THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL AND 
 THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF THE THEORY OF EDUCATION AS 
 ADJUSTMENT 
 
 BY 
 
 J. E. ADAMSON 
 
 M.A., D.LIT. 
 
 DIRECTOB OF EDUCATION, TRANSVAAL PKOVINCE 
 
 47534 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK 
 
 BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 
 I 92 I
 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 In this book I have tried to establish the view that in 
 the conception of the adjustment of individual and en- 
 vironment we have a fundamental principle about which 
 a rational theory of education can be developed. It is 
 not new of course. Plato's theory might be described 
 as economic and social, Herbart's as sesthetic, and 
 Rousseau's as natural adjustment. It is a conception 
 which helps to reconcile rival claims arising, for 
 example, when, on the one hand, the individualistic 
 point of view is taken, with its consequent emphasis of 
 the importance of self-realisation ; or when, on the other 
 hand, the environmental point of view is taken and 
 questions such as the value of different kinds of know- 
 ledge or social duties and responsibilities become 
 primary and fundamental. It certainly makes it pos- 
 sible to present a coherent theory and provides us with 
 an aim and a criterion attractive on account of their 
 simplicity and their direct applicability to the details 
 of practice. 
 
 I found it necessary to keep separate the three 
 orders of reality — nature, the social fabric, and the 
 world of moral values — making up the environment into 
 which the individual is born, and to treat adjustment to 
 them in separate books. That as objective worlds or 
 orders the second and third inter-penetrate is obvious, 
 and many believe in the ultimate spiritual texture of all 
 three. However that may be, within the experience of 
 the individual where adjustment takes place they seem 
 to constitute a single integral universe of reality. If 
 the separation of civilisation and morality offends any 
 reader, I must plead that no other method of treatment 
 seemed possible if I was to make my meaning clear. I 
 agree wholly that experience, the arena of adjustment, 
 is one.
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 The introduction is long and postpones the develop- 
 ment of the theory to perhaps a wearisome degree. But 
 it was necessary to dispose of the questions touched on 
 there first if the three books where the theory is de- 
 veloped in detail were to be free from digressions. It 
 may be said that the second book is not free from them. 
 I refer to the second and third chapters where an attempt 
 is made to extricate the main strands in the social fabric. 
 My answer would be that its texture is not a matter of 
 common knowledge like that of the physical universe. 
 People are only just beginning to talk and think about 
 it. The Newton and Darwin of social science have yet 
 to appear. So that this summary account seemed 
 necessary before any attempt at a solution of the 
 problem of adjustment to the second world could be 
 made. 
 
 Since this work was completed two books have 
 appeared which throw much light on many of the 
 problems discussed. One is Dr. W. McDougall's 
 "Group Mind." His treatment of the problem of 
 nationality would have been especially helpful. Another 
 is Dr. T. P. Nunn's " Education: Its Data and First 
 Principles." This useful and arresting book lays stress 
 on individuality and on the need for the best and most 
 original contribution of each individual to the whole of 
 human life. This view of the aim and focus of educa- 
 tional effort only differs, I think, from my own in the 
 selection of the point for greatest emphasis. I have 
 found it in the process of adjustment which individual 
 and environment share and out of which progress and 
 betterment must emerge if they are to emerge at all. 
 
 I have had specially in mind students taking a 
 course of ■ professional training for education at the 
 universities or elsewhere ; but I hope anyone interested 
 in that fascinating subject will find the book useful. 
 
 I wish to thank my wife and Miss E. M. Oswald 
 for valuable assistance in s^etting it readv for the press. 
 
 J.E.A. 
 
 Pretoria, 
 
 March, 192 1.
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 Introduction i 
 
 I. The conception of adjustment ; the three-fold 
 environment. 2. The Individual. 3. The pro- 
 cess. 4. Adjustment to the three orders com- 
 pared. 5. The relation of education to its 
 scientific and philosophic bases. 6. Specially 
 pertinent principles recently established : (a) The 
 dynamic character of experience ; (b) experience 
 rather than consciousness the subject-matter of 
 psychology ; (c) change as a characteristic of 
 experience; are we to add creation? (d) psychic 
 fringes. 7. Social psychology. 8. The common 
 idea of the bi-polar relation between teacher and 
 pupil. 9. The same idea at the level of theory. 
 10. The view that bi-polarity is between the pupil 
 and his worlds. 11. An illustration. 12. The 
 function of the teacher. 13. Note on plan to be 
 followed. 
 
 BOOK 1. THE WORLD OF NATURE 
 
 Chapter L Preliminaries 39 
 
 I. The unity of subject and world in experience. 2. 
 Individuality of experience. 3. Change in 
 experience. 4. The data from which formal 
 schooling can start. 5. The aim of adjustment. 
 6. What adjustment involves. 
 
 Chapter IL Nature Study 61 
 
 I. Nature should be the focus of the primary curri- 
 culum. 2. Three principles to be observed in 
 the selection of material for nature-study : 
 Realism, Relative Novelty, and Utility. 3. A 
 fourth : Psychological rather than logical 
 coherence. 4. Further observations on the selec- 
 tion of material. 5. Manual work, arithmetic, 
 and reading, as ancillary to nature study. 6. 
 Geography : its sphere. 7. The first stage : 
 maps and the way to them. 8. The second 
 stage : comparative political geography. 9. The 
 third stage : regional geography. 10. Regional 
 geography as rational geography. 11. The 
 economic aspect. 12. Physiography.
 
 viii TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter III. Science 97 
 
 I. The science stage of adjustment means the shifting 
 of the dynamic centre of experience from the 
 objective to the subjective pole. 2. Tenure must 
 be freehold. 3. It extends to the second w^orld. 
 4. It is a double-edged process : objectively an 
 ordered world, subjectively self-realisation. 5. 
 It may secure unity of adjustment. 6. Develop- 
 ment of laboratory work and heuristic methods. 
 
 7. Obsession of the instrument and the reaction. 
 
 8. Education must take an independent position, 
 
 9. Summary of conclusions so far reached. 10. 
 The selection of material : it must be representa- 
 tive of the individuality of nature on its physical 
 and its organic side. 11. An illustrative sylla- 
 bus. 12 Science for girls : an illustrative sylla- 
 bus in hygiene. 13. Need for some biology for 
 boys. 14. Mathematics and science. 15. Re- 
 sumption of the consideration of the question 
 whether scientific adjustment means the victory 
 of the ego. 16. The conceptions of cause and law 
 as man's contribution. 17. The individuality of 
 nature as the ideal counterpart of the unity of 
 the individual man. 
 
 BOOK II. THE WORLD OF CIVILISATION 
 
 Chapter I. Preliminaries i53 
 
 I. The spiritual nature of the social order. 2. Its 
 existence confined to individual experience. 
 3. Its potentiality for capitalisation ; and its 
 plasticity. 4. Features common to the material 
 and the social orders. 5. Language and the 
 social order. 
 
 Chapter II. Political, National and Religious 
 
 Strands in the Social Fabric - 167 
 I. The political or governmental structure of 
 Society : its necessity and basis. 2. The form 
 and sphere of government. 3. Nationality as a 
 strand : its relation to democracy. 4. Two con- 
 ditions if political freedom is to transcend nation- 
 ality. 5. Some illustrations. 6. Religion as a 
 strand. 7. Its relation (a) to the organisation of 
 Society. 8. (b) To nationality, economic develop- 
 ments, emigration, and the spread of civilisation. 
 9. (c) To education.
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS ix 
 
 Chapter III. The Economic Strand in the Fabric 
 
 OF Society 195 
 
 I. The manor and agricultural organisation. 2. The 
 merchant guilds and commerce. 3. The craft 
 guilds and industry. 4. Summary. 5. National 
 control : its effect on agriculture. 6. Its effect 
 on industry. 7. Its effect on commerce. 8. 
 Economic policy and the food supply. 9. 
 Economic freedom and individualism. 10. 
 Economic freedom and competition. 
 
 Chapter IV. Adjustment to the Second World - 219 
 
 I. Adjustment is constant and there are many 
 agencies. 2. The schools must project the social 
 order and link the individual on to it. 3. These 
 two principles and two others as criteria of school 
 history. 4. Illustrations. 5 The sequence and 
 selection of topics. 6. The question whether 
 school pupils can appreciate history on the 
 organic plane. 7. The teaching of civics. 8. 
 Training in social service. 9. Weighing evidence. 
 
 Chapter V. Vocational Adjustment - - - 237 
 
 I. The general question of the relation of education 
 to vocation. 2. What vocation comprehends. 
 3. Value for a vocation attracts pupils and 
 parents. 4. There is a formal side to vocational 
 training. 5. Another statement of the aim. 6. 
 The problem at tl>e primary, or better, prepara- 
 tory stage. 7. Vocational classification of secon- 
 dary schools. Common studies. 8. The " human- 
 istic " and " nature " types. 9. Craft schools. 
 10. Commercial and agricultural schools, n. 
 Vocational schools for g^irls. 
 
 Chapter VI. Language and Literature as a 
 
 Vehicle of Adjustment - - - 267 
 
 I. Language in its relation to the three worlds. 2. 
 As an instrument of analysis and synthesis. 3. 
 As an aid to aesthetic, moral, and social adjust- 
 ment. 4. The unity of language and literature. 
 
 5. An illustrative course in English Literature. 
 
 6. Literature as a means and as an end. 7. A 
 modern language as a vehicle of social adjust- 
 ment. 8. The classical languages. 9. The treat- 
 ment of literature.
 
 X TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 BOOK III. THE WORLD OF MORALITY 
 Chapter 1. Preliminaries 299 
 
 I. Justification of the use of the term " continuum " 
 in respect of the moral order and of the concep- 
 tion of its "creation " by the individual as the 
 aim of moral education. 2. How the continuum 
 is created teleologically i-e. by the idea of an end 
 of ethical value. 3. The content of that teleo- 
 logical idea, namely, self-realisation as a stress 
 or tension towards a whole which satisfies the 
 highest elements of the self. Some illustrations. 
 4. Summary of conclusions so far reached. 5. 
 How the psychical elements of thought, feeling, 
 and will are involved in the adjustment of the 
 individual to the whole, that is, in the creation 
 of the moral continuum. 6. It is the whole self 
 which must be adjusted. 
 
 Chapter II. The Factors of Adjustment - - 321 
 
 I. Individual and social heredity. 2. Instincts are 
 congenital. The home as the vestibule of the 
 school. 3. The school as a moral order mediat- 
 ing the emergence of (a) the cognitive element 
 in the moral continuum. 4. (b) The affective ele- 
 ment. 5. (c) The volitional element. 6. Sum- 
 mary. 7. The master as an element in the moral 
 order. His part in adjustment. 
 
 Chapter III, The Process of Adjustment - - 347 
 I. The ethical standards and the school as a moral 
 order. 2. The school and law. 3. The school 
 and happiness. 4. The school and perfection. 
 5. The process of adjustment : through the 
 healthy physical life of the school. 6. Through 
 the symmetry, order, and beauty, i.e. the 
 aesthetic quality which it embodies. 7. Through 
 direct and indirect moral instruction. 8. Though 
 other subjects and activities. 9. Religious 
 instruction. 
 
 Index 
 
 373
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 §1. The aim of this essay is to develop, in oiitHne, a 
 theory of education. It is no hght task; for, apart from its 
 wide scope, there is the inherent drawback that many of those 
 to whom it is in the first place, but by no means exclusively, 
 addressed, are impatient of theory. Teachers are not dif- 
 ferent in this respect from the practitioners of other arts. 
 There are always some who are ready to hold their work at 
 arm's length and to extricate, so far as this is possible, the 
 conditions which make for success or failure. Usually they 
 are a minority, and they certainly have no monopoly of 
 enthusiasm. Most men would rather be up and doing; and 
 assuredly theory is a thin and arid business compared with 
 the fulness and glow of practice. Yet enthusiasm generally 
 needs the corrective of criticism and teaching is an outstand- 
 ing example. There is perhaps no art whose practice gains 
 more in effectiveness and aesthetic satisfaction from rational 
 insight into its meaning and purpose. So that an attempt 
 at a comprehensive survey needs no special justification. 
 Moreover the subject has often been approached in piece- 
 meal fashion, and even lightly. There is the futile contro- 
 versy about the rival claims of literature and science for 
 example, the artificial opposition of disciplinary and content 
 theories, and the often superficial attempts to "apply" 
 psychology and philosophy to practice. Our effort may fail 
 but there seems to be room for it. 
 
 The first essential would appear to be a synthetic prin- 
 ciple. That seems a better starting-point than a definition. 
 What we want is a conception which will embrace the de- 
 S:ails, aspects, and stages of education. Is there one? This 
 essay is based on the view that we can find it in adjustment. 
 Whether the view is sound or not will appear in the sequel. 
 We hope to show that within that conception details of 
 theory acquire unity and coherence. If we succeed, or in
 
 2 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 proportion as we succeed, we shall have a criterion which can 
 be applied to the problems of organisation and execution 
 which education, complex and vital business that it is, 
 presents from day to day and from hour to hour. And 
 presents, we may add, not only to teachers. We are too apt 
 to leave out of account the fathers and mothers, the man in 
 the street, and the man in a position of public responsibility. 
 They want to know what we are doing and why we are doing 
 it. Indeed, if a principle and a criterion acceptable to them 
 can be found, they will be more ready to leave the details of 
 execution without question to us. The irritability of parents 
 and public seems to be easily aroused just because of the fog 
 of indecision which hangs about the purpose and practice of 
 education. Will the conception of adjustment help to clear 
 it away ? Well, we can only try it. The first step is to say 
 what we mean by it. 
 
 That will only become quite clear when we have finished 
 our task. Meanwhile, psychology suggests a method of 
 approach. It tells us that a conception is vague and 
 schematic at first, a shadowy thing with blurred outline 
 which gradually becomes clearer and more definite ; but that 
 it must be in the mind in this indefinite form before we can 
 begin to attend to it, or better, perhaps, with it. Let us 
 follow psychology, then, and try to get hold of it. Fortu- 
 nately we usually find ourselves in possession of the schema 
 of any current concept, mainly through the operation of 
 language as a social and, consequently, a suggestive instru- 
 ment. We all have a vague notion of what adjustment 
 means. It means three things, at any rate, for education : 
 an individual, his world, and the process of bringing them 
 into relation. We may conveniently glance at each factor, 
 and then at the process itself. And we may look at the objec- 
 tive factor, his world, first. It is three-fold like the indi- 
 vidual himself. We are going to deal with it as three 
 worlds : nature, society and morality. Whether they are 
 three in one and one in three is a moot point of philosophy, 
 and, of course, one of the most profound questions which a 
 theory of education or indeed any other theory of life has to 
 face. We cannot evade it, big and unsolved as it is; and we 
 shall refer to it from time to time. Indeed, so far as the 
 second and third worlds are concerned, their intimate relation
 
 INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 and partial identity will, it is hoped, clearly emerge. The 
 relation of the first to the other two is a more speculative 
 matter : whether, for example, we see nature with Browning, 
 as the mere "scenery of human passion "^ or with Tennyson 
 " who gives human thoughts and feelings to nature."^ The 
 reader will be free to make his own philosophic choice. Our 
 own development of the question in this essay will point to 
 the unity of all three worlds in a single universe, although we 
 must discuss adjustment to them in separate books. We 
 shall adopt in its entirety the view of Dewey that *' education 
 should take its departure from this close interdependence. It 
 should aim not at keeping science as a study apart from 
 literature as a record of human interests, but at cross-fertilis- 
 ing both the natural sciences and the various human disci- 
 plines such as history, literature, economics and politics.'" 
 And in finding a place for ideals, for the moral order, we may 
 add in both the natural and social spheres. Here, however, 
 we have to note the distinctiveness of the three : nature in 
 visible form; the "transparent and responsive world of 
 minds "* the fabric of society and civilisation; and the moral 
 order, borne up, as we hope in the sequel to shew, by acts of 
 individual creation. These three worlds are around and 
 about the individual, in a sense which should become clear 
 as we proceed, almost throughout his conscious life ; and 
 adjustment to each and all of them is the task of education. 
 
 §2. So much, for the moment, for the environment. 
 The individual, it might be thought, needs no description or 
 definition. It is, however, less easy to lay hold of him, even 
 schematically which is our immediate purpose, than of the 
 threefold world he is to be adjusted to. Superficially there 
 seems to be no difficulty. The man in the street would say 
 there are so many million boys and girls, each one of whom 
 has to be adjusted to this threefold world : from the side of 
 the individual, at all events, the problem, complicated though 
 it may be, is straightforward. When we look closer at the 
 individual, as we must if we are to develop sound theory, we 
 soon find that the matter is by no means simple. We must 
 
 1 Stopford Brooke, Browning, p. 70. 
 
 2 Ibid, p. 68. 
 
 3 Democracy and Education, p. 334. 
 
 4 Ward, Psychological Principles, p. 286, footnote.
 
 4 THE INDIVIDUAL AND TITE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 try to clear up at least three difficulties and it will be well to 
 tackle them one at a time. The first concerns the separate- 
 ness of the individuals. It need not detain us long. There 
 are philosophical and social theories which either deny ulti- 
 mate separateness or take a form which tends to cloak it. 
 They stand on two levels. On the highest there is the theory 
 of a universal mind-substance, a world-spirit in which indi- 
 viduals are supposed to share, and which so far negates the 
 conception of their ultimate separateness. This we may at 
 once dismiss as a theory of no practical value for education, 
 whatever it may contain of ultimate philosophic or religious 
 truth. The problem of adjustment is not affected by it. At 
 a lower level there is the theory of the social organism which 
 we shall have to examine more closely later. All we need 
 say here is that, while we shall endeavour to bring out the 
 vital importance for education of social bonds — the second 
 book will be devoted to this purpose — the notion of society 
 as an organism must not be allowed to cloud over and con- 
 fuse — as it often does — the conception of real individuality. 
 Matthew Arnold has expressed the doctrine of an extreme un- 
 bridgable individualism in an arresting way in his poem 
 entitled " Isolation," and we will quote two stanzas: 
 
 " Yes ; in the sea of life enisled, 
 
 With echoing straits between us thrown, 
 Dotting the shoreless watery wild. 
 
 We mortal millions live alone. 
 The islands feel the enclasping flow 
 And then their endless bounds they know." 
 
 After depicting their longing to be joined—" parts of a single 
 continent" — he concludes: 
 
 " Who ordered that their longing's fire 
 
 Should be as soon as kindled, cool'd? 
 Who renders vain their deep desire? 
 
 A God, a God, their severance ruled 
 And bade betwixt their shores to be 
 The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea." 
 
 Here we have the direct antithesis of the world-spirit view. 
 It would seem to be between these two extremes of a common 
 substance and an unbridgable individualism that the truth 
 lies. Both are, in their extreme form, unsupported by 
 science, but both reflect an aspect of truth. There is simi-
 
 INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 larity, perhaps, indeed, identity, partial at all events, between 
 individual and individual, in the innate elements of experience 
 on both its cognitive and its affective side. On the cognitive 
 side we have the spatial and temporal forms of phenomena 
 and the categories of conceptual thinking, e.g., cause and 
 effect, substance and quality, which, whether we regard them 
 with Kant as a priori or — which is more probable — as evolu- 
 tionary products are, as forms or ways of thinking, though 
 not, of course, as objects of thought, probably innate. On 
 the affective side we have far more than forms, viz., the 
 innate instincts out of which, as McDougalP has so clearly 
 shewn, the development of our affective life, even so far as it 
 is organised about the most abstract sentiments, can be ex- 
 plained as a natural process. Also, as he clearly and con- 
 clusively shews, their development depends on the reaction 
 of the individual and his social environment at almost every 
 stage. So far the image of the "estranging sea" has no 
 scientific warrant. Nevertheless Arnold's picture reflects an 
 aspect of truth we must keep a firm hold of. Identity through 
 innate disposition and the web of society must not be allowed 
 to obliterate, so to say, the boundaries of individuality, even 
 to a small extent. It is the fate, and we may add the privi- 
 lege, of each of us to work out our own salvation. Adjust- 
 ment must ultimately be individual, however much of past 
 and present experience we share with our fellows. It is in- 
 teresting to note in this connection that in enumerating the 
 " levels of conduct " McDougall distinguishes the highest 
 stage as that " in which conduct is regulated by an ideal of 
 conduct that enables a man to act in the way that seems to 
 him right regardless of the praise or blame of his immediate 
 social environment."^ The word immediate implies the re- 
 moter moral order to which ideals of conduct belong. To 
 that order the individual must himself make good his right 
 of entry. 
 
