiality of wind and the other invisi- ble forms of matter ; and the spiritual senses inherent in the " Me," which is the most essential of all substances, verifies the ideal world to children, as truly as the bodily senses ver- ify the material world, and even more so; for children live in God before they exist out of God. The Italian philosopher Gioberti says that the soul is a spintual activity; that is, it sees God as the first act of its life. God says, *'^e thou,*' and the soul — before it is put into the sleep of nature (the deep sleep that came upon Adam) — looks back and says, ''TJioii art,*' We have the memory of this primeval vision, and act in our sense of holiness (wholeness?), right, justice, pure love from the uncalculating delight of loving, the ideals of beauty, and the sense of accountability to God and man, which forever haunt us, sometimes giving us pain, as remorse, whose sting is in the comparison of our outward manifested self with our inward sense of "being increate" (as Milton expresses it). It is this supernatural pre-intellectual soul which distinguishes man from the animal creation, and is symbolized by his form, which looks upward to the symbol of infinity made by the sky, with which the human being instinctively communes, and towards which the child wants to fl}', — and delights in and loves the birds, beyond all other forms of animal life, because they can fly. Gioberti goes on, in his psychology, to say that when the soul, which has recognized its Divine Source as the first act of its life, is put to sleep in nature, it is gradually waked up by the individual forms of nature, which are so many syllables of the Divine Word that are echoed in human words, which describe mat- ter and its evolutions ; then the understanding begins, and DISCIPLINE. 69 (which is the point I want you to observe especially at this moment) the words of even a very young child soon bring to its understanding spiritual realities. And it is the office of education to see that the relations of things, — the laws of order among things, — the adjustment of external cause and effect, be accurately icorded; and especially that the spiritual consciousness gets a happy symbolization ; that is, that the best words are used to do justice to the Ideas of God and the sentiments of the heart of man. A materialistic educator (or no less a mere dogmatist in religion, who docs not see that the logical formulas and abstract terms of scientific theology cannot possibly waJce up the primeval vision) may do an all but infinite mischief to the character and heart, by the words he uses in talking to children ; and the theologian a greater mischief than the materialist, because the forms and evolutions of matter are, as I have said, syllables of the Word that was in the begin- ning with God and, in a certain sense, God, while the abstractions of the human mind are the refuse of finite spirit, infinitely superficial, mere limitations of thought which become stumbling-blocks to the mind when not used as step- ping-stones to new outlooks, or rather, inlooks. Never should children be talked to in the language of theological science, but wholly in imaginative S3'mbolization, and the symbols should be chosen with great care, and we should be on our guard against rousing the faculty of abstraction which is a sleeping danger in the nature, whose premature development is injurious in strict proportion to ignorance and sensitiveness. The symbols of the spiritual should be human because human consciousness involves substance outside the physical, and, therefore, did the Word which had not been comprehended in its creation of '' everything which it had made," though "without it nothing was made," take flesh and dwell among us, in order that we might apprehend the glory of God and perfection of man with our whole 70 DISCIPLINE. nature. That it would do so, was the insight of the Hebrew genius, whenever by worthy soul-action the law-giver, king, and whoever entered into " the liberty of prophesying" was raised to the height of his nature. Now a child is "on its being's height," " mighty prophet," " seer blest," " On whom those truths do rest That we are toiling all our lives to find," and therefore a child can supply a substantial meaning to any name for God adequate to awaken the living echo of the soul that " Cometh from afar Trailing clouds of glory from God," whose voice sent it forth, as Gioberti says, "to suffer and to be for a season on earth." I hope you follow me in my thought, for I think I am looking into the child, which is the thing that ought to be done if one undertakes to teach it. That the child really knows God before God is even named to him is not a specu- lative theor^^ with me but a fact of my experience. It is one of my earliest remembrances, that I was sitting in the lap of a young lady, whose name and countenance I have forgotten, who was caressing me, and calling me sweet, beautiful, darling, etc., when all at once she seized me into a closer embrace and exclaimed, rather than asked, Who made you? I remember my pleased surprise at the question, that I feel very sure had never been addressed to my consciousness before. At once a Face arose to my imagination, — only a Face and head, — close to me, and looking upon me with the most benignant smile, in which the kindness rather predomi- nated over the intelligence ; but it looked at me as if mean- ing, " Yes, I made you, as you know very well." I was so thoroughly satisfied, that I replied to the question decisively, " A man." DISCIPLINE. 71 The lady said to another who sat near us, "Only think! this great girl does not know who made her ! ** I remember I was no less sure of my knowledge, notwith- standing she said this. Though it was the first time I had thought God and given the name " man" to the thought, it seemed not new to me. I had felt God before. I teas a rather large girl, more than four years old, as I know from the fact that we were living in a certain house, to which we went on my fourth birthday. M}^ next recollec- tion is of going into a room of this house, where my mother was sitting, working at an embroidery frame that hung against the wall. I went up to her and said, "Mamma, Eliza asked me who made me, and I told her a man, and she said he didn't ! " I stated this reply as a grievance and outrage. Since I came to the age of reflection, I have always re- gretted the conversation that followed. It was not judi- cious, and seems to me a little out of character for my mother, who was of strong religious sentiment and quick imagination, and all other conversation on religious subjects that I remember of hers was very good. She was rather thrown off her guard by my unexpected theology and lost her presence of mind. I was her oldest child, and she had waited to see some enquiry raised before speaking on the subject. I had seemed more stupid than I was, for I belong by nature rather to the reflective than perceptive class, and so had very little language. At this distance of time I can- not, of course, remember the details of the conversation, but I came out of it with another image of God in my mind, conveying not half so much of the truth as did that kind Face, close up to mine, and seeming to be so wholly occu- pied with His creature. The new image was of an old man, sitting away up on the clouds, dressed in a black silk gown and cocked hat, the costume of our old Puritan minister. He was looking down upon the earth, and spying round 72 DISCIPLINE. among the children to see who was doing wrong, in order to punish offenders by touching them with a long rod he held in his hand, thus exposing them to everybody's censure. Of course my mother said no such thing to me, but what she did say, by subtle associations with the words she used, gave me this image, which I need not sa}' rather checked than promoted my spiritual advancement. This experience has been of value to me as a teacher since, for it has effectually saved me from being didactic and dogmatic in my religious teaching of children. The Socratic method is the true way of bringing into the definite conscious thought God's revelation of Himself to the soul. That image of authority and power to punish did not, I think, help, but rather puzzled my moral sense of which I was already conscious. For I remember that I used to muse very much in my childhood upon the mental phenomenon of feeling myself to be two persons. I was clearly conscious of an inward conversation on all occasions of a question of right and wrong, when a higher and lower law distinctly uttered themselves. The lower self often prevailed by the argu- ment that the thing to be done was transient^ I would do it onl}^ this once^ and never again ; and often I thus sinned against the very present God, which I think I might not have done so presumptuously, had I associated the thought of this strange other me with that kind face of Love Divine. When later in life I did learn that the remonstrating voice was unquestionably God, because He is the Love that I saw in my childish vision, the war between self-love and con- science ceased. But this was not till a great body of death had be^n accumulated, which I have never shuffled off except in moments of hope. But to take up the thread of my discourse again. I would very earnestly say that the Socratic or conversational method is the only way of bringing into a child's definite consciousness God's revelation of Himself to souls. But DISCIPLINE. 73 this requires a mutual understanding of words, and if we are careful, we may produce this in the kindergarten. Froebel intimates that a general impression of there being an invisible Friend and Protector may be given by the baby's seeing the mother in the attitude of devotion, and he would have recognition of God called forth b}^ her naming the unseen Father at moments when the child's heart is overflowing with joy and love, or seeking to know where some beautiful thing comes from. The child feels already at such times the presence of the Inlinite Cause, the Infinite Source of joy and goodness, and the name of Heavenly Father given to this presence will not be an empty vocable. Using with the name of Father the word " our," with which the Lord's Prayer begins, suggests that He is the Father of all alike, and all human beings will thus be united together with Him in the child's imagination.^ This idea of one personal but comprehensive Being, the centre of the social organization, is a quickening of the immortal personality, which has a date in time no less certainly than the quickening of the body, and is our sense of identity.^ * See Frederic Denison Maurice's book on the Lord's Prayer, pul)- lished by Hurd & Houghton. 2 See Appendix, note A. LECTUEE TV. THE KINDERGARTEN. In my last lecture I spoke of the ideal nursery ; for only there, hitherto, has the divine method of education ever been completely carried out, the unquestionable teacher there be- ing the cJiild^ "trailing clouds of glory from God who is our home " ; its sweet content and inspiring smile indicating when its nurse is treating it aright ; while all that is wrong, whether proceeding from mere ignorance or selfish wilfulness on the part of the adult, is indicated by its cries of fright and anger, which it behooves her to heed. How is it that, with the spectacle forever before our eyes of the mother and infant, mutually emparadised in child's play (that mutually educating communion of trust and love, by which the child is put into gradual possession of his body, and joyous consciousness of his individuality), — how is it, I say, that we find education has lost its ideal ^ and as soon as the child leaves the nursery for the schoolroom, an antago- nism has begun, "with its blessedness at strife," and which leaves us all such scarred and bewildered creatures as we find ourselves to be, as soon as we come to reflect? But I must remember that what we have to speak of especially is the kindergarten, which follows hard upon the nurser}'. When the child's growing activities begin to require a larger social sphere than the nursery, — i.e., at about three years old, — it was Froebers plan to gather the children of several families into what he called a "Child Garden," and to extend the nursery law of cherishing (which is the dealing with 76 THE KINDERGARTEN. living organisms that children are) , by exercising them for several hours of every day in rehearsing in plays, in the first place, all the sweet charities of life. This employs their physical forces, and makes them experimentally know that human happiness and goodness are social and generous. For the so-called " movement plays " are social exercises, gently calling out moral sentiments, as well as intellectual powers. They can only be beautiful and enjoyable when they give mutual pleasure ; and this involves that mutual reference and kind consideration of each other which leave no room for selfish feeling or action. Moral education is the alpha and omega of a kindergarten, but it cannot be given by precept. To do the will of God, — t.e., to obey the moral law, — ''doing to others as we would have others do to us," even in play, is the only wa}'' for children to know vitally the doctrine of moral life. Froebel has suggested a variety of these movement plays, all of them conceived with the greatest care as to their intel- lectual as well as moral effect. They always have a fanciful aim, within the scope of the child's knowledge and affection, and to play them begins to develop the understanding also. A gentle intellectual exercise, involved in learning by rote, reciting, and singing the songs that direct the plays, takes the rudeness out and puts intelligence into that exhilaration of the animal spirits which health}' children crave, and pre- vents it from exhausting the body or disordering the mind ; the joyous association of the children with each other aiding this effect. In the sedentary plays, which are called *' occu- pations," and in which the child is genially drawn into pro- ducing s^'mmetrical effects to the eye, by making things (albeit only little toys) which begin their artistic life, Froebel has had equal regard to the moral as to the intellectual influences. When the child has gone beyond the age in which he is satis- fied with making transient forms and gathering the materials back into boxes, and desires to make something that will last, THE KINDERGArvTEN. 77 a legitimate sense of property arises. He feels that what he has made is his own^ for the thought and work which he knows that he has put into it are his own. Frabel, therefore, would have him, before he begins to make anything, pause and appropriate it intentionally to some object of his love, reverence, or pity. This will check the otherwise rampant propensity to hoard, and prevent the passions of avarice, vanity, and jealousy from making their appearance. In our common school life, the pride of showing off their powers, and excelling others, is regularly cultivated in children by competition, as a stimulus to industry. But this is as unnec- essary as it is deleterious. For disinterested desire to confer pleasure, and express gratitude and love of others, is found by experience to be a surer stimulus to industry than the baser passions, and has the additional value of cultivating positive sweetness and active benevolence. It is desirable, and really produces the greatest practical humility, for chil- dren to regard themselves as embryo powers of beneficence, learning to do the Heavenly Father's business from the be- ginning, like the child Jesus. Then may they grow " in favor with God and men," as they grow "in stature," and all their knowledge will prove a divine wisdom unto the salvation of others and themselves. To go into a truly ordered and well governed child -garden, and see all the little children busy making things for the Christmas tree, or for birthday and new year's gifts, for all the friends they know or fancy, we shall see sufficient proofs that love is the truest quickener of industry, and love-inspired industry the true sweetener of the disposition and temper. Moreover, such industry is the special desideratum to tem- per the spirit of the present age, which is so keen and ener- getic that it hurries our young men into pursuits in their amusements which take on the character of gambling ; and hence gambling in business, gambling in politics, where even human beings, instead of being regarded as brothers to he 78 THE KINDERGARTEN. . hept^ are used as dice, to be recklessly thrown in our game. The only preventive or cure for this passion for gambling is industry, and the only industry that is attractive is artistic; and why should not all industry become artistic, now that the great cosmic forces are suborned, by our advancing civilization, as the legitimate slaves of men, to do all the hard work for men ? I have already set forth this view of the subject in the Plea for FroebeVs Kindergarten as the Pri- mary Art-School^ which I appended to Cardinal Wiseman's lecture on the relation of the arts of design with the arts of production (which I published in 1869, under the title of The Artist and the Artisan Identified, — the Proper Object of American Education) . Before I leave these general remarks for more specific ex- planation of Frcebel's method of intellectual development, I would make one more observation. It is in the social and moral character of the kindergarten that Froebel has shown himself so much superior to Eousseau, whose method was to cultivate individualities exclusively', the teacher pretending to know no more than the child, but taking his idiosyncrasy for his only guide in discovery and invention. In the first place, Rousseau's method has been found an impracticable one, for it requires a separate teacher for every child ; and in the only instance, perhaps, in which it was ever carried out with perfect fidelity, that of Maria Edgeworth's eldest brother (we have in her memoirs of her father all the facts) , the ultimate effect was to make a monstrosity. He was utterly strange, so odd and unsocial, nobody but his father, who educated him, could have any practicable relation with him. He might be said to be conscientious!}^ unsocial, and there- fore immoral ; and, though not ungifted, he was an utter failure in human life. "We see similar effects produced meas- urably, in all cases where the main object is to cultivate the individual rather than the universal characteristics of human- ity. Froebel was tender, and gave freedom to individualities. THE KINDERGARTEN. 79 but he took great care not to xoamper them. They are the results of the free-will, irrefragable, and will take care of themselves suflSciently, if not cruelly snubbed, but tenderly respected. What is to be intentionally cultivated in earliest infancy, are the general affections and faculties, which relate us to our kind, insuring common sense and common conscience with a reasonable self-respect. Therefore, what is done in the kindergarten is necessary for all children, their idiosyn- crasies being left free to play on the surface and give variety and piquancy to life, freedom and dignity to the individual. All minds seem to be divided into two classes. In one class, the primal tendency is to observe single objects ; and these are the so-called smart children, interesting the specta- tor by their vivacity- and precocity. In the other class, children seem to be dull in sense, unobserving, but dreamy, as if they had an over-mastering presentiment of that con- nection of things which binds them into wholes. It has been remarked that this latter class turns out the great men, — the poets, the philosophers, the inventors, high artists, great statesmen, and law-givers, — while the precocious children disappoint expectation ; probabl}^ because they have accu- mulated such a chaos of single impressions of disconnected things, that it quite overwhelms the classifying and gene- ralizing powers of the intellect. FroebeFs method equally meets the respective wants of both these classes of minds, supplying by specific culture the other side of their practical endowment. By its discipline of production, it gives the lively and restless ones the wand of the Fairy-Order, in discovering to them the connections of things, and the con- ditions as well as laws of organization ; while for those of the dreamy, poetic, philosophic temperament, it sharpens the senses to individual things, supplying the definite and sensuous impressions, and suggesting the corresponding words that enable them to give an account of their own 80 THE KINDERGARTEN. thinking, and illustrate to others the struggling ideal ; which, like conscience and the love of order and rhythm, is perhaps the yet persistent vision of that Heavenly Father's face, which Jesus Christ has told us we are created beholding. Jesus evidently is quoting a familiar proverb, when he says " for their angels behold the face of my Father who is in heaven." Does it not refer to the Persian mythology current in Judea after the captivity ? However neglected and eclipsed, that primeval vision can never be quite lost. It persists in the love of order and beauty ; in the desire to be loved infinitely; in hope " that springs eternal in the human breast " ; in the ideals of imagination, that haunt both the savage and the sage, and, at worst, in remorse^ \h which, as Emerson says, '' there is a certain sweetness" whether it be gentle as in what the Quakers call "the reproof of truth," or felt as the reproachful strivings within us of our neglected infinite nature. This brings me to speak of FroebeFs superiority to Pesta- lozzi. The kindergarten is not mainly object-teacJiing, though of course a constant object- teaching is involved; all the materials of their work and all the surroundings of the children become objects of examination in their individual- ities of form, size, number, etc., and in their possible con- nections with each other and with the child. If Froebel proposes to give the fruits of the tree of life, before he gives those of the tree of knowledge, it is only that the latter may prove, 7iot a curse, but a blessing. The world's history and the present state of civilization in the foremost nations of the world shows us that knowledge may be a power