FRIEDRICH WILHELM AUGUST FRÖBEL, one of the world’s greatest civilizers and benefactors, was born at Oberweissbach, in the Thuringian forest of Germany, April 21st, 1782. The century into which he came to make his remote birthplace memorable as one of the “Meccas of the Mind” was favorable to his education. The advantage the eighteenth century in its last quarter offered for the education of an active intellect was the vigor and aggressiveness of the spirit in which Condorcet, when a fugitive from the Terrorists of Paris, with the certainty of death at hand, wrote calmly of peace and good-will as modes of infinite progress for individuals and for society. To the extent to which Rousseau and his disciples really represented this spirit, they prepared the way for Pestalozzi, Fröbel, and Father Jahn,—the greatest of whom was Fröbel. At Jena, where he went at the age of seventeen, it is said that he was already mastered by the governing idea of his life,—that knowledge of the unity underlying all diversities of nature which had first taken hold on him while as a forester’s apprentice he studied nature in the depths of the Thuringian woods,—

	“In allem wirkt und schafft ein Leben
	Weil das Leben in all’ tin ein’ger Gott gegeben.”

This is his own expression of his controlling thought and it has been translated as “All has come forth from the divine,—from God,—and is through God alone conditioned.” This is accurate enough, but perhaps Fröbel himself might have preferred to the metaphysical definition the rhyme,—

	“One Life is working, building!—giving
	The world the life that God is living.”

This is the idea which made it possible for Goethe to write “Faust.” When evil in the person of Mephistopheles, the spirit of Negation, appears in heaven, his presence there and the power that he asks and obtains to tempt Faust, are made the means of impressing on the mind of the reader the same thought Fröbel had had impressed on him by the myriad nature-forms of unity in diversity he saw in the Thuringian forest. Practically it means that the secret of progress is not opposition to evil—to the mere phenomena of negation, but active work for the evolution of the good—that is, of the positive forces of the mind which as far as they can be made operative, must finally become modes of the central unity even in their divergence from it.

“Es irrt der Mench so lang er strebt—”

is Goethe’s expression of the same idea—“Man still must err or cease to strive”—is a law of human divergence from the perfect type of unity, but the higher law to which Fröbel trusted was that evil must be overcome of good whenever good is asserted against it—that negation, evil, the unrealities of the universe, must cease to exist to the extent to which the positive forces of reality—that is, of kindness and creative efficiency—actually operate.

  This idea of “central unity,” this faith in its omnipotence, was unquestionably the governing energizing force of the constructive German intellect of the nineteenth century. The useful “Higher Criticism” which Goethe takes cognizance of in Wagner, the laborious and aspiring “Famulus” of the German creative mind, has done its part, but it had little part in the higher education for which Fröbel stands with Goethe and the great geniuses of his century who have been moved by the sublime faith that as the good in a human soul is actually developed, the intellectual power of apprehending all knowledge the soul needs to express its realities of goodness is developed with it.

  This faith, taking hold on Fröbel, moved him to begin the work of higher education, not in the university, but at the cradle, by developing in children from their tenderest years a sympathetic knowledge of all the forms of beauty, grace, and power, through which in the diversities of nature the central unity expresses itself. As all the principles of higher mathematics are involved in the growth of a plant from its seed to its blossoming, Fröbel worked systematically to impress these laws and all their related principles on the mind, through object teaching at its period of greatest docility and receptiveness. Whatever he may have left undone at his death, June 21st, 1852, he had still succeeded so far that a world which is painfully slow to recognize its benefactors had learned to know him at last and had put him in its pantheon among those whom loving service has raised to an immortality of usefulness.