 The second difficulty has also been the battle-ground of 
 rival schools. It turns on the question whether individuality 
 is completely explained by differences in the sum-total of ex- 
 perience which, in the process of adjustment to the three 
 worlds, each one of us accumulates ; or whether there is a 
 
 5 Social Psychology, passim. 
 
 6 Ibid p. 181.
 
 6 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 residuum over and above experience, which, even if this were 
 the same — an impossible hypothesis, of course — would still 
 leave A eternally and finally different from B, just because it 
 is A, and not B, who is the subject of experience. It is the 
 old question whether the pure self, the subject, is a reality, 
 as distinguished from the empirical self, which, though it has 
 a subjective brand, is still an object of experience among 
 others. James has argued persuasively and eloquently^ that 
 psychology, at any rate, need not postulate such a stable and 
 permanent ego. Ward argues' that such a postulate is a 
 logical necessity. And it seems to us that the victory is 
 easily with Ward, even on the scientific ground of 
 psychology. Our point of view is the theory of education. 
 And, while learning all we can from psychology, we have to 
 ask what religion has to say. We might possibly develop a 
 coherent theory of education on the basis of the empirical 
 ego, knowing itself from moment to moment; but in the 
 practice of education, we need the conception of the pure ego, 
 the immortal soul, as the alpha and omega of our inspiration. 
 We shall be safer, as to this point, with the man in the street 
 than on the arid heights of philosophic doubt. 
 
 The two difificulties we have just discussed concern the 
 nature of the individual to be adjusted. The practical teacher 
 and even the student of theory may say he can afford to dis- 
 regard them. We cannot admit that. If he is to be the 
 exponent of a science or a philosophy of education, he must 
 make up his mind about such essentials as these. Otherwise 
 he remains, to that extent at all events, a rule-of-thumb prac- 
 titioner. Adjustment cannot be directed without the occa- 
 sional guidance and the constant inspiration of principle. 
 The third difficulty which we have now to face is, fortunately, 
 not a controversial matter, and it can be got over by clear 
 thinking. It is this. We have so far used language which 
 implies that the individual and the world he is to be adjusted 
 to, whether natural, social, or moral, are two separate and 
 distinct things; and that adjustment means bringing them 
 together and fitting them to one another. We have done so 
 in order to keep to the tracks of every day thought. We 
 
 7 Principles of Psychologv, Vol. I, pp. 342-373- 
 
 8 Psychological Principles, pp. 376-382. This is the last section of a 
 chapter which seems to mc conclusive.
 
 INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 must now leave them and take up an exactly opposite stand- 
 point. We take as our point of departure the fact that the 
 individual and his world are one. That is just what is meant 
 by experience. It is a unity within which the individual and 
 his world occupy the subjective and objective poles; but it is 
 one and not two, save in the sense that the two, the subject 
 and the objective continuum, the individual and his world, 
 are complementary to each other, in the same way as the 
 biologist regards an organism and its environment as com- 
 plementary. "'The w'ords 'environment,' ' medium,' denote 
 something more than surroundings which encompass an in- 
 dividual. They denote the specific continuity of the sur- 
 roundings with his own active tendencies."^ Each of the 
 three worlds is only a world at all for the individual to the 
 extent that it is developed — made articulate — within his ex- 
 perience ; and, we may add, made warm and intimate through 
 personal selection and appropriation. The term presenta- 
 tion, like the term experience, implies a unity in which sub- 
 ject and object meet ; but it differs from experience in being 
 confined to cognition, while experience implies affective and 
 conative elements as well. Experience is the common 
 ground of the individual and the world he knows, feels, and 
 acts upon ; and it is one before it is two, not vice versa. The 
 child only gradually distinguishes itself from other objects 
 as the consciousness of the self develops; similarly, avant 
 I'horume est la societe ;^° and similarly again it is out of the 
 objective moral order that individual morality by a process 
 of re-creation emerges. 
 
 It follows that no two experiences are alike. " Every 
 individual experience is unique," says Ward." And so 
 James: " It varies in every creature, "^^ This is, of course, 
 the very antithesis of ordinary ways of thinking. The world 
 as known, felt, and responded to in volition being within 
 experience, polarised to the individual, differs from indi- 
 vidual to individual ; not only because our points of view — 
 spatial, social, and moral — are never the same, but also be- 
 cause " accent and emphasis, light and shade, background 
 
 ' Dewey, Democracy and Education, p. 13 
 
 ^^ Ward, op. cit, p. 369. 
 
 11 Op. cit, p. 31. 
 
 12 Op. cit. Vol. I, pp. 402, 403.
 
 8 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 and foreground,"^' are the effect of subjective selection. So 
 many men, then, so many worlds, is a truth which is of 
 fundamental importance for a theory of education. Of 
 course this uniqueness does not mean that there is not enough 
 correspondence to make intercourse intelHgible and common 
 education possible. That correspondence is usually suffi- 
 ciently close as a result of proximity and similarity of points 
 of view, although one has seen children side by side in a 
 Transvaal class-room, e.g., one from the back veld and 
 another from the heart of London, whose worlds have, for a 
 time, hardly anything in common. Language the " instru- 
 ment of society"^* soon cross-fertilises them. And we have 
 already noted how common forms of sense and thought, 
 together with common instinctive dispositions, contribute an 
 essential element of correspondence. At the same time it is 
 better to emphasise the inherent uniqueness of experience 
 rather than what is common to mind and mind, if only be- 
 cause it is more likely to escape us, as it escapes everv one 
 sometimes and most people at all times. 
 
 §3. We have, then, the individual actually or poten- 
 tially in possession of three worlds given him in experience. 
 We have now to consider the process of adjustment. First 
 we may note that it will be both extensive and intensive. It 
 will be extensive as experience widens. Thus geography 
 and history we may regard as means of adjustment by ex- 
 tension to the first and second worlds respectively and the 
 experience of a school as a social and moral order we may 
 regard as the extension of the third world, in so far as it 
 widens such experience gained in the home. The objective 
 continuum in experience is constantly growing at its edges 
 and thus extending the three worlds to which the individual 
 is polarised. Also there is constantly going on at the same 
 time an intensive development. That we may illustrate from 
 each world. Science will discover in the continuum of 
 material things relations of cause and effect ;^^ history will 
 reveal political, economic, national, and religious strands in 
 the social fabric ;^^ school experience and literature will make 
 
 13 James, op. cit, Vol. I, p. 402. 
 
 1* See Book II, Chap. V, p. 255, 
 
 15 Sec Book I, Chap. III. 
 
 16 See Book II, Chaps. II. and III.
 
 INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 the moral order more articulate in respect of ideals and ethi- 
 cal values." That is to say adjustment will be in the direc- 
 tion of depth as well as length and breadth. 
 
 Secondly we must note that adjustment is a two-edged 
 process. This point is vital. If it is real and truly educa- 
 tive, it is as much a process of active appropriation as one 
 of passive assimilation. We shall elaborate this point more 
 fully presently. Here we are just noting it as of the essence 
 of adjustment. In ordinary thinking the environment is 
 conceived as moulding passive material. Bergson, especi- 
 ally, has emphasised the active part which life and conscious- 
 ness play in the process of adjustment and has given us the 
 conception of creative evolution. We shall embody it in the 
 details of our theory as we proceed. Here we want it as an 
 element in our schema. We want the idea not only of an 
 active acquisitive subject but also of a contributory subject. 
 In adjustment to the worlds of nature, society, and morality 
 we shall find the element of contribution in an ascending 
 scale of magnitude and importance, culminating, as we hope 
 to shew, in the case of the moral order in a process of con- 
 tinual creation. Our view of adjustment will be that of a 
 double-edged process in which the individual wrestles with 
 his environment and, while he appropriates it, also con- 
 tributes to it, leaving it, it may be hoped, better than he 
 found it. Within the limits of his capacity he should mould 
 as well as be moulded. 
 
 Having now some notion, if only a schematic one, of 
 what adjustment within experience means on the objective 
 side of the worlds and on the subjective side of the indi- 
 vidual, we may note what the effect on educational theory 
 has been of undue emphasis of one or other of these really 
 complementary factors. Artificial abstraction has given us 
 one-sided doctrines. Emphasis of the objective factor has 
 led to the ideal of the accumulation of knowledge and to 
 barren controversies as to which knowledge is of most worth. 
 Education has been taken out of its concrete setting in life. 
 The ultimate question is not how much knowledge can be 
 compassed in school or in life, or which sort is ultimately of 
 most value, but how the individual can be adjusted to the 
 
 ?7 See Book III, Chap. Ill,
 
 lo THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 truth, beauty, and morality of the worlds he can claim mem- 
 bership of, so as to make them and himself the better for the 
 process. Knowledge we shall want, as much of it and in 
 such variety as we shall find necessary to adjustment. But 
 it is adjustment, and not knowledge as such, which is the 
 gaol. Emphasis of the subjective factor has produced the 
 disciplinarians. The ideal of discipline, of gymnastic, torn 
 blindly and ruthlessly from the conception of life's practical 
 purposes, left the schools for centuries isolated, detached and 
 secluded from the busy haunts of men. It has given us 
 grammar instead of language and literature, kings and 
 battles instead of the fabric of society, isolated laws of 
 physics and chemistry without the theory of evolution : dry 
 bones never quickened into life. It has given us platitudes 
 about self-realisation without an insight into the worlds with- 
 in which the self must struggle and live. Education is 
 neither the mere acquisition of a body of knowledge nor the 
 mere development of power and personality; it is adjust- 
 ment : a life to be lived. 
 
 §4. We may now look a little more closely at this pro- 
 cess of adjustment in the three directions indicated ; and first 
 to what we call the physical world. It stands over against 
 us in unmistakeable objectivity, continuous in space, 
 material, tangible, and mostly opaque. It is, as the phil- 
 osophers say, given. But we have agreed to take as our 
 point of departure the fact that it is given in experience, a 
 continuum of presentation. It is ours, so far as we know it. 
 It is not alien : our relation to it is not mechanical, or not 
 only mechanical, like that, say, of wax to the seal that im- 
 presses it. In some mysterious way — the unsolved and per- 
 haps insoluble riddle of philosophy— the marriage of subject 
 and object, of knower and known, has been consummated. 
 The first step in adjustment has been taken for us, without 
 our being aware of it. We awake, so to say, to find our- 
 selves not even tenants but freeholders, in virtue of experi- 
 ence, of the world of nature. Without our knowing it, too, 
 we have done much to set our inheritance in order. What 
 Kant called the synthetic unity of apperception has been at 
 work, arranging the phenomena of nature in the form of 
 things ordered in space. That at least is his doctrine. 
 Whether we follow him in the view that this synthetic power
 
 INTRODUCTION n 
 
 is an a priori equipment of man, or whether we prefer to 
 regard it as a product of evolution, modern psychology sup- 
 ports the fact of subjective synthesis. We may safely take 
 as our starting point, then, the world of nature given as a 
 continuum of presentation. Adjustment will mean explora- 
 tion of it : extensively and intensively. We wish at this 
 point to emphasise the fact that exploration will be of the 
 essence of the process. Not the whole essence because, as 
 we shall in a moment note, aesthetic and conative adjustment 
 must accompany the cognitive business of exploration. But 
 it will be a primary task of education to direct the indi- 
 vidual's efforts to explore his physical environment, to make 
 himself at home in it. That no one should be an alien in it 
 seems hardly to need saying, and yet we know how many 
 walk in darkness or with but a glimmering of light. 
 
 With regard to the second world, the social fabric, the 
 task is a different one. It is, first of all, to find it. Although 
 it is woven into the texture of experience in an immediate and 
 final way, just as nature is (even more intimately in the pre- 
 natal unity of mother and child) it is, like air, transparent 
 and elusive. This is due to the fact that its material is, at 
 first, instinctive, appetitive and emotional rather than cogni- 
 tive. It is not given in spatial, material form as the world 
 of nature is. It is not, as we may say, on the surface of ex- 
 perience and presentation, but deeper down in the life of 
 feeling and conation. The process of adjustment will in 
 this case be, at first, of the nature of nurture and development 
 and, in some respects, of repression and inhibition of ten- 
 dencies. It will be extensive and intensive, as in the case 
 of the first world, but the subjective rather than the objec- 
 tive side will be the focus of the educative process. In the 
 nursery and the garden the social world will develop, but 
 will scarcely be revealed. Later the problem of discovery 
 will emerge. School will make the social fabric more real, 
 but it will still be felt rather than known. History will be 
 the first real agent of discovery, and the individual will not 
 be really aware of this second world until there are revealed 
 to him the strands of society — political, social, economic, 
 national and religious — which we shall consider in the second 
 book. To many, indeed, this world, the fabric of civilisa- 
 tion, man-made, is never a reality in the same sense as the
 
 12 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 material fabric is, although adjustment to it is as vital to 
 effective existence. The essence of adjustment we shall, 
 therefore, emphasise as discovery, in contrast to exploration 
 of the given — a conception more appropriate to adjustment 
 to the first world. 
 
 It may be helpful to carry this introductory note on 
 adjustment to the second world a step further. It is by no 
 means an easy matter to get a real grip of the problem. The 
 social world is a spiritual continuum and thus in antithetical 
 contrast to the material continuum. Perhaps we are justified 
 in saying that it pervades men as spiritual beings in a way 
 analogous to that in which the continuum of relations which 
 we think of as physical laws, pervades the phenomena of 
 nature. It animates and controls their spiritual life, although 
 it has no separate existence apart from them. This some- 
 what difficult point will be discussed more fully later. ^' The 
 point of view may be further illustrated by the proposition 
 that history is more than a sum of biographies. It records 
 the social evolution of laws, customs, institutions, traditions 
 and spiritual achievements, as well as the contributions of 
 individuals to the process. Social evolution has brought 
 into existence a spiritual continuum, the fabric of civilisation, 
 to which the individual stands in as vital a relation as the 
 air he breathes. But there is this difference consequent on 
 its spiritual texture. The continuum of nature he finds out- 
 stretched, the social continuum he must seek if he would 
 find it. The first is solid and resistant, the second spiritual 
 and elusive. The first is a continuum of perceptual, and 
 therefore constraining and arresting, presentations. The 
 second is a continuum of instincts, emotions, ideas and ideals. 
 
 The third world, the moral order, is like the second in 
 that it is made of spiritual material, but it is suigeneris, and 
 adjustment is of another kind. It is a world of values as 
 distinct from a world of facts. It is a world of divine revela- 
 tion, and yet science, facing this domain fearlessly, as it 
 should, is now offering an explanation of its natural genesis 
 in the mind of man. McDougall's " Social Psychology " 
 and other similar works, have gone far to make clear how 
 moral and religious sentiment can develop from instincts and 
 
 18 See Book II, Chap. I.
 
 INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 emotions. Such detailed reference as is necessary for our 
 purpose will be made in the course of the third book. It 
 should be made clear there how this divine flower can 
 blossom on the natural plant of human development. Here 
 we are only concerned with its differentia as a world or order. 
 When we say that this consists in its nature as a world of 
 ethical values, as distinct from the facts of the physical and 
 social worlds, the meaning will be clear enough for our 
 present purpose — the creation of a schema which will make 
 attention to further detail easier. Everyone has a general 
 idea of what is meant by ethical values. They seem to make 
 a world reserved for man : animals, even the most domesti- 
 cated, appear to be shut out from it. And even man has only 
 the right of entry in proportion as he can cast off, inhibit or 
 transfigure the nature he shares with animals. Some men 
 only get occasional glimpses of it, for the majority its light is 
 fitful, and few find in it a continuum of illumination and 
 inspiration. The reason seems to be that its reality, its very 
 existence, for the individual, depends on acts of subjective 
 creation. In other words its objectivity, for him, is self- 
 made. Indeed its total objectivity, so to put it, at any time, 
 depends on the resultant of the moral insight and purpose, 
 together the moral momentum, of men. This does not, of 
 course, affect the question of its divine origin. It does not 
 affect the objective character of the inspiration w^hich the 
 lives of great men and the thoughts of great writers originate. 
 It does, however, mean that for the individual, and thus for 
 a theory of education, the central conception is neither ex- 
 ploration, nor discovery, but creation. As the differentia of 
 this world, then, is a fabric of moral values, so the differentia 
 of adjustment to it is the conception of creation. The third 
 book will be developed from this point of view. It follows 
 that this third world will not have the unity and continuity, 
 or the objectivity, for the individual, of the first two. Moral 
 education, indeed, is, as we hope to shew, just the effort to 
 create them. Success at the best will only be approximate. 
 We shall take advantage of moral impulse, example, and 
 even precept, as the material which mediate adjustment, just 
 as we work on the phenomena of the physical and the social 
 worlds. But the adjustment in the case of the moral order 
 will be bv creation and adoption. This order is man-sus-
 
 14 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 tained at the same time as it is divinely revealed. It is borne 
 up, like the fame of Browning's grammarian, on the hymns 
 and shoulders of men.^' 
 
 The conception of adjustment which we have chosen in 
 the case of each of the three worlds, and the names we have 
 appropriated — exploration, discovery, and creation respec- 
 tively — suggest cognitive activity, especially the first two. 
 What we have said implies feeling and action also, but it 
 may be well to state it expressly. The three continua are, of 
 course, not for contemplation only : they define spheres of 
 action. That is what adjustment means. There is, no 
 doubt, something in the parallelism between cognition, feel- 
 ing, and conation as aspects of experience, and the three 
 worlds of nature, society, and morality. But there is no 
 point, for a theory of education, in pressing it too far. For 
 on the side of mind we can only separate these three aspects 
 by a process of abstraction. Every concrete psychosis reveals 
 all three elements though in varying proportions. On the 
 side of the worlds, too, there is inter-penetration. For 
 example, there is moral value, as well as social utility, in a 
 scientific investigation of, say, ocean currents ; history is the 
 outcome of the application of both scientific and ethical 
 criteria to recorded facts ; and an ethical truth has social appli- 
 cation in a material world. The threefold man must be 
 adjusted to the threefold universe. 
 
 We may take another glance at our three worlds before 
 leaving this preliminary survey. The second is intermediate 
 between the first and third from the point of view of con- 
 tinuity and stability of existence. The first is the world of 
 birth and death, of growth and decay, so far, at least, as its 
 organic forms are concerned ; and its inorganic forms are in 
 an eternal flux of composition and decomposition. The 
 rhythm of development, maturity, and decline is, indeed, a 
 feature which may, without strain of metaphor, be predicated 
 of the process of evolution in all its forms, organic and in- 
 organic. The second world is, by comparison at all events, 
 a stable and progressive structure. This sounds paradoxical. 
 We are so accustomed to think of the physical and material 
 — men, trees, mountains — as the standard and archetype of 
 
 13 " Let us begin and carry up this corpse, 
 Singing together."
 
 INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 the stable and permanent, that the suggestion of their in- 
 feriority in these respects to that attenuated social and 
 spiritual fabric which we call in a comprehensive way civilisa- 
 tion, seems extravagant and absurd. Yet it is profoundly 
 true. Civilisation, as the repository of spiritual achieve- 
 ment, is more tenacious of its treasures than the physical 
 universe. The bones of Hamlet or his prototype have long 
 been dissipated through the fields of Denmark, but Shake- 
 speare's conception and delineation of that complex person- 
 ality will live for ever. The reluctant fingers of King John 
 are of the earth earthy, but the Great Charter lives in the 
 law-courts of to-day. The planets are changing, but Kepler's 
 empirical laws and Newton's rational interpretation of them 
 are validated every hour. What we may have lost by the 
 apparent explosion of the theory of the transmission of 
 acquired characteristics from parent to child, we have, per- 
 haps, more than gained in the accumulated products of 
 social heredity. History, literature, politics, economics, 
 science, live on and are for ever extending the unbroken 
 fabric of civilisation. It is here, if anywhere, that we find 
 continuity and progress. While the first world is the world 
 of birth and death and the second the world of unbroken and 
 progressive life, the third is the world of eternity. For 
 although we, with our human limitations, progress but slowly 
 and painfully towards the good and evolve our ideals as we 
 go, our very progress and our developing ideals postulate a 
 moral order eternally true and eternally perfect. Between 
 the world of growth and decay and the world of truth and 
 perfection, the world of progressive civilisation stands, linked 
 on to each by the bonds of destiny. The chains are un- 
 breakable. Man is harnessed to his physical environment 
 but he embodies and mediates the moral order. 
 
 We may also look again, in the same general and com- 
 prehensive way, at the process of adjustment. It will reflect 
 the characteristics of each of the worlds man inherits. As a 
 member of the physical world he will experience, in adjust- 
 ment, its waxings and wanings over shorter and longer 
 cycles. Morning and evening, summer and winter, will 
 have their ups and downs, their successes and their failures. 
 Childhood, adolescence and manhood, will develop, mature 
 and decay, each with its characteristic achievements and
 
 1 6 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 short-comings. As a social being, if adjustment is success- 
 ful, his progress should be more uniform and cumulative, as 
 the woof and warp of his social inheritance are more clearly 
 displayed and envelop him more closely and intimately. As 
 a moral being he will have to re-create and help to support 
 the ideal order, the order of values; but he will have the 
 abiding satisfaction of knowing that the more coherently he 
 can weave the details of conduct into it the more he will be 
 laying hold of the steadfast and stable, the eternal element 
 of life. And it is clear that adjustment in all three directions 
 must be a continuous process and one without finality. It is 
 well to get rid at the outset of all notions of boundaries 
 between schooling and life : boundaries and barriers in time 
 or between agencies. Education is as long as life and as 
 wide as life. The distinction between primary, secondary, 
 and higher education, and that between the education of the 
 home, the school, and the world, are purely artificial. 
 Adjustment is constant, and, as we are to maintain, three- 
 sided. We may add that within these conceptions that of 
 vocational adjustment will find its true place. We shall deal 
 with it in a separate chapter. Here all we need say is that 
 adjustment to our three worlds will be the final criterion, of 
 it that we shall apply. 
 