without being a good (a snakish subtlety not Divine Wisdom). It begins to be realized in Europe as well as in America, that Froebers idea of education, in making character the first thing, and knowledge the hand-maiden of goodness, is the desideratum of the age, and promise of the millennium. I should like to read you some letters of eminent men in THE KINDERGARTEN. gl France, addressed to Froebers most earnest disciple and apostle, the Baroness Marenholtz Biilow, which I have trans- lated from the appendix of her Work in Relation to Educa^ Hon (see Appendix, Note B). In an address to the school committee of Boston in 1868 I gave the call addressed in 1867 by the Philosophers' Congress in Prague to the convention of teachers in Berlin, and the call of the latter to the second convention of this con- gress at Frankfort-on-the-Main in loG9. The burden of all these papers is the paramount necessity of religious and moral education, begun in earliest infancy, in order that the modern intellectual activity may not land us in licentious vices and heartless atheism, our nearest dangers. They all accept Froebers method of education b}^ work and experience (beginning with the work and experience of the child of three years old) as the first condition of the regeneration of the human race. It is the office of the kindergartner to awaken the intelbct, which the child does not bring into the world, like its heart and will, full-grown. The infant suffers and enjoys as keenly, and wills as energetically, at first as ever in its life, but apparently begins and lives for some time, unconscious of a world without as a not me. It is purely subjective, i.e., feeling its material environment to be a part of itself. As Emerson says : — " The babe, by its mother, Lies bathed in joy ; Glide its hours uncounted ; The sun is its toy ! Shines the peace of all being, Without cloud, in its eyes ; And the sum of the world In soft miniature lies ! " Only by intentional help of those around the child can it grow into individual consciousness of its relations with 82 THE KINDERGARTEN. nature in that order which produces the sound intellect. For the intellect is a growth in time, that carries on the nursery exercises of the limbs and affections by the move- ment plays, and adds those sedentary plays with the series of gifts, which are symbols of all nature in miniature, that objective revelation of God to which the receptive mind answers by thoughts. Thinking is that reaction of the individual mind upon nature which, when it is put into words, produces progressively an image of God, which is the human mind. The kindergartner's conversation with the children upon their playthings is therefore her most important and deli- cate work, and one which she cannot do instinctively, but only if she scientifically understands the child on the one hand, and nature in some department on the other. It is impossible in this lecture, perhaps, to demonstrate my mean- ing. By following out Frcebers own method of playing with the gifts, as suggested in Mrs. Kraus-Boelte's guide or in The Florence Handbook^ the whole process of the forma- tion of tlie Imman understanding by the order of objective nature will become patent, and enable the kindergartner to avoid any great mistakes in her guidance of the children's minds, which guidance should always be tentative, and respectful,, to say the least, of their freedom to will. Then we shall have not mechanical work, but orderly, creative work from the children, whose spontaneity is not to be choked ; but when it seems to be going in a wrong direction, interrogatively guided. Like Ariel, she must do her spirit- ing gently, lest she violate the legitimate individuality, and we have Caliban instead of the germ of Prospero. I here pause to display two kinds of work actually done by children under seven years of age at Frau Marquadfs kindergarten in Dresden. They enable me to show that those sedentary plays, with which Frcebel would have children amused, must needs develop and educate the per- THE KINDERGARTEN. 83 ceptive faculty and understanding in a substantial manner ; for these things were done without patterns, and therefore from thought^ — the thought being sometimes suggested by the dictation of the child-gardener, requiring of the child only one single act of reflection. But much of this work was invented by the children themselves, their wildest fancies being controlled to produce symmetry, by following the one rhythmical law of always making an opposite to everything they do. After showing and explaining the modus operandi of the work exhibited, I went on to say : — I believe nobody disputes, after they see what kinder- garten is, that it is the gospel of salvation for children. The exercises put them into complete possession, not only of their limbs, especially the characteristic limb of man, the hand, just when they are the most flexible, and therefore most easily trained ; and of their organs of sense (by which they gradually make the universe their instrumentality) , but also of accurate speech^ enabling them to express their impres- sions of individual things, as well as of what they do with things and in the order of its doing. Thus they are pre- pared for entering upon more abstract subjects, by means of books and schools of instruction. A child well " gardened" and exercised in the intelligent use of his mother tongue enters upon the process of learning to read, for instance, with all the more advantage from being accustomed to hear and use language with precision and fluency ; and is ready to learn to cipher all the more quickl^^, because of the concrete arithmetic and geometry he has mastered experi- mentally with the playthings and in the occupations, all his habits of delicate observation and nice calculation formed b}' the embroidery and other fanciful work giving the basis for intelligent classifications. Even the few years of experience of some genuine kindergartens in this country has already ^0^ proved this. I can give an instance in detail of the almost miraculous rapidity with which a class of seven-year-old 84 THE KINDERGARTEN. children learned to read in the* primer called After Kin- dergarten — What? (Note C, in Appendix.) All the time given to "child-gardening" is therefore more thaii saved at the next stage, when instruction begins. Other advantages accruing are incalculable, for the children them- selves have become intelligent and conscientious co-operators with their elders, instead of passive receivers or antagonists. When Miss Youmans* First Lessons in Botany (a book made to teach botany in nature on Prof. Ilenslow's method) was introduced into the New York primary schools, with great expectations of a brilliant success, it was found that the children did not take hold as expected of this science of observation. "I see now," said Miss Youmans to me, '' the iudispensableness of kindergartens to develop the faculties ; more than half the children are intellectually demoralized hy neglect or injudicious teaching before they are seven years old." Everything, however, depends upon the single- minded self-devotion and affectionate character of the kindergartner, and it is obvious that her education must be as special as that of a teacher of instrumental and vocal music ; for as little as music can be tauglit by the ear, or drawing by the eye, without studying the underlying princi- ples of harmony and symmetry, can kindergartning be taught empu'ically. Its foundation is in both a scientific and sympathetic study and understanding of the child's percep- tive powers and the material world. Not merely what is to be taught, as is the case with a university professor, but the free-willing and deep-feeling beings that are to be taught must be studied generally and individually above all things else. Hence, there must be special schools for teach- ing child-gardening, or a special department made in the already existing normal schools. The burden of thinking out the steps of procedure in the schoolroom is too great a one to be laid on the teacher who has to exercise the general care. It must all be at th^ THE KIXDEEGARTEN. 85 tongue's tip and fingers' cuds bcforelifind. It took Froebel r. lifetime, with all liis genius and wisdom, to discover all the steps of this order of exercises, in correspondence wath the true evolution of the faculties ; but "one man dies, and other men enter into the fruits of his labors." Besides, it is as cruel to stud}' the philosophy of education at the expense of the living children's minds, as it would be to study anatomy and medicine at the expense of their living bodies. All kin- dergartners should observe and practise for awhile under the direction and criticism of those who are ah*eady experts and adepts ; and the latter should be careful that their assist- ants try no rash experiments, but at first reverently observe successful work. It is the highest interest of all teachers to learn this method, because it develops themselves. It not only makes the best mothers, but the most perfectly accom- plished women. It is entering into the secret of creation and redemption, which is the flower and fruit of human culture.^ When people ask me if kindergartning is not a method especially adapted to German children, I reply that it seems to me to encounter as great obstacles in that nationality as in any other. It is not a national method, but the human method ; and I would remark in this place that it strikes me as especially desirable for Irish children. The natural pre- dominance in them of fancy needs the check of accurate perception, associated with accurate expression; accurate perception, first, of the individuality of objects, their form, size, color, direction, their mutual resemblances and con- trasts, and the no less accurate perception of their relations to each other and to the child. These things can only be made objects of perception by children's being accustomed to make things, which employ the activities that otherwise will play 1 For details of manipulating the gifts and occupations, see The Florence Handbook ^ published by Milton Bradley; or Mrs. Kraus- Boelte's Manual in Eight Parts, which is being published by Steiger. 86 THE KINDEFiGARTEN. at random and divert their attention from the matter m hand. In my observations of Irish servants, I am struck with their never seeming to see what is before their eyes, or to hear what is said to them, on account of the predominance of their creative faculties. Accurate perception of the things children play with, and successful manipulation of them to produce effects, would also help them to moral integrity ; for order moralizes just in proportion as disorder demoralizes. Successful action cures idle dissipation, while unsuccessful efforts discourage and paralj'ze industry. Froebel wishes the child to be started at something he can certainly accomplish, though perhaps not without direction in words. When the child sees an effect produced by himself, he will repeat it until he can produce the effect without direction, and, if asked, will be delighted to show another child how he has done it. It is a necessary step to put his action into words, and raises it from mere mechanical into intellectual work ; from Chinese imitation into European and American inven- tion. By and by, when he has learned a little steadiness of attention by doing successfully what pleases his fancy, he will make some motion of his own, and proceed according to the law of symmetry (whose virtue he has learned) to dis- cover and make new forms of beauty and use ; but he sliould still be carefully overlooked, and saved, by timely sugges- tions, from making mistakes. These suggestions he will crave and not resist, if they are not x)erem2')tory ^ but are put in the form of a question, which seems to respect his power to choose, which is his personality^ the image of God within him. In proceeding in this way, both teacher and child are led more and more to realize that there is a mysterious third Being present, who is neither the teacher nor the child, but in whom they meet, through whom they communicate, and who gives the law they both must respect ; that there is, in short, One ' ' in whom they live and move and have their be- ing " ; that is the God who ' ' worketh in them to will and to THE KINDERGARTEN^. 87 do" ; that He enables them to create beauty, not at random, but with a certain freedom which is not lawlessness. He is the Creator of the Beauty they do not make, and of the Good they love, and gives the Laws which they obej', and in obey- ing become powers of good and inventors of beauty ; for the laws of order are truly God's thought revealed to their thought. To be active powers of good and beauty is to be religious, and also to be free from superstition ; to love God instead of being afraid of Him ; to make their lives a reason- able serv'ice, and thus become free from priestcraft and spir- itual tyranny. Incflicienc}', still more than ignorance, is the mother of fetich worship, and reduces man to slavery ; and to be surrounded by natural and artistic beauty docs not cul- tivate the mind, unless it is already an active power. Rev- erie is not thinking. But the mind can only become active by the electric touch of a sympathetic mind which is already in motion. It is the destiny of men to become one In that same sense that the Divine Father and Son are one. God has made human communion a moral necessity, and does nothing for man, except by the instrumentality of man. "By man came death, by man also cometh the resurrection from the dead." In short, education, that "mysterious commun- ion of wisdom and innocence," is presupposed in reasonable religion. I once heard an eloquent man, who was speaking of education, say, "The Archangel is born upon earth ; we may know him by the many difficulties that he has found and sunnounted, and his consequent power to educate ; for edu- cation is the highest function of humanity in earth and heaven, cementing the links of the chain of love which binds us all to one another and to God." We are always either educating or hindering the development of our fellow-creatures ; we are always being uplifted or being dragged down by our fellow- creatures. Education is always mutual. The child teaches his parents (as Goethe has said) what his parents omitted to teach him. Every child is a new thought of God, whose 88 THE KINDERGARTEN. individuality is significant and interesting to others, though it is his own limitation ; and to appreciate a child's individu- ality is the advantage the teacher gets in exchange for the general laws which he leads the child to appreciate. It is this variety of individuals that makes the work of education fascinating, and takes from it all wearisome monotony. Those persons who feel that education is wearisome work have not learned the secret of it. I have never seen a good kindergartner who was not as fond of the work as a painter of his painting, a sculptor of his modelling. Teachers who are not conscious of learning from their pupils, may be pretty sure they teach them very little. It is because kindergartning is this true education, which is mutual delight to the adult and the child, that I have faith it will prevail, and its prevalence is my hope for humanity. By the infinite mercy of God, no human being is hopeless of redemption into God's perfect image at last ; but humanity will not be redeemed as a whole, — will not become the image of God, or live the life of God, — until little children are suf- fered to go unto Christ while they are yet of the kingdom of heaven, and are blessed from the first and continuall}', by those who shall take them in their arms to bless them. Those are only perfect kindergartners who are '* hidden in Christ," receiving every child in his name, and humbly learning of them the secrets of greatness in the kingdom of heaven, which is to be established on earth. Kindergartning is not a craft, it is a religion ; not an avocation, but a vocation from on Hio:h. LECTUEE T. LANGUAGE. Teaching, which in the common sense of the word is the suggestion of thoughts by words, is not the kindergartner*s special work, but the a priori process of drawing out into the individual consciousness of a child those latent powers whose free activity gives him conscious relations, first, with his kind ; secondly, with material nature, including his own body ; and, thirdly, with God. He is unconsciously in this threefold relation already-, but to become conscious of these relations severally, in his own growth builds up the human understand- ing, which is not born with him like his sensibility and force of will. The human understanding, a creation in time of the free will, creates language as the element of a life not shared with animals ; an intellectual life using the symbolism of nature as a means of intercommunication, and which is correspondent and bearing a relation to its creator, man, similar to the relation of the material universe to God, being in both instances an image, as in a min*or, of what is necessary and immutable in the self-consciousness, though without entity itself. Hence, as the material universe expresses the wisdom of God, human languages express the imperfect wisdom of man. Language is the element in which the intellectual nature makes a sphere wherein to live and move and have its being. TVhat breath is to the material body, making man alive in nature, language is to the social body, making it alive in history. A word is both spiritual and material, being an articulate form of the voice which, as Goethe has happily said, is the 90 LANGUAGE. nearest spiritual of our bodily powers, taking significance from the articulating organs, which are symbolical, like everything else in material nature, which, as I said before, is but an image, as reflected in a mirror, without absolute entity, but bearing witness of an entity progres- sively apprehended by the finite spirits of men, who are the children of the Infinite Spirit inheriting creative power forevermore. The ^articulate sound of the voice is the scream of pain or the shout of joy, mutually intelligible to all human hearts ; and this aerial basis of language continues to be more or less intelligible to all souls, when modulated as iu poetry into melody and rhythm by emotion and character. The first human language was, perhaps, music of the deepest char- acter, of which pliase there is historic trace in the spoken Chinese, which has been perishing for ages on the lips of a nation whose origin is lost in the depths of antiquity. This spoken language is monosyllabic, and even the initial con- sonant often only a semivowel, while the whole word takes its significance from the tone of the vowel ; thus In in a low tone would have one meaning, lu in the tone of a musical third another meaning, and so on as the tone ascends through the octave. The inception of such a language implies an original equipoise of a brain not yet despoiled of its first vigor through moral delinquency which is incident to the freedom to will of a finite spirit, and consequently the Chinese language was inevitably lost. It would be interest- ing to enquire if those rare individuals among the Chinese who are expert in the spoken Chinese, are not of finest musical temperament. Not till after thinking had begun could articulation by the organs of speech begin. Thinking is the free individual act which associates the mind's activity and the sensibility of the heart with material things, and must precede the use of words. A time comes to every intelligent child when it wonders LANGUAGE. 91 how words should express thoughts. Victorious analysis has never yet penetrated the whole mystery of language to the complete satisfaction of men, though I think philologists and metaphysicians are on the way to it, and have ref^ched some fundamental facts. For instance, that insignificant sounds and articulations could not make significant words, and that vocal sounds (vowels) get their meaning from feeling, while articulations get theirs from the symbolism of the organs of speech. The organs of speech are, first, the throat, — as the guttural organ is called in English because through it we take our food and send forth our voice, — is out of sight, covered up, hidden, the central point where the voice starts ; secondly, the lips, which are obvious, movable, parallel ; thirdl}', our teeth, against which the voice strikes, are hard, stiff, and dead in comparison with the flexible lips, and the tongue which con- nects all together, the voice rolling over it and hardly articu- lated. Hence the hard c and g, and the rough aspirate h are factors in all words signifying the beginning of self-originat- ing motion (observe go and kick, or cause to go), the causal, the central, covered, hidden ; while the labials, p, b, f, v, are factors in all words expressing obviously moving phenomena ; and the dentals, d, t, s, z, found in words expressive of stiff, hard, dead phenomena (the word death is all but identical with the word teeth) ; separation and number being expressed by s and z, which are made by throwing the vocal breath out between the separated teeth. The liquids r and I, r being also a factor of words expressing indefinite beginning, (as original anroral, arise, etc.) are made by the voice moving over the tongue more or less energetically, to express move- ments whose diflference of energy is exemplified in the words fry and fly, groiv and glow, M closes the lips without prevent- ing the continuous sound of the voice from being heard ; and n, negating limitation by throwing the breath (or voice) out at the nose, symbolize respectively the positive and negative aspects of Infinity. 