foyer domestique la tache que Froebel remet, en grande
partie, aux jardins d'enfants et a sa directrice. A l'egard des rapports
de l'education domestique, telle qui elle est a l'heure qu'il est, on
doit reconnaitre que Froebel avait un coup-d'oeil plus juste que
Pestalozzi.--_Histoire d'Education_, FREDERICK DITTES, Redolfi's French
translation, Paris, 1880, p. 258.

While others have taken to the work of education their own pre-conceived
notions of what that work should be, Froebel stands consistently alone
in seeking in the nature of the child the laws of educational action--in
ascertaining from the child himself how we are to educate him.--JOSEPH
PAYNE, _Lectures on the Science and Art of Education_, Syracuse, 1885,
p. 254.

Years afterwards, the celebrated Jahn (the "Father Jahn" of the German
gymnastics) told a Berlin student of a queer fellow he had met, who
made all sorts of wonderful things from stones and cobwebs. This queer
fellow was Froebel; and the habit of making out general truths from the
observation of nature, especially from plants and trees, dated from the
solitary rambles in the Forest.

As the cultivator creates nothing in the trees and plants, so the
educator creates nothing in the children,--he merely superintends the
development of inborn faculties. So far Froebel agrees with Pestalozzi;
but in one respect he was beyond him, and has thus become, according
to Michelet, the greatest of educational reformers. Pestalozzi said
that the faculties were developed by exercise. Froebel added that
the function of education was to develop the faculties by arousing
_voluntary activity_. Action proceeding from inner impulse
(_Selbsthaeligkeit_) was the one thing needful, and here Froebel as
usual refers to God: "God's every thought is a work, a deed." As
God is the Creator, so must man be a creator also. Living acting,
conceiving,--these must form a triple cord within every child of man,
though the sound now of this string, now of that may preponderate, and
then again of two together.

Pestalozzi held that the child belonged to the family; Fichte on the
other hand, claimed it for society and the State. Froebel, whose mind,
like that of Frederick Maurice, delighted in harmonizing apparent
contradictions, and who taught that "all progress lay through opposites
to their reconciliations," maintained that the child belonged both to
the family and to society, and he would therefore have children spend
some hou