 §5. The next question is what use we are to make of the 
 guidance — perhaps we had better say inspiration, or, at any 
 rate, put it first— which psychology, logic, ethics, sociology, 
 and philosophy offer to the student and practitioner of edu- 
 cation. This seems to be the proper place for a discussion 
 of it. We have indicated, in outline, what we take to be the 
 purpose and scope of education. That it seemed necessary 
 to set down first. Education must define its task before con- 
 sidering what help it can get from scientific truth and philo- 
 sophic speculation. It must stand on its own feet, like law 
 or medicine, demarcate its own province, and extricate its 
 own goal.^" It is the more necessary to insist on this, be- 
 cause education is a science and an art which stands between 
 the natural sciences, like physics, botany, and psychology 
 on the one hand and the theories of value, like logic, 
 
 20 The article by Professor Findlay on the Science of Education in the 
 second volume of the Reports of Special Enquiries, Board of Education, 
 London, may be consulted.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 17 
 
 assthetics, and ethics, together with the speculations of 
 philosophy, on the other. It is true, indeed, that even in 
 attempting- to define its scope and purpose by means of a 
 direct and immediate survey of the life to be lived, as we 
 have tried to do, it is impossible to escape the implications 
 of the theories and speculations of the enquiries which lie 
 above it, and of the results of those which lie below it. That 
 is because they themselves throw direct light upon the whole 
 life to which the individual is to be adjusted. This does not, 
 however, affect the logical priority of educational purposes 
 and aims. Nor can we evade a posteriori and practical con- 
 siderations. Experience, tradition, social needs and aspira- 
 tions, economic considerations — these are some of the factors 
 to be taken into account, as well as scientific results and philo- 
 sophic ideals, before we can arrive at a right orientation 
 towards the task of education. They will emerge in this 
 essay as we proceed. If we start from either end and try to 
 find, by deduction, a road to the goal of education, neglect- 
 ing the other factors just mentioned, we not only abandon 
 the claim to independence which a theory of education can 
 and should vindicate, but we arrive at a one-sided and 
 abstract point of view which does not take in life in its con- 
 crete complexity. From the top the path leads to idealism 
 cut ofif from the firm ground of fact, and from the bottom to 
 an uninspired naturalism; and both ways arrive at the indi- 
 vidual in isolation ; whereas, as we maintain, the end is the 
 individual in adjustment to three worlds. The theory of 
 education should take up its own ground. 
 
 It is perhaps in the practice rather than the theory of 
 education, however, that the deductive line of approach, 
 especially from psychology, has found so many adherents. 
 It is, therefore, necessary to state as clearly as possible what 
 we hold to be the sound view in this sphere also. The issue 
 may be made clear by asking what is meant by the applica- 
 tion of psychological theory to teaching. Now, it is always 
 dangerous to dogmatise about education. It is a business of 
 so many departments that pushing one may hinder another. 
 There is an obvious sense in which every bit of theory and 
 every successful, or, indeed, unsuccessful, eflfort at teaching, 
 is the application of psychology. Principles and results 
 must be according to nature. It may also safely be said that
 
 1 8 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 there is no gleam of insight into principle which arrests the 
 thinker with the sting of reality, that will not, sooner or later, 
 illuminate some detail of practice. The reward of reflection 
 is certain. The bread cast on the remotest waters of science 
 or philosophy is found again in the course of the days. But 
 consider the elements of success in any successful bit of 
 teaching. They will usually be found to be sympathy, in- 
 tuition, enthusiasm for the subject, the outcome of quick 
 diagnosis which we call tact, and adaptability, born of ex- 
 perience. And these are just those elements which, while 
 they are, of course, of psychical origin, almost elude the most 
 rigorous psychological analysis. They cannot ultimately 
 elude it, but the student without them may get up from an 
 application of, say, McDougall's thorough examination of 
 the constituents of sympathy, with a feeling of despair about 
 translating them from the pages to the class-room. And the 
 best teachers will be ready to admit that the fountain of these 
 rare aptitudes often runs dry. Consider again the arresting 
 fact that that warm vital contact has to be established with 
 thirty different pupils who, with the best efforts at classifi- 
 cation, will face the topic with thirty unique systems of 
 apperceptive machinery. That fact alone should give us 
 pause before we set out light-heartedly to "apply" psycho- 
 logical doctrine. The truth seems to be that the time for 
 such doctrine is before we face the concrete situation, when 
 we are rehearsing the task whether in the elaborate form of 
 notes of lessons or in the preliminary mental forecast which 
 the very best teachers cannot afford to shirk ; and afterwards 
 when we are feeling the glow of success or the ebb of failure. 
 It is not unlike golf. Thinking before and after is the way 
 to such success as we are capable of, but it is as likely as not 
 to hinder the playing of the stroke. Let it be repeated that 
 no glimpse of theory, whether of science or philosophy, will 
 lead a man astray. The practice of the naturally expert and 
 of the less gifted will inevitably be better for it. And both 
 will realise the inestimable privilege of membership of a 
 vocation rationally buttressed as a profession. The educator, 
 be he preacher, politician, parent, or schoolmaster, who has 
 lived himself into scientific and philosophic truth, will find it 
 an abiding source of inspiration. The guidance he will get 
 will be constant and pervasive. It will not be a substitute
 
 INTRODUCTION ig 
 
 for that native power of touching the springs of responsive- 
 ness, but it will unquestionably develop and perfect it. Only 
 it is not to be thought of as machinery to be directly applied ; 
 it is the turning on of light. 
 
 §6. In recent times interest in psychology has been 
 steadily widening and deepening, and not least in its appli- 
 cation to the theory and practice of education ; and we may 
 profitably consider broadly the significance for our purpose 
 of any recently-established general truths, or of the harvest 
 of any new field of enquiry. The old ground has been 
 illuminated by new conceptions and new ground has been, 
 and is being, broken. We must be alert, ready to adapt our 
 theory and practice to the progress of knowledge. But we 
 must also be wary. We need established truth, not un- 
 established hypothesis. The mere glamour of new possi- 
 bilities should not tempt us from the firm ground of the old 
 and the tried. On the other hand, the cake of custom and 
 the established is often opaque to new light. Conservatism 
 is useful but its glance is always behind ; science and phil- 
 osophy look constantly ahead. Flexibility is not incom- 
 patible with stability. 
 
 Perhaps the principle of most profound significance for 
 us is what we may call the dynamic character of experience 
 and particularly of the subjective element in it. Conceptions 
 derived from biology, e.g., psychoplasm, have almost en- 
 tirely replaced conceptions drawn from physics, e.g., the 
 atomistic idea of psychic elements. The subject is no longer 
 thought of as a passive being, merely beaten upon and 
 shaped from without. He is, when he becomes a self-con- 
 scious individual, rather the predominant partner in the 
 business of adjustment. While as a mere animal, as organic 
 tissue, as one with the other elements of organic and in- 
 organic nature, he is merely a product and development of 
 natural forces, as a self-conscious personality he contributes 
 more and more to experience as he develops weaving its fabric 
 after his own pattern ; a human pattern, of course, because 
 he and his fellows are built after the same general mental 
 plan ; but an individual pattern, because the content of his 
 own past experience becomes ever more organised as time 
 goes on, and new material is immediately woven in with the 
 old. This is always so in mature life, unless some com-
 
 20 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 pletely revolutionary thought or purpose is revealed and re- 
 shapes us. But that is rare. And anyway the process of life 
 practically in its entirety, both before and after such a revo- 
 lution, if it ever occurs, may be described as dynamic de- 
 velopment of the subjective factor in experience. There is 
 a fine compensation as between man as a part of the natural 
 world and man as a member of the world of self-conscious 
 experience. The former is in the main controlled by his 
 environment, the latter, in the main, makes his own. 
 
 This dynamic conception of the subjective element in 
 experience had its origin in Kant's philosophy. The Car- 
 tesian dualism had led on the one hand to the rationalism of 
 Leibnitz and Wolff and on the other to the empiricism of the 
 British school, culminating in the scepticism of Hume from 
 which Kant's critical thought emerged. ^^ But, whatever 
 view may be held of the relation of the pure and the empirical 
 ego, all modern psychologists postulate an apperceptive pro- 
 cess. We pass inevitably to the conception of the ever- 
 increasing potency — the dynamic quality — of the subjective 
 element in experience. The works of Ward, James, and 
 Stout are pervaded by this conception of subjective and 
 synthetic activity.-^ 
 
 The same point of view is revealed in the modern tend- 
 ency to define psychology in terms of experience rather than 
 consciousness, and to reject intellectualism. " A decided re- 
 action against intellectualism, which first set in more than a 
 century ago among philosophers, has since been greatly 
 extended and confirmed by the ascendancy of evolutionary 
 ideas and the consequent growth of genetic and comparative 
 psychology. The result is that in the present day psy- 
 chologists are beginning more and more generally to insist 
 that not intellect but will, not cognition but conation, not 
 sensitivity but activity, is the clue to a true understanding of 
 the character and development of experience."" It is this 
 dynamic synthetic quality we wish to bring out, and the 
 consequent individuality of experience. So many men so 
 many worlds is true because, as we now note, they weave the 
 material given into a pattern of their own, fixing not merely 
 
 21 J. M. Baldwin, History of Psychology, Vol. I, pp. 95-99- 
 
 22 See especially Chapter I of Ward's Psychological Principles, 
 i?3 Ward, op. cit, p. 29.
 
 INTRODUCTION 21 
 
 the warp of cognition but the woof of conation. From the 
 same source, the synthetic activity of the subject, come also 
 the unity and continuity of experience. Its form, pattern, 
 and coherence are thus the work of the individual. 
 
 We note, too, that change coexists with unity and co- 
 herence. The terms current now are such as these : differen- 
 tiation within a continuum, mental process, the " stream " of 
 consciousness, "section " of the stream. Whether direct or 
 metaphorical expressions are used the implication is of 
 change and flux. That no two moments or phases of mental 
 process have the same significance, that there is no repe- 
 tition in experience — these are now the commonplaces of 
 psychology. Dynamic evolutionary conceptions have com- 
 pletely displaced innate idea, faculty, and psychic atoms of 
 fixed and determinate quality. The very opposite idea of 
 constant change, of complete fluidity, holds the field. 
 " There is no feeling, no idea, no volition, which is not under- 
 going change every moment : if a mental state ceased to vary 
 its duration would cease to flow — the truth is that we change 
 without ceasing."-* 
 
 We may note here that Bergson has added the notion of 
 creation to that of change and evolution. From change to 
 creation is a big step, but the transition is helped by the 
 conception of momentum. And certainly that conception is 
 also pervasive of the writings of Ward, James and Stout. 
 There seems, indeed, to be very little doubt that the idea of 
 creative evolution may appropriately be applied both to 
 individualistic experience and to the common experience 
 which constitutes history. Whatever may be the judgment 
 of posterity on it as a theory of the genesis of all reality, of 
 life and matter, of the organic and the inorganic, it does un- 
 questionably appear to be of vital significance for the spiritual 
 life we call experience, whether of the one or of the many in 
 common. It is certainly foolish to refer to the thought of 
 James and Bergson as obscurantism,^^ or to fulminate against 
 the latter as Bateson does.^® The conception of creative 
 evolution does not stand or fall with the idea of intuition. 
 Something like it is behind Bradley's dictum that association 
 
 -* Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. i, 2. 
 
 -5 As Dean Inge does, Cambridge Essays on Education, p, i^. 
 
 26 Ibid, p. 138.
 
 22 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 marries only universals; and behind the theory of relative 
 suggestion" as developed by Stout and his whole doctrine of 
 mental activity." It is contained in embryo in all Ward's 
 psychology. It is certainly a conception which fits with the 
 theory of education adopted here. It is perhaps not irrele- 
 vant to point out that experimental psychology as applied to 
 education is shifting the centre of gravity of method from 
 teaching to learning, from outside to inside, from the teacher 
 to the pupil. ^^ We shall not hesitate to add the conception 
 of creation to that of an active principle — the logical subject 
 demanded by the very idea of experience, whether we call it 
 the pure ego or not. We have, indeed, already almost 
 assumed it in referring to adjustment as a double-edged pro- 
 cess. We have actually postulated it as of the essence of 
 adjustment to the moral order. We believe it to be a factor 
 of adjustment to the first and second worlds also. 
 
 Another principle of first importance which, in its full 
 and eloquent explication at all events, we owe to the late Pro- 
 fessor James, is the doctrine of psychic fringes.'" He dis- 
 tinguishes the focus of a presentation from its fringe, margin, 
 or halo. The former is clear in consciousness. It may be 
 anything from a percept like an orange to a concept like the 
 British Constitution. The latter is vague and inarticulate 
 but nevertheless intensely active. James calls it a " feeling 
 of tendency," using the term feeling in a cognitive sense. It 
 is an awareness of relations. What is in focus " swims in a 
 felt fringe of relations."" The fringe gives it familiarity, or 
 relatedness, binding it, though we are not conscious how, to 
 what has gone before or what is coming after in conscious- 
 ness. The context of meaning which a single word in a 
 sentence has, is known by this fringe in consciousness. The 
 paragraph is similarly related to the sentence and the whole 
 topic to the paragraph. " It is no exaggeration to say," 
 writes Dr. Stout, " that this mode of thinking pervades our 
 whole mental life. If it is ever absent, it is absent only in 
 very primitive phases of conscious experience."'^ 
 
 2 7 Analytic Psychology, Vol. II, Book II, Chap. VI. 
 
 28 Ibid, Vol. I. Book II, Chap. I. 
 
 2» Cf. Rusk's, Experimental Education, pp. 199-230. 
 
 30 Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, pp. 249 ff, 281, 282, and 471, 472. 
 
 31 Ibid Vol. I, p. 289. 
 
 32 Analytic Psychology, Vol. 1, p. 92.
 
 INTRODUCTION 23 
 
 The principle is important for us because it indicates the 
 birthplace of the unity and continuity of experience which is 
 an essential of adjustment. It is the point of departure for 
 the evolution of experience as a coherent whole. The way in 
 which the lower aspects of conscious life, e.g., percepts, are 
 taken up into conceptual thought — what Kant found such a 
 stumbling block, viz., the bringing of perceptions to concep- 
 tions — finds an explanation in this doctrine of fringes. It 
 bridges the gap between the empirical and the rational, a 
 task so difficult, e.g., for Descartes, limited as he was by his 
 static conception of the res cogilans. It is also a sound index 
 to the solution of a frequent problem of pedagogy. The 
 question how far we ought to try to make rational a process 
 which can be done empirically, like the multiplication of 
 decimals, when it is first attempted, is one which is constantly 
 recurring. The doctrine of fringes points to two things. It 
 indicates that, without our intervention, save to see that the 
 difficulty is introduced at the proper place, the fringe of re- 
 lations will be there. We have something to work upon. 
 We are justified in inferring, in the second place, that we 
 shall proceed soundly if we let the fringe, the rationale, come 
 gradually into focus. If we vary our empirical procedure — 
 our examples — wisely, the fringe of relations will vary with 
 them and at the appropriate moment the rational element will 
 emerge into full life. And conversely, we may create a 
 fringe, for example, by a quick reading over of a play, which 
 will operate as an agent of appreciation of passages, incidents, 
 scenes, and characters as they emerge. So also a final read- 
 ing W'ill give a final unity. We may go so far as to say that 
 the whole process of adjustment to all three worlds depends 
 upon a sound appreciation and a proper use of focal and 
 marginal factors in experience. Only we shall do well to 
 observe a warning which Dr. Stout gives. " His termin- 
 ology " [James'] he writes, " is convenient, and we shall use 
 it freely. In one respect, however, it tends to mislead. It 
 is apt to give a false impression of the comparative import- 
 ance of the distinct apprehension of the part [the focus] on 
 the one hand, and the distinctionless apprehension of rhe 
 whole [the fringe] on the other. Fringes are less essential 
 than that which is fringed ; overtones count for less than their 
 fundamental tone ; a halo is merely an appendage of what it 
 
 3
 
 24 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 encircles. But in the metaphorical application of such terms, 
 which we are now considering, this does not hold. If any- 
 thing is to be regarded as relatively unessential, it is not the 
 psychic fringe but the image or other apprehension of detail 
 which it fringes. "^^ 
 
 These two principles, the synthetic and creative activity 
 of the subjective factor in experience and the fringe of refer- 
 ence in almost all presentations which is a dynamic factor giv- 
 ing continuity to experience, we must take over from recent 
 achievements in psychology, so that they may inform and 
 pervade both our theory and practice. As to new depart- 
 ments, new fields of enquiry, it is significant that perhaps the 
 most fertile also throw most light on the active side of mental 
 life. We refer to the work of McDougall,^^ Ross," Shand," 
 Graham Wallas,^^ and Drever,^* on the instincts, emotions, 
 and sentiments, and their effect on the conative and volitional 
 development of man. The first-named refers to it as a 
 " dynamic, functional, voluntaristic, view of mind."^' It is 
 astonishing to think, when the results already reached are 
 considered, that, while cognition and volition have been so 
 exhaustively analysed, mainly from a static point of view, 
 the mediate area of instinct and emotion, whence the whole 
 motive force of the mental life is derived, has remained so 
 long practically unexploited. It is astonishing, first, because 
 the evolution of individual experience on its dynamic side is 
 involved. We are now in possession of at least the broad out- 
 lines of a genetic account, connecting the highest abstract 
 sentiments with the innate instincts which man has inherited 
 from his animal ancestry, and shewing their composite func- 
 tioning in the complexity of his emotional life. We have 
 revealed, in outline, the development of an affective and 
 moral continuum in experience, comparable with the develop- 
 ment of the cognitive continuum. 
 
 §7. In the second place this new psychology shows us 
 that development in its social implications. We have here a 
 
 3" Analytic Psychology, Vol. I, pp. 92, 93. 
 
 '* Social Psychology. 
 
 •''•'' Social Psychology. 
 
 ^^ The Foundations of Character. 
 
 3^ The Great Society. 
 
 ^* Instinct in Man. 
 
 ^' Op. cit., p. 16.
 
 INTRODUCTION 25 
 
 subjective key to adjustment to the second and third worlds 
 especially, but also to the first. It is clear that a student of 
 that adjustment must make himself thoroughly familiar with 
 that key. We shall refer from time to time to the results of 
 these investigations, but the student must not be satisfied with 
 occasional references. He should realise that he must take 
 up its standpoint and develop a thorough familiarity with its 
 field. An analysis of consciousness will no longer furnish 
 an adequate equipment. He must be at home in experience 
 on the side of behaviour, and the springs of behaviour or 
 conduct, in both their individual and their social implications. 
 There are two other recently-explored fields of enquiry to 
 which we must refer : experimental psychology, especially in 
 its educational applications, and organised child-study. Thev 
 serve two most important purposes. First they aim at cor- 
 recting and amplifying the results obtained by introspective 
 methods, and by the observation of individuals which can 
 only be interpreted by introspection. It should be clearly 
 understood that they do not affect the position maintained by 
 the foremost psychologists, e.g., Dr. Ward,*" that the stand- 
 point of psychology is essentially individualistic. Experi- 
 ence is the subject-matter of psychology and experience on 
 the side of consciousness, feeling, and behaviour, is a phe- 
 nomenon of individual life. And adjustment, our topic, is 
 an individualistic process. At the same time whatever of pre- 
 cision and generality experimental and comparative methods 
 can contribute is clearly of the utmost importance. It is a 
 contribution to psychology as a science. Secondly — and this 
 is only another way of putting the same truth — these two 
 methods will elucidate and validate our knowledge of the indi- 
 vidual himself : what qualities, dispositions, and powers he 
 shares with his fellows, and what peculiarities of quality or 
 intensity are his own. Their results will thus be welcome to 
 every true student of the theory and practice of education. 
 There are enthusiasts who see in the experimental and com- 
 parative psychological study of children a possibility of re- 
 placing our tentative methods of evaluating their potentiali- 
 ties and attainments by a precise and scientific estimate. The 
 Binet tests, with their elaborations and refinements, have 
 
 *" Psychological Principles, pp. 26-28.
 