92 LANGUAGE. Of course I am giving only a hint in order to define what I mean when I say significant words are not made out of insignificant sounds, and that articulated sounds get their meaning from the symbolism of the organs of speech. The historical origin of language is lost in the depths of antiquity, when the human race was yet in that equipoise of mind, heart, and self-activity, which in the process of evolution is only progressively recovered by the free agent, it being the office of education to restore it. The infant (that is, the non-speaking child) in vision of the Eternal, only gradually becomes aware of the succession of time. For, as Mr. Emerson sings in his Sphinx song, — "The babe by its mother Lies bathed in joy, Glide its hours uncounted/' And Wordsworth says of " the little child, — '* " On whom those truths do rest, That we are toiling all our hves to find ; " and "By the vision splendid Tlie youth is still attended ; " " Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy, Yet he beholds the light and whence it flows ; He sees it in his joy : At length the man perceives it die away. And fade into the light of common day." But this fall from the Ideal is not what Calvin istic theology declares it to be, reprobation either intellectual or spiritual I " Oh, joy that in our embers Is something that doth live, That nature yet remembers What was so fugitive." LANGUAGE. 93 True education shall lead out the iraprisoned spirit, grow- ingly conscious of individualit}', by means of the symbolism of the prison-house itself which is that correlation of neces- sary forces we call the material universe. The material universe, as I have already said, is the sym- bolization of everything in God except his creativeuess which is the spiritual essence that he shares with Humanity, his only -begotten Son. It is the body of God, and human language is the body of individualized Humanity, whose im- perfections correspond with its various partial developments and short-comings. And it is ever growing towards perfec- tion in the form of poetry, bearing witness to the creative- ness (or genius) of man forevermore. As breath is to the material body, keeping men alive in nature, so language is to the social body, keeping individuals alive in history and literature ; and as the material universe is symbolical of God's wisdom, so the echoes of the universe tossed from the lips of men are symbolic images of the wisdom of man. Lan- guage, in short, being of both natures, spiritual and material, makes an elemental sphere for the intellectual life, beyond the material ; in short, makes a metaphysical world, in which the finite and infinite spirits commune with other finite spirits and with the Infinite One ; for by words every minutest shade >^^ of individual consciousness may be communicated from one ] finite mind to another, making not only an immortal com- i munion of men possible, but a communion of God and Humanity also that shall have no end. Heaven and earth pass away, but the Word of the Lord endureth forever. But I must not be tempted into philosox)hizing farther upon language at present, precisely because it takes us into the^ deepest mysteries of speculative thought, and our business with it now is practical, and concerns the nursery and kin- dergarten processes of culture. Looking at it superficially, speech is an imitative art, and so far as our experience goes, is always taught by elders to 94 LANGUAGE. the young generation empiricall}'. This teaching of the mother-tongue in the nursery is an immensely important thing, because it carries on the development of the under- standing towards the fulness of Reason (which is seeing particular things in their proportionate relation to the whole) . In the whole course of a chikVs education, nothing is done which so much involves the totality of his activity as his learning to talk. For to talk presupposes observation, dis- crimination, memory, fancy, understanding. The first three (observation, discrimination, and memory) are nearly passive reactions from sensuous impressions. But fancy and under- standing are creative acts of the human spirit, almost def}'- ing analysis. In fancy, the mind acts quite reckless and even defiant of nature's laws and order. In understanding, it observes and uses them subjectively. That children de- light in using words to name things in the order of nature, and to express qualities and relations in connection, making an echo-picture within of what they see without, is not so wonderful as the exaltation of delight produced by a story which is, as it were, triumphant over nature's laws, and reckless of its order ; and the shocks of laughter with which they catch at a grotesque and impossible combination of images made in their fancy by means of words. The pre- dominance of fanciful talk to children which seems to be instinctive with all peoples, everywhere, is an indication that fancy is as legitimate an activity as understanding, to say the least. It seems to me to be an evidence of our be- ing begotten directl^^ by the creative spirit, sons of a divine Father, who is the complex of Infinite Love, Infinite Wisdom, and Infinite Power, of which our human feeling, power of thinking, and executive ability are the shadow, or rather a living image. Both fancy and understanding are developed in time by words. We all know how children are waked up and de- LANGUAGE. 95 lighted by Mother Goose absurdities, and still more by fairy stories that seem to set at naught the facts and override the laws of nature. It is a stubborn fact, of which materialistic positivists afford us no explanation, and which I commend to the consideration of Mr. Mansell, and whoever else talks of the limitations of religious thought. And I think it will be found that children who are talked to by Mother Goose and fairy-story tellers learn to talk more quickly than others, and have more vivacity of mind generall}^, with a power of entering into the minds of others commensurate with their sensibility, and justifying the human sympathies which are often a burden to the unimaginative, who are nevertheless kind. A great deal of the misunderstanding of others which causes unnecessar}' pain and social bitterness, checking gen- erous furtherance of one another's good purposes, arises from want of saliency of imagination, preventing us from being able to put ourselves in another's place. And of course it is not without the highest reason that the Father of our Spirits has given fancy the advantage of the first start in our mental process. That fancy precedes understanding in our psycho- logical history cannot be denied by any nice observer. I have known some parents who would not use Mother Goose or fairy stories with their children, but substituted therefoi* amusing experiments in physics, — the metamorphosis of insects and the classification of plants according to their dif- ferences. Their children became scientific when they grew up, were fine mathematicians, and were interested in mechani- cal inventions and natural history ; but took comparatively little interest in political and moral problems, though not at all wanting in the social and patriotic affections, which also characterized their parents, who were themselves brought up on the imaginative system not well modified by studies of nature's phenomena, which was probably the reason of their strong reaction from the imaginative method. But I have known as intimately some other parents who 96 LANGUAGE. made predominant, perhaps extreme use of Mother Goose and fairy literature. Their children much earlier and more com- pletely got command of all the resources of language, had a tendency to art, especially literary art, in their own activity, and were earlier interested in human history, and all varieties of human experience reflected in the literature of nations ; but perhaps were slower in attaining practical ability for life's labors. Each direction of education has its advantages and disadvantages in the religious relation, and I think it is the better way to mingle them, especially at the early period of the kindergarten, where the objective point is to cultivate the understanding, which needs that we should appreciate the facts and order of external nature as the exponent of God's wisdom. This will chasten and give substantialit}' to the creative action of the human fancy, which is never to be snubbed, but gently entreated to be reasonable, or we shall have Caliban instead of Ariel or Prospero, as I have said before. I cannot find out whether Frcebel has anywhere expressed himself distinctly on this point. There are certainly no grotesque images and no fairy stories in the mother's prattle with her children over pictures, and in the out-door walks which are suggested in the Mutter spiele iind KOse-Lieder; but children are led to recognize the poetical symbolism of nature, and its invisible and impalpable substances and forces ; the invisible forces of air, heat, and light are used to lead them out from the world of matter towards the more substantial spiritual world where the soul meets and com- munes with God, the omnipresent Spirit to be apprehended onl}^ by the spirit within us, whose organs are ideas. ^ In the kindergarten, as in the nursery, children learn lan- guage by using it empirically. To utilize their love of talk- ing as they play is what is first to be done by the kinder- 1 Idea is a word I always use in the sense of insight, as Plato uses it^ rather than in the sense of notion, as Locke uses it. LANGUAGE. 97 gartner. The things seen and done give a clear definition and precise significance to the words used, which become the steppiDg-stones of the mind, by which it mounts up from the sensuous ground of the understanding into the heaven of invention and imaginative art, plastic and heroic ; and thence to communion with God. But before children are put to reading, before proceeding from things through thoughts, and from spiritual experiences through ideas to their vocal signs, and from vocal signs to their written or printed representa- tions, it is wise to consider the signs themselves. I do not mean to go deeply into etymologies or anything that is abstract. It is not doing so, for instance, to ask children what is the difference between the words see and look, (Can you see without looking? Can you look without seeing?) It gives precision to the understanding to discriminate what are often called synonymes, but which seldom mean precisely the same thing, unless, in our potpourri of a language they are mere translations, as for instance morsel and bit, respective derivatives from the Latin morsum and the English bitten. The little English-speaking child should not be troubled with the derivation of morsel, but is pleased to be called to notice that of bit. We must be guided here by Froebers rule of proceeding from the known to the unknown, and not endeavor to plunge children into the unknown without a clue. That children understand and use figurative language readily, shows that without going out of their childish world we can define s^'mbolic expression to some degree, and this is a means of regulating fanc3\ But I must take another opportunity to speak of the method of doing this.i I can now only affirm that unless children could signify by words not merely their impressions of material things and their correlations, but their feelings and thoughts, it would be impossible for the religious education to be begun in the 1 See note A in Appendix, and the Record of a School. H 98 LANGUAGE. nursery, or to be carried on in the kindergarten, as Froebel proposes it shall be. It is only by naming to the child his own intuition of creative being or cause, or rather by leading the child to name it, that the understanding is started upon the religious thinking which is necessary to keep pure from superstition his religious feeling, while his blind sense of God is chang- ing from an undefined intuition of the heart into a definite thought of the mind, which change Froebel would have take place very early. But this is the most delicate region of consciousness to enter, and we must take great care that we do not profane instead of consecrating the process by what we do and say. Words that are adequate and living names lor the spiritual intuition of a very present God, generate spiritual thoughts in natural relation with them. And this reminds me of a circumstance in the mental history of Laura Bridgeman, illustrative of what I mean. This poor child was deprived, when two years old, of her sight and hearing, and partially of taste and smell, by the scarlet fever, which left her but one avenue of knowledge of material things, — the sense of touch. But through that the practical benevolence of Dr. Howe won a way to her imprisoned spirit, and opened communication of thought with her by means of words ; and she even learned to read in the raised t^pe for the blind. The whole story is immensely interesting and important to any teacher. She had been taught enough of the properties of matter to be able to work on and with things, and moral science could be taught her through her own and others' activity ; but how was she to be taught about God and spiritual things ? Dr. Howe reserved to himself to speak to her of God, forbidding all others to do so, and watched for his opportunity. My sister Sophia went over to the asylum to model Laura's bust, and one day asked her teacher (who was with her always) to translate into spoken words the conversation that LANGUAGE. 99 she saw was passing between them by means of the hand language. Very soon occurred the following : — Laura. I want to go to walk. Teacher, You cannot go to-day, because it rains. Laura, Who makes it rain? Instead of making a direct reply, the teacher went on to explain how moisture exhaled from the earth by the action of the sun, and was collected in masses which were called clouds, and when the clouds were so full as to be heavier than the air, it fell to the earth in drops of rain. Laura said, reverently, '' God is very full." The teacher was startled, and said, "Who told you about God?" Laura, No one told me. The Doctor is going to tell me about him when I know more words. But I think about God all times. The teacher said to my sister, "This is very important," and went to tell the Doctor, who was a good deal moved, but found himself at somewhat of a loss. That evening he came to a little gathering at our house to talk about it. He said that nearly a year before, if not longer, Laura had come upon the word God in her reading, and immediately stopped and asked the meaning of the word. According to his directions, she was then sent to him, and he was so anxious not to do any harm, especially not to frighten her with the idea of Infinite Power (which is the main element of our conception of God, even eighteen hundred years after Christ's manifestation of Infinite Love) , that he was embarrassed, and said to her that she did not yet know other words enough to explain the word God^ but when she had learned more words, he would tell her, and meanwhile he wished she would not ask any one else. But now he was pondering what was the best way to proceed. I suggested that perhaps Laura could teach him more than he could teach her about God, and asked what was the sentence in which she had found the word. But this he had 100 LANGUAGE. Dever known. It was then suggested that probably the word had explained itself, for no sentence could possiblj' contain the word, not even in an exclamation, that would not suggest to such a perfectly clear thinking mind as Laura had always shown, the fact of supreme love or wisdom. The company present proved this by trying to make sentences. I do not know what he finally concluded to do or sa}' to Laura. I think certainly that the ti*ue way would have been to have drawn her out, and according to what she said or seemed to need, to have shaped whatever teaching he had to give, taking great care not to negate an}^ of her positive assertions ; for we could not doubt that God was manifesting himself to the imagination of her heart, if not yet in the forms of the human understanding. If I had known how to use the hand language, I would have solicited the privilege of going to learn what this her- mit soul could have told me before it was darkened by our traditional theology, which did not originate in children, — "On whom those truths do rest That we are toiling all our lives to find/* but in the minds of old sinners who had lost the original purity of soul that ''sees God." " I think about God all times ! " How interesting it would be to know exactly what she thought ! That it was nothing terrific or painful was evident from her habitual mood, which was even joyous. So careful had the Doctor been to educate every bodily and mental activity, that she had none of that discouragement, inelasticity, and indolence of mind, which comes of want of success in childish effort. A genial, educating assistance was always around her, but careful not to weaken her by do- ing anything for her that she could learn to do for herself. Obstacles, therefore, only stimulated her efforts, and so de- lightful was her sense of overcoming them, that, for instance, she would laugh exultingly when sewing if her thread be- LANGUAGE. 101 came knotted, or if in anything she was doing there was some little ditiiculty to be surmounted. Ilcr faith in herself seemed never to have been broken ; but she rested on the fulcrum of Infinite God, in whom she " lives and moves and has her being.'* The only thing we ought to do in the religious nurture of childhood is to lyreserve this faith which comes from the child's seeing God even more clearly and certainly than it can see outward things. See to it that you use language so as more clearly to define and not to blot out the divine vision, as old Dr. Barnard's cocked hat and black silk gown and seat in the clouds eclipsed the sweet face with which my Creator seemed to own me as his child, as I told you in my last lecture. Another mistake that was made in my religious education was during a visit that I made to a great-aunt when I was five years old, and was taught to say the Lord's prayer by the servant who put me to bed. I got the idea that some unknown q\\\ might happen to me in my sleep if I did not do this, and was also told that God would be displeased with me if I thought about anything else when I was saying it. But I was involuntarily consdous of having my mind full of images, while the words of the prayer were empty vocables. In order to prevent the intruding thoughts, I would try to rush through the words quickly, going back to the beginning over and over again. But this artificial duty was not asso- ciated with the instruction of my mother, who was in general very happy in what she said to me about God, dwelling on his goodness, referring to it everything delightful, making Sunday a day of quiet but constant enjoyment, letting us paint, and cut paper, with other little amusements, devoting herself to making us happy, while the rest of the week she was busy ; for She kept a large school, and Sunday was, as she often said, her only and blessed day of rest. Long after, at a time of religious controversy and so-called re- 102 LANGUAGE. vival, I was immensely aided by hearing my mother say to a young aunt of mine who affirmed that St. Paul, in saying that we must pray without ceasing was fanatically unreason- able : "Yes, if praying meant saying over prayers ; but spir- itual prayers mean a devotional attitude of mind towards God which we can have whatever we are doing." This sentence seemed to pour light into a shady place. "Don't you say prayers^ mamma?" I said to her when aunt was gone. " Not when I am alone," she said; "for God sees my thoughts and feelings, and knows that I love him, and always want his help." My mother had nothing of the martinet about her. She took it for gi-anted that upon the whole we wanted to do what was right. She was not apt to give the worst, but the best interpretation to doubtful phenomena. She believed that to treat a child with generous confidence invoked gener- osity and truthfulness, and what was better than all the rest, she did not talk down to her children, but rather drew them up to her own mental and moral level ; and interlarded stories from Spenser's Faerie Queen and the Scriptures with stories of the kind and noble deeds of real people around us. (See Appendix.) Her religion was moral inspiration to herself and consola- tion for all calamity, and always very naturally expressed. She more than corrected her first mistake and inadequate talk with me about my Creator, by telling me the story of the Pilgrim Fathers, when I was yet so very young that my fancy clothed her words with grotesque images, but on the whole did better justice to the spirit of the emigration and the ultimate results it has worked out for the world than the exact facts that transpired in history. What I gained from my self -created mythology was that my ancestors knew themselves to be God's children, whom neither tyrannizing king nor priest had any right to prevent from going to him LANGUAGE. 