[Footnote 8: See p. 4.]

But Froebel was more than a biologist, he was a philosopher and an
idealist. Such words have sometimes been used as terms of reproach, but
wisdom can only be justified of her children.

At the back of all Froebel has to say about "The Education of the Human
Being" lies his conception of what the human being is. And it is
impossible fully to understand why Froebel laid so much stress on
spontaneous play unless we go deeper than the province of the biologist
without in the least minimising the importance of biological knowledge
to educational theory. As the biologist defines play as "the natural
manifestation of the child's activities," so Froedel says "play at first
is just natural life." But to him the true inwardness of spontaneous
play lies in the fact that it is spontaneous--so far as anything in the
universe can be spontaneous. For spontaneous response to environment is
self-expression, and out of self-expression comes selfhood,
consciousness of self. If we are to understand Froebel at all, we must
begin with the answer he found, or accepted, from Krause and others for
his first question, What is that self?

Before reaching the question of how to educate, it seemed to him
necessary to consider not only the purpose or aim of education, but the
purpose or aim of human existence, the purpose of all and any existence,
even whether there is any purpose in anything; and that brings us to
what he calls "the groundwork of all," of which a summary is given in
the following paragraphs.

In the universe we can perceive plan, purpose or law, and behind this