III.

The Romantic School at Jena

During the vears 1799-1801, the period of Froebel’s sojourn, we

find at Jena the beginnings of a movement, which, grounding itself upon
philosophv, is destined to reach far bevond it and to embrace Literature,
Art, and Religión and to extend even into the field of Education, in which
last work Froebel will have a part. This is the so-called Romantic
Movement, verv famous in its dav, into whose fermentation our
susceptible countrv bov makes another plunge head foremost bv the verr
fact of his coming to Jena at this time. (6)
The Romantic Movement springs confessedlv out of Fichtes doctrine
of the Ego, which has asserted itself as the creator of the world inner and
outer. The unlimited Self is now free, nav is enthroned, and is bound to
rule, even in a despotic wav. What is to restrain its caprice? Social and
institutional life is as nothing, vou can make vour own institutions and
change them at will; you need have nothing to do with what is
established. So Fichte in his Science of

Now this Romantic strand will be woven through Froebel’s life and
work. Later, during more mature vears, he will again come upon it in
Berlin. His two chief friends there, his companions in arms, as well as his
fellow-workers in Keilhau afterwards—Middendorf and Langethal—mav
be fairlv called Romanticists. Both were students of theologv, pupils of
Schleiermacher who belonged to the Romantic School, and who, though a
Christian minister in real Prussia, fled to ideal Greece, and lived there with
the ancient idealist Plato, whom he translated and interpreted to his own
age. Then Froebel’s wife,
Wilhelmine Hoffmeister, was a Romanticist, highlv cultured and refined,
and her marriage to the poor, rustic Thuringian schoolmaster must be called
romantic in a double sense.