103 in prayer first hand, and that in order to do his will as then- consciences understood it, they left home and country and all the comforts of civilization, and trusted themselves in a frail vessel to be driven over a stormy ocean by the winds, at imminent peril from the waves below, which would have swallowed them up, had not God, who loved them, approved what they were doing, guided the ship (by a power stronger than the wind, for it was his love) through the narrow open- ing of Plymouth Harbor to the rock where I still seem to see Ihem streaming along, a procession of fair women in white robes as sisters (for so I had interpreted the word ancestors, who strangely enough were all named Ann) . I still seem to see these holy women kneel down in the snow under the trees of the forest, and thank God for their safety from the perils of the sea ; and then go to work in the sense of his very pres- ent help, and gather sticks to make a fire, and build shelters from the weather with the branches of the trees. Among these rude buildings my mother took pains to tell me that they built a schoolhouse where all the children were to be taught to read the Bible. There is nothing for which I thank my mother and m}^ God more than for this grand impression of all-inspiring love to God, and of all-conquering duty to posterity, thus made on my childish imagination, and its association with the idea of personal freedom and independent action. It never could have been made except by one who herself had faith in God, and believed that he had made all men free to come to him, and also that the mother was his first appointed mouthpiece. The fanciful images which were the effect of the shortcomings of my ignorance did not hide the vital truths which I was as open to accept then as now ; namely, that God is m}' Father, the Father of all souls, from whom no one has a right to shut off another. That first schoolhouse, which I fancied that I saw the *' Ann Sisters" building, taught me as no mere words ever 104 LANGUAGE. could have done, that it was the most acceptable service to God to educate all his children to know him and his works. That first idea of human duty I have never outgrown, but still believe universal education is the true culture of the American people, the reasonable service they owe to him who called them out of the Old World to be a nation of indi- viduals. There was nothing fatal, therefore, in that first false notion of God (which I received for a time) , though it was for a time more of an evil to me than it would have been to a child less subjective, or of more lively perception of things without. Liveliness of perception brings so many things before the mind, and so stimulates its volatility, that it undoubtedly prevents the stereotyping of many a single impression and fancy that does injustice to spiritual truths ; and false impressions, unless strongly associated with terror or some other morbid sensibility, do not take hold of a child so strongly as the images that are consistent with the eternal laws of mental evolution, such, for instance, as that human face divine with which I had instantaneously clothed my intuition of God, and which, notwithstanding its tem- porary eclipse, has haunted me all my life. It is very encouraging to the educator to know that the innocent soul of childhood has so much more affinity with truth than with falsehood, because the best and most careful educator cannot sequestrate children entirely from false impressions. But what finds no echo in the spirit passes off, unless the mind is shocked into passivit}' by fear or pain. When the soul is active, it has a certain superiority- to passive impressions, and makes use of them as materials for imagi- native production. It is, therefore, desirable to keep children employed in gentle activity which has successful results, and happy in the midst of attractive natural surroundings, by which God is working with us in the same purpose of educating the child, allowing us to be his partners, as it were, in this work, because it educates us. It is not uncommon to LANGUAGE. 105 hear persons say that they would like to begin life all over again with the knowledge they have gained from their life- experience. This we can all do if we will in imagination really live icith our children^ as Froebcl says, whose motto explains what Christ meant when he bids us to be converted and become little children. LECTURE YI. A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. Part First. I SAID in my last lecture that had I possessed the power to talk in Laura Bridgeman's hand, I should have begged Dr. Howe to let me have some conversation with her after she said that she '' thought about God all times" ; not that I felt that I could teach her, but that I might learn what God had taught her concerning Himself. It was a wonder- ful chance for a most important psychological observation of the innocent mind of childhood, and would have afforded, doubtless, a luminous illustration of the truth that the human soul is also a divine personality justifying the method initiated by Froebel of conversing with the children in the Socratic manner. But already in my lifetime I had had an opportunity for psychological observation, made under circumstances per- haps still more favorable for getting evidence of the impor- tance of a very early recognition of the Heavenly Father's name in the formation in a healthy manner of the human understanding and the development of the reason, verifying the declaration which Froebel has made the corner-stone of his system ; namely, that though a child is the extreme opposite of God, contrasting as effect to cause, as absolute want to infinite supply, all these terms arc connected — con- ciliated — into unity, by Love and Thought, which must recog- nize each other, and whose loss of equal companionship is a " Grief, past all balsam and relief," as Mr. Emerson has sung. 108 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. I have somewhere, very careful memoranda, made at the time, which I have unfortunately mislaid, but I will present from present recollection as well as I can the whole psychological observation, though I am aware that I shall leave out many little things said and done which were perhaps not unimportant links in the chain. Before I begin, I will observe that I tell it to the class to show the difference between talking to and conversing with children, and to illustrate several truths. First, There is an innate Idea, not as a thought but as a feeling, given to every child, of an all-embracing Love (named by Jesus, Father) , one in substance with the deepest consciousness of self ; Second, That this Idea becomes a child's personal, and individual perception only when he has a realizable name for it ; Third, That such a name is not an empty vocable, a mere movement of air, but a sign, to which the intuition of his heart gives vital meaning ; Fourth, That an adequate name for God is the axis of the intellect, and the revolution of thought around it gives perfect globular form and solidity to the mind, balancing the centripetal force of individual self-assertion with the centripetal force of a Divine Love, comprehending all Being. Before God was named to and by this child of whom I am about to speak, you will see that he was a dreary little chaos "without form and void." After he had learned to utter intelligently the name of a Heavenly Father he was what I am going to tell you. But first I must tell you how I had this opportunity and privilege of being the first person to name God to this child when he was four and a half years old. He was the son of a most conscientious mother whose early orphan life had been saddened with religious teiTors. Her earliest recollec- tion, as she told me, having been the death-bed, and immedi- A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION 109 ately after, the burial of her mother, whom she saw, when she was too young to comprehend death, shut up in a coffin and put into the ground ; and she remembered how her agonizing cries at what seemed the frightful cruelty, were peremptorily hushed, with the declaration of the person taking care of her, that God who made the heavens and the earth willed it to be so and would punish her if she did not acquiesce. Little did the thoughtless and heartless person who thus dealt with the distressed little heart think, how disastrously she was emasculating the word God of good by associating it with such an image of ruthless power divorced from tenderness, as she unheedingly did. It was not till long years after that her imagination was cleared of the frightful falsehood ; and when she came to have a child of her own, her governing thought was to keep him ignorant of the fact of death, and the name of God, until he should be old enough to understand them, as she said. She was a person of deep feeling, upright and benevolent, but her imagination, probably by reason of this life-long depression, was of feeble wing, and she was taciturn. In consequence, her child, though most tenderly cared for as to his body, was starved in mind and spirit. His face continued to be an infant's countenance, and he was strangely without that childish jojousness called animal spirits, and grew more and more peevish as he grew older ; for he was sequestered to the society of his silent mother, who would not even be read to in his presence, lest, as she said, some chance word which he could not understand should excite some fear. Suddenly a hemorrhage of the lungs brought this mother to death's door. She had been, for a few years before her marriage, m}' pupil in my own house, and she used to say she owed to me all the happy views she had of God and Heaven, as well as of human life and death, and I was sent for in this extremity as a mother to a child. 110 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. Since her marriage she had lived in a city distant from me, and I had seen her but little. Her child was so very timid I had made no acquaintance with him in transient interviews, and of me he had no impression but of one little story that I had told him six months before when I met him at the house of her husband's parents. This story I had half in- vented to explain a picture in the '• Story without an end," that I was showing to him. (See Appendix.) When I came to the mother's bedside, she told me it was best for her to die, because she was utterly baffled in all her efforts to bring up her child. She went on to describe her timid methods ; she said she feared he was non compos^ for he made no progress. Among many phenomena, she men- tioned that when she gave him playthings, he immediately broke them to pieces, and when she tried to prevent this, by endeavoring to make him understand their uses and construc- tion, he would look drearily into her face and say, rather than ask, " What for ? '* He seemed deficient in will, without impulse, for, though flowers seemed rather to please him, if she took him into the garden and told him he might gather them, he would stand still, and helplessly cry ; and she had to com- mand him to do everything, even to play, before he would attempt it. He acted like an automaton. Moreover, he had no sensibility, and expressed no affection. Just at this point of her dismal story her chamber door was opened by the nurse, with this great boy in her arms. He had his mother's beautiful large brow and deep ej'es, but with no speculation in them, and his whole figure was lifeless and so languid that the arms that had been about the nurse's neck, slowly lost their curve when she put him down on his feet. But his look rested on me, who, with an inviting smile and gesture, held out my hand. Immediately the large eyes filled with intelligent light, and with a cry of joy he sprang towards me, climbed up into my lap, clasped his arms round my neck, nestled upon my bosom, and looking up with a A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. Ill j'jyful expression of confideuce said, '^ Story — little boy — drop of water!" It was, as I have said, about half a year before, that I liad lured him to me as he held off in timidity, by offering to show him the picture where the child, in the " Story without an end" is represented beside the brook, looking at a drop of water hanging from a leaf, ''telling the little boy a story," as I said, to which he had answered " Stor}' ! " and I had gone on and invented a free paraphrase of the story given in the book, adapted to his infantile capacity, and when I had finished, he said, " Story again ! '* and I repeated it again and again, so imperative was his '' story again ! " and now he again said " Story," with a con- fiding pressure, as he leaned on me then, gazing at the picture on the book in my lap, giving me the conviction that he understood me. It was really, as I found subsequently, the only rational words that had ever been addressed to the child's imagination. '' This does not look like want of sensibility, or mens non compos " 1 said to the mother. " I never saw anything like it before," she said, all tears. The ensuing silence was imme- diately broken by the child's imperative repetition of the word "story!" I was too much affected by the mother's emotion to remember or invent any story, but it was an early, warm spring day and the windows were open. The house stood on a bluff of the Merrimac, within sight of the Rapids ; and the sound of the rushing waters came in upon our silence. I said, cheerfully, "Do you hear the water running?" to which he responded with a joyful "yes! what does it run for?" "Oh, because it is glad," I replied, and again he responded with a joyful and satisfied "^es," and after a moment asked, " Where is it running to? " "Oh, into the ocean, where all the rest of the waters are ! " and again an emphatic "yes" expressed his satisfaction. Perhaps he remembered that in the story I had told him of a drop of water ii had ended with the drop falling off the leaf, and 112 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. running away with its brothers and sisters, and falling into the ocean, out of which the sun had originally taken it. At any rate, he not only repeated his 3'es with the emphasis of satisfaction, but seemed to be thoughtful. I said, '' Do you ever look out of the window and see the sun shine on the water, and all the little sparkles of light in the water?'* "•Yes," said he, joyfully, "what makes the sun shine on the water?" "Oh," said I, "it is because the sun loves the water." "Yes," said he, and began to embrace me in the most energetic manner. It was too much for the poor mother, who absolutely wept aloud, whether with joy or soitow she could not tell, as she afterwards said. The sound of her weeping attracted his attention, and he sat up in my lap and turned his large eyes upon her as she lay in bed, and then upon me, with a look of concern and appeal. " See," said I, " poor mother. She is sick and sorr}'. She wants me to tell her a story, and won't you get down and go into the nursery and let me tell dear mother a story to make her feel better ? Then I will come to you and tell you one." With a cheerful " yes " he immediatel}' got down and went into the nursery-, but stopped at the door to say : — " When you have told mother a story, won't you come right in and tell me one ? " I said to the mother, " You see, my dear friend, that the child has mind enough, heart enough, and a moral nature. He can understand and feel sympathy; feels the symbolism of nature ; and can obey a self-denying motive. No fatal harm has been done after all by your delay, but he needs now to know he has a Heavenly Father, fully to manifest all the powers of a human being. You must allow me to give him that name for the Love he feels within and without." " Not quite yet," said she, " not until you come to stay, because he would ask me questions that I should not knov A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 113 now to answer. Childreu ask such terrible questions. I am afraid as soon as you name the Invisible God, he will be frightened. Don't you know M. D. was afraid to stay in a room alone because of the omnipresence of God, which seemed to be an unimaginable horror to her ? " '' I do not wonder," I replied. " Omnipresence of God ! What was there in a child's experience to interpret this Latin abstraction? I think it would have been quite another thing, considering who her earthly father was, had she been told that our Heavenl}* Father was all about her though she could not see Him with her eyes, but could feel Him giving her love and joy. I cannot but wonder that anybody around her should have talked to her in such abstractions." ''I am so unready in expression," she persisted, "and can so poorly express my thoughts and feelings, I am sure I should only do mischief if I should try to answer his ques- tions, and I am sure he will go on asking them, for his mind seemed to wake up at once as soon as you began to talk to him. How different was that ' yes ' from the dreary ' what for?* with which he always received the very best explana- tions that I could make of the things he pla3'ed with. That ' what for? ' was not an enquir}' of intelligence, but an ex- pression of utter want of perception, with no interest to hear a reply. It is best for him that I should die ; then I shall ask his father to give him to you to bring up. Nobody ought to have children but people of genius ! " '' No, no," said I ; '' it does not require genius to talk with childreu, but only simplicity of heart trusted in. I interested him and gained a response, not because of genius, for I have none, but because I believe in him, and in myself, whose happiness is in loving, and that Goo has created us to love and commune with one another and Him. You have said yourself that he seemed to love flowers, though he was afraid to gather them, and that he loved to hear the street musicians. Beauty and music touch his sensibility. By 114 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. saying that the waters run because they are glad, and the sun shines on and makes things beautiful because be loves them, I put his own conscious life into the music of waters and the light of the sun. He recognized the meaning of gladness and love because he himself felt glad and loving, which made a pre-existent possibility of recognizing the love and joy of the Creator that shine in those natural objects, because they are God's own words of love addressed to His own image, who is capable of love and joy and knowledge of Him. If we talk to children in instinctive faith, they understand us. You have not done so because of 3'our earl}' misfortune that saddened your heart and took awa}' your instinctive courage. Faith is the proper act of the heart (courage, you know, is a synonym of heartiness) ; the heart goes before the understanding in the process of life. With- out heart one can do no justice to children in talking with them ; with it, we awaken their minds and nurture their souls, and all our mistakes will be of small account beside the posi- tive advantage of setting their minds in joyful motion ' amidst this mighty sum of things forever speaking.' " "When you come to stay," was her rejoinder, '*you can say to him what you please, for then you will be here to take care of his mind and answer his questions." This was all I could gain at that moment, and I left her, to go to the child, who had several times opened the door and looked at me wistfully, with a silent appeal which was all the more proof of his quickened intelligence that he did not tease. His own desire to have a story had interpreted to him his mother's need. I have very little power of inventing a story, and to his demand for one I responded by taking from the bookshelves Miss Edge worth's first story of Frank, and began to read to him of Frank's making a noise on the table and the conver- sation between him and his mother that ensued. But this did not suit my little one's mood, which was a little exalted A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 115 by his delight at seeing me, and having had his imagination touched by the beautiful language of nature that I had made intelligible to him. He pulled the book away, and asked me to tell him a story '^out of your own self," as he said. Thus urged, I began : '' Once there was a little worm about as long as the nail of my thumb, and no larger round than a big darning-needle. This little worm lived in a little house that he had made for himself in the ground, just big enough to hold him, when he rolled himself up like a little ball with his head sticking out. There were no windows nor doors in his house, but one on top, which was his door to go in at, and his window to look out of. When he had made this house he was tired and crawled into it and curled himself up and went to sleep, and slept all night. In the morning the sun I'ose and spread his beams all over the world, and one of the bright sunbeams shone into the window of the little worm's house and touched his eyes and waked him, and he popped up his head and looked out and saw it was very pleasant in the garden, and he thought he would go out He squirmed himself up out of his hole, and because he had no feet he crept along the garden path. The warm beams of the sun put their arms all round his cold, lit- tle body and made it warm as could be, and the sunbeam went into his little mites of eyes, and filled him all full of light, and the songs of the birds went into his little mites of ears and filled him all up with music, and the sweet smell of hundreds of flowers went up that little mite of a nose and filled him up with their perfumes. And so that little worm went creeping along as glad as he could be that he was alive. '' Now in the house that stood in that garden lived a little boy about four years old ; and when the morning came, the sunbeams had gone into the window of his nursery and waked him, and he was washed and dressed and had his breakfast of bread and milk, and then his mama took him to the door that led down the steps of the piazza into the IIG A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. garden, and told him he might go down the path and have a good run to make himself warm. So down he ran. But now if that little boy should put his strong foot on that dear little worm, it would break him all to pieces — '' "Oh, he shall not, he must not!" cried the child in a spasm of distress. "Aunt Lizzie, don't let him break the dear little worm to pieces 1 " "No indeed," said I, "that little boy would not not do such a cruel thing for the world ! He saw the little worm creep- ing along, so glad to be alive, and he ran on the other side of the path ; and the little worm nibbled a little blade of gi*ass, and drank a little dew for his breakfast, and then he felt tired, and went creeping back, full of good food, to the little hole that was his home, and curled himself up like a little ball and went to sleep." " Now tell me that story all over again ! " said the child. I did so more than once at his entreaty, and always when 1 came to the possible catastrophe of crushing the worm, the same terror seemed to seize him, and he would cry out : — "Oh, he must not, he shall not!" and I always tranquil- lized him again, and gratified his sense of justice by my assurance of the little boy's consideration of the little worm's right to his life and happiness. Of course, I told his mother of the effect of this story, and the evidence it gave of the child's sound moral nature and innate sense of justice. And I begged her to let me lose no time in referring to the presence of the Heavenly Father, that the intuition of his heart might become the possession of his mind. I said I did not believe that he would ask any question. He would suppose that I alone knew, for, as I observed to her, he had never for the whole six months re- ferred to the little boy with the drop of water, and yet had vividly remembered the whole story, as his greeting me had shown, and I had the proof of it, for I had just told it to him again at his request. I told her if I proved to be mis- A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 117 taken, and he should ask her any question she could not answer to her own satisfaction, she could say she would write to me and ask me, and I felt sure he would wait. But I told her I believed what I was thinking of saying to him would keep his thoughts busy while I was gone (for I was going only for a week to prepare for a stay with her for an indefi- nite time). At last I gained her consent, and the child was put into my bed, that I might have the conversation the first thing in the morning. ^^Tien I awoke, I found him awake, close by me, and his great eyes seemed to devour me. '' How long you did sleep ! " said he ; "I have been seeing you sleep." Said I, '' What do you see with?" " My eyes," he replied, and to the questions. What do you hear, smell, taste, touch with? he made the appropriate answers. "But what do you love with ? ** I asked. He jumped up uix)n his knees and crossed his arms on his breast, paused a moment wonderingly, and then exclaimed, "With my arms !" and throwing hio arms round my neck, hugged me. I was taken a little aback, but in a moment said : — " Have you a great deal of love?" " Oh, a great deal, a great deal ! " he exclaimed. " Where is it? where do you keep it?" said I. He started up again on his knees, again crossed his anns upon his breast, and said, " Where do I?" Placing my hand on his heart, I said, "Is it not in there?" His whole expression was afllrmative, he looked delighted, but did not speak. ' ' Are you good ? " said I. " Sometimes," he said. "What are you when you are ^^rpf?