 26 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 apparently been fruitful in investigations into alleged 
 mentally deficient children. A card recording the results of 
 scientific diagnosis at successive stages of a pupil's schooling, 
 is promised us/^ It opens out a new prospect and the more 
 fields we can draw upon the better. We shall have to be 
 content with this bare reference. These new depart- 
 ments have not yet reached the frontiers of the empire. At 
 the time of writing/^ there is, so far as we know, no properly- 
 equipped laboratory of experimental psychology in South 
 Africa. Nor has any scientific observation of normal 
 children been organised. In connection with the medical 
 inspection branch of the Transvaal Education Department 
 Dr. J. M. Moll has made a careful study of mentally deficient 
 children. With these unfortunates a beginning has been 
 made. Otherwise the field of experimental and comparative 
 investigation is unbroken.'*^ 
 
 §8. We come now to a point of fundamental import- 
 ance. It is the position and function of the teacher in rela- 
 tion to this business of adjustment which we take to be the 
 end and essence of education. In the process itself there 
 doesn't seem to be any room for him. On the one hand there 
 is the individual and on the other the three worlds, and in 
 the miracle of experience they, the subjective and the objec- 
 tive, have become one; while adjustment is but the elabora- 
 tion and extension of this unity. The whole business is 
 between the individual and his worlds, and the teacher is out- 
 side it, external to it. He may facilitate it, turning his atten- 
 tion to one or other member of the wedded pair. He may 
 approach the individual, and his avenues of approach will be 
 one or other of the instincts or emotional dispositions which 
 are the prime movers of mental life. He may try fear, pug- 
 nacity, curiosity, or svmpathy, or a combination of them, to 
 quicken the current which seems to him sluggish. Or he 
 
 *' Adams, Evolution of Educational Thcon , pp. 352-363. 
 
 ■*- October, 10 19. 
 
 *3 A useful summarj- will be found in Rusk's Experimental Education. 
 The reader may wonder at the absence of all reference to the developments of 
 psychology associated with the names of Freud and Jung and to what is called 
 psycho-analysis. There is no doubt of the great importance for education of 
 this field, including as it does such topics as mental activity beyond the boun- 
 daries of consciousness, submerged complexes as springs of conscious behaviour, 
 and, generally, forces which profoundly affect conscious life though we may 
 be unaware of them. No doubt adjustment in the individual case will be con- 
 ditioned by them, but they hardly seem to.be ready to be woven into any 
 general theory.
 
 INTRODUCTION 27 
 
 may approach the fact or truth, whichever of the three worlds 
 it belongs to, and see whether anything can be done by Hghl- 
 ing it up, or hning in main features and blotting out detail, 
 to facilitate adjustment. But whether he tries subject or 
 object or both together he remains outside the process, a 
 spectator, a manipulator, perhaps a disturber; he is never in 
 it and of it. Within that mysterious synthetic activity 
 through which the individual is at once appropriating and 
 contributing to his environment, forming and being formed 
 by it, and which we are considering under the conception of 
 adjustment, the teacher has neither place nor part. 
 
 And yet the very opposite view is commonly, indeed, 
 almost universally, held. It certainly is by nine hundred 
 and ninety-nine parents out of a thousand. When they send 
 their boy or girl to school, their idea is that the teacher is in 
 possession of something which he will pass on directly to the 
 child. No doubt there is much less ignorance than there was 
 about what schooling means. Probably the seal and wax 
 conception is less prevalent than it was. The growth of 
 democracy has raised the value of the individual and his 
 schooling, and the meaning and purpose of it are topics to 
 which men's minds are turning with greater persistence. 
 Development as well as learning has now, no doubt, a place 
 in the average parent's conception of it. But there is no 
 question that he would describe that development, if he ever 
 attempted to, as the result of direct contact of teacher and 
 pupil. He w^ould say that fact, truth, knowledge, was trans- 
 mitted or instilled by a direct process. That is part of the 
 current meaning of teaching or instruction. They are 
 thought of as directly analogous to inoculation or impregna- 
 tion. The business is one between pupil and teacher imme- 
 diately and directly. 
 
 The same idea pervades text-books on teaching. One 
 would be quite safe in saying that it also permeates the 
 thought and practice of the majority of teachers. The pupil 
 is one term of the relation, whether thought of as acquisition 
 or training or both ; and the teacher is the other. A common- 
 place of the text books will illustrate the point. The teacher 
 must take up a position where he is in focus to every member 
 of the class. Why? In order that he may be most advan- 
 tageously placed for the business of inoculation. The neces-
 
 28 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 sity for the activity and co-operation of the pupil is not lost 
 sight of. But the underlying assumption is that direct action 
 and reaction between teacher and pupils is the essence of 
 the process. School architecture starts out from the same 
 assumption. The deep oblong is the usual shape of a class 
 room, and the justification is that in it each pupil falls within 
 the angle of vision of the teacher when in his correct position 
 in the middle of the platform. If it be asked why he should 
 be, an answer assuming the necessity of direct and immediate 
 relation and communication between teacher and pupil may 
 be confidently expected. 
 
 Take again the common implication of such a statement 
 as "A taught me mathematics." What is it but that A in- 
 stilled into me some of the knowledge he possessed, that he 
 inoculated me with it? But surely that is superficial and 
 erroneous, and the fundamental truth is that he put me en 
 rapport with mathematical processes, and such success as was 
 attained is properly described as my adjustment to this 
 quantitative aspect of reality and that of it to me. The 
 adjustment was not of me and him but of me and this depart- 
 ment of truth. And the issue is vital. For we all know that 
 A sometimes is so imbued with the conception of instillation 
 that he is a positive hindrance to adjustment, well meaning 
 and enthusiastic though he may be. 
 
 §9. We find the same idea haunting educational theory 
 on a scientific and philosophic level. Professor Adams, in 
 his search for the connotation of education, submits the con- 
 ception to a rigorous logical analysis, as a result of which he 
 finds that it is bi-polar. After deciding to adopt education 
 for the wider all-comprehensive term that includes teaching 
 or instruction as a part, he goes on to say : " The close con- 
 nection between the teaching process and the educative be- 
 comes clearer when we realise that they have in common a 
 characteristic that may be called bi-polarity. In both cases 
 there are two forces concerned, both imply an active and a 
 passive member : there is the teacher and there is the 
 pupil, the educator and the educand. The interaction 
 between these pairs is essential to teaching and to educa- 
 tion. There must always be a teacher-or-educator pole 
 and a pupil-or-educand pole."" He explains how, with 
 
 ** Evolution of Educational Theory, p. 18.
 
 INTRODUCTION 29 
 
 the progress of education, there is a gradual transfer of 
 the centre of gravity of the process from the educator to the 
 educand pole. " There is a gradual redistribution of activity 
 between the educator pole and the educand pole. ... A 
 good system of education is marked by just this transition 
 step by step from educand pole to educator pole. At the 
 earlier stages the external educator does practically all the 
 work as educator that is to be done ; but as the process 
 advances the educand takes a hand, and by and by comes 
 to such a mastery of himself that he is practically his own 
 educator."*^ When he discusses what he calls "subjective 
 education," he says: "In subjective education we have the 
 phenomenon of the merging of the educator in the educand. 
 The self takes the self in hand, so that educator and educand 
 are one. . . . Polarity in education is in fact nothing 
 more than a special application of the subject-object relation 
 in the ego."*® This is very near to the position we wish to 
 establish. Referring to what he calls "cosmic education" 
 he describes it as the process in which " Nature is at the 
 educator pole."*' The result of his analysis of the concept 
 of education he gives as follows : 
 
 " (i) It is a bi-polar process in which one personality 
 acts upon another in order to modify the de- 
 velop of that other. 
 
 " (2) The process is not only a conscious but a deliberate 
 one. The educator has the clearly realised in- 
 tention of modifying the development of the 
 educand. 
 
 " (3) The means by which the development of the 
 educand is to be modified are twofold ; (a) the 
 direct application of the educator's personality 
 to the personality of the educand, and (b) the 
 use of knowledge in its various forms. We 
 shall find as we go on that the communication 
 of knowledge tends to play the predominant 
 part."** 
 
 ''■'> Ibid, p. iq. 
 
 *•» Ibid, p. 22. 
 
 47 Ibid, p. 31. 
 
 *8 Ibid, p. 39.
 
 30 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 He goes on to add that " It remains to be discovered what 
 the aim of the whole process is. It will be felt that it is too 
 vague to say that it is merely to modify the development of 
 the educand. We want to know in what direction the modi- 
 fication is to take place. We know in a general way the 
 process; but we do not yet know its goal."^' He indicates 
 that self-realisation and many-sided-interest are two aspects of 
 the goal which are really complementary, and that in their 
 combination or composition a solution will be found. We 
 think they can be combined in the unifying conception of 
 adjustment. 
 
 §io. But our difficulty is that a logical analysis of the 
 conception of education, abstracted from any idea of the end 
 to be achieved, will not reveal the true relation of pupil and 
 teacher, of educand and educator. And the bi-polarity it does 
 reveal, is not the relation revealed when we consider the two 
 at work on the concrete process of self-realisation and the 
 development of a many-sided-interest which we combine 
 under the notion of adjustment. Abstractly considered there 
 is no question that education implies the bi-polarity of edu- 
 cator and educand, and in the concrete process of adjustment 
 there is what might be called a subordinate and ancillary bi- 
 polarity of the two. But it seems to us that the essential and 
 final bi-polarity in adjustment is of the educand and his 
 worlds in experience. It is just what Professor Adams has 
 himself described as "the subject-object relation in the ego." 
 In that description of polarity, however, there is no room for 
 the teacher or educator. He has disappeared from it just 
 because he has served his subordinate purpose. We prefer 
 to say that from the very beginning of teaching and educa- 
 tion, the essential poles are the pupil or educand and each 
 bit of the worlds to which education and teaching adjust him 
 and which he adjusts to himself. In the interests of both 
 sound theory and sound practice it seems to be essential to 
 assert the altogether subsidiary, ancillary, and transient per- 
 sonal bi-polarity of teacher and pupil or educator and edu- 
 cand. As Bergson might put it, the logic of education, as 
 such, is static, and must be adapted to the dynamic process 
 of adjustment. 
 
 '* Ibid, p. 39.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 31 
 
 Let us try to represent the process, as we conceive it, by 
 means of a diagram. It is crude and subject to the dis- 
 advantages of all diagrammatic representation of the fluid 
 character of mental process; but it may help. 
 
 Let us suppose that P represents the pupil and W a fact 
 or idea belonging to one of the three worlds which the three 
 concentric circles may stand for. We need not distinguish 
 one from the other, by means of different letters, for our 
 present purpose. The straight line from P to W may repre- 
 sent adjustment, the double-edged nature of which the double 
 arrow-heads may indicate. Let T be the teacher supposed in 
 one or other of the three worlds according to the nature of 
 the fact or idea being presented. The lines from T to W, 
 with the double arrow-heads, may be taken to indicate that 
 he is himself completely adjusted (if that is possible) to the 
 fact or idea. The line from T to P with the double arrow- 
 heads can indicate that teacher and pupil are en rapport. 
 
 Now adjustment means a spiritual flash along PW. 
 There may be a current along PT of imitation, suggestion, 
 or sympathy, or one set going by a primary emotion, e.g., 
 tenderness from T or fear from P, or by a habit of obedience 
 from P. But whatever its nature, such a current is ancillary 
 to the flash. We may go further. Since P's total mental 
 activity is limited, any drawing off of energy along PT may 
 diminish the amount available along PW. It seems, indeed,
 
 32 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 that T's most effective help will be along TW. He can be 
 most profitably employed facing W, bringing out its 
 features, and when, as for a question, he turns to P, not 
 diverting the current along PW. It may be said that we 
 have begged the question by placing T outside the line PW, 
 and the critical case of T at W in moral education may be 
 adduced. We shall deal with that particular difficulty in a 
 moment, and the corresponding one when the teacher is lec- 
 turing and seems to be at pole W. It will be sufficient to say 
 here that in our view P never actually coincides with W. He 
 is often in front of it, in the line PW, but then his business 
 is to make himself as transparent as possible. 
 
 It would seem that the inference from education as 
 adjustment, as distinct from education as such, abstractly 
 considered, is tri-polarity and not bi-polarity. It would be if 
 two conditions were fulfilled ; first that the direct, polar rela- 
 tion of the teacher was always necessary, and secondly that 
 his relation to either pupil or world was of that fixed and 
 definite character which the conception of a pole connotes. 
 But neither condition is constantly fulfilled. He often finds 
 it more helpful to adjustment to efface himself or constantly 
 to shift his ground. In other words the bi-polarity of him 
 and his pupil is a purely ancillary and transient relation.^" 
 We shall retain the conception of bi-polarity then, but take 
 it to be primarily and essentially of pupil and his worlds, not 
 of pupil and teacher. We are convinced, indeed, that this 
 conception of direct relation and action, of the pupil at one 
 pole and the teacher or educator at the other, is fundamentally 
 unsound. It is the natural outcome of a partial view of the 
 aim of education, but does not represent the essence of it in 
 the wide and comprehensive sense which we are proposing to 
 define as adjustment. The partial view may be that of the 
 development of powers and qualities abstractly — education in 
 the narrow sense — or that of the communication of know- 
 so Welton's presentation of the case exhibits the same fallacy, from the 
 point of view of education as adjustment. " Assuming that the end is deter- 
 mined, and so putting it on one side for the present," he writes, " it is evident 
 that the problem of means is that of the influence of educative agents upon 
 those who are to be educated. It is, thus, essentially psychological. . . . 
 It is a psychology of interaction, and therefore must take account of the 
 spiritual life of the educator as well as that of the educated, and must so under- 
 stand the relation betiveen them that they are seen as correlative factors in one 
 process." (What do we mean by Education, p. lo, italics mine.)
 
 INTRODUCTION 33 
 
 ledge abstractly — teaching in the narrow sense. The com- 
 prehensive view of education as adjustment, as living, necessi- 
 tates the inference that it is to the environment — our three 
 worlds — within experience that the orientation of the pupil 
 or the educand must be made ; and that the teacher or educa- 
 tor is essentially and ultimately an indirect factor in the pro- 
 cess. We are convinced, too, that both partial views have 
 carried with them all the disadvantages of borrowed external 
 values and of dogmatism. It is not uncommon to hear a 
 teacher of literature anticipating, and so arresting, aesthetic 
 appreciation on the part of his pupils by pronouncing his 
 own ; to hear a teacher of history arresting a spontaneous 
 movement of his pupils towards inference from facts, by his 
 own inopportune theorising and eloquence ; or to hear a 
 teacher of mathematics himself lauding the neatness of a solu- 
 tion, when his pupils are warm with the sense of it. It is a 
 thing not unknown to hear a teacher of elocution imposing 
 modulations of voice, the very idiom of appreciation, on 
 pupils themselves ripe for declamation. Such obstacles to 
 real adjustment can only be the outcome of a radically per- 
 verse view of the teacher's task. We are convinced, finally, 
 that this idea of direct action and, we may add, direct responsi- 
 bility, more particularly w^th regard to moral and religious 
 training, is what keeps many conscientious men from adopt- 
 ing the schoolmaster's profession. 
 
 §11. The point is such an important one that it is worth 
 while trying to fix our view of the relation of the teacher to 
 the business of adjustment by means of an illustration. If 
 the direct communication of content is an erroneous concep- 
 tion of teaching, if there is nothing more than the establish- 
 ment of a relation between the subject and the object of experi- 
 ence in what we mean by adjustment, what is the precise 
 function of the teacher, so often thought to be an immediate 
 factor in the process? Let us take an illustration of adjust- 
 ment to the first world, the world of nature. A convalescent 
 boy is sitting in a chair which has been placed in a shady 
 part of a garden. A butterfly alights on a flower just inside 
 the boundary of shadow. Through the enervated gaze of 
 convalescence there arises in consciousness a blurred presenta- 
 tion in which insect and flower are scarcely distinguished. 
 At that moment the mounting sun shortens the shadow and
 
 34 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 illuminates both. The presentation develops detail where 
 blur was : the diaphanous wings and busy antennae emerge 
 from the continuum. The convalescent has taken a step for- 
 ward in adjustment of a cognitive nature ; cognitive content 
 has been enriched. Perhaps he has also felt the glow of 
 iESthetic appreciation. Adjustment both cognitive and 
 aesthetic has been conditioned by light. A greater measure 
 of subjective activity, of attention, might have produced the 
 same result while flower and insect were in the shadow. It 
 was, as it happened, facilitated and conditioned by light. If, 
 however, the conditioning and facilitating had been brought 
 about by human agency, say by a nurse w-ho gently bent the 
 stem of the flower and carried it and insect across the boundary 
 of shadow, we should have had an act which embodied the 
 essentials of teaching. The wind might have done it, but 
 the differentia of the nurse's action is purposiveness. If, 
 now, we say that the nurse directly changed the continuum 
 of presentations in the experience of the convalescent we shall 
 be committing the fallacy of making her and him bi-polar. 
 If we say that progress in adjustment was an effect of his 
 subjective activity developing a given content of experience, 
 and that the nurse, although she made it possible, facilitated 
 it, yet remained altogether outside of it, we shall have a true 
 conception of the relation of the teacher to adjustment. 
 
 Facilitation might have been carried by a teacher to 
 greater lengths. He might have stimulated the curiosity of 
 the boy by describing the butterfly while it was in the shadow. 
 He might have pointed to this or that feature when it w-as in 
 the light. He might have directed attention by skilful ques- 
 tioning. But he would have remained in the sphere of con- 
 ditions and outside the sphere of adjustment, just as truly as 
 the sun, the wind, or the nurse. She and he are only differ- 
 entiated from the natural agents by the presence of purposive- 
 ness. That does not carry them inside the adjustment pro- 
 cess which is a matter between the boy and this bit of his 
 world. The truth is that pedagogy must divest the concep- 
 tion of teaching of the notion of direct agency in a way not 
 too remotely analogous to that in which physics has divested 
 the concept of force of it. 
 
 §12. The case is no wise different, though it is more 
 diflficult and complicated, if the master has to be himself the
 
 INTRODUCTION 35 
 
 mouthpiece and exponent of reality, as, for example, when he 
 must employ the method of the lecture in a history-lesson. 
 The focus in this case is a bit of the second world, that of 
 civilisation, and the business of the teacher is to make him- 
 self as transparent as possible and get the truth into focus. 
 He must, as we say, let the facts speak for themselves. He 
 will not hesitate to stimulate adjustment, to direct and facili- 
 tate it, with all the art of which he is capable. It should be 
 unobtrusive art, however. He must be ever on the alert to 
 the intrinsic danger of the lecture that it may draw off the 
 current of attention, setting towards adjustment, from the 
 truth to the mere exponent of the truth. " The truth shall 
 make you free," free of the master if true adjustment is 
 achieved. 
 
 We may now turn to the question of moral education, or 
 moral adjustment, as we prefer to call it. It certainly pre- 
 sents some complications, but it does not make untenable the 
 position we have taken up. We shall try to show that it 
 strengthens it. It may be urged that here, at all events, bi- 
 polarity is between pupil and master, and the moral relation 
 between them is immediate and direct. The pupil is at one 
 pole, the master at the other, and the problem of moral edu- 
 cation is, in part at least, to bring the influence of the master 
 to bear directly on the pupil. He is put for the time being 
 in the position of the parent, and shares opportunity and re- 
 sponsibility with the latter; and surely the moral relation 
 between parent and child is direct and immediate. It is bi- 
 polar and so, consequently, is the moral relation between 
 teacher and pupil. Again, it may be urged, the primary 
 instincts and their accompanying emotions such as fear, 
 tender feeling, wonder, and the rest, together with those 
 general instinctive tendencies imitation, suggestion, and 
 sympathy, these operate directly between mind and mind, 
 and the teacher, from the very prestige which his age and 
 attainments give, will not only occupy a pole, but will be the 
 most powerful of all occupants, the parent, perhaps, not 
 excepted. 
 
 The answer is that all this is true but beside the mark. 
 Let us take the two points in turn. The parental relation is, 
 of course, immediate, and that of the teacher, in loco parentis, 
 to the pupil is, so far, also immediate. And both parent and
 
 36 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 teacher set out on the route to moral adjustment from the 
 primary emotions which cluster about the relation. But they 
 are only a point of departure. Moral adjustment is just the 
 process of harnessing them to a non-personal pole, the pole of 
 ideals to which the personal emotions are, if adjustment pro- 
 ceeds, gradually transferred. There are parents who are in- 
 clined, at any rate, to postpone the transfer : they like to keep 
 their children or their pupils is that they may forge their 
 ence on themselves. It is common knowledge that, so far as 
 they succeed, they hinder adjustment. And the result is often 
 a tragedy : a boy or girl stranded for lack of a moral pole. 
 There are teachers equally shortsighted. Their schools or 
 classes are shaped by rule and law, it may be, indeed, tem- 
 pered by personal affection and reverence. None the less is 
 it true that their pupils are, so far as moral adjustment is 
 concerned, without a pole, unless they have found it in spite 
 of their teachers. Fortunately such parents and teachers are 
 in a minority. The majority realise that the only hope for 
 their children or their pupils is that they must forge their 
 own moral anchor. Their ultimate pole is the moral order, 
 and neither mother, father, nor teacher. 
 
