ficially perfect environment. You will take your tender plant out of the common ground and away from the common air and keep it safe by setting it in a sunny window of your own room. The struggle for life may mean something for other plants, but you will improve on the divine method in rearing your choice rose. Two false assumptions are latent in your procedure: first, the assumption that character may be formed without effort; and second, the assumption that evil is only outside your child, and not at all in him.

Both flower-pot and sugar-plum education are attacks upon freedom. The former holds that the child may be molded by environment, the latter that his blind impulses may be played upon by the educator. Froebel holds that he is a free being, and therefore must be a self-making being. Hence, while sugar-plum education appeals to the activity of the educator, and flower-pot education to the activity of environment, Froebel appeals first, last, and always to the self-activity of the child.

Contemporary students of childhood claim such a monopoly of the insight into motor activity as the point of departure for a wise nurture of infancy that it sometimes seems as if they really believed

that before the rise of the new psychology no one had ever noticed how babies love to kick. The kindergartner, however, may proudly point to the Play with the Limbs in proof of the fact that Froebel at least anticipated the wisdom of our laterday prophets, and if she is courageous she may even insist that in his description of the ascending stages, through which motor activity is transfigured into creative self-revelation, the founder of the kindergarten and author of the Mother-Play has far surpassed any recent child student. Froebel's great insight is that the human being is a self-expressing being. As a baby he expresses his abounding fullness of life in incessant movement. Through movement his inner force strengthens and unfolds, and he becomes an imitative being. Making himself into dog, cat, flower, bird, father, mother, brother, sister, tradesman, soldier, preacher, he makes over these objects and persons into himself. From imitation he rises to transforming and productive activity, and strives to stamp himself upon the little world which through imitation he had stamped upon himself. Finally, he establishes within his soul the two contrasting yet complementary activities of self-revelation and investigation, and while

on the one hand he expresses his own ideals in plastic, pictorial, verbal, or musical form, he strives, on the other, to discover by ceaseless search the meaning of the world in which he finds himself. The duty of education is to utilize the ascending modes of self-activity so as to help them realize their own unconscious aim. The Mother-Play songs and the kindergarten gifts are Froebel's carefully chosen means to this end. The Play with the Limbs and the Falling Song are the terminus ab quo of the whole process of development because they seize upon the primordial manifestations of generic selfhood. Abounding vitality expressed in movement is the primal revelation of the God in the soul; faith is the primal outreaching of the God in the soul toward the God in the world.

One more question must be touched upon before we say good-bye to the Play with the Limbs. Why does the instinctive mother love to talk and sing to her child long before he is able to understand words or catch melodies? Why does Froebel insist that each of his little games shall be accompanied by word and song? It is only necessary to put these questions to begin to suspect their anIt is through the frequent association of

swers.

words with objects and acts that the child comes to connect sounds with ideas, and it is through imitating these sounds that he becomes a language-using being. Hence he should hear much speaking, and the connections between words and the objects and acts for which they stand should be often and clearly pointed out. Maternal instinct has met the first of these needs, but has not adequately responded to the second. One great merit of Froebel's games is that they associate elementary sensations with the words through which they are designated, and throw into relief the connection between word and sensation by means of gesture.

In addition to its intellectual incitement the mother's prattle has a moral influence, and this is augmented when song is added to word. For through prattle and song the child learns to know his mother's voice, and this voice soothes, calms, attracts him though he understands not a word of what is said. Love for his mother's voice renders him at a later stage of development more obedient to its commands, more susceptible to its appeals. Who shall say how far maternal influence may be increased or diminished by the presence or absence of fibers of experience connecting

the conscious with the unconscious periods of life?

In Froebel's opinion song has a still deeper import, for he recognizes in music the natural language of emotion, and believes that love, the melody of the heart, is revealed in the melody of the voice. Hence in his commentary on the Kicking Song he explains that the mother's song is born of her longing to nourish her baby's feeling. He shall not only learn through her opposing hands to know her strength and his own: in some slight degree he must feel the tenderness that inspires her act. Hence in song she seeks to reveal herself as love, just as through pressure she reveals herself as power. Since the presentiments of infancy help to determine the thought of maturity, and since in the relationship of the child to its mother is foreshadowed the relationship of the soul to God, I think you can not too seriously consider the suggestion that you should never oppose your boy without revealing love as the motive of your opposition. Love shining through your prohibitions and penalties will help him to believe in the love which hides under all the contradictions of life. The rebellious Titan chained to the rock and