^^^ 118 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. He had evidently been told it was naughty to cry. I said, " Why are you not good all the time? " " Why ain*t I?" said he, after a moment's pause. *' Oh," said I, '' I think you have not goodness enough to be good with all the time." He looked assent, delighted and earnest. I answered bis unuttered feeling with the question, — " Should you like to have goodness enough to be good with all the time ? " ''How can I?" "Oh," said I, " you have a good friend who has a whole sky full of goodness. He gave you all the goodness and love you have in there (I touched his breast) , and will give you more and more if you want him to, always and always, enough to be good with all the time." He looked perfectly blest, did not speak, but laid himself down close by me, took my arm and put it over him, and said, as he nestled up to me, — " Talk to me some more." I went on : '' Your gooci friend gives you all your joy to be glad with, and all youj:'love and goodness. The}' always go together. And now listen to me : the next time you are going to cry (I used his own practical expression instead of saying the next time you are naughty) , stop and think. I have a good friend who has a whole sky full of goodness and he will give me goodness enough to be good with all the time, and I guess you will not cry." He responded only with huggings and kissings and exclamations of " I love 3'ou a whole sky full," and as I did not want to overdo or say any- thing to mar the impression I had made, I took advantage of a noise I heard, to change the subject, and said : — "What is that noise?" He jumped out of bed, went to the window, and said : — " It is the carpenters making a house," and after a pause, asked, " Who made all the other houses? " A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 119 " Carpenters," said I ; '^ don't ^-ou see they make houses out of boards?" " Who made the boards?" "The boards are made out of trees. People cut down the trees, and then they saw them up into great logs, and then they split up the logs and smooth them out into pieces we call boards." " Who made the trees? " said he. I understood very well where the tyrannizing unity of his personality was leading his understanding, but did not wish, just then, to risk giving outward form or connection to his thought of the Divine Cause, so I said : — "The trees grow out of the ground; don't you see old trees and 3*oung trees and little baby trees growing out of the ground?" For this information he did not give me that hearty " yes'' with which he had received my communication of spiritual facts, but came back to bed again. I persisted, however, in talking playful nonsense for half an hour, until his nurse came to take him up to dress him. As soon as she appeared at the door, he started up on his knees again, crossed his arms over his breast, and in a loud, joyful voice cried out : — " Mrs. Doyle ! I have a good friend up in the sky who has a whole sky full of goodness, and he will give me as much goodness as I want to be good with all the time,'' emphasiz- ing the last three words. The nurse, a good-hearted Roman Catholic, who, like all the servants, had been forbidden to talk to the child about God or any kindred subject, looked at me startled, yet gratified, and said : — " What will his mother say? " I replied, " His mother will be very glad ; she only wanted to wait till she thought he could understand. But I have told him enough for the present ; don't talk to him about it ; but if he says anything to you, come and tell me." 120 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. ''Yes/' said she, "and I thank God you have come to teach the poor child something." I then said to her aside, " His mother is very anxious lest he be frightened ; for she was frightened about God and death when she was a little child, and has suffered from it all her life long. She has been a double orphan ever since she can remember." I said this to her for several reasons : one was my ex- treme desire to see what the one simple truth would do for the child, and this was the reason I gave good fnend for God's name. Of course, the mother craved to know exactly what had passed on this important occasion, and was im- mensely relieved and gratified at what I told her, and wanted it all to be written down ; and thus it happened that I made memoranda of this and subsequent conversations, and even of those held in her presence, for they continued to be no less interesting than they began. Observe these points in the child's speech to the nurse : he interpolated the words up in the sky. I had given no place to the good friend, though I had said he had a whole sky full of goodness and love ; and the sky being the glori- ous symbol of unboundcdness, elevation, purity, and power to the human imagination, in all nations and times, as is proved by the earliest idolaters who worshipped the heavens, and the host of stars, and verifying the more spiritual con- ceptions of the Hebrew Psalmist, and of Job, who did not confound (nor did this child) the sign with tho Living God who created it to signify His Being. Another thing: Observe it was not even as the giver of love and joy, but as the giver of goodness that the Person of Persons had seized the imagination of the child so powerfully. It was wonder- ful to see that very day, the effect upon his understanding of this conversation. The night before, when I told him the story of the little worm, I found his vocabulary so small that I could give my imagination a very narrow scope. But in A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 121 the course of the thiy (iu which, for the first time in his life) he talked iucessantly, askiug iuiiumerable questions about his good friend, he seemed to have no ditiiculty in talking. I am very sorry I have not my written memoranda, because 1 sliould like to tell you everything in order ; but I re- member he wanted to know how his good friend " looked." I replied by asking him, ''How does love look?" He laughed, and said, '' Love does not look, but feels." '' Well," said I, "so your good friend docs not look, but feels. Don't you feel him now, putting love and good- ness into you?" He laughed assent, and said, ''Where is he?" '* Wherever love and goodness are," said I ; "in you, in me, and in mother, in everybody who loves " I was en- couraged to believe he would comprehend this language, unimaginable and inconceivable as such truth is to the mere understanding, for I had in my remembrance a conversation I once overheard between two children, one five and the other not tliree years old, at which I had not ceased to won- der since I heard it. I was sitting drawing with their mother in a recess of a room that hid us from the children's sight, when our attention was diverted by hearing the younger one say : — " Can God see me now, when I am all wrapped up in this shawl?" The elder one replied very earnestly, "O yes! God can see everybody, everywhere." " But I don't see how He can see me when I am all wrapped up in this shawl. It is dark," pei-sisted the little three-year- old. There was a pause, when Eliza, in a very anxious voice, said : — "Amelia, can you see mama in your eye?" (She meant imagination.) Amelia replied after a moment, " Yes, I can see mama in my eye, just how she looks." 122 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. " Well," said Eliza, " I suppose that is the way God sees everything, because He knows everything." I cannot conceive a more perfect proof that the soul of a child is a "sparkle of God," and its mind the intuition of the eternal reason — its image, than was given by this original illustration of the truth of truths made by a child of five years old. The mother made an exclamation of wonder, and said : — " I am sure I never could have given so profound an answer as that," and I continue to think it the most wonderful thing I ever heard of so young a child's saying, and had I not heard it m3'self, I doubt if I could have believed it was said. But it has given me courage to think that children might have very early a definite conception of the invisible God without materializing it. The omnipresence and invisibility of God were mysteries that attracted my little pupil's mind and taxed it, but did not distress nor perplex it. Of the reality of God's being, the intimacy of his own relations with Ilim, he never seemed to have a doubt ; his delight in the thought of Ilim was boundless. At the end of the first day he said a thing which struck his parents with astonishment. The evening of the day on which I arrived, his father had made tea for me in the parlor, and as the child did not want to leave me a moment, he was set up at the table in his high-chair opposite me, to eat his bread and milk with us. While the father talked of one thing and another, the child's eye and mine occasionally met, and he would immediately make some gesture of lovingness and an inarticulate sound, ce ee ee ! At last his father checked him with the words '' Don't make those silly noises, Foster ! " I interposed, and playfully said : — '' Now please don't come between me and Foster. I under- stand his silly noises and just what he means to say to me. How can you expect he will talk any sense when you have never given him any help to think ? " The father laughed at A rSYCnOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 123 my *' transcendentalism," as he called it. But the second night, when we were all again in the same relative position, the demeanor of the child was wholly changed ; he sat silently eating as if wrapped in thought. By and by he said in a very decided tone, " Some things live, and some things only keep." With a look of astonishment his father exclaimed, " What an extraordinary generalization!" "The consequence," said I, " of being talked to as if he were a rational being one day ! " The next day I went to Boston for a day or two, to make arrangements for returning to stay an indefinite time, which was such a disappointment to the poor little thing that he screamed in the most passionate manner, so that his mother could no longer doubt his sensibility or will. lie was so angry with the stage-coachman who took me away, that his father had great difficulty in persuading him that he was not a bad man, but, on the contrary, a kind one, whom Aunt Lizzie had asked to come to take her to the railroad. At last he somewhat reluctantly agreed that he might be a good man. " But I shall never like him," he said, and left his father, to go and caress his mother, who was weeping, as he divined, with the same regret as his own, and he was apparently com- forted by her saying, that she, too, was sorry Aunt Lizzie had to go away for a little while, but she had promised to come back in a day or two and stay all summer. It turned out as I had surmised, that he had asked no questions while I was gone, and had said very little except to wonder that I stayed so long, though I was gone only two da3-s. When I came back I had immediate evidence that he had been thinking while I was gone, and to some purpose. You remember that on that first morning of our conversation, he had asked me who made the trees, and I had said, " The trees grow out of the ground," which did not seem to give him the 124 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. satisfaction that my reference of his emotions, sensibilities, and thoughts, to an invisible personality had given him. Now, as soon as the embraces of welcome and expressions of joy had subsided a little, he burst into the subject which had so possessed his mind, and with a sort of triumphant air, as if he was sure of a satisfactory response, he asked : — " What did our good friend want the trees to grow out of the ground for?" I said, " Do you think the trees are pretty? Do you like to look at them?" " Yes, I think they are beautiful." " Well," said I, " I guess that was one reason ; you know he loves us all, and so he likes to please us. Do you like to please those you love ? " "Yes ! " and a passionate embrace and kiss was the expres- sive reply. I then went on to call his attention to the fruits that grow on some of the trees, and which serve us with delicious food, and the uses of wood to build houses with, etc. This con- versation naturally introduced other kindred subjects of in- quiry as to why our good friend had arranged things so and so. The tyrannizing instinct of his own mind, of which he had become conscious through the exercise of it, that my naming of the Spirit Father had so happily started, had made objective to him the Unity of all life, and he was sure that the good friend was at the bottom of everything outward as well as inward, even trifles ; for I one day heard him say, as he was lying on the floor at play, " Heavenly Father, I wish you would not let my leg feel so cold." This was later on, in the winter time, however. I cannot sufficiently regret that I have lost my original memoranda. They were transcribed from notes that his mother made, who was watching every word said, with the most intense interest. She always had pencil and paper at her side, because the danger of hemorrhage caused her to A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 125 avoid speaking. She wrote clown with care the very words, us if they were, as indeed the}' were, a divine Revekition. AVhatever he accepted or expressed with joy, she felt was true, knowing as well as she did the past emptiness of his understanding, and the dreariness of his feeling as an indi- vidual. But I can perhaps remember enough to show you the method I took, which was truly the very method of con- versation that Frojbel proposes we should have with children, prompted by the Wisdom of love, which so profoundly re- spects its object that it gives it opportunity to be itself by not obtruding. The reason that we do not get the lesson that childhood can give us is that we tlirust our finite minds between the child and the Divine, instead of limiting our- selves to putting the child into the point of view to see for itself what of course though essentially one, is perhaps of dif- ferent aspect to each. I made it a point to be very quiet, and to exhibit no surprise at his questions or mistakes, but to lead him by my questions to the answers, and the correc- tions of mistakes which must needs arise from one-sidedness. The entire respect with which I listened to what he said gave him complete possession of and confidence in his own mind. One laugh at any incongruity he uttered (as Dr. Seguin would tell you) would have shut him up perhaps forever. How often children's thinking is thus nipped in the bud ! The circumstances in this instance were favorable to real conversation. In addition to my love of psychological ob- servation in general, and m}' love and interest in this child in particular, was that which I felt in the mother, whose own childhood had been so shadowed by her human environment that it had not taught her what only childhood can teach with its uneclipsed vision of the Father's face, of which Christ speaks and warns the adult not to offend (or, as the revised version translates it, cause to stumble) . On her account, as well as on my own and the child's, I was careful not to put my thoughts into his head, but merely lead him to the stand- 12G A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. point from which he could see the truth for himself. It is because these conditions made for once an opportunity for a genuine conversation between intuitive childhood and such maturity of experience as I had attained, realizing Froebers ideal of the conversation of the kindergarten, that I am desirous to give it to you as a hint of how you should pro- ceed — though, of course, you would probably never have so exceptional an opportunity ; because the children that come to you will generally have minds already misty with half -defined ideas of God, received from the vague, half -defined minds of the imperfectly educated adults, conveyed to the children either in that careless or dogmatic manner in which they are usually talked to, not with. Another advantage I had with this child was, that besides the arrested development arising from his mother's timid plan with him, he inherited from both parents, and perhaps from remoter ancestr}-, an individuality of mind that was not at all imaginative ; which did not, however, exclude him from spiritual truth, for that is not the work of imagination, but is discerned by the spiritual sense, being as objective as what is discerned by the five senses (a transcendental objective, not a material one). The respectful interest with which I treated him gave him a happ}^ confidence in his own thought, which was my opportunity for observing the natural order of mental development. In short, the conversation we had was a genuine one as between equals, unless, indeed, he was the superior in giving to me the divine laws of the spiritual order. He often surprised me by his next question, and was so dis- armed of all fear by my consideration and tenderness, that he revealed that which is always the individual's secret, and I gained as much as he did by the conversations, and certainly I gained certainty in what was previously only conjecture on my part. I was sometimes obliged to say I did not know, and remember his asking me with surprise, " Don't you know everything?" *' Oh, no ! " said I. " Only our good friend A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 127 knows everythiug and gives us our thoughts all the time. Doesn't he give new thoughts to you every day?" "Yes, he gives me a great many new thoughts all the time," he replied with animation. On another occasion, when I had become perfectly exhausted in answering his questions, I said to him : — ''I am very tired, but I will answer that question, pro- vided you will not ask me another before dinner." As he walked away he said, ''Oh, I wish I had asked another question instead of that ! " " Well," said I, " what? Perhaps I will answer that one." Turning back, he said eagerly, "Will our good friend answer all my questions when I go into the sky ? " I said, "Yes, every one; for he knows everything, and can never be tired." The expression of complete satisfaction with which he went away from me was most expressive. You will observe his expression of "when I go into the sky," and consider it together with the words that he interpolated saying, " I have a good friend up in the sky," in repeat- ing to Mrs. Doyle that first morning when I had told him that his good friend who gave him thoughts, and joy, and goodness, and love, had a sky full of goodness. The sky is the natural symbol of the unbounded and infinite and the essentially spiritual, and the conception of God into which I had led him, and which I named his good friend, pervaded all space. The subsequent questions of how God looked, and upon His whereabouts, and the conversation on this, by identifying Ilim with the Love that he felt within himself, had revealed to him Immortality before he had defined mortality. The God he felt within him in his conscious Love and without him in all manifestations of beauty and power, gave him assurance that he would be sometime wherever God was. I have lost the connection and place in the narrative of 128 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. another conversation I had with him on the omnipresence of God. He often had said his thoughts were in his head, and his feelings were in his bosom. One day he was sitting in my lap close to a table, with his feet bare, and I put my hand under the table and pinched his toe. He said : — " What are 3'ou pinching my toe for ? " I said, " How do you know I pinched your toe? you can- not see what I am doing under the table." " I think you pinched my toe, because I felt it." '' I thought all your thoughts were in your head, and all your feelings in your bosom, not in your toes.'