 We arrive at the same conclusion when we consider the 
 personal nature of the primary emotions and those general 
 instinctive reactions and responses which, following 
 McDougall, we may include under the conception of imita- 
 tion. They imply personal bi-polarity, of course, and the 
 teacher at a pole of particular prestige. But is it not true 
 that at this stage we should be wrong in applying the con- 
 ception of morality ? Is not this form of bi-polarity the one 
 we have in common with animals? Is not morality just the 
 structure we erect on this instinctive and innate foundation ? 
 The teacher is polar to the pupil at this level. But the 
 structure rises slowly but surely in proportion as he suc- 
 ceeds in transferring these motive forces from himself to the 
 ideals which are, or should be, his own moral pole. He 
 must, if we are right, get out of the way of adjustment here 
 as in the more purely cognitive sphere. McDougall's chap- 
 ter on the " Advance to a Higher Plane " should be read.^* 
 It brings out very clearly, as, indeed, practically every theory 
 
 51 Social Psycholc^y, Chapter VIII
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 37 
 
 of ethical doctrine does, that the pole in adjustment must be 
 within the self. So long as adjustment is to external 
 authority — a parent's, a teacher's, a code of laws, the pre- 
 scriptions of a church, whatever it may be — so long is it arti- 
 ficial, and essentially non-moral. It must be adjustment to 
 moral ideals, self-adopted, the pole about which the self-re- 
 garding sentiment is organised. The development of this 
 view will be attempted in the third book. 
 
 We shall, therefore, refuse to accept polarity for the 
 teacher either in the natural, the social, or the moral worlds, 
 except that which is common to him and every other person 
 or thing. We shall ask him to walk side by side with his 
 pupils, to face the pole with them, and, as occasion arises, as 
 it will more often than not, to regard himself as an obstacle 
 to their true adjustment, and get out of the way. The 
 momentary polarity which he assumes when he faces about 
 in anger or in exhortation, we shall ask him to shake ofif as 
 soon as possible. We think he will be glad of the relief. 
 He will certainly be in a stronger position professionally, 
 comparable with that of a physician. He will not need to 
 fear lack of inspiration. That will come from the goal ahead 
 and the young fellows marching along by his side. If he 
 needs guidance he will find it in the attitude which Browning 
 assigned to David before the King, in his immortal poem 
 "Saul." The fervour of his song, the inspiration of his 
 words, the love that fills his heart to overflowing, do not break 
 the restraint, do not bridge the detachment he maintains, so 
 that the soul of the King may awake, and by the sole virtue 
 of its own resurrected power resume the life it has lost. A 
 little child shall lead them. 
 
 §13. We shall not be concerned directly with educa- 
 tional values in this essay. They are constituted by the con- 
 ception of adjustment as the end of schooling. A school 
 subject or activity, and the school itself as a formative 
 agency, will be considered in their relation to life in the three- 
 fold order. Value will be found in the measure of contri- 
 bution to that life. For the same reason we shall not be 
 concerned directly with the disciplinary effect of subjects and 
 agencies. We shall avoid looking either at them or at the 
 special powers and activities they evoke independently and, 
 so to say, atomistically. As bye-products of adjustment they 
 
 47534 
 
 ^
 
 38 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 might well form the subject of a separate essay. Nor shall 
 we be concerned, save incidentally, with questions of method. 
 That topic has been exhaustingly dealt with ; perhaps, indeed, 
 in too much detail. One general principle of procedure we 
 propose to adhere to may be noted. It is the one followed 
 so far. The general idea of what is involved in adjustment 
 to each order will first be given ; then, in each succeeding 
 chapter, the idea will be developed so as to make it more 
 articulate, precise, and complete. Also, the account of each 
 order and that of adjustment to it will proceed, as far as 
 possible, pari passu, though it will be necessary to depart 
 somewhat from this plan in the second book, as is explained 
 in the preliminary chapter. At the end of the essay we 
 hope it will be clear that a liberal education — the right and 
 privilege of all — means free and active membership of a single 
 universe of reality, and that this implies adjustment to the 
 three orders which reveal and express it.
 
 BOOK 1. THE WORLD OF NATURE 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PRELIMINARIES 
 
 §1. In this book adjustment to the world of nature is 
 to be the topic, and we have chosen the word exploration to 
 distinguish the essence of the process on its cognitive side. 
 The original motive of exploration is the instinct of curiosity, 
 a product of evolution of obvious biological value, for the life 
 of the primitive man must often have depended on this 
 quality of alertness. The problem of adjustment is then, on 
 its objective and cognitive side, such exploration, extensive 
 and intensive, as the capabilities of the individual and the 
 opportunities afforded him, make possible. On its subjective 
 and aesthetic side, it is development of the instinct of curiosity, 
 a development which under favourable conditions may cul- 
 minate in the scientific spirit or sentiment. Before consider- 
 ing the stages of such adjustment, cognitive and esthetic, 
 the data which supply a point of departure, a basis on which 
 to build, must be examined. They have been referred to in 
 a summary way in the introduction. Here we must look at 
 them more closely. 
 
 At the very outset we must clear up what is meant by 
 the statement that the physical world is, for the young child 
 as for the mature adult, a fact of presentation. Presentation, 
 in its technical psychological sense, means a modification of 
 consciousness by virtue of which we are made aware of some- 
 thing. It may be simple or complex, the sound of rain on 
 the roof or the conception of gravitation. What, then, do 
 we mean when we say that the physical world is a fact of 
 presentation ? We do not mean, of course, that it exists 
 only in consciousness. Its objective existence is not in ques- 
 tion. On the other hand, the statement does mean the rejec- 
 tion of the unrefiective assumption of the man in the street 
 who takes consciousness and the physical world to be two 
 
 39 4
 
 40 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 things, each with its own separate existence apart from the 
 other, and only brought into relation in a mysterious but 
 mechanical way by the impinging of the latter and the re- 
 action of the former. The question carries us into fairly 
 deep water at once. We must find a firm foothold, however, 
 or progress in theory and practice will be blind and 
 stumbling. The foothold we need is the conception of the 
 world as a fact of experience. This simply means, that just 
 because it is a fact of experience, it implies a subject as well 
 as an object. It is a whole or unity which implies these two 
 poles. Remove either of them and the conception of experi- 
 ence disappears. What either may be in itself we cannot 
 know, and guessing will not help to a solution of the prob- 
 lem. Philosophy has been speculating about one or other, 
 the nature of the ego or the nature of things-in-themselves, 
 ever since reflection awoke, and will go on doing so as long as 
 life lasts. It is the riddle of the universe. But the fact of 
 the universe we must start out from is that as soon as ex- 
 perience begins we have these two poles, however they may 
 be described. There is not, for each of us, the self and the 
 physical environment which have somehow to be brought 
 together. They are united in our experience as soon as that 
 experience begins. In this sense adjustment is not the end 
 of education ; it is the beginning. All we have to do is to 
 develop a unity which we find : a unity which is a miracle, 
 an insoluble riddle, perhaps, but yet a fact. 
 
 Anyone, indeed, who argued against education as, in part, 
 adjustment to the physical world — if there were anyone so 
 foolish — would have to prove that atrophy of a given func- 
 tion, the relation of the subject to nature, was a good thing. 
 He could not get away from the fact of adjustment. He 
 could only urge that it be left alone like a necessary evil, if 
 there is such a thing. The idea of an original duality which 
 has to be bridged, is not confined to the man in the street. It 
 is the working conception, like that of a coloured resonant 
 universe, which we all harbour during nine-tenths of our 
 waking existence. It crops up sometimes, indeed frequently, 
 in discussions of points in the theory of education. It is 
 common, for example, to read that the primary emotion of 
 wonder should be made an incentive to nature-study, a means 
 of bridging the gap. If the gap is a reality to the theorist
 
 PRELIMINARIES 41 
 
 we have a palpable husteron-proteron, the cart before the 
 horse. Nature-study is a necessity arising out of the nature 
 of experience (unless atrophy is our aim) and wonder is an 
 emotional effect or product of it. Of course wonder may be a 
 stimulus to further adjustment, but it is not a prior cause 
 originating adjustment. Even curiosity, the instinct paired 
 with the emotion of wonder,' follows, i.e., arises out of, the 
 adjustment into which a man is born. It is originally conse- 
 quent not antecedent; though it may, of course, be ante- 
 cedent to further adjustment. It is highly important for a 
 theory of education to start out from precise data ; and this 
 unity of ego and world, subject and object, in experience is 
 fundamental. 
 
 That unity is, then, our starting point. There is an imme- 
 diate step onward from it which must be taken. Some people 
 find it a difficulty; although it is, perhaps, hardly a deduc- 
 tion but only the same truth in a different light. It is the 
 continuity of the self and its physical environment. We do 
 not mean the continuity of the two which air and ether 
 mediate by means of the senses. That is physical continuity 
 and we are referring to the continuity of experience which is 
 spiritual. We need not trouble about the difficult problem 
 of the relation of matter and mind. We must, however, 
 grasp the fact of the continuity of subject and environment 
 in experience. A star in the heavens when it enters experi- 
 ence — is seen — becomes an element, a factor, a feature of 
 conscious process. In that sense (a very real one) matter 
 and mind are bridged and distance is annihilated. The point 
 is important for our theory because adjustment means neither 
 more nor less than developing the casual and transient con- 
 tinuity of subject and star into something more coherent and 
 stable. And this is secured when it is woven into the closer 
 organic texture of scientific knowledge and when it becomes 
 of deeper emotional and sentimental import. We must get 
 a firm grip of this notion of development, of continuity in 
 two dimensions : an extension at the boundaries or edges of 
 experience and an increase in cognitive and emotional com- 
 plexity. It follows that we must re-adjust the ordinary 
 meaning of environment, it is nothing alien and inde- 
 
 1 McDougall, Social Psychology, p. 57-59.
 
 42 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 pendent in a mechanical relation of action and reaction. It 
 is that, of course, so far as we are ourselves material. But 
 it is not alien and external so far as we are conscious spiritual 
 beings. In experience it is continuous with the self. In the 
 cognitive continuum (the term which Dr. Ward has made 
 familiar) which mediates a knowledge of the external world, 
 in the wonder, awe, and enthusiasm which suffuse the con- 
 tinuum, and in the curiosity which becomes a permanent 
 conative bent, the duality of subject and environment dis- 
 appears. 
 
 §2. We must now look a little more closely at the con- 
 ception of individuality. Usually it means that each person 
 is unique by virtue of his physical characteristics, including 
 what we call temperament — ultimately, perhaps, a physical 
 matter — his innate proclivities of mind — cognitive, esthetic, 
 and volitional — and his character which is the outcome of 
 the reaction of these and circumstances. But uniqueness is 
 still more fundamental. The datum that the world of nature, 
 as each of us knows it, is a unity of experience with its sub- 
 jective and objective poles, means that this world is unique 
 for each of us. For the subject is not passive. Adjustment 
 is a product of two factors, the subjective and the objective. 
 So that to the conception of individuality as a result of 
 physical characteristics, innate proclivities, and character, 
 we must add that the whole " choir of heaven and furniture 
 of earth " takes on an unique quality in individual experi- 
 ence. It would be true to say that no two people have the 
 same cognitive, aesthetic, or conative experience. Our point 
 here, however, is that the physical world is unique for each 
 of us. From the very beginning of experience nature is dif- 
 ferent for every one of us. So many men so many worlds, 
 is an inevitable inference from experience as a unity of sub- 
 ject and object. 
 
 We might at first sight be inclined to conclude from 
 this fact of fundamental and far-reaching individuality that 
 any attempt to promote adjustment by organising pupils in 
 groups or classes, must be mistaken and futile. That would 
 be fallacious, however, because it overlooks the fact that 
 adjustment is to three worlds which objectively are the same 
 for all. The truth about nature, the social order, and 
 morality is universal truth, although for each of us it takes
 
 PRELIMINARIES 43 
 
 on individual colour and import. The aim of adjustment 
 is, indeed, in this very sense twofold. We want it to be 
 adjustment to the universal, but we want it also to retain the 
 hall-mark of individuality from which it starts. We here 
 come across a principle of first-rate importance for both the 
 theory and practice of education. We need not hesitate to 
 present the same truth to a group of pupils or to shape a 
 common disciplinary environment for them, just because 
 they must be adjusted to three common worlds, common that 
 is, objectively. Only we must ever be on the alert to see 
 that adjustment to each is individual. Universal truth with 
 the hall-mark of individual appropriation is the goal. Each 
 aspect is equally vital ; but the one we are most likely to for- 
 get and not leave room for, is individuality of adjustment. 
 That is why we are emphasising it. 
 
 It must be remembered, too, that there is a considerable 
 amount of what may be called formal identity in the midst 
 of real individual difference ; and this makes common treat- 
 ment possible and effective. There are, first, the forms of 
 sense and thought — we shall refer to them in a moment — and 
 instinctive dispositions which are generic in character. They 
 are innate because they are the product of evolution during 
 the process of adjustment common to men since the dawn of 
 human life. Secondly, the process of development, cogni- 
 tive, emotional, and volitional, follows much the same general 
 lines and stages in normal individuals. Thirdly, there is the 
 tendency of presentations, differing from individual to indi- 
 vidual, to acquire a common currency value, a common 
 meaning or reference. Their differences are sunk in the fact 
 that they become common signs or tokens. A bark stands 
 for a dog, a face for a friend, a bell for a tramcar and the 
 beginning of the day's work, a placard for a revolution, a 
 word for a system of philosophy, and so on, through the 
 long range of associative synthesis. These presentations 
 become like current coins : we no longer attend to their indi- 
 vidual diversity. Value in the one case and objective refer- 
 ence in the other is what we attend to. Fourthly, and per- 
 haps most important of all (though it is but a particular case 
 of the general principle just mentioned) words, though they 
 are linked with different individual experiences and the 
 apperceptive systems which develop out of them, acquire
 
 44 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 identity of reference ; and since language is the great means 
 of bridging individuality, individual differences of meaning 
 tend to disappear. Words become counters. 
 
 The views of Principal Bateson on this question of indi- 
 vidual diversity and its relation to scientific education call 
 for serious consideration, for he speaks as one of the first 
 living authorities on biology. He has given vigorous utter- 
 ance to them in an essay entitled " The Place of Science in 
 Education."^ He is somewhat sceptical of possibilities. 
 Setting out from " the one hard, physiological fact that 
 should form the foundation of all educational schemes : the 
 congenital diversity of the individual types,'"' he goes on to 
 say : " Education has too long been regarded as a kind of 
 cookery : put in such and such ingredients in given propor- 
 tions and a definite product will emerge. But living things 
 have not the uniformity which this theory of education 
 assumes. Our population is a medley of many kinds which 
 will continue heterogeneous, to whatever system of education 
 they are submitted, just as various types of animals maintain 
 their several characteristics though nourished on identical 
 food, or as you may see various sorts of apples remaining 
 perfectly distinct though grafted on the same stock. Their 
 diversity is congenital."* We may record this pronounce- 
 ment as confirming individuality, while noting that it 
 assumes the application of biological truth in the sphere of 
 mental development. He is of opinion that " there is no 
 general neglect to provide teaching of natural science . . . 
 probably no boy able to afford a good secondary school, cer- 
 tainly none able to proceed to a university, is debarred from 
 scientific teaching merely because it does not ' form an 
 integral part of the curriculum.' "^ This opinion is not con- 
 firmed by the Committee appointed to inquire into the posi- 
 tion of Natural Science in the educational system of Great 
 Britain. Its report says: " We think it manifest that so far 
 there has been no general and suflficient recognition of 
 Science as an essential part of the curriculum for all boys in 
 the Public Schools."* Probably the discrepancy is apparent 
 
 - Cambridge Essays on Education, Chapter VII. 
 
 ^ Ibid, p. 124. 
 
 ■* Ibid, pp. 124, 125. 
 
 •' Ibid, p. 130. 
 
 * Report, p. 13.
 
 PRELIMINARIES 45 
 
 rather than real, for Bateson goes on himself to say : " The 
 trouble is not that science is not taught in the schools, but 
 that in schools of the highest type, with certain exceptions, 
 the young boys are not offered it."' 
 
 The last point is, however, a digression. What we are 
 glad to note is that congenital diversity does not prevent 
 Bateson from urging that what we have called adjustment to 
 the first world is essential for all. We must be allowed to 
 quote him at length. " Realising the determinism which 
 modern biological knowledge has compelled us to accept, we 
 suspect that the power of education to modify the destinies of 
 individuals is relatively small. Abrogating larger hopes we 
 recognise education in its two scientific aspects, as a selective 
 agency, but equally as a provision of opportunity. In view, 
 therefore, of the congenital diversity of the individual types, 
 that provision should be as diverse and manifold as possible, 
 and the very first essential in an adequate scheme of educa- 
 tion is that to the minds of the young something of every- 
 thing should be offered, some part of all the kinds of intel- 
 lectual sustenance in which the minds of men have grown 
 and rejoiced. That should be the ideal. Nothing of varied 
 stimulus or attraction that can be offered should be withheld. 
 So only will the young mind discover its aptitudes and 
 powers. This ideal education should bring all into contact 
 with beauty as seen first in literature, ancient and modern, 
 W'ith the great models of art and the patterns of nobility of 
 thought and conduct ; and no less should it show to all the 
 truth of the natural world, the changeless systems of the 
 universe, as revealed in astronomy or in chemistry, some- 
 thing too of the truth about life, what we animals really are, 
 what our place and what our powers, a truth ungarbled 
 whether by prudery or mysticism.*" 
 
 Here we have the case forcibly and eloquently put. It 
 supports the view we are asserting. There is the individual 
 in his hereditary and epistemological uniqueness, but he 
 must be adjusted to the world in its universality. How far 
 that adjustment is to be carried, if education "as a selective 
 agency " reveals congenital incapacity to go beyond a cer- 
 tain point, is another matter. Adjustment in some measure 
 
 ^ Ibid, p. 132. 
 
 « Ibid, pp. 132, 133.
 
 46 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 is necessary for all and we are sanguine enough to believe 
 that the momentum gained will never be wholly dissipated. 
 And it is to be remembered that adjustment to the first world 
 implies adjustment to the second also. For the second world, 
 civilisation, is a fabric into which scientific conceptions and 
 achievements are becoming ever more and more closely inter- 
 woven. History and literature, to say nothing of economic 
 and social relationships, must inevitably reflect progress in 
 the adjustment of man, through science, to his physical en- 
 vironment. Tennyson, Browning, and Wordsworth cannot 
 be appreciated without some acquaintance with the develop- 
 ment of modern scientific thought. 
 
 §3. We come now to the phenomenon of change, of 
 dynamic quality, in the experience of the individual. What 
 has just been said refers to differences between one individual 
 and another. Here we have to take note of the fundamental 
 characteristic of mobility and change in the conscious process 
 or experience of the individual himself, and see what its 
 significance is for the task of adjustment. James has treated 
 it in his arresting way in the well-known chapter on the 
 stream of thought.® Bergson has made it the point of depar- 
 ture for a whole philosophy of change.^" Whatever may be 
 the final verdict on the philosophic theory, the psychological 
 doctrine is now a commonplace. To put the latter meta- 
 phorically, it asserts that no two sections of the stream of 
 consciousness are alike. Experience never repeats itself. 
 But that bald statement would not be enough ; for a mechan- 
 istic conception of conscious process, that of the same 
 ultimate elements — the " ideas" of Locke — corresponding to 
 the atoms of the physicist, combining, being disintegrated, 
 and re-uniting in ever-new combinations, would not be incon- 
 sistent with it. But no one now maintains this atomistic 
 theory of experience, and to the bald conception of change 
 must be added that of the continuum of presentations within 
 which it takes place. It is in this continuum that no two like 
 phases recur. There must be added also that the effect of 
 past process is never obliterated : potentially at all events, 
 and probably actually, if we think of the continuum as the 
 
 8 Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, Chap. IX. 
 
 10 Creative Education, pp. 1-8. See also Wildon Carr, The Philosophy 
 of Change.
 
 PRELIMINARIES 47 
 
 whole character, any moment of experience is the effect of 
 all our accumulated experience responding to some present 
 stimulus. James says : " Our mental reaction on every given 
 thing is really a resultant of our experience of the whole 
 world up to that date."»» Bergson's expression of the same 
 truth is as follows: " Doubtless we think with only a small 
 part of our past, but it is with our entire past, including the 
 original bent of our soul, that we desire, will and act.'''^* 
 And again : " Each of our states ... is an original 
 moment in a no less original history."*^ 
 
 We must, however, be on our guard against a fallacious 
 conclusion from this phenomenon of change in experience, 
 similar to the one from individuality referred to above. We 
 might infer an uncontrollable chaos of experience, defeating 
 any attempt at stable adjustment to the first world, or indeed 
 to any objective world. Two considerations reveal the fal- 
 lacy. One is the currency value of presentations to which 
 we have referred already. The same presentation, the same 
 content of consciousness, never recurs, but different presenta- 
 tions can, and do, refer to the same objective fact. Whether 
 the same objective fact ever recurs, whether, for example, our 
 first world ever presents the same phase of objective reality 
 twice, is a question which Bergson has set men thinking 
 about. It is a profound philosophical conclusion which the 
 doctrine of creative evolution seeks to establish, and the keen 
 student will no doubt follow up the question and form his 
 own opinion. Whatever ultimate import it may have for a 
 theory of education, the problem of actual adjustment to the 
 first world is not made impossible by it. Even if it is true, 
 we shall not get lost in the physical environment. Objective 
 flux may be an ultimate fact, but it is hardly likely to be fast 
 enough to endanger adjustmient. We may safely say, then, 
 that changing presentations are currency which mediate refer- 
 ence to a stable environment. The second consideration is a 
 consequence of the cumulative effect of experience. It 
 changes but not capriciously. Conscious process becomes 
 organised. Apperceptive and emotional systems emerge in 
 consciousness. We never look twice with the same mental 
 
 11 Ibid, Vol. 1, p. 234. 
 
 12 Ibid, pp. 5, 6. 
 
 13 Ibid, p. 7.
 
 48 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 equipment at an objective fact, or feel twice in the same way 
 about it, but we steady down, as experience becomes more 
 and more organised, into recurrent generic ways of looking 
 and feeling. There are thus both objective and subjective 
 checks on the mobility and change of momentary experience. 
 
