This brings me to speak of Frœbel's superiority to Pestalozzi. The kindergarten is not mainly _object-teaching_, 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 individualities of form, size, number, etc., and in their possible connections with each other and with the _child_. If Frœbel 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, _not 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 Frœbel's 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 France, addressed to Frœbel's most earnest disciple and apostle, the Baroness Marenholtz-Bülow, which I have translated from the appendix of her _Work in Relation to Education_ (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 congress at Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1869. 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 Frœbel's method of education by 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 intellect, 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:--