* '' My feelings are all over my bod}'," said he ; " and when you pinched my toe, the feeling ran right into my head and turned into a thought." " So you see," said I, " that 30U live all over your body and in any part of it, just as your Heavenly Father lives all over the world and in everything at once." " Yes," said he, " I did not know how that was before." The date of this conversation was some weeks, perhaps months, from the beginning of our intercourse, as I know from the use of the word Heavenly Father^ which came after a time to take the place of good friend^ and it was preceded by some other conversations. He was always overflowing with expressions of love to me. When I gave him anything, he would embrace me, and I would ask, ''Which do you love best, me or the thing given?" (an apple perhaps, or whatever it might be). He would always say, " You, you." Once he said, " I love 3'ou more than all the apples in the world." Once when he was kissing my hand, I said, " Which do you love best, me or my hand?" " I love both," he said. I persisted, and said, " Supposing my hand was cut off, would you love me as well?" " I should love you a great deal more,'* said he, energeti- cally ; " for it would hurt you so to have your poor hand cut off. Would it not hurt you dreadfully ? " A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 129 " I suppose it would, but by and by it would get well and what I want to know is, whether 3'ou would love mc as well without my hand as with it?" He still declared he should love me more. I then said, *' So you see my hand is not me. It is only one of the things the Heavenly Father gave me to make things with, and He gave me my feet to walk with, and eyes to see with ; but my eyes and ears and tongue are not me ; and if I should lose them all, still I would be all of myself, and you could love me?" ''Yes," said he; "but I don't want j'ou to lose any of those things, for I love them all together." My object in these conversations was to see if he would separate in thought the finite material body from the con- scious soul or himself^ as I preferred to say, for to speak of one's self as a soul makes what is essentially subjective as objective as we desire to make the body, the use of which is to reveal to others the feelings and thoughts of the indi- vidual that otherwise the finite apprehension could not seize. I was endeavoring to prepare him to minister to his mother, when I could persuade her to let him know the fact of death, by appreciating and defining that crisis of life as a step onward into the deep consciousness of immortality, which I believed would lift her out of the abyss into which her own consciousness seemed to fall at the utterance of the word, in spite of all the intellectual views of immortality which she had for many years cultivated, but which somehow did not meet her exigency, when she felt herself on the brink of the separation of body and mind. No intellectual process can give what the faith of childhood has in its own immortality of which those who had the care of her infancy had robbed her. It was delightful to see how she enjoyed the child who had long been a burden to her. She wanted him in her presence all the time with his playthings, and to hear all our conversa- E 130 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. tion, and that I should tell her what we said iu the little time that he could not be with her. She declared that she never had known what the enjoyment of life was till she had it in her s^'mpathy with him. All the pleasures of intellect, and also of personal affections of the happiest kind, were pale beside the joy of this child — in his communion with God, who was in all his thoughts, and had taken him from his dreari- ness and growing peevishness, into that joy of childhood which Ruskin speaks of as so entirely out of proportion to the occasions of its expression, and which still had no painful excitement in it, but was simply a spontaneous outflow, not only quickening his thoughts but informing his affections with generosity and gratitude. The self that lost all sense of boundary, in its joy in the unbounded, spread out to em- brace all about it. He said one thing to me which will, I think, explain to you what I mean. Of course, I was the first person on whom the flood of his heart poured itself out, though he did not stop with me, but also expressed his love to all with whom he came into near or remote relation. When saying to me how much he loved me, what a skyful of love he had for me, I said, " Yes, darling, I know you love me as much as you can," he replied scornfully, " I love you a great deal more than I can ! " Was not that a wonderful expres- sion of the immortal essence of his love, — of Love Divine? Without its being suggested to him to thank others for kindnesses, he did so without a single exception. He would be taken to drive in the carriage with his mother, and stand- ing at the window, would shout with delight at the things he saw on the way, and when he got home would often run back to the gate to say, " Thank you, horsey ! " and all his habits of timidity were forgotten when the street musicians came by, and he was allowed to take out pennies to them. Callers at the house, from whom he used to shrink when they would have spoken to him, were in wonder at his hospitable welcome and fearless but intelligent interpositions in the A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 131 conversation, which the}' thought indicated precocity instead of backwardness. The length, breadth, and depth of all the words Christ let fall in the last part of his life, of which I had had some insight before, became doubly intelligible to me. I saw into the beaut}* and meaning of mankind's being created in successive generations, and I was thus prepared to enter into and appreciate FroebePs ideas and methods, with which I did not become acquainted till a quarter of a century later. I want you to observe that in what I did there was simply the spontaneous wisdom of love — love, not fondness, not desire of reciprocation, but self -forgetting and reverent of its object. Only this gives the creative method, or is the essence of creativeness, whether human or divine. You remember, in the memoir of Froebel with which I began this course of lectures, it was said that he posed his elder brother with his questionings of God*s wisdom in the ar- rangement of the social sphere. Unable to answer him, the instinct of his love led him to divert the child's attention into a department of nature where apparent discords were seen to be harmonized for the production of beauty and use, that the poor little perplexed and bewildered child might enjoy himself legitimately. He gave him the clue to the laby- rinth and the strength to conquer the Minotaur. He had no idea of educating, but only of comforting. Thus, uncon- scious of any theory of education, he solved the problem practically, first for the child Frosbel himself, later for man- kind to whom the man Froebel has revealed it with such ample illustrations as to make an era in human history that, as we hope, shall retrieve the past. Childhood understood, leading in the promised millennium of peace on earth and good will among men, will make mankind forget the Babel confusion of its first experimenting, and enter into the mutual understanding of the Pentecostal miracle. LECTUEE VII. A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. Part Second. In our little F.'s case, as it became perfectly plain to his mother that he conceived clearly of God's embracing un- bounded space as well as time in His Infinite Essence, she became desirous of knowing how he would receive the fact of death, so painfully and prematurely forced upon her own soul, — whether his mind would leap the gulf in which hers seemed to sink at the utterance of the word. But the difllculty for him seemed to be to conceive of death at all. I tried to approach the subject in such a man- ner that he should have the initiative, as it were, in any con- versation upon it. There was a poor old man who occasion- all}' passed the house in the clothes of a pauper, supporting his steps with a stick. One day when he did so, F. asked me, "What makes men old?" and before I had time to answer, added, '' Mary [the name of a former servant] used to say viany days, when I asked her. Do many days make men old?'* '^ Yes," said I, " just as many days make your clothes and shoes old. That old man has walked on his poor old legs so long that they are quite worn out, and he has looked so long with his eyes that they are dim, and listened so long with his ears that they have grown dull, and his back has grown weak, and his whole body is so worn out that it will not do what his thoughts tell it to do, as your little fresh legs and eyes and ears and as your whole body does." 134 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. He received this intimation quietly, but raised no question as to the ultimate result ; and as often as the old man walked by, he would ask the same question and receive the same answer. At last I took down from the book-closet Mrs. Trimmer's story of the robins and read it to him, and he became very much interested in the little nest and its inhabitants. After a while, the children in the story had birds of their own in a cage, which they took care of assiduously, but at length on one occasion went away and left them for many days uncared for, so that they died ; I read right on through the page on which it was told that on going to the cage when they came home, they found the birds lying on their backs with their beaks wide open, stark dead! I paused in my reading, and he repeated, '' stark dead ! what do those words mean ? What was the matter with the birds ?" I laid the book down, and said, " You know that some things live, and some things only keep." " Yes," said he. I continued, ''You know that living beings feel pain or pleasure, one or the other, all the time, and that things that only keep do not feel at all." "Yes," said he. " "Well, things that live and feel — living beings — always eat and drink ; they continue to live by eating and drinking, and God tells them to eat by making it pleasant for them to taste things. Now these little birds lived by eating and drinking, and if they had been free, they would have found food and drink somewhere in the world ; but those children had shut them up in a cage ; and when they were so thought- less as to go away and forget the birds that they had under- taken to take care of, the little birds grew hungr}', and you know it is not pleasant to feel even a little hungry, but they grew hungrier and hungrier till their poor little bodies were as full of pain as they could be. Now our Heavenly Father could not possibly have them suffer so much pain, and so He A rSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 135 told them to come to Him, and their life went right out of their bodies, and then their bodies were just like everything else that only keeps ; they could feel no more pain." "What a dear, dear, dear Heavenly Father it is!" said the child ; '' what nice ways He has about everything ! " " Yes," said I, "He has the ways of love." He asked no questions at this time, nor made any gener- alization. I took up the book, and read on about the chil- dren's burying the bodies of the birds, etc. Thus the death of the body was first presented to his imagination as only a relief from pain of the life that in- habited it. He was immensely interested, and the subject became the most common topic of conversation. There were some books in the house which had pictures of hunts, and one was of a stag-hunt, the stag at bay, the dogs seizing him, the huntsmen firing. These books had been carefully kept from him. I now took them down, and showed them to him, interested him in the timid stag running for its life, and its ingenious devices to elude the dogs by swimming across streams, and at last when the dogs had seized it, or the huntsman fired the cruel shot which tore the breast or side of the poor beast, the final release, God's call of the life to Himself ! At which the child would utter exclamations of delight : that final escape was the best of all. This story was so interesting, it absorbed his attention, and he did not generalize. But it took its place among the good deeds of God's love, that when life became too painful in the body it was taken away to enjoy itself with God. His mother, in whose presence were all the conversations, was intensely interested ; but still as he did not think of human death, she hardly felt that he had conceived the idea. I told him about the metamorphoses of insects, and their depositing their life in eggs as soon as they were born. When the old man came by, as he did nearly every day, we 13G A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. commented on the wearing out of his body, but he did not think of death as a relief for him. At last one day it happened that stretching out of the window for some purpose, he nearly lost his balance, and it was only by my timely seizing him that he escaped falling out. I said, " F., what if you had fallen out on those rocks and been broken all to pieces ! " He shrieked with horror, " I don't want to ! I don't want to ! " " But what if you had ! " said I, calmly. " You came very near it. What should you have done?" "What could I?" he screamed. " What could I do, all broken to pieces ! " " Why, don't you think," said I, smiling, ''that your Heavenly Father would have taken you right into His own bosom? " A heavenly smile spread over his face and a look of perfect satisfaction and acquiescence, and he said after a moment's pause, "I forgot my Heavenly Father. Oh, what a dear, dear, dear Heavenly Father He is ! " Then, after another moment, he said in a distressed voice, " But must I be broken all to pieces when I go to the Heavenly Father?" " Oh, dear, no ! " said I ; " but when we are broken all to pieces, or starved, or are very sick, He takes us ; but generally people grow to be old like the old man, and all their bodies get worn out, and they get very tired and kind of go to sleep, and the Heavenly Father takes them, so they do not wake up again in their old bodies, which are buried as the children buried the bodies of the robins." He expressed himself very happy, and asked a great many questions, and it seemed as if he had already known of the fact of death. At all events, he now accepted it as the common destiny, without any painful feeling, and it seemed to give new realization to his mother's feeling that her own was indeed nothing but a morbid feeling, and that normal nature did not shrink from death. The subsequent questions were innumerable. I read to him Krummacher's parable of the caterpillar and butterfly in the garden of Thirza, after A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 137 the death of Abel, as it was paraphrased by Mr. Alcott when he read it in his school, iu which I was assisting him at the very time that I was called away to the child's mother. And it was the study I had made of childhood iu his school which had enabled me to pursue with so much confidence the method I took with the child, though it was in my own child- hood I conceived the plan ; and I remember speaking of it to Dr. Channiug in 1824, and how much interested he was in the idea, though he told me that in his own case he was in- debted to the symbolism of nature, especially the ocean seen from the beach at Newport, for clearing his mind of the effects of the teaching and preaching which he had heard. These grand objects, and later the beauty of some mani- festations he had seen of love giving courage and power to the weak, kindled his ideal, and gave form and substance to his consciousness of God. For a time there was nothing but delight expressed in the fact of death, the relief from all suffering, the enlargement of life and joy and new knowledge of God and His ways. At last a little incident showed him the shadow which attends death in this world. We often went to call on the family of the physician who attended his mother. One day when we went, the Doctor, who was very fond of F., took him into his lap while I was playing with the baby in his mother*s arms. They always called it '"baby." I said to Mrs. D., "Has not baby any name?" The mother replied, "His name is Edward." F. looked up at the Doctor with a bright, jo3'ous expression, and said, "Where is your other Edward?" The Doctor's face changed instantaneously ; he clasped the child close to him, and said, " Oh, he has gone to his Heavenly Father," with a burst of grief. F. stretched himself back, looked into the agitated face, and said with a look of the greatest concern, " Are you sorry that he has gone to the Heavenly Father?" "Oh, very, very sorry," said the poor father. 138 A rSYCIiOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. "Should not you be sorry if he should take away your dear mother?" and putting the child down, he immediately left the room. Mrs. D. said, " The Doctor has never got over the death of that child, and we never name him in his presence." I immediately left the house, and we walked some distance in silence, and as I found F. did not incline to speak, I said, '-' F., did the Doctor look glad when you spoke to him about his other Edward ? " He pressed himself close up to me, and said eagerly, '' No, no ! he looked very sorry. What made him sorry ? Did he not like to have his other Edward with the Heavenly Father?" '' Oh, yes ! he liked that, but then he wanted to have him in his own arms. You see he cannot see him now, and he wants to kiss him." " Yes," said F., *' he hugged me ! " I continued : *' You see, the Doctor is very strong and well, and I suppose he will live in his body a good many years, and he has Mrs. D. and Julia and the rest, but he wants that other Edward, too, every day of his life." F. replied sympathiziugly, '' He was large, and white, and bright, and when I go into the sky, I shall look all over to see where he is." I said, after a little while, " Shall you say anything more to the Doctor about his other liklward ? " " No, indeed ! " said he. "I never shall say another word about him. Do you think I want to make the poor Doctor sorry?" I told his mother, when I got home, of the whole affair, and we agreed that it was well he should see the sad side of death for the survivors. It was soon a question with F. how we were to live without the body, and he asked me. I told him I did not know exactly how it was to be, but I supposed God would let new eyes, ears, and whatever limbs we should need, grow out of us, made of the finest stuff like air, which we could not see because it was so delicate, or even feel, as we did the air when it moved, but which souls could use just as they pleased. He said, " I have seen some pictures of souls that A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 139 had gone out of their bodies, and I did not know before what they were." Surprised, I asked him how they looked. He said, '' They were nothing but heads with wings." The delightful thing was to see the effect of all this earnest prattle upon the mother ; and one day, after I had returned from a visit to a friend in the town, she told me she had had a conversation with F. on her own approaching death that was very satisfactory. She said she had his bread and milk put on a little table opposite her easy-chair, and when he was happily engaged, she said, "F., I think our Heavenly Father will soon take me to Himself." He looked up with an expression of great feeling, and said tenderly: "Do you? Then you will get rid of that poor, sick body, and your cough ; " and he added presentl}', "Perhaps he will give you icings!" She said nothing could be likened to the impression of peace and sweetness which these simple words made upon her. Soon after, he said, "But what will be done with your poor old body?" (She said he spoke as if it was of not much impor- tance.) She replied, " Your father and Aunt Lizzy will take it to Cambridge in a carriage, and put it into the ground ; and the grass will gi'ow over the place, and sometimes you can come to the place ; and I guess I shall look out of heaven and see you." But in a few minutes he began to cry, and said, " I want to go with j-ou into the sky." She said, " Oh, you have a nice little body, which gives you a great deal of pleasure, and you must stay here with poor, dear father! What would he do when he has no wife any longer, without his little boy to make him happy, and take care of him when he grows old? " After a little more of such remonstrance he said, " Well, I will stay with him ! " It was curious that in talking with me he never referred to this subject of his mother's approaching death, which evidently had touched him tenderly, and I did not introduce the subject. It was also a curious circumstance, that after this matter 140 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. of death was, as it were, settled satisfactorily, and the mind of his mother freed from all trouble on the point, the love of this life^ to which she had hitherto been more than indifferent, sprang up in her with great energy, and she proposed to break up the house, and go to Florida for cure ! Her husband and I could not share the hope, but we could not but sym- pathize in the new joy in life, that she seemed to have re- ceived from her now happy child, with whom she had learnt to live in the spirit. Things were so arranged that she made her husband's father's house, about thirty miles distant, the first goal of her journey. She reached with great fatigue this first stage, and stopped to rest, and never mentioned Florida afterwards. She breathed on another year, during which time I only saw her in weekly visits, having returned to Mr. Alcott's school in Boston. Her disease was not very painful, but so lingering that every trace of her former beauty was lost in the ghastly emaciation. There were in the house two little cousins, younger than F., taken care of exclusively by a very sweet mother, and this gave him the most desirable social intercourse and play that took the place of our discourses at the right moment, and called into action very sweet traits of character. JMy weekly visit of a day or two was a great affair to the chil- dren. I told them stories, innumerable variations of Tlie Stonj without an End, and of Pilgrims Progress, modified to their infant minds. I always repeated the stories in pre- cisely the same words (which is a great point in telling sto- ries to children, and impresses them on the memory), and they became very familiar with the ends of my paragraphs, and would take them from my lips, and repeat them as a chorus. Thus when I had got Pilgrim laid away in the upper chamber of the House Beautiful, whose white draperies I minutely