 We have, then, the physical environment, as a content 
 of consciousness, as material which conscious process 
 elaborates, for ever renewing itself, for ever presenting new 
 aspects from the dawn of life to the sunset of death. Adjust- 
 ment is ceaseless, although it may be momentary and casual. 
 It may be swamped by more urgent elements of experience : 
 organic sensations, hopes and anxieties, the calls of art, or 
 philosophic speculation. But the world of nature will 
 emerge from time to time and claim the attention of the most 
 preoccupied of us. We are enrolled, willy-nilly, in the real- 
 schule, the school of nature, and we never get our exeat, so 
 long as conscious life lasts. The world which is, perhaps, 
 first as an order of reality, in the life-history of all of us, is 
 the first theatre of the ego. Futile controversy about the 
 relative values of what have been unfortunately named 
 realistic education and humanistic education, seems to have 
 overlooked that elementary fact. Light and shadow, rain 
 and drought, the procession of the hours, the panorama of 
 the seasons, are given to us in the endless variety of presenta- 
 tion, whether they come with the sting of immediate percep- 
 tion, or pictorially, or through the suggestive agency of the 
 written or spoken word. Early impulses may become 
 atrophied, congenital bias may, as Bateson asserts, find more 
 congenial theatres, but the school of nature keeps no holi- 
 days; and within the curriculum of experience adjustment to 
 the physical environment is included as a fact. 
 
 Adjustment of this unregulated kind, mediated by con- 
 stant change of presentations is thus for ever being achieved. 
 There is a tendency to distinguish it from the regulated kind 
 which we call education or schooling. And no doubt the 
 distinction is useful and necessary for the organisation of 
 theory and practice. It is, however, a purely formal distinc- 
 tion. In the real business of adjustment there is no break of 
 continuity between unregulated and regulated experience. 
 And it is clear that the latter must conform in its regulation 
 to the data of the former. In other words formal education
 
 PRELIMINARIES 49 
 
 must take up and carry on the process of adjustment to the 
 first world which it finds to be a datum of experience. It 
 must make the attempt. Nothing is lost by it. Much is 
 gained if the attempt succeeds. For congenital bias away 
 from nature will gain compensation, sanity, and balance, from 
 occasional appreciative glances at this world waiting to be 
 wooed. Bias towards it may, if rationally guided, carry the 
 individual into the enchanting fields of natural science. In 
 the latter case compensation, the check on toppling over, is 
 to be sought in an introduction to the second world. Litera- 
 ture and history are complementary to nature study and 
 science. Their opposition exists only in the minds of 
 theorists. Balanced adjustment finds room for both just be- 
 cause the individual is a member of both worlds. 
 
 To return to adjustment to the first, however, we have to 
 ask how this fact of change in presentations can be harnessed 
 to the end. We shall come down to detail in the two follow- 
 ing chapters. Here our concern is the general character of 
 the process. It would seem that we must start out from the 
 fact of change, the flitting of attention in the young from 
 presentation to presentation, much as the butterfly flits from 
 flower to flower. Adjustment must be extensive rather than 
 intensive. It is not devoid of intensity even early : the why 
 emerges soon enough, but depth is not a characteristic of the 
 first phases of interest. Equally important is the point that 
 the whole personally must be adjusted. .(Esthetic and cona- 
 tive activity are to be stimulated as well as cognitive : all three 
 are essential. It is experience on its dynamic side and in its 
 undivided front which here faces us. We must keep adjust- 
 ment on the move as a whole, as a unity. Later on it will 
 consist, first, in collecting and classifying, then in searching 
 for grounds of classification, and later still, for causal rela- 
 tions. But these stages involve a turning back upon presenta- 
 tions. The first adjustment is at their growing edges : it is 
 by extension rather than by intension. It is not by way of 
 the intellect but by way of the whole personality. 
 
 §4. We come now to another point. Schooling is not 
 a new beginning, a fresh start. It is the bringing of external 
 influences to bear on a process already begun and carried, 
 through the reaction of individual and environment, subject 
 and object, to a certain point dependent on age and circum-
 
 50 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 stances. The re-action has gone on within experience : it 
 has been a modification of the continuum of mental process 
 of which experience consists, and not a bringing of two 
 things, externally related, together, because they have been 
 one, in experience, from the beginning of conscious life. 
 We have now to ask how far adjustment has been carried, 
 from what data schooling can start out. We are not con- 
 cerned with individual differences of mental content, dealt 
 with in such an essay as Stanley Hall's on " The Contents of 
 Children's Minds on entering School."" It would, of 
 course, be extremely valuable to know them and experimental 
 psychology and comparative child-study, have here a fruitful 
 field of investigation. If we had a ready and reliable method 
 of getting at the individual content of experience when a 
 child was admitted to school, it would obviously facilitate 
 classification and the organisation of the means and 
 machinery of early adjustment. That, however, is a specific 
 problem not before us. Our question is the general features 
 of the organisation of adjustment when schooling begins. 
 According to what broad lines, what general plan, has adjust- 
 ment of the first world been so far carried ? 
 
 If we touch, at this point, on philosophic and psycho- 
 logical theory, the justification is not that details of directed 
 adjustment will be immediately affected. Our attitude, how- 
 ever, will be, or ought to be ; and attitude is more important 
 than detail. If we find that the subject has been playing a 
 vital part in the process from the beginning, we shall be more 
 likely to realise the point of view taken up in this essay that 
 the subject, the individual, must carry it through to the end. 
 And Kant does seem to have established, once and for all, 
 this synthetic activity in the elaboration of experience of the 
 physical world. Since his day psychologists have placed the 
 first principle of unity within experience. Some, e.g. 
 Herbart, have found it within the play of presentations them- 
 selves. Others, e.g., Ward, have found it in the activity of 
 the subject of presentations — a view we accept. The student 
 will form his own conclusion. He will find synthetic activity 
 in consciousness wherever he is inclined to fix it. An active 
 ego, as fons et origo of synthesis may not appeal to him, 
 
 14 Aspects of Child Life and Education, pp. 1-52. Reference by Rusk in 
 Experimental Education, p. 78.
 
 PRELIMINARIES 51 
 
 being a postulate of philosophy, and not a hypothesis of 
 science whose validity can be tested. On the other hand 
 philosophy and religion may clinch it for him. He will in 
 any case be able to assume synthetic activity as a fact. And 
 the inference from the fact, indeed the mere explication of it, 
 implies the constructive co-operation of the subject in the 
 organisation of the world of nature. It is the key to adjust- 
 ment and consequently the key to schooling. The conception 
 of the subject — pure or empirical — as, in part, that is, as re- 
 gards its form, the creator of his world as he knows it, as it 
 exists for him, must be the starting point for that directed 
 adjustment of which schooling consists. This power of con- 
 struction, developed by social intercourse, is just what gives 
 man his pre-eminence in the universe, whether we regard it 
 as his d priori, or, as most of us would think, as a product 
 of evolution. 
 
 What, now, are the broad features of this adjustment ? 
 We may distinguish three. In the first place, it gives him 
 the world ordered in space. We do not, of course, mean 
 order with geometrical exactness. That is a final stage of 
 adjustment which few reach. What is meant is that this 
 world will be a spatial continuum within which a certain 
 amount of rough organisation, as to distance and direction, 
 will have been achieved. Up and down, left and right, near 
 and far, will be more or less familiar differentiations in a 
 given whole of extensity. How they have been made is a 
 matter for psychology. We may ask how the spatial con- 
 tinuity, in which they are differentiated, is itself given. The 
 answer is that it is an original datum of experience. That 
 step in adjustment, we may say vaguely and generally, is one 
 taken by nature itself ; by which we mean not external nature, 
 but the natural constitution of the human mind, and probably 
 the mind of the animals nearest to man. It is not, as we have 
 just suggested, space continuous and infinite which is an 
 original datum of experience. But presentations of the ex- 
 ternal world are given in the original form or garb of ex- 
 tensity. Students of Kant will remember that he took space 
 to be a contribution of the subject to the phenomena of 
 nature. It was for him an a priori form of sense, a humanly- 
 originating medium within which, in some inexplicable and 
 ultimate way, the objective manifold was unified. Sp that
 
 52 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 the phenomenal world owed its ordering in space to the 
 a priori constitution of the mind of man. Bergson seems to 
 maintain this view. He writes: "What the Transcendental 
 ^Esthetic of Kant appears to have established once for all is 
 that extension is not a material attribute of the same kind as 
 others. . . . Supposing even that it is given empirically 
 by sight and touch (and Kant has not questioned the fact) 
 there is this about it that is remarkable that our mind, specu- 
 lating on it with its own powers alone, cuts out in it, d priori, 
 figures whose properties determine a priori: experience, with 
 which we have not kept in touch, yet follows us through the 
 infinite complications of our reasonings and invariably justi- 
 fies them."^^ We may quote Karl Pearson to the same 
 effect : " The mystery of space, whether it be the finite space 
 of perception or the infinite space of conception, lies in, and 
 not outside, each human consciousness."" Others hold the 
 opposite view of the objectivity of space. James calls the 
 Kantian view mythological.^^ 
 
 Ward says : " That the knowledge of space is a priori in 
 the epistemological sense it is no concern of the psychologist 
 either to assert or to deny.'"' James,'*, Ward,''" Stout,^' 
 and Bergson,-- are all agreed, however, that extensity is an 
 original quality of certain sensations, organic, visual, and 
 tactual. Progress in the development of this original spatial 
 continuum is made possible by means of local signs and 
 motor sensations. We are only concerned to note that that 
 development goes on naturally in the normal individual. So 
 that adjustment to the spatial order in experience, mediated 
 by the activity of the subject, can be taken as a datum of 
 schooling on which further adjustment in respect of direction, 
 distance, and geometrical relations can be based. 
 
 In the second place, the world as a world of things with 
 their attributes or qualities, can be assumed. Again, we 
 must be careful to note that by this is not meant that know- 
 ledge of specific qualities of things— the adjustment sought 
 
 15 Creative Evolution, p. 215. 
 
 >" Grammar of Science, p. 159. 
 
 17 Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, p. 275. 
 
 18 Psychological Principles, p. 144. 
 18 Op. cit. Vol. II, pp. I34-144- 
 
 20 Op. cit., pp. 145-147- 
 
 21 Manual of Psychology, pp. 344-355- 
 
 22 Op. cit., p. 213.
 
 PRELIMINARIES 53 
 
 in object-lessons — can be assumed, any more than precise 
 spatial differentiations. All that is meant is that the world, 
 in its general structure as a world of things possessing quali- 
 ties, is a datum when schooling begins. This is another re- 
 sult of the synthetic activity of mind. It is explained by 
 psychology as the projection of the experience of the self as 
 an abiding unity amid diversity of presentations. Things 
 get their unity as a projection of the unity of the self. Hence 
 the animistic view of nature characteristic of the young. 
 
 Thirdly, adjustment will have gone some way by the 
 same anthropomorphic path in unifying things under the 
 idea of reaction. The idea of cause and effect will, of course, 
 only be there in a vague embryonic form, the genesis of 
 which is explained psychologically as the projection of indi- 
 vidual experience of the self as agent and patient. We may 
 note again the Kantian view that these adjustments are a re- 
 sult of a priori categories of substance and attribute, cause 
 and effect. That is the static philosophic standpoint. The 
 scientific view would be that, so far as there may be any 
 innate disposition so to synthesise experience, it is to be ex- 
 plained as a product of evolution. That is the Bergsonian 
 standpoint. " Intellect and matter have progressively 
 adapted themselves one to the other to attain at last a 
 common form."-^ 
 
 Our point is that whatever the philosophic or scientific 
 explanation may be, we can start out on the business of direct- 
 ing adjustment to the first world, with much work already 
 accomplished for us : a world of things, ordered in space, 
 and beginning to be linked by relations of reaction. We can 
 assume, too, that it is a congenial theatre, made so by springs 
 of activity constant, if intermittent and fragmentary as 
 regards direction, and fed by a strong instinct of curiosity." 
 Natural powers and bent, whatever their philosophic mean- 
 ing and genesis, have secured orientation and momentum 
 which it is our business to develop and direct. It may be 
 well to note, too, that real adjustment means giving as well 
 as taking, receptivity as well as activity, being created as 
 well as creating. We have laid stress on the synthetic 
 activity of the subject, because this fundamental factor in 
 
 ^^ Op. cit., p. 217. 
 
 24 Cf. Von Wyss in Broad Lines in Science Teaching, p. 25.
 
 54 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 adjustment has not, as we think, received the recognition it 
 ought to receive in educational theory. We hasten to add, 
 however, that adjustment implies also the absorption of the 
 self in its objective content, in the not-self. The objective 
 attitude, that of the gardener, engineer, or scientist, is the 
 one that gives life its joy and zest. We are all enrolled in- 
 evitably in the real schule but there are endless degrees in 
 the extent to which we profit. We must be assimilated as 
 well as assimilate, in some such way as the individuality of 
 the artist is taken up into the product of his art. Presenta- 
 tion implies the laying of the object before the subject. 
 Adjustment implies the subject going over into, being fused 
 with, the object. We find ourselves in losing ourselves. 
 
 §5. Having now some idea of the data which may be 
 assumed at starting, the next question is the end to be 
 achieved, or the aim, as we had better call it, since of finality 
 of adjustment there is none. Two directions should be 
 clearly distinguished, for failure to do so seems to lead to 
 confusion and fruitless controversy. We must keep quite 
 clear adjustment (a) to the world of nature and (b) to natural 
 science which is the sum-total of organised knowledge about 
 that world. Of course adjustment to each can only be par- 
 tial. The world is too big to be compassed in the life of 
 man, even mostly at second hand through records and repre- 
 sentations; and science, even for the professor giving his 
 whole life to it, must be departmental. And we are con- 
 cerned with the average boy or girl with average opportuni- 
 ties. Granted the obvious limits, however, we ought to keep 
 clear in our minds nature itself and the science of it. The 
 latter belongs to our second world, civilisation. It is a social 
 possession. It is part of the spiritual fabric which the mind 
 of man has built up. The first world itself, as the fabric of 
 inorganic and organic forms, is a different order of reality. 
 Adjustment to science is not necessarily adjustment to that 
 order; and we may have adjustment to that order without 
 science. The shepherd on the hills, the fisherman on the 
 sea, the labourer in the fields, may be at one with nature, 
 linked to it by bonds of sympathy and intuition which the 
 scientist of profoundest knowledge has never felt. Which 
 form of adjustment should schooling mediate, that of the
 
 PRELIMINARIES 55 
 
 child of nature, pregnant perhaps with celestial fire, though 
 inarticulate, or that of the scientist, penetrating with intel- 
 lectual insight the very secrets of the world ? The question 
 provides its own answer. We want both in interplay. 
 Experience shows, however, that schooling may incline in 
 one or other direction unduly, and so miss that composite 
 adjustment we need. The enthusiastic master may envisage 
 law, hypothesis, and formula with such obsession that they 
 become ends in themselves, cut out, in their abstractness, 
 from the concrete whole of reality. He may, on the other 
 hand, flit from instance to instance, from specimen to speci- 
 men, and then from group to group, with the collector's 
 impulse, accumulation and classification so obsessing him 
 that the genesis of types and orders is neglected. Perhaps 
 physics exhibits the former tendency and botany the latter. 
 Physics may be divorced from the world as old-fashioned 
 botany was from science in its dynamic aspect. In neither 
 case does schooling mediate the adjustment we want. The 
 danger of getting out of touch with reality is the 
 greater : there is little danger now of even school science 
 halting at the merely classificatory or static stage. In intel- 
 lectual obsession, however, we may forget the necessary 
 contact with reality. 
 
 Another way of forgetting it is more elusive, but none 
 the less real. It lies in the obsession of scientific method. It 
 is common to find it urged that the paramount reason for the 
 inclusion of science in the curriculum of all schools, is, not 
 adjustment to the world of nature, but the discipline of in- 
 vestigation. Accuracy of observation, rigour of inference, 
 fearlessness and fidelity of verification, become more than the 
 essentials of sound procedure. They become ends in them- 
 selves. This would seem to be the fallacy of looking at the 
 individual, and the development of his powers and habits, 
 too much in abstraction. The aim, so conceived, may be- 
 come overshadowing, and the world, and adjustment to it, 
 may disappear in the shadow. There is no question, of 
 course, of the vital importance of such discipline. To make 
 it primary and paramount seems, however, to be a con- 
 sequence of a one-sided theory of education. The concep- 
 tion of education in its two-fold aspect of adjustment to both 
 nature and science, finds a place for it, and one befitting its 
 
 5
 
 56 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 essential importance; but it is derivative and secondary, not 
 primary and paramount. 
 
 There is another obsession : by the metliod which we 
 may describe as a combination of recapitulation and dis- 
 covery. This may also tempt the enthusiast from the straight 
 track of adjustment. There is no question, of course, that 
 for some time and to some extent all the time, the pupil must 
 follow in the footsteps of history and w-alk along the well- 
 trodden path of discovery. But it seems possible to get the 
 eyes so glued to the track that adjustment is arrested. It 
 would seem, indeed, that the thing to be discovered could 
 hardly be obscured in the process itself, and yet something 
 like this often happens. The world of nature may be out of 
 sight and even out of mind in the heuristic laboratory. We 
 are inclined to go further than O'Shea, who said : " Nothing 
 for mere formal discipline will be the watchword. "^^ He was 
 referring to subjects of the curriculum. The dictum may be 
 extended to obsessions of method. 
 
 Let us carry this contrast between adjustment to Nature 
 and adjustment to science a little further. The first we 
 feel and enjoy with the whole of our being and especially 
 with our aesthetic and conative selves. We are in warm 
 living unity with the concrete world. When the rain beats 
 on the cheek and the wind is stirring; when we walk in a 
 wood or on the seashore, we are alive with the warmth of 
 adjustment. It is real and arresting. It is a compound of 
 nearness and intimacy wath remoteness and aloofness. If it 
 be asked why this sort of adjustment should be sought, the 
 answer is that it gives us some of the best moments of ex- 
 perience. It carries us beyond ourselves: we are attuned to 
 the infinite. In virtue, however, of its characteristic quality 
 as aesthetic and conative rather than cognitive, the experi- 
 ence is and remains largely subjective and individualistic. 
 It is not, however, markedly egoistic. It is that sense of 
 communion with nature which Kant found in the conscious- 
 ness of the beautiful and the sublime. 
 
 By contrast, adjustment to science — a matter of the intel- 
 lect — is a colder experience. We do not offer all of ourselves 
 as, so to say, an area for contact with reality. Moreover the 
 
 -^ Education as Adjustment, p. 291.
 
 PRELIMINARIES 57 
 
 object of adjustment is usually cut out from its context in 
 reality. "^^ The feeling is one of power rather than com- 
 munion, of conquest after exploration. It is more egoistic. 
 Finally it is universalistic. There is an onward dynamic 
 sweep about adjustment to scientific truth whereas in adjust- 
 ment to the world of reality itself the subjective pole is the 
 individual self. From that pole it may include the uttermost 
 depths of reality, but the pole remains the individual. With 
 science the pole is universal. 
 
 We need the union of both forms of adjustment. The 
 blend of the shepherd's and the scientist's is the unity to be 
 sought : power and communion, abstract truth carried over 
 into concrete reality, intellectual insight suffused with 
 emotional warmth, particularity with universality. A com- 
 parison with the second world may help. Literature is the 
 vehicle of thoughts and aspirations as science is the vehicle 
 of laws and hypotheses. Even in literature we may get the 
 vehicle rather than its content into focus. With science the 
 danger is greater, because, being the expression of the first 
 world in terms of the second, of matter in terms of spirit, it 
 can be handled by itself. And as it gets more intensive and 
 penetrating, further removed from the surface of phenomena, 
 the tendency is almost inevitable. In being adjusted to laws 
 and hypotheses it is easy to become divorced from the 
 phenomenal world. The way to unity is by presenting 
 scientific truth and the facts of the concrete world of reality 
 which it formulates and synthesizes, in close conjunction. 
 Sometimes the point of departure will be the fact, e.g., a 
 piece of chalk thrown across the class room, or falling rain 
 outside it, if gravitation is the topic ; sometimes the truth, as 
 when from the formula S = ^gt^ the height of a projectile 
 dropped vertically, the time of flight being observed, is in- 
 ferred. The doctrine of psychic fringes is the theoretical 
 basis of union. Sometimes the phenomenon will be in focus 
 and the law in the margin or fringe; sometimes vice-versa. 
 There will be interplay in experience if there is interplay in 
 exposition. The sign-posts of divergent adjustment are only 
 a warning; the paths can be made convergent if the teacher is 
 alert. One-sided obsession is the danger. 
 
