Merry Songs & Games For Use in Kindergarten

90 pieces for children with lyrics & sheet music - online songbook

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	INTRODUCTION
			HERE is nothing real, wrote Friedrich Froebel but mind. In these few words he tells his secret 1 to all who have ears to hear. History records the	Again, what is true of the general course of development is true of each particular phase of it. It would be false to say that the infant feels and the man thinks, or that the race as a whole left feeling behind, when through feeling it had painfully struggled upward into thought. Born of feeling, thought creates new feelings, and in the circular process by which mind returns upon itself, each idea cul­minates in an emotion which again yields a new idea. We illustrate this process in every detail of our lives. We believe and love before we comprehend, and yet clear comprehension intensifies our faith and our devotion. Our hearts reach out blindly towards the hearts of others and only experience transforms the instinctive attraction into the comprehending affection. Yet who does not know that the love he bears to the friend he has tried and tested is deeper far and stronger than the unanalyzed instinct which first singled out that friend and set him in his heart apart from other men ? In our religious experience we set up our first altars always to the " Unknown God," and our abstract faith yields feebler evidence of the things not seen. But when beholding, as in a glass, the glory of the Lord, we are changed into His image, and learn to know Him through becoming like him, a higher faith is born of our clearer insight, and the truths we know stimulate acceptance of the truths unknown. The unity of creation thrills the heart long before it is grasped as a conception by the mind, and what the correlationist demonstrates to-day, the poets sang centuries ago, and yet, it seems to me, the sublimity of the proved truths must and will in­spire a strain nobler far than any yet chanted into the listening ear of the world. Remembering then that thought is simply feeling which knows itself, we pass to our second point, which is that it comes to this knowledge through, expression and through the recognition of correspondences to itself in nature and in men. As spirit is the reality of which nature is the symbol, it follows that the less spirit knows itself the more it will seek its image in natural forms. For this reason we find that the earliest forms of religion and art are always symbolic. The obscure thought or feeling recognizes itself in a symbol and cannot recognize itself in a definite and exact reflection. We need a mirror, not of what we are, but of what we already dimly know ourselves to be. Man­kind's vague feeling of a supreme power led first to the identification of that power with rivers, mountains, sun, moon, or whatever natural object corresponded most nearly to the indefinite idea which floated unconscious in the depths of the emotion. When through the analogy thus detected, the feeling began to define itself, men embodied in symbolic forms the impression they were still unable to fully grasp. Vast monuments like the Tower of Babel breathed their awe of unknown Power ; images with multi-
		process through which mind learns to know itself, and
		the individual struggle towards a complete self-
	consciousness we must each re-live, at least in outline, the grand historic periods which mark advancing stages of mental and spiritual growth. The development of mind is a progressive self-recognition, and this recognition is effected through perception of the analogies between mind and nature, through the in­stinctive exertion of uncomprehended power and through the participation of the one in the thought of the many. In nature, in other men, and in the products of his own activ­ity man finds the solution of himself. He knows himself spiritually, as he knows himself physically, only through the mirrors which reflect his image. Born in unconscious­ness and destined to freedom, he is constantly transforming the abstract possibility through experience and expression into attainment and insight, and interpreting the ideal by making it actual. The facts to hold in mind, if we would trace this process through its various phases, are : 1st. That sympathies and feelings are the rudimentary forms of thought. 2d. That the transition from feeling to thought is effected through the activity of the will, and that thought itself beginning with the vague abstract, and confused only through repeated returns upon itself, becomes concrete,organic and complete. These points need illustration in detail. As a matter of fact, we will all admit that we feel be­fore we know what or how we feel. The unconscious baby is pleased, or angry, or fretful, and manifests the feel­ing he does not comprehend in his smile and his cry. He begins to know when he begins to distinguish between these different sensations—to separate the sensation of hunger from that of sleepiness, or to recognize the difference be­tween anger and content. In distinguishing one from the other he becomes vaguely conscious of the nature of each, and dimly recognizes them as general possibilities apart from their particular manifestations. This abstracting and generalizing consciousness is precisely what constitutes the difference between feeling and thought. What is true of the baby is true of the primitive man. Instincts and impulses precede conscious thought. The maternal instinct of the savage differs but little from that of the brute—it is thought reacting upon this instinct which converts it into true mother love. So the blind feeling of dependence expresses itself instinctively in a crude social organization, the vague sense of beauty gives birth to art, and in the feeling of wonder we find the source of science and religion.