described, they would all interrupt me, and sing out, "And the name of that chamber was Peace." So of the last words of other paragraphs that I purposely made epigrammatic. A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 141 The substantial character of the child's piety and sense of immortality, which I have described as bubbling up at the name Heavenly Father, spoken at the right time, and in the right way, was exhibited unmistakably in his after life, and began to express itself at once in his association with his little cousins, which proved a very timely thing for him, bringing out his moral character by means of what he con- stantly did to make them happy, and keep them good, but he never said anything to them about the Heavenly Father. That subject seemed reserved for me. It was amusing to see how fatherly he was to the little one, and he continued this fatherly manner all his after life to all the children with whom he came in contact, and even during his childhood it was singularly unmixed with any tyr- anny or managing spirit. He would play as they wanted to with them. He seemed to be di'awn to children because he could so easily understand their innocence, and make them happy by his companionship, and because he enjoyed them. All his subsequent life he exhibited an exquisite sensibil- ity to beauty, which he continued to accept as the Creator's smile of consent; the very good pronounced on everything which He had made. In the last part of his mother's life, she became so frightfully emaciated, that it was evidently painful for him to look at her ; but he said nothing about it ; and it was sweet to see the delicacy with which he tried to conceal this pain from her^ when he was admitted into the room to see her, which, at length, came to be only in the middle of the day, when she was seated in an easy-chair, with a broad white footstool at her feet. He would come into the room, looking on the floor, and seat himself on the footstool, Tvith his back partly turned to her, and, drawing down her hands, cover them with kisses : he refused, as it were, to recognize her, under that ghastly mask, which, however, did not shut off from his remembrance, her former loveliness ; for, as soon as she was really dead, and he be- 142 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. gan to think of her in heaven^ she became his standard of beauty. During the little more than a year that he contin- ued under my care, " not so beautiful as my mother," or " as beautiful as my mother " were words very frequently in his mouth. As she approached her death, she was so careful lest he should have any of the shock which her own mother's death gave to her, that she readily consented that he should go for the last few days with the other children to stay with a kind neighbor. He was therefore not present at her death ; neither was I. It was an event gi*eatly longed for by her- self, at last, and its approach, which she knew before any one else discerned any special change, seemed to gladden her. Her last breath was peaceful; her last words, "Give my love to F." I told him of the event the morning after the funeral, from which I returned with his father, in the dusk of the evening, calling for the child to go home and sleep with me, which he always was delighted to do. He was put to bed in the room where his mother had died, and 1 went in with him, to explain her absence, if he should notice it. But he was tired, and so occupied with my presence, he did not^ — not even when he woke in the morning. At last, I said to him, "Do you see what room we are in?" He rose up and looked around, and said, " Why, it is m}' mother's chamber I Where is my mother?" I paused a moment to see if he would divine the truth, and then said, "The dear Heavenly Father has taken her at last ! " He fell back on the pillow, with a single exclamation of not painful wonder, and a coun- tenance sublime with the mingled expression of awe, love, and joyful satisfaction. The fact of her absent body seemed to be a more palpable proof of the truth of her deathless soul, than even her form and word, which had rep- resented it to his senses. He was "silent, as we grow when feeling most," as if he realized that he was in the presence of the *' substance of things hoped for, the evidence of A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 143 things unseen." You may be sure I respected this sacred silence, which seemed to me to last several minutes, but pos- sibly it was only owe. At last he said gently, ''Was the window open?" I replied, ''I don't know; I only know our Heavenly Father, who is everywhere, you know, took her to himself. He does not mind about windows, you know." '' Xo, indeed! I know that very well," he said, with a little laugh (as if he wondered at his momentary lapse of thought) . Soon he asked, '' Did He give her a new body right away?" ''I do not know anything more about that than you do," I replied ; " I only know He will do better things for her than we can think of." " Do you think," said he, " that she looks beautiful as she used to? " but, before I could reply, he sud- denly added, ''I want U) go to my mother. I want to see her noiv^'* and began to cry. I kissed him, and began gently to recall the conversation that she had had with him the day she told him she expected soon to leave him ; and, after awhile, he said spontaneously, as he had done when he talked with her he ''would stay with his father to comfort him for the loss of her." His father told me afterwards, that when he saw /am, he went over the same ground again, beginning with saying that he wanted to go to her ; but when his father represented to him how solitary he should be with no wife or son to show their love to him, F. closed the conversation with the words, *' Well, I will stay with you till I grow up " (as if it was quite within his option to do so or not) . Very soon after this I took him away with me to Salem, where he remained in our family for a year or more, I think. My father's family were living at the corner of an old burial ground, two sides of the house being bordered by it. The day we arrived we went directly to my sister Sophia's room, which looked out upon this burial ground. He was imme- diately attracted to the window by the trees, and exclaimed joyfully, "Oh, Aunt Lizzy, what a beautiful green garden 144 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. this is ! What are those things ? " (referring to the tomb stones.) I replied : '^ That green garden is where people lay away, underground, the poor old worn-out dead bodies of their friends, who are with our Father in Heaven, and those things are called tombstones ; they are put there with the ' names carved on them of the persons whose bodies are buried in those spots." He at once seemed greatly interested and pleased, and became still more so after he had seen some burials ; his emotions of joy at the thought of the enfranchised spirits entering on their heavenly life, being tempered with tender sympathy for the bereaved friends in their mourning- robes, whom he sometimes saw weeping at the earthl}' part- ing. He was always very anxious to know how the buried ones had died, from what particular sickness or danger they had escaped ; and one day when my sister Mary came back from a walk, he joyfully told her that he had found out an- other way in which souls went to heaven. She, of course, asked him, ''What way?" and he said, "Why, sometimes ships that go to sea are driven by -the wind against some rocks and broken to pieces, and all the men's bodies are drowned, and they go to heaven through the water." An- other time, he ran to her in great excitement, and said : "Oh, Aunt Mary ! I saw a little baby's body buried in the green garden ; some carriages came, and there was a hole dug already, and people got out of the carriages, and one man had a little box in his arms in which the baby's body was ; and they put some ropes around it, and let it down ; and then they filled up the hole with the dirt, and I saw the little baby fly up, fly up, fly up ! " and he accompanied the words with a circular gesture of his arm. Whether the subjective conception was so vivid, that it reproduced itself to his imagination in an objective form, as the Sistine Madonna is said to have done to Raphael ; or it was what is called " a spiritual mani- festation " ; it was evidently a reality to him, and no com- ment was made, except that my sister said, " I never saio a sold fly tip,^^ A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 145 I should say here that this child was not imaginative, and we never saw in him the smallest untruthfulness in speech or act, nor tendency to exaggeration. In this he resembled both his parents. Afterwards, he became something of a scientist, and studied medicine for his profession. He was a good classical scholar in college, and before his early death, had completed in manuscript the history of one of the mechanical arts. I think he was not of a visionary tem- perament. (See Appendix E.) His life with us in Salem was perfectly delightful. He had no faults, though a certain pertinacity (which was an expression of inherited firmness of character) sometimes required a little disciplinary conversation, nothing more. I never knew of his being subjected to any punishment, or requiring any, in all his childhood. He had not the usual impetuosity of children ; perhaps the effect of his early de- pression of spirits. My sister Mary had a day-school in the house, made up of children between six and twelve years of age ; he was allowed to have his playthings in the school-room, and loved to listen to her oral instruction of the children in natural history and science, especially in the stories that she told or read to them about human beings, in whom he was always more interested than in auimals. I taught him how to read by the word method in Tlie Story ivithout an End^ a slower and more laborious way both for him and me than the mixed method detailed in my Kindergarten Guide ^ of which I have lately published a primer under the title of After Kindergar- ten^ tchat? But had I then known of Froebers method of employing childish play, organized by the adult with single aim to intel- lectual development, I should not have taught him to read so early, but something more profitable ; I then shared what Professor Agassiz called '' tJie American insanity of teaching children to read before they have learned the things signified 146 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. by words," which he, like Froebel, believed would produce habits of iniiid positively iujurious, dropping a veil between the observer and nature, preventing all freshness of thought, and destroying the mind's elasticity and originality. But 1 had not (at that time) presumed to question the time-honored tradition, that the beginning of education was learning to read. When, later, my studies with a great philologist gave me a little light upon the subject, and showed me that English had the misfortune to be written by an inadequate alphabet, whose result was to confuse the phonography entirely, by obscuring the original principle of having but one letter for one sound, and a letter for every different sound, I realized the positive disadvantage of children's being forced through a process which baffles all their natural instincts of classifica- tion ; and it was then I invented a method of separating English words into classes, the phonographic ones to be first made familiar, and the exceptions classified. Yet I could not be insensible to the unnaturalness of beginning with spending so much of the time of very young children upon this work of the imperfect mind ofman^ as languages are, rather than on the works of Infinite AVisdom. I was therefore well pre- pared to accept Froebel's method of first sharpening the senses by examination of things that charm children, and of developing the understanding by first making things according to the laws which constitute the mind, and then naming them in all perceptible relations. First let us form a mind which can apprehend nature as the standard of truth, before we undertake to mform it with what embodies the confusions and errors of men ; as, for instance, in a considerable degree the written English language does. For language stands in the same relation to man as nature does in relation to God. The eternal word of Truth makes things before it is made flesh. The confusion of tongues was the inevitable conse- quence of the fall of man out of that communion with God in which children are born, and our written language is an image A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 147 cf this confusion, especially the English, whose so-called orthography is the most anomalous of all languages ; and the acquisition, therefore, ought to be postponed, at least until the understanding is fairly developed by some recognition of so much of the AVord of God as is alive in the things we see and can handle. The time comes when the children can understand that exceptions prove the rule, and then those irregularities and anomalies of English writing may be made even entertaining lessons to children ; because if its laws and rules are apprehended first, there is something amusing to them in contradictions of law that so many words seem to be. It is the pleasure in the grotesque ; children enjoy the funny ^ as they call it, but it is a different enjoyment from that of the beautiful, and the latter is the highest element for human activity. A predominance of the funny even demoralizes intellectuall}' as well as morally, but it has its own subordi- nate place in healthy child life. My little friend had a slate and pencil, and immediately inclined to draw from real objects, but we did not know how to give him any other help than to guess at what were the things he was trying to represent. If we could not guess, I remember he would blush, and go away, saying he would ^' fix it a little.'' I had the instinct that he could only be effectually encouraged by success, and I would endeavor to divine what he meant, by looking to see what were the sur- rounding objects when I saw him drawing, and would point out to him with congratulation any part in which he had at all succeeded, letting the rest go. But without adequate and legitimate guidance he necessarily became discouraged with his failures. What children do not succeed in, becomes dis- tasteful to them, and they turn their attention from what has disappointed them, and thus their natural tastes die, or are starved out. As they have no knowledge of materials, nor judgment in using them, they undertake tJie impossible, and being baffled, lose courage to undertake the possible. So 148 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. young artists accumulate difficulties by their unwise choice of subjects, not realizing the limitations of their own powers. It is the part of the educated kindergartuer to supply this want of judgment and analysis until the pupil catches the secret of gradualism and the law of opposites. Froebel's plan of giving the squared slate and paper to ensure straight- ness of line in children's drawing is like the leading strings by which the mother helps the child to develop his limbs for walking, which cannot be done without his own personal effort. So Froebers plan of having the kindergartuer sug- gest a symmetrical drawing of lines in opposites, vivifles the sense of symmetry into a thought, whence springs a plan of making still another symmetry. For by suggesting opposites, and then the connecting of them, the child delightedly sees orderly forms that grow under his hands, and feels that he is acting from his own individual personality (which he is^ though the thought was suggested by the words of another) . What he does gives him confidence in his own mind, whose fanciful movement suggests other symmetries ; for though fancy is a spontaneous play of the free will among impres- sions passivelj^ received, it is amenable to the laws whose exponents are presented to it by nature's works and human suggestion. F. liked to watch my sister Sophia at her drawing and painting, but its very perfection discouraged eflbrts on his own part. It is bad not to do really at once what we con- ceive of ideally. It was only in the moral and religious sphere that we really lived with him, and he was properly educated by us. We always answered all his questions about what we were doing, and how, and why (I wish now I had asked him more questions) . My sister Sophia had a rare talent for talking with chil- dren, whose purity and innocence she comprehended by a sympathetic intuition, and to whose imagination her Chris- tian faith gave ample scope, for it was hampered by no A rSYCIIOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 149 human creeds. We hael a circle of acquaintances who were only too much inclined to pet him, and who, knowing something of the history of his mind, liked to talk with him. His mother had been very much beloved by tliis circle, and I used to tell him that for her sake, they cared for and at- tended to liim^ which interested him immensely, and perhaps prevented his considering himself as a person of too much importance comparatively. lie would talk of going to sec his *' mother's friends." If new persons spoke to him kindly, he would ask me immediatcl}' if they knew and loved his mother ; at all events, the element of personal egotism did not appear, and the affection he at first poured out on me, now freely flowed out in every direction. I remember his saying to me, one day, with an accent of great self- gratulation, " I think I have a great man}' friends," and in a moment after added, " m}' mother was so beautiful ! " (as if that were the reason of it) . A young husband and wife became inmates of our house, and brought a beautiful in- fant. This was a perennial fountain of delight to F. The singular beauty of the little one was a constant subject of observation. One day he was looking at her, as she lay on her mother's lap, and presently he burst out, " Oh, Ellen, 3"our little bright eyes are shining themselves into a sif?i/'' He was equally delighted with the musical sound of her crowing. His ear for sounds was fastidiously delicate. One day my mother was in the garden, looking at some wild flowers which had been brought to her for transplanting. As she looked at them she said to F., " Run into the house, and get my — '* He interrupted her eagerly with, "Don't say that w^y word! I know what you mean," and he ran into the house, and brought back Bigelow's Plants around Boston (Bigeloiv was the ugly word). But let me hasten from these details, to redeem my promise of telling you how prayer became a thought of his mind, and his spontaneous practice. loO A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. It v^as very early a question of great interest to bis mother, and also to me, whether prayer would become spon- taneous with him ; that is, whether he would think of speak- ing to God in human words. His intense realization of God's presence seemed to be a cause of his not doing so, and I feared to put God at a distance by suggesting what, in or- dinary cases, is a means of bringing Him near. If prayer be defined as a communion of the finite and Infinite, as per- sonal as that of children with earthly parents, his whole con- scious life was a prayer ; for truly God was in all his thoughts from the day he first accepted Him so joyfully as the Substance and Giver of goodness and love, which in- volved to the natural logic of his innocent mind the corol- lary that He was the Giver of everything outward, as well as inward, which gave him any happiness. I did not dare to meddle with the natural evolution of thought in so happy an instance, but watched to learn the true method of life of the little child, as Christ suggested to his disciples to do. One day when his grandmother, who was at the house on a visit, dropped her needle, she called to F., " Come, and look with your little sharp eyes for my needle." He did so, with his usual alacrit}' in service, and soon found it. Then he ran to me, and said, " When I go into the sky, I shall thank my good Friend for giving me such sharp eyes." I said, '' What do you wait so long for? " He gave me a glance of recognition, as it were, and laughed (as if he had been con- victed of saying something silly) ; but he said no more then. From that moment, however, he often came to me to say, "When I go into the sky, I shall thank my Heavenly Father for giving me " this or that ; and I would always answer him as before, "Why do you wait?** which would always bring out the same complete expression of satisfac- tion on his face, showing that he loved to renew the occasion for my uniform reply, "Why do you wait till then?" A FSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 151 On one of these occasions be turned from me, and said very tenderly, " I thank you, God,'' One day, after he went to Salem, he had been suffering from a bad earache, and my sister had relieved it by putting a little tuft of cotton dipped in arnica into his ear. Then she asked him to go to the window and look out into '' the green garden," and she took up a pencil to draw. Very soon he began, "God, I thank you for making this green garden to put away the dead bodies in. God, I thank you for making these beautiful trees grow out of the ground. God, I thank you for making all the pretty wild flowers grow." He paused between each com- plete sentence, and my sister, having a pencil in her hand, wrote down his words till she had covered a sheet of letter paper with his thanksgivings ; for he went on naming every- thing he could think of ; and it was quite wonderful to hear the minuteness of his gi^ateful appreciation of life. Oue sentence was : " I thank you, God, for making medi- cine to put into my ear when it aches." He also thanked God for his father, and his father^s letters to him, for his mother in heaven, for many friends whom he loved, naming them. I hope that sometime I shall find my sister's paper, which I have mislaid with the other memoranda of this inter- esting psychological observation. The pauses between the thanksgivings became longer and longer, and at last, after one for which he seemed to have searched his inmost mind, in despair of finding anything else, he closed with, "My dear God, I love you very much." You will observe that in all this spontaneous act of devo- tion, there was no petition. In the fulness of his happy life, and, as I think, in the faith that God was giving him every- thing needful, and more, he never thought of asking for anything. Temptation to wrong-doing had not yet revealed the need that the progressing spirit always feels of more goodness and love, which I had taken care to represent that God gave 152 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. whenever the soul acknowledged to itself its need and aspired for more of this, its vital substance. For it is my opinion that prayer should always be for spiritual good only, in order that our religion should be pure from self-seeking, and generously self -forgetting in its aspirations for perfection. A little while after this incident, my sister was reading to him, and came to a sentence in which were the words " morn- ing and evening prayer." He immediately stopped her and asked her, '' What does that mean, that word ^ra?