 28 Cf. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 32.
 
 58 THE INDIVIDUAL A.^D THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 §6. This distinction between adjustment to nature and 
 adjustment to science which gives us command over it, is but 
 a pedagogic appHcation of that which Kant drew between 
 perception and conception. " Perception without conception 
 is bhnd," he wrote, and "conception without perception is 
 empty,"" and he was at considerable pains to show how 
 perceptions might be " brought to conceptions."^' Limited 
 as he was by the static ideas of mental functions or faculties 
 then prevalent, he had to find a nexus for the two. Hence 
 his elaborate theory of the schematism of the categories,^' 
 which found a nexus in imagination. The progress of 
 psychology has given us a surer footing in the unity of con- 
 scious process. Experience being one, whether it is per- 
 ceptual or conceptual, and the embryo of relations being 
 given in the fringe which from the outset carries a percept 
 beyond itself, we have no theoretical obstacle to surmount. 
 The shepherd reading the stars may feel perception ringed 
 about with suggestion, passing over into imaginative play.^" 
 So with our pupil. A moment will come, when, wearying of 
 adding percept to percept, he will be ready for a glimpse at 
 their bonds, a peep behind the continuum of phenomena. 
 Adjustment, at first extensive, becomes intensive naturally, 
 just because even the first percepts have a fringe — James' 
 " feelings of tendency."" In other words, the continuum of 
 experience, at first active at its growing edges, will naturally, 
 i.e., by its own inherent dynamic power, develop along a 
 second dimension, that of depth. 
 
 All that the teacher has to do is to wait patiently, but on 
 the alert, for the moment when his pupils are weary of flitting 
 from instance to instance, and are ready to look behind them 
 for the bonds of similars, and to note the absence of these 
 in dissimilars. Adjustment will proceed in depth as natur- 
 ally as it proceeded in breadth. The synthetic function of 
 the ego, at this stage acting through relative suggestion,'' 
 will become intensive instead of extensive. Once it does, 
 
 27 Caird, Critical Philosophy of Kant, Vol. I, p 221. 
 
 28 Ibid, Vol. I, p. 391. 
 
 29 Ibid, Vol. I, Br. I, Chap. V. 
 
 30 Cf. Baudet's delightful sketch entitled " Les Etoiles," in " Lettres de 
 mon Moulin. 
 
 '1 See p. 22. 
 
 33 Stout, " Analytic Psychology," Vol. 11, Chap. VI.
 
 PRELIMINARIES 
 
 59 
 
 there is no obstacle to progress ending in the grasp of law 
 and hypothesis save the teacher's precipitancy born of 
 enthusiasm. That enthusiasm may arrest the flow, and arrest 
 of mental process is the condition of distaste, of withdrawal 
 of attention." The concept, so vivid to him, may be lifeless 
 for his pupils when taken away from its perceptual setting. 
 If his harvest is the negation of interest, he will only have 
 himself to blame. At the nature-study stage he must be con- 
 tent with a fringe of conceptual relations, with a halo of 
 implied meaning, felt rather than articulate. Out of it 
 science will develop but it must not be forced. In the early 
 stages the perceptual world must be kept in focus. At the 
 science stage the arrangement may be reversed. Attention 
 may be centred on law or science in its universal aspect, but 
 never to the exclusion of instance and application. And the 
 principle of continuity holds here as always, of course. That 
 is to say, there is no sudden jump from perceptual to con- 
 ceptual adjustment, and there should be no sudden change 
 from the one standpoint to the other by the teacher. We 
 may repeat, too, that the nexus should never be broken. The 
 professor of physics or mathematics may pass from deduc- 
 tion to deduction, in vacuo, so to say. But, confident in the 
 rigour of his logic, he knows he can pass from formula to 
 fact whenever he may choose to do so, or, at any rate, that 
 the transition is conceivable, even if he is not able to make 
 it. That is, however, too rare an atmosphere for the school- 
 boy. He must maintain constant contact with the reality 
 which the laws he dimly begins to comprehend help him to 
 interpret. For him the second world of science must be in 
 something more than tangential relation with the first world 
 It must ever renew its vitality by penetration. 
 
 We may now state summarily what adjustment to the 
 first world means. There are three stages, two of which we 
 have already implicitly recognised. The first is that which 
 we have distinguished as mainly, though never wholly, ex- 
 tensive. We develop experience superficially in length and 
 breadth, but as a whole or unity. This is the stage of nature 
 study, geography (in the narrow sense), and physiography. 
 
 '3 Ward, " Psychological Principles," p. 263, footnote. Meiklejohn's ren- 
 dering of these well-known principles is : " Thoughts without content are void : 
 intuitions without conceptions, blind." (Critique of Pure Reason, p. 46.)
 
 6o THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 We shall consider this stage in some detail in the next 
 chapter. The second is that which is mainly intensive, but 
 which, as it advances, brings an ever-widening grasp of 
 phenomena, extension by conquest rather than by accretion. 
 This is the stage of science which we shall consider in detail 
 in the third chapter. Dewey says : " Science is experience 
 becoming rational."'''' It begins to become so when the 
 '* flash of similarity " unites elements previously experienced 
 separately, e.g., falling rain and the curved path of a pro- 
 jectile. But this union is only the point of departure for 
 science. It is only the synthesis of imagination, the hand- 
 maid of the intellect. The latter must begin to manipulate 
 the material which imagination brings together in conscious- 
 ness. Causal relations must be discriminated : gravity must 
 be extricated from the raindrop and the projectile. Then it 
 must be carried to other instances, e.g., the running brook 
 and the "coasting" cyclist. Another step is taken when 
 quantitative conceptions are introduced : when, for example, 
 the value of g is determined. By such degrees does experi- 
 ence become rational. It means also that when this stage of 
 adjustment is reached the universal standpoint has been sub- 
 stituted for that of the individual. Science is a social product 
 and possession. Finally we reach the third stage when we 
 return to the unity we started out from, but now to envisage 
 it, not as a superficial unity, but as a rational whole. Such 
 conceptions as the conservation of energy and the theory of 
 evolution enable us to do this. 
 
 Through these stages the individual must be taken if 
 adjustment to the first world is to be complete : complete that 
 is in principle, not of course in extent. Education ought not 
 to be satisfied with less than this. 
 
 3* Democracy and Education, p. 263.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 NATURE STUDY 
 
 §1. We take nature-study to include adjustment, by 
 exploration and investigation, to (a) the phenomena of nature 
 as presented in nature lessons, (b) the world as the home of 
 man, the sphere of geography, and (c) the phenomena of 
 earth, sea, and sky, the subject-matter of physiography. The 
 first and third are direct adjustments to the first world; the 
 second is indirect, being complicated by the introduction of 
 another factor, human societies. All three are appropriate 
 to the primary and the early part of the secondary stage of 
 schooling. If the second, geography, be excluded, it may 
 safely be said that this side of adjustment has, speaking 
 generally, been neglected. Theory and practice have been 
 enlightened and sound at the lower end of the primary course. 
 The work of Froebel has, on the whole, given us real kinder- 
 gartens, and Montessori is throwing fresh light on the same 
 field. The science of the secondary school has been the sub- 
 ject of searching and fruitful investigation. But the gap 
 between has remained dark ; and it is to be feared that instru- 
 mental subjects such as reading, writing, the elements of 
 language, and the rudiments of calculation, have usurped the 
 place in the middle and upper classes of the preparatory 
 school which rightly belongs to nature. This is true as a 
 general criticism of state schools. Niceties of grammar and 
 recurring decimals have received far more attention than the 
 phenomena of nature. And it appears to be true of private 
 preparatory schools also, for the Natural Science Committee 
 recently reported that in the majority of 307 of such schools 
 as replied to the Committee's questionnaire : " No provision 
 is made for the teaching of science (including under this head 
 nature study and practical measurements) as part of the regu- 
 lar curriculum,^ and that " it is much to be regretted that, as 
 an introduction to more formal work in science, there should 
 be no preliminary instruction in nature study, broadly inter- 
 
 1 Report, p. 14. 
 61
 
 62 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 preted, or in practical measurements."^ Systematic adjust- 
 ment to the first world is not a part of the schooling of either 
 rich or poor, in the years between, say, eight and fourteen. 
 
 And yet nature should be the focus of the curriculum at 
 the primary stage. Reasons are obvious. The kindergarten 
 takes up the task which, as we have seen, is considerably 
 advanced when schooling begins. Continuity demands that 
 the gap to the stage of transition to science should be bridged 
 systematically. The opaque world of nature is the appro- 
 priate theatre of activity at this stage : children are moved 
 to explore it by curiosity and wonder. The " transparent 
 world of minds " of which history, literature, and art are the 
 vehicles comes more slowly and more gradually into focus. 
 It only shares attention equally with the first world at the 
 secondary stage. Yet the whole bent of the primary course 
 is literary. Again, the subjects which tend to loom so 
 largely, and to occupy independent positions, ought to be 
 subsidiary and mainly to adjustment to nature. Drawing and 
 oral description as fixing this adjustment, reading as extend- 
 ing it, arithmetic and manual work as giving command over 
 it, recitation and singing as contributing sesthetic warmth to 
 it, all fall properly into a subsidiary and instrumental rela- 
 tion. They stand in the same relation to adjustment to the 
 second world, of course. Only the second world is less 
 prominent at this stage. It is, indeed, necessary to reverse 
 completely the common conception of the relation of nature 
 study to other subjects at the primary stage. It is funda- 
 mental and they are secondary. It is imperative that they 
 should not, in artificial abstraction, be allowed to elbow out 
 real adjustment. "The study of nature," writes Professor 
 Sadler, "should form an indispensable part of the early 
 education of every child. But in present circumstances the 
 early education of some of the most promising boys in the 
 country is injured by a prematurely specialised curriculum, 
 in which linguistic and mathematical training holds too large 
 a place, with the result that the study of nature and manual 
 training are unduly neglected."^ Nature should be the 
 primary focus, the humanities being the secondary one, on 
 which the instrumental training should converge, and from 
 
 2 Ibid, p. 14. 
 
 ' Broad Lines in Science Teaching, Introduction, pp. xxxviii, xxxix.
 
 NATURE STUDY 63 
 
 which it should radiate. The correlation of subjects derives 
 meaning and purpose from the conception of adjustment. 
 The objective unity of the curriculum should reflect and con- 
 solidate the unity of experience. 
 
 §2. We may now consider the departments of nature 
 study in the order mentioned above. The first is direct ex- 
 ploration of the phenomena of nature. And we may con- 
 veniently begin with the selection of material. Principles 
 rather than details will be our concern, for each school ought 
 to express its own individuality in the subject-matter chosen. 
 The first is so obvious that mention of it hardly seems called 
 for. It is to nature itself, at first hand, that the pupils are 
 to be adjusted, not to pictures, drawings, diagrams, and 
 verbal descriptions. These have their place and purpose, 
 but only as elucidatory of the real ; and they should be, as 
 far as possible, the production of the children themselves. 
 Yet how often do verbalism and formalism appear where 
 realism ought to be ? The result is arrest of adjustment. 
 On the other hand, it is not to be forgotten that from the 
 beginning something more than the mere piling up of per- 
 cepts is wanted. The animistic view of nature which is the 
 child's, may, and should, be exploited, imagination set free 
 and experience made intimate, by childish speculation. 
 From the outset we must remember the subjective factor in 
 adjustment, whereby the alien is made akin. And it may be 
 checked by excess of material. The danger of nature at 
 second hand is, however, greater. The first principle is 
 adjustment to the real, and imagination, though allowed free 
 flight round and about it, must return home again and alight 
 where it set out, but with stronger wings. The story of the 
 dew-drop must end on the grass or the flower. 
 
 It follows from the principle of realism that the area of 
 selection is the immediate environment. And choice is, 
 apparently and at first sight, free and unrestricted. Objec- 
 tively, at all events, there is an unlimited field. The rose 
 has no priority over the rounded pebble, nor the butterfly 
 over the floating cloud. They stand out, each claiming atten- 
 tion, by virtue of their organic or inorganic relation to the 
 whole background of nature. But as claimants they have to 
 make good their relation to that other unity, the subject, and 
 its prime mover, at the stage we are considering, is the in-
 
 64 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 stinct of curiosity fed b}' the attendant emotion of wonder. 
 The instinct is cathoHc, before it has begun to organise itself 
 into an embryo sentiment; at least it is as nearly so as those 
 congenital tendencies — the hard physiological fact which 
 Bateson says we cannot escape — will permit. Nevertheless it 
 falls within the sway of the general conditions of attention, 
 and catholic though it may be potentially, actually we soon 
 find interest more predominant in one direction than another, 
 though never sustained long in any. In a word, the second 
 principle we have to take account of is that involuntary atten- 
 tion is conditioned by relative novelty. Relative, it is to be 
 noted, and not absolute; the relativity being determined, as 
 the psychologists tell us, by the alBnity of new presentations 
 with previous experience. The petal of a rose is not novel in 
 an absolute sense, if it links on by means of association with 
 the idea of a pretty dress. So familiarised, it may for a 
 moment or two occupy the focus of attention and adjust- 
 ment may have advanced a stage. 
 
 A remote cloud may be drawn into the content of living 
 and dynamic experience if its affinity with the roof of a house 
 or the shady foliage of a tree emerges. In this sense 
 curiosity and wonder begin at home, in the ego. Properly 
 hitched on there, phenomena remote as the stars in space may 
 form the living tissue of experience. McMurry rightly pro- 
 tests* against the practice, now obsolescent, of filling 
 children's nature books with the wonders of the world, col- 
 lected from far and wide, for no reason save their uniqueness. 
 All the same we need not go to the opposite extreme of what 
 might be called a pronounced domestic bias in our search for 
 material. A sea-gull, properly presented, need not be abso- 
 lutely alien to children of the hinterland, nor a whaler's 
 harpoon to those who live on temperate shores. The far-off 
 in habitat is not necessarily remote from experience. Of 
 course the criterion of reality remains pertinent. If we 
 observe this condition and the others to be mentioned in a 
 moment, we may accept the view that " since nature-study is 
 essentially a particular attitude of mind, which generates a 
 particular method of approach, it is absolutely unrestricted 
 in its choice of material for study. "^ 
 
 * Special Method in Elementary Science, p. 9. 
 
 5 Von Wyss, in Broad Lines in Science Teaching, p. 26.
 
 NATURE STUDY 65 
 
 Reality and relative novelty are principles founded in 
 the nature of thing-s, indeed, in the nature of the subject. 
 The principle of utility seems, at first at all events, to stand 
 on a different footing. It is artificial, the product of man's 
 appetite or needs ; especially as these have been developed by 
 the conditions of modern civilisation. Hence the disrepute 
 into which it has fallen. As a criterion of moral worth, its 
 day is over. As a stimulus for scientific work it is in some 
 quarters* rejected with scorn. There appear to be two senses 
 in which the term is understood. The first is associated with 
 individual and material gain and so calls down contempt from 
 the high-minded. The emphasis laid on the value of the 
 applications of science to industry and to production arises 
 from short-sighted ignorance in the opinion of the scientists 
 themselves. Here are the views of the committee which re- 
 cently enquired into the position of natural science in the 
 educational system of Great Britain. "How necessary 
 Science is in war, in defence and offence, we have learnt at 
 a great price. How it contributes to the prosperity of indus- 
 tries and trade all are ready to admit. How valuable it may 
 be in opening the mind, in training the judgment, in stirring 
 the imagination and in cultivating a spirit of reverence, few 
 have yet accepted in full faith. A nation thoroughly trained 
 in scientific method and stirred with an enthusiasm for pene- 
 trating and understanding the secrets of nature, would no 
 doubt reap a rich material harvest of comfort and prosperity, 
 but its truest reward would be that it would be fitted by an 
 ample and generous education to perform justly, skilfully and 
 magnanimously the olifices both private and public of peace 
 and war."^ 
 
 There is, however, another meaning of utility, the exact 
 opposite of the one just referred to. It is the one so con- 
 stantly emphasised by Dewey. Knowledge, education, and 
 life are for him essentially of social import.* The value of 
 science lies in its utility, but this is social and spiritual rathei 
 than individual and material. It is probable that utility in 
 this sense is never wholly absent as an incentive to scientific 
 investigation. The astronomer making a survey of the 
 
 " Cf. Bateson in Cambridge Essays on Education, p. 135. 
 '■ Report, p. 7. 
 
 8 The School and the Child, pp. 64, 65, and Education and Democracy 
 pp. 234-237 and passim.
 
 66 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 heavens is seeking to extend the boundaries of knowledge, 
 but in so doing, he is contributing to a common stock for 
 common betterment. Utility in this finer sense we shall, of 
 course, not hesitate to make a principle of selection for nature- 
 study. And we may follow Dewey in his insistence on the 
 "study of natural objects, processes and relations — in a 
 human setting."* This is to be taken to mean that, at the 
 nature-study stage, natural phenomena, e.g. seeds, may be 
 taught in their relation to human occupations, such as garden- 
 ing and farming, and not necessarily in their relation to the 
 subject-matter of botany. " Instead of the subject-matter 
 belonging to a peculiar study called botany, it will then 
 belong to life, and will find, moreover, its natural correlations 
 with the facts of soil, animal life, and human relations."" 
 This is to bring nature-study very close to geography. It is 
 to unite our first two worlds in teaching, at any rate at the 
 start, as they are united in some way by all philosophies at 
 the end. We may, then, select material for nature lessons 
 by the human brand which it bears. It will be found that 
 this criterion is far-reaching. It takes in insects, for example, 
 as agents for the fertilisation of the flowers of man's gardens 
 and fields. Since there is morality in all purposive activity, 
 and natural objects are to be taught in their human setting, 
 there may be adjustment to all three worlds in nature study. 
 §3. Our fourth principle may be first stated negatively. 
 We are not to select material because it coheres logically. 
 "The practice of choosing for a course of lessons objects of 
 nature which belong to the same class, e.g., rodents, insects, 
 composite flowers, cannot be condemned too strongly."^' 
 The reason is sound. These classes are scientific termini. 
 They are late products of rational thought, whereas the child 
 must travel along the track which leads to them. His imma- 
 turity does not square with the maturity of objective classi- 
 fication. His adjustment must proceed, generally at all 
 events, by the stages which the history of scientific achieve- 
 ment has revealed. We may learn from history of course, 
 and direct adjustment so as to avoid the pitfalls. Abortive 
 efforts to bring the natural world within the sphere of law 
 
 9 The School and the Child, p. 64. 
 
 10 Democracy and Education, p. 235. 
 
 11 Von Wyss, op. cit, p. 26.
 
 NATURE STUDY 67 
 
 may be avoided. We can, for instance, in dealing with the 
 habits of plants and the colouring of insects, bring in the con- 
 ception of adaptation to environment at an early stage, and 
 so lay an empirical foundation for the hypothesis of evolu- 
 tion. But psychology and not logic must be our guide in 
 the selection of material. Logic, exemplified in the body of 
 coherent scientific doctrine, is the goal of adjustment, but the 
 starting-point is the child. ^^ The error of a logical as dis- 
 tinct from a psychological syllabus of nature study is a very 
 common one, as any inspector who has to scrutinise schemes 
 of lessons can testify. It is perhaps natural being an obses- 
 sion of the enthusiast. The orderly array of phenomena is so 
 arresting and satisfying to his scientific sentiment that he 
 hurries to an attempt to bring his pupils up to his own level. 
 They must envisage phenomena as he does, in scientific 
 order. It is a vain hope. Phenomena will only become in- 
 terwoven with the fabric of experience if they are consonant 
 with the pupil's interests. And these are not logical and re- 
 flective, but emotional and active, at the stage we are con- 
 sidering. Let us quote Dewey again : " The necessary con- 
 sequence is an isolation of science from significant experience. 
 The pupil learns symbols without the key to their meaning. 
 He acquires a technical body of information without ability 
 to trace its connections with the objects and operations with 
 which he is familiar — often he acquires simply a peculiar 
 vocabulary."^* We are back at verbalism again instead of 
 real adjustment. An observation of Herbart's is pertinent. 
 "Do not," he says, "forget interest among interesting 
 things; classify not objects but conditions of mind,"^'^ 
 
 We may, indeed, find very clear guidance in Herbart for 
 nature-study. Distinguishing the " parts of knowledge and 
 sympathy " he reduces them to 
 
 Knowledge. Sympathy. 
 