/er ? " She said, ''Many grown up people, when they wake in the morning, and find that God has taken care of them in the night when they coukl not take care of themselves, and given them a new day after their good sleep, feel very thankful, and love to tell God so, just as you did the other day when you thanked God for so many things ; and besides, remembering that there are a good many things they ought to do, and that He gives the love and goodness, they like to ask Him beforehand to give them what they shall need to be good icith when the time comes to want it ; and at night, after they have got througli the day, they like to thank Him for all the joys of the day, and they ask Him to take care of them through the night that is coming, when they shall be asleep and cannot take care of themselves ; and this loving talk with God is called the morn- ing and evening prayer." 1 think she added that when she was little she used to say, when she was going to bed : — " Now I lay me down to sleep ; I pray the Lord my soul to keep; If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take ; " and that was her evening prayer. " I think it is a very good wa}'," said he, " and I mean to do so this very night when I go to bed." And it was true that when he went to bed, he remembered and made a similar thanksgiving to his former one in kind, and closed with this little verse. And again in A rSYCIIOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 153 the morning be began the first thing to thank God for the new day, etc. Nor did he forget afterwards, night and morning, to give thanks and utter prayers spontaneously, and seemed to enjoy it. One morning be waked me with his loud singing, and as soon as I opened my eyes, said to me, '' Aunt Lizzy, I am singing my morning prayer." I said, " There was a wonder- ful little shepherd boy once, whoso name was David, who loved God as you do, and who always sang his prayers." Immediately he wanted to know all about him, and I told him the story of David in his childhood and up to the time he was sent for to sing to King Saul ; and 1 ended with say- ing that I would read to hira some of David's psalms (as these sung prayers were called) ; and this I did, and the eloquence of the sweet singer of Israel seemed to vivify his idea of the Heavenlj' Father, and of His connection with the soul within us all and the world without. Especially I tried on him the efifect of the Psalm beginning, " The heavens are telling of the glory of God," whose rhythm had charmed my own childhood, even before I fully comprehended it ; and he liked to hear it, too. Before this, I had read considerably from the Bible to him, for he had one day said that he won- dered how the world began to be in the first place, and I had said : " Yes, everybody wonders about that. But there is a book (pointing to the Bible) where one of the first men told about how it seemed to him, and I will read it to 3'ou.'' So I opened the book and began the first chapter of Genesis, without introductory comment. "When I came to the words '' And there was light " he sprang up and shouted, " Directly when He said ' Let there be light,' there was light directly !" I wished Longinus could have heard the confirmation of his great criticism. Immediately he ran into my father's study, which was across the entry, and burst out, '' Dr. Peabody, when it was all dark and there was nothing made, God said, ^ Let there he light, and there was light' directly! 154 A rSYCHOLOGICAL OBSEKVATIOX. directly ! " This was not enough ; he ran to find my mother and sister, and again repeated the simpl}' sublime words. Then he came back to me to hear the rest, and I finished the chapter which he wanted me to read to him again and again, day after day. I read afterwards the parable of Jotham, which he liked to hear very much. I cannot help thinking how much more I might have made of that very par- able for his moral culture had I then known of Froebel's gospel of work. I can hardly bear to think how stupid I was ; the effect of not having had the kindergarten education myself. But he was too soon taken away from my observation, not without my acquiescence, however ; for it was to go to his father, who, I thought, needed his companionship. And as it was at a distance that he lived, and, as afterwards my own life was full of vicissitude for many 3'ears, I lost the run of him entirel}'. There was a mutual misunderstanding between his father and me, for several years, from his think- ing I wanted to be free from the care of him, and I thinking he did not desire my personal influence on him, and we were both mistaken, as we found out afterwards. When he went to Harvard College, he came to see me, and the interview was very interesting. He had a sweet, though it had become a dim, remembrance of a happy time with us, succeeded, as he told me, by a lack-love experience of years of a dark, gloomy time at a boarding-school, to which he was sent when he was eight years old, because, as he said, his grandmother thought he ought not to be living with his solitary father at a hotel. But the boarding-school proved more than a heart solitude, as the boys were rough and cruel to him in their unguided play. While he was with me, on the occa- sion of this call, it happened that my sister Sophia'.s children came into the room where we were. They had a very vivid idea of him from their mother, she having often spoken of him to them, and telling them of his joy in learning he had a Heavenly Father, when he had never thought or been told A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. 155 of it. When I said to them, ''This is F.," one of them said, '* Is this F. ? I thought he was a little boy/' looking at him wonderingly, surprised to see a growu-up man. I told him they were well acquainted with his childhood. It touched him very mnch, and the conversation that ensued touching on several things I have told, brought back the old time more distinctively, and he said he should often come to recall it by my help, and to learn more of his mother, whose beautiful face haunted his dreams. But just afterwards I left Boston for some years, and did not see him again until after his return from Vienna, where he went after leaving college, and remained till he had completed his medical studies. I promised then to show him his mother's letters to me, written in her girlhood, and to tell him how much the early experience of his own childliood had minis- tered to her a heavenly consolation. But again inexorable circumstances interfered. He became a practising physician in Worcester, and I went to Concord to live, and we pro- crastinated a promised visit until at last Death mocked our slow affections. I saw him last wrapped in the flag of his country, for when the war broke out in 18G1, nothing would do but he must go to it ; and he went as one of the surgeons of the loth Regiment, which was terribly cut up. For a year and a half he did an incredible amount of work, for he would always have his hospital on the field of battle, and the 15th was in a great many battles, and left but few survivors, most of whom are maimed or halt. He took care of those wounded ones who could not be taken from the battle-field, wrote letters for them, and never took a furlough, as every other oflScer and surgeon did. In the last letter that he wrote to his father, he said that this year and a half was in one sense the happiest time of his life ; for it was the only time when he seemed to be of any use. He was killed at last, walking up through the main street of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in the van of the regiment, as was his wont, and Ie56 A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION. his death was instantaneous. His patriotism and his brav- ery were the fruits of his piety. Every year his father and I met to decorate his grave until his father's death in 1883-4. He is buried at Mt. Auburn bj^ his mother's side, whose body was removed from the tomb in the old burial ground of Cambridge. I have a photograph of him taken at the same age as his mother when she died, — thirty-one years. It was the year before he went to the war, a drooping head, pensive as if marked for early death. But when I saw him dead, his brow was lifted, his whole countenance had become grand and heroic, and it was plain that he had found his ideal vocation. His funeral was celebrated in the city of Worcester with military honors, the wounded soldiers of his regiment following the hearse in carriages, and the sidewalks of the city thronged with the multitude of spectators. A discourse upon the text, "No man can do more than lay down his life for his friends," was pronounced over him at the church, and the beautiful hymn sung, " Nearer my God to Thee," which seemed to me the most appropriate conceiv- able, though he had never been far from Him, after he knew a name for Him. After the funeral his father's relatives and friends gath- ered together, and we talked of him. I told my recollec- tions of his childhood, and all of them expressed the feeling that the life he had led was in perfect harmony with such an early acquaintance made with the Heavenly Father. LECTURE VIIL ^ELIGIOUS^U^TURE. Fkcebel speaks of the child as a triuity, meaning a unity in threefold relation (with God, with man, and with nature), and says that education, to be perfect, or even healthy, must help him to be conscious of all these relations at once^ in order to ensure the equipoise of heart and intellect with his spuitual power (or freedom to will) , in which inheres his just self-respect and natural religion. Nature (that is, the material universe, as I have said before) is God's expression of mathematical and all corre- lative laws, the apprehension of which builds up the intellect of the individual who, through his sense perceptions, on which he reflects and generalizes, gains knoivledge of his surroundings, beginning with that part of nature which is within his own skin. It was the grand intuition of Oken which has been splendidly illustrated by Dr. J. Garth Wilkinson in his Human Body in its Connections with 3/an, that the human body is the metropolis of material nature, in which may be found in vital order all the elements of the material universe ^Yhich are, outside of the human body, in a more or less chaotic state. This development of the individual intellect needs more or less aid from the human environment, simul- taneously with that nurture of the heart which means man's conscious relation to man. But though morality, which is the performance of man's duty to man, is not religion, which is man's consciousness of relation to God, it leads to it in- versely, because it shows the heart its need of a Father of us 158 RELIGIOUS NURTURE. all, in order to be happy. All three processes, the intellectual, the moral, and the religious, must go on together, to make a perfect education, for in proportion as integral education is wanting in those about the child, his intellect will be starved, confused, or darkened with error ; and immorality and irreligion will more or less transpire in the individual. Froebel perfectly realized the deficiency of this integral education to be the cause of all the evil that is the present experience of mankind, in spite of Church and State and the optimism which in form of hope " springs eternal in the human breast " (for the pessimist is the exception, not the rule among men, the great mass of whom are pursuing some ideal aim, even though it be a low one, their moral sentiment having been perverted and their religion having become a superstitious idolatry either of material forms or of logical formulas) . The system of education which Froebel discovered, or invented, in consequence of realizing this, is what we are endeavoring to learn and apply, that we may bring out of the moral chaos around us the lost equipoise of the threefold nature in our children, by ourselves plunging into infant life in imagination and realizing its innocent heart and un- f alien spiritual state, watching it in its own attempts to understand and use its material surroundings and its human environment, to the end of guiding it by our own experience and matured knowledge, from the errors and misfortunes it inevitably falls into if left to its own ignorant experimenting unrevised. The playthings and means of occupation Froebel invented are to develop the intellect, and are a perfect miniature of nature, and to use them in playing with the child is an art and a science that the kindergartner must add to her moral affections and religion, which are also her indispensable qualifications. I wish to say this very emphatically, all the more because RELIGIOUS NURTURE. 159 this part of your education (the art and science that develop the intellect) is not my part of your training course, but the moral and religious nurture ; and therefore I must leave the exhaustive analysis of the gifts in their relation to the un- folding intellect as well as of the " schools of work" (as the series of embroideries, foldings, drawings, weavings, pea- work, etc., are called, and which require your study the whole yeai') to your accomplished trainers to do justice to. But before I turn to my specific department, I would say that this intellectual part of the training, which it was the special genius of Froebel to discover, is of equal importance ; for it is the duty of man to worship God with the mind, as well as with the heart and might, though that is a part of the izreat commandment, which seems to have been systemati- cally overlooked by many of the churches, if not virtually denied. To worship God tdth the mind means to develop the intel- lect ; as to worship Him with the heart keeps pure the moral sentiments and quickens moral action ; and to worship Him with the might lifts the will, quickened by the heart and en- lightened by the mind into oneness with the Holy Spirit, more and more forever. And here let me recall to you what I said of Froebers authority in my second lecture, and be- ware of deviating from the path he has pointed out (he was nearly fifty years in inventing his technique) ; and be very careful about adding to his Gifts or Schools of Work, though I would not have you mechanical followers. There will be legitimate outgrowths of his method. He himself, in one of his Pedagogies, published after his death by "Wichard Lange, has suggested a '' school of drawing " upon the curve, which Miss Marwedel has developed, leading the child natu- rally through vegetable formation ; and Mr. Edward A. Spring, the sculptor, has also suggested and partly carried some children through animal forms, from the worm to the " human face divine" ; and we hope both these " schools" 160 RELIGIOUS NURTURE. may be published and used. In the musical line, also, in which Froebel was personally rather deficient, Mr. Daniel Bachellor, now of Philadelphia, has suggested a series of exercises b}^ means of the correspondence of tones and colors, that makes the children as creative in the discovery of melodies, as they are of the harmonies of color in their weaving and painting. There is unquestionably danger that the kindergartner may degenerate into mechanical imitation and rote-work in this part of her guidance of the children, nevertheless in some of the charity kindergartens I have seen there was danger of doing injustice to the technique ; On this last day of communion with you on the Froebel education, I would like to speak with some comprehensive- ness and particularity on the subject of religious nurture. Mark me, I say religious nurture, not religious teaching. The religion that integrates human education is not to be taught. It is the primeval consciousness of filial relation to God, who alone can reveal Himself ; for human language has no adequate expression of God, founded as it is on the mate- rial universe, which is the finite opposite of Creative Being. Every individual child is a momentum of God's creativeness which the human Providence of education must take as its datum. Only childhood symbolizes God as "the sum of all being," realizing itself in joy incommensurable. Iluskin has happily said the joy of childhood is out of all proportion to the occasions that call forth its expression, and in order to make God the central conscious truth of the child's intellect, we must give the name father or mother to God, which is intelligible to the heart, and which will identify its filial aspi- ration with the parental bounty, as another, yet the same. But what I want you to observe is, that language being RELIGIOUS NURTURE. 161 limited in meauiug by its origin iu material nature, you should talk about God as little as possible, after having given Him the name that will excite the child's worshipful aspiration, and limit yourselves carefull}' to regulating moral manifestations, loading children to act kindly, generously, truthfully', in your own assured faith that God is present to inspire the truth, generosity, and loving icill that is practi- cally prayed for with good resolution. (Good resolutions are the special prayers of faith, as children should be taught ex- pressly.) Kindergartners cannot carry out this course quite irre- spective of the theory of human nature declared in their creeds. But the heart is generally larger than the creed, as was once strikingly evidenced to me by Louisa Frankenberg, a dear, devout old German kindergartner, who had learned the art of kindergartning from Fra»bel himself, in the very beginning of his own experimenting ; but she was such a bigot to the Lutheran Church that she could not theoretically admit as a Christian any one who did not swear by its dogma of total depravity. Yet I remember hearing her exclaim, '^ Oh, Froebel's method is so beautiful ! because the affectionate plays and innocent occupations take the children entirely away from the depi*avity of their hearts." She said this with a gush of love and faith that showed how much the unbounded human heart is beyond being totally eclipsed bj' shadows cast by the limited human intellect. It is neither feeling or think- ing, but righteous doing, that gives us victory.^ The child in the first era of his life has no individual con- sciousness of separation from God, and for a certain time it is obvious to all observers that this august unconsciousness even prevents the immediate development of an intellectual conception of him. The child in its infancy (infant, you re- member, means not speaking) does not see nature as object, ^See George Macdonald's Vicar's Daughter, 162 RELIGIOUS NURTURE. but feels it also to be himself, and hence he has no language, for language is the expression of his intellect. Hence the infant's sublime unconsciousness of danger and absolute fear- lessness, and its impulse to spring upward out of its mother's arms, the laws of gravity notwithstanding ! It stands, as Wordsworth has sung, — " Glorious in the might of heaven-bom freedom on its being's height," and only gradually do " Shades of the prison-house begin to close aroimd the growing boy." For, as the same poet has it in that ode which is as much inspired as anything in the sacred oracles of the Hebrew or the Christian ; — " Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own; Yearnings she hath in lier own natural kind, And even with something of a mother's mind, And no unworthy aim, The homely nurse doth all slie can To make her foster-child, her innate man, Forget the glories he hath known And that Imperial Palace whence he came. Mf * * * * Hence, in a season of calm weather. Though inland far we be. Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither ; Can in a moment travel thither," And see the children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." The " not unworthy aim" of the " humble nurse" is to give the child the sense of " having life in himself " as an individ- ual free agent, so that he may come into intellectual con- sciousness of the laws of God by going counter to them, which reveals to him that he is separating from God in his activity. This separation is sin^ which is a short word for RELIGIOUS NURTURE. 163 separation, and the first step iu the development of individu- ality, and therefore pardonable, because it is finite. Now the true religious nurture is to keep the child in the mood of inetlable joy in which he was created, while he is evolving his sense of individuality and free agency by experi- menting freely, but more or less painfully, so that he shall not lose sight of the central Sun, to which everything he is slowly learning through his senses and his reflection is related ; and this must be begun by giving a name to the central Sun that shall express the character of his inmost consciousness of joy and love, which is his vision of God, and needs to be recognized as God in the understanding. In the Old Testament we see that it is the name of the Lord which is set forth as the only means of escaping that idolatr}^ which is destructive of progressive spiritual religion. The name of the Lord, or Ruler, with the Hebrews was Jehovah, a word made up of the three tenses of the sub- stantive verb to 6