 Of the manifold, With humanity, 
 
 Of its law. With society, 
 
 Of its aesthetic relations. And the relation of both to 
 
 the Highest Being. ^^ 
 
 12 Cf. Dewey, Essay on "The Child and the Environment," in the School 
 jtnd the Child, and Democracy and Education, pp. 256-261. 
 
 13 Democracy and Education, p. 257. 
 
 1* Science of Education, Felliin's Translation, p. 132, 
 15 Ibid, p. 133.
 
 68 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 We are concerned here with the parts of knowledge ; the 
 parts of sympathy would be specially apposite to history. 
 Knowledge of the manifold is empirical, the result of merely 
 contemplative observation. " However rich and vast nature 
 may be, still so long as the mind receives it as it presents 
 itself, it will only be more and more filled with the actual. 
 The manifold in the mind is merely that of phenomena, just 
 as the unity in it is merely that of their similarity and inter- 
 connection. The mind's interest depends on the strength, 
 variety, novelty, and varied succession of these phe- 
 nomena."^^ This expresses the standpoint in nature-study 
 faithfully. It is particularly important, however, to empha- 
 sise a feature which in the statement appears relatively 
 unimportant. The unity, it is said, is " merely that of their 
 similarity and inter-connection." He means that it has not 
 the constraint and necessity characteristic of the second 
 "part " of knowledge, that of law. But we must always be 
 on our guard against clean-cut divisions, corresponding to 
 faculties, in psychology. This similarity and inter-connec- 
 tion is the embryo out of which the conception of law de- 
 velops, and develops gradually and without a break. The 
 idea of necessity is there, though inarticulate and unextri- 
 cated, in the idea of connectedness. In other words specula- 
 tive observation — Herbart's description of the mind's 
 activity at the law stage — brings nothing new into being. 
 It only gives point and articulateness to the harvest of con- 
 templative observation. The practical point is that in our 
 nature-lessons we need not be careful to keep strictly to con- 
 templative observation. When speculation appears, as it 
 assuredly will, it should be welcomed and encouraged. Even 
 less discernible is any hard-and-fast line between aesthetic in- 
 terest and the first and second forms. In fact an act of 
 interest or observation which from one side is contemplative 
 is from the other aesthetic. And one side reacts on and re- 
 enforces the other. It is these mental relations and connec- 
 tions, i.e., the psychology of knowledge, rather than its 
 objective, i.e., logical bonds, which must be our guide in the 
 drawing up of syllabuses. At the same time it is the manifold 
 as such, that is, the phenomena of nature in their novelty 
 and impressiveness, but also in their entirety, which w^e must 
 
 1* Ibid, p. 133
 
 NATURE STUDY 69 
 
 envisage in nature lessons. Analysis, abstraction, the close 
 examination of parts, is for a later stage, that of science. To 
 quote von Wyss again : " As it [nature-study] represents the 
 reaction of a young mind to the direct and immediate influ- 
 ence of an unexplored but a priori interesting environment, 
 the more clearly the latter is shown as a complete whole, un- 
 touched by the analysis and generalisation of scientific 
 thought, the more perfectly will the conditions of nature- 
 study be fulfilled both in letter and spirit."^' 
 
 Now we have been laying down principles somewhat 
 boldly, perhaps dogmatically. It is high time to add that 
 the evolution of a nature course is dependent equally on trial 
 and experiment. In the introductory chapter we pointed out 
 how futile it was to attempt to "apply" psychology and 
 philosophy in any direct and immediate way to the solution 
 of educational problems. And the evolution of a syllabus is 
 one of the most important of them. We shall certainly do 
 well to get principles clearly focussed in our minds, but we 
 must be ready at every stage to modify and adapt them in 
 accordance with the plain teaching of experience. The four 
 we have considered, reality, relative novelty, utility in the 
 sense of human application and amelioration, and psycho- 
 logical rather than logical coherence, cannot, it may safely 
 be said, lead us far astray. But there is not only the diffi- 
 culty of evolving a syllabus which will embody and reflect 
 them all. That is not insurmountable. The real obstacle is 
 the working out in detail. And to get over this, patient in- 
 vestigation, trial and experiment with alertness born of 
 intuition and experience, are what we must depend upon. 
 Here is a wide field for research which the training institu- 
 tions for teachers can initiate but which must be carried to 
 full fruition in the concrete normal situations which the 
 ordinary schools afford. The educational journals should be 
 the repository of results achieved : difficulties met and tried 
 methods of surmounting them. So far the text-book of 
 theory and practice has been, to far too limited an extent, the 
 outcome of the school as a testing laboratory. Our doctrine 
 has too rarely been thoroughly tried and proved. 
 
 §4. Keeping this need for testing principles constantly 
 in mind, we may consider a fifth. It is urged that wholes, 
 
 17 Op. cit, p. 26.
 
 70 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 individuals, types, are more appropriate than parts : a plant 
 in its entirety for example, rather than roots, stems, leaves, 
 flowers, and fruits, as organs taken abstractly and apart 
 from their setting. There are some obvious advantages. 
 The life of individual things is interesting to the child be- 
 cause it squares with his own experience and resulting 
 animistic attitude towards nature. It offers a field for the play 
 of his imagination and his emotions. Its congruity with his 
 own experience makes adjustment real. It also affords a 
 scheme, outline, or background in relation to which details, 
 especially the fitting of organs to function, for example, roots 
 to feeding, buds to growing, or even seeds to reproduction, 
 acquire real meaning. In a word, life-history or biography 
 is a natural method of approach, of adjustment, out of 
 which comparison as the prelude to classification emerges 
 almost spontaneously. It makes nature-study the natural 
 avenue to the science which is to follow. Empirical acquaint- 
 ance with scientific truth embedded in reality is accumulated 
 almost unconsciously, and the way prepared for the more 
 abstract rational adjustment which is to follow. All this 
 seems clear. At the same time it is necessary to remember 
 that individuality, the interplay of parts subserving in their 
 functioning the welfare of the whole, is the ultimate goal of 
 science and, indeed, of philosophy, since the whole universe 
 in space and time is probably individual. We mean that 
 when we talk of life-history as a method of nature-study, we 
 must remember that, while it links on easily and naturally to 
 the experience of the child on the one side, it touches reality 
 as a whole on the other. Unless we test its applications care- 
 fully and systematically, it may lead us and our pupils into 
 deep waters, and defeat the effort at adjustment which it is 
 meant to facilitate. When we get beyond the individual to 
 life-societies, often put forward as suitable units for nature 
 courses, the difficulties are multiplied. It is easy to talk 
 airily of a pond, a forest, and a farm, as themes around which 
 details can be organised. They can unquestionably ; but 
 only if the material is carefully worked over, limits found 
 and fixed by trial, and ways of carrying the intermittent atten- 
 tion of the young over gaps which science alone can fill in, 
 discovered by actual experiment. 
 
 The same note of warning seems necessary with regard
 
 NATURE STUDY 71 
 
 to the conception of the unity of nature. It is sometimes 
 maintained that this principle should be our guide in draw- 
 ing up nature courses, and that it is fundamental, as con- 
 trasted with the departmental conception which is the basis 
 of scientific advance. Now, no doubt, the dependence, say, 
 of the functioning of roots on soil and moisture and of leaves 
 on light, can be made a reality to children, as also the inter- 
 dependence of plant, bird, and insect life in a wood, and the 
 continuity of all three with inorganic elements and forces. 
 Further, from the adjustment of the teacher himself to the 
 unity of nature may arise many an illuminating suggestion. 
 But we must not deceive ourselves. Such ideas of depend- 
 ence and interdependence must for children be, in the nature 
 of things, vague and fragmentary. And it would be the sub- 
 version of sound method to base our syllabuses and our 
 teaching on the assumption that the unity of nature is to be 
 a pervasive operative principle. It is rather a far-off end, 
 though it may now and then throw a ray of illumination 
 backwards on to our modest task. More than this it would 
 be folly to expect. 
 
 The principles we have noted are formal : they are applic- 
 able to any material we may select. And they will help, if 
 rigorously tested, not onl}^ in the first selection of suitable 
 material for each stage of adjustment, but also in the weaving 
 of the syllabuses for the separate stages together, so that the 
 course forms a coherent and progressive whole. Thus, living 
 and organic phenomena will predominate at the outset. In- 
 organic elements and forces will be introduced incidentally 
 as conditions of life. Gradually they will be brought into 
 focus, as when a raindrop or a weather-worn hill claims 
 attention for itself; although it will be well to see that they 
 are never long without a fringe of human reference. So also 
 a concentric basis of selection may be imposed by the need 
 for perceptual reality. It may be necessary to go to the same 
 garden or the same window-boxes for material in successive 
 years, in which case a progressive treatment of familiar 
 topics will be the only way of satisfying the principle of 
 relative novelty. In a word, the separate principles must 
 be so combined that the course as a whole reflects a gradual 
 withdrawal from the complexity of the real to the more 
 clearly-defined and simpler outlines revealed by analysis and 
 
 6
 
 72 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 abstraction. There must be a steady onward movement 
 towards the point of view of science. It should be gradual, 
 keeping pace with growth in the power of voluntary atten- 
 tion. If skilfully made, the transition need involve no loss 
 of emotional warmth. The main safeguard is to satisfy the 
 need for a personal grip of fact and truth. Adjustment at 
 this stage of transition means branding phenomena with the 
 hall-mark of personal possession. We may say that the 
 centre of gravity of adjustment is shifting. At first it lies in 
 the phenomena themselves. They take possession of the 
 child, satisfying his curiosity and wonder. Subjective and 
 objective factors co-operate at this, as at every, stage ; but 
 the dynamic resultant is perhaps in the latter. As, how- 
 ever, immediate objective constraint weakens — catholicity of 
 interest flagging — it is necessary to develop a counterbalanc- 
 ing sense of power over a narrower range. This is the time 
 for collections, aquaria, garden-work and models. The time 
 also for diagrams, graphic representations, drawings and 
 verbal descriptions. The former are not to be regarded 
 merely as healthy disciplinary occupations, nor the latter 
 merely as valuable exercises in reproduction. They are such, 
 but that is not their essence in the process of adjustment. 
 That is rather the restoration of equilibrium through 
 emphasis of the subjective factor in the process. Within ex- 
 perience a process of fixing, of nailing down, is mediated by 
 these activities. They are not subordinate but fundamental. 
 They represent the victory of mind, the assertion of indi- 
 viduality. Through them the environment is not merely 
 made continuous with the self ; it is branded as the posses- 
 sion, the extension of the self. In like manner a technical 
 term boldly and confidently applied is a beacon, a blazed 
 tree, on the track of exploration. It is not merely a sign- 
 post, it is a peg signifying conquered territory. 
 
 §5. This is a convenient point for a note on the place of 
 ancillary activities such as manual work, arithmetic, and read- 
 ing in the primary course. They are ancillary to adjust- 
 ment. We are considering adjustment to the first world, 
 but their relation to adjustment to the second and third is of 
 the same nature. Take manual work. Its enthusiastic 
 champions — and they are in the front line of protagonists — 
 often seem to lose perspective. The subject in their hands
 
 NATURE STUDY 73 
 
 becomes absolute rather than relative ; or perhaps it would be 
 truer to say that its relativity becomes partial. Its focus or 
 terminus is the individual. It is the old obsession of disci- 
 pline which we come across once more. Their exercises are 
 organised mainly, if not entirely, with a view to the indi- 
 vidual's progress in skill and dexterity. They proudly dis- 
 claim utilitarian ends. It is not their task to give vocational 
 training; and there we entirely agree. Our complaint, how- 
 ever, is that in hypostatising their work they hypostatise the 
 individual. And, if our view is sound, he cannot be 
 hypostatised. If, not the individual, but the adjustment of 
 the individual is the goal of education, manual training 
 should be directed to the attainment of that goal. In practice 
 that means, so far as adjustment to nature is concerned, that 
 the bench and the workshop should contribute directly to the 
 conquest of the physical environment. Boys — and girls — 
 should be making window-boxes, plant-props, rabbit-huts, 
 record-boards, working-models, T-squares, and the like. 
 These things subserve utility in the higher sense we have 
 already noted. ^* Manual training can thus help to give the 
 pupil the sense of adjusting his environment to himself. 
 And in the process the instructor will find ample opportunity 
 for the discipline in calculation and precision of execution 
 which he rightly assesses so highly. Only it will have a 
 focus and an objective at once in the individual and beyond 
 him. It will help to make him master of his world as well as 
 of himself. 
 
 Arithmetic perhaps stands on a different footing. It 
 deals with a definite aspect of reality, the quantitative one, 
 and its raison d'etre is thus essentially the bringing of 
 adjustment to precision. Yet, as one of the three R's it has 
 got into a false position. These, it is said, represent the 
 minimum of equipment, but since it has rarely been asked : 
 equipment for what ? theory has halted at the subject itself, 
 and not got beyond it to its purpose. The result has been 
 that the subject, secure in its own right, has developed fan- 
 tastically and beyond its proper boundaries so that the pupil 
 is taken through intricacies which will not only never serve 
 him usefully, but which actually block the avenues of easy 
 access to algebra. Power to manipulate quantities and 
 
 18 See pp. 65, 66.
 
 74 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 magnitudes is a need which arises naturally in the process of 
 
 real adjustment to nature. Arithmetic is a necessary part of 
 nature-study and arises naturally out of it. If it were kept 
 in this relation almost exclusively in the primary school, and 
 the intricacies arising out of its application to human affairs, 
 e.g., interest, exchanges, and investments, postponed to the 
 secondary stage when history in its economic and social 
 aspects really begins, half the time now given to it might be 
 saved, while its factorial efficiency for adjustment would be 
 doubled. In this as in other directions the primary course 
 begins better than it goes on. Number emerges naturally 
 from nature in the beginning of the course, but it gets further 
 and further divorced from it as the course proceeds. The 
 problem is to bring them together again. Dewey thus sum- 
 marises the experience of the elementary school attached to 
 Chicago University : " (a) The more direct modes of activity, 
 constructive, and occupation work, scientific observation, 
 experimentation, etc., present plenty of opportunities and 
 occasions for the necessary use of reading, writing (and spell- 
 ing) and number work. These things may be introduced 
 then, not as isolated studies, but as organic outgrowths of 
 the child's experience. The problem is, in a systematic and 
 progressive way, to take advantage of these occasions, 
 (b) The additional vitality and meaning which these studies 
 thus secure make possible a very considerable reduction of 
 the time ordinarily devoted to them, (c) The final use of the 
 symbols, whether in reading, calculation, or composition, is 
 more intelligent, less mechanical ; more active, less passively 
 receptive; more an increase of power less a mere mode of 
 enjoyment."^' 
 
 The particular function of reading in relation to nature- 
 study is to extend the area of adjustment and to feed and 
 stimulate the imagination so that attention, rivetted to suc- 
 cessive details in actual nature lessons, now passes freely 
 from the one to the other, from organ to function, from 
 phenomena to their relations, so that a continuous fabric is 
 spun, later to be the field of more intensive intellectual in- 
 vestigation. Books about nature, brightly written, supply a 
 link between perception and conception and serve the pur- 
 
 19 The School and the Child, p. 125.
 
 NATURE STUDY 75 
 
 pose which Kant conceived under the idea of the schematism 
 of the categories of the understanding. Reading, and reci- 
 tation especially, will also serve the further purpose of 
 emotional development and adjustment and thus carry for- 
 ward the evolution of the scientific sentiment. So that 
 linguistic and literary work, like arithmetic and manual work, 
 become, as Dewey puts it, " organic outgrowths of the child's 
 experience." The book will not only be an instrument of 
 adjustment to the first world at this stage. Readers with 
 humanistic content will be a link with the second. But thev 
 will stand in a different relation to this second direction of 
 adjustment. Their purpose here is to supply the actual in- 
 troduction through song and story to the "transparent 
 world of minds." Song and story will, of course, link on to 
 the child's previous experiences of social relationships in the 
 home and the school. But they will formally introduce the 
 second world in the same way as nature lessons formally 
 introduce the first. They will furnish the empirical and 
 emotional experience out of which adjustment to history and 
 civilisation will emerge. 
 
 We may now sum up. The child comes within the direc- 
 tive control of the school with an outfit of experience of nature 
 in which a considerable amount of synthesis and analysis 
 has been achieved. Nature study continues the process. 
 Childhood is at home in the realm of nature, but it is nature 
 in the concreteness of perception, imagination, and associa- 
 tion, rather than in the abstract significance of conceptual 
 thought. In promoting adjustment to the first world, nature- 
 study must conform to psychological rather than logical 
 criteria. Grouping or classification goes on and, of course, 
 presupposes some measure of isolation of qualities and 
 features, similar and dissimilar. There is even the germ of 
 definition which is classificatioji " brought to conception." 
 But procedure should remain empirical rather than rational, 
 should lie with denotation rather than connotation, with 
 classification rather than definition, with biography rather 
 than analysis. Rational conceptions can only be inadequate 
 being based on inadequate experience. Definition should be 
 hinted at rather than pressed. Such simple experiments as 
 those which elucidate the effect of warmth, moisture, and 
 light on growth are appropriate, and foreshadow the isolation
 
 76 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 and quantitative determination of causes which is the goal of 
 science. Manual work, arithmetic, and reading are aids to 
 adjustment growing organically out of nature study. The 
 transition to science is gradual but continuous. But nature 
 study remains at the concrete and pictorial stage. Develop- 
 ment of experience, extensive and intensive, must be sealed 
 by emotional warmth. Imaginative play, with the animistic 
 impulse behind it, must be given free scope. Adjustment 
 must bear the individual brand. The environment must 
 grow on to personality. 
 
 §6. Geography comes next in the series of studies 
 whose aim is adjustment to the world of nature. It is 
 obviously a department of nature study in its comprehensive 
 meaning, and it stands in the closest relation to the introduc- 
 tory work we have just considered. There is a sense, indeed, 
 in which nature study and geography are one. They both 
 look out on the same broad field. And their unity extends 
 to depth as well as breadth; for, as has already been noted, 
 all scientific investigation of nature is ultimately utilitarian in 
 the fine sense of giving a man a better footing in his first 
 world, even if the knowledge accruing remains unapplied in 
 any immediate and direct way to his material betterment; 
 while geography looks at that world as the home of man. 
 It is necessary to emphasise this identity rather than differ- 
 ence, if only that schooling may be made an organic unity, 
 and not that mechanical juxtaposition of activities which it 
 so often is. Still, geography has its own individuality, 
 readily realisable if it be thought of as a great divide, shelv- 
 ing off on one side into nature study and science, and on 
 the other into history and civilisation. Viewed thus, it is 
 seen to be focal and fundamental in respect of adjustment. 
 Indeed, tradition has been sound in assigning to it a central 
 place, at all events in the primary course, just as until quite 
 recently it has been unsound as regards method of attack. 
 Now that a more rational treatment has been generally 
 approved, and the subject itself has won a place in the front 
 rank of the sciences, we may hope it will find the welcome it 
 deserves in the secondary sphere also. Without it adjust- 
 ment remains incomplete even in the vulgar estimate. To be 
 constantly "at sea" in the physical environment, to have 
 developed neither the rare sense of the north nor the common
 
 NATURE STUDY 77 
 
 sense which enables a Boer to read spoor and the city man 
 his Bradshaw, is to be an ignoramus in the eyes of all men. 
 A good rule in geography is not to get so far down the 
 slope which leads to nature study and science as not to be 
 able to see humanity on the other side of the divide ; and 
 vice-versa. But we need not press our rule too far. Dewey 
 seems to find a human, i.e.., a social, reference in all know- 
 ledge worth pursuing, but we are inclined to agree with 
 O'Shea^" that there is value, as well as delight, to be got by 
 putting our own individual mark on a bit of the first world, 
 written in wonder as well as understanding. Geographical 
 phenomena, though their ultimate significance may be their 
 human import, sometimes come home to one through their 
 own arresting power. Table Mountain was for me, on a 
 November morning of 1902, just a miracle of beauty. It was 
 not the end of a sea-highway, not a sea-junction for India, 
 Australia, and South America. And we are justified in 
 sometimes treating geography as a means of presenting the 
 phenomena of nature for themselves alone. They will 
 accumulate human import naturally enough in the process of 
 adjustment, just as they will assuredly shed it in moments 
 when nature itself calls again. This means that we need 
 not, indeed must not, be too rigid in fixing our theoretical 
 boundaries and differentiae of subjects. As a rule and in 
 general, geographical facts all depend on their meaning for 
 man, man in community with his fellows. But that is not 
 their whole significance and value. The submarine bluff 
 which at the hundred-fathom line off the British Isles con- 
 verts undulatory into translatory tidal movement, and makes 
 the easy incoming and outgoing of ocean vessels such a 
 significant economic fact for British harbours, is also in itself, 
 as an under-sea rock-face, a natural fact which, on its first 
 revelation and at every subsequent naked presentation, can 
 arouse the elemental emotion of wonder. We must in 
 geography from time to time get back to nature. It is sound 
 to withdraw to the standpoint of meaning for man; it is 
 equally sound to get back to nature. It would be true, of 
 course, to say that the further we get from the great divide 
 which is geography's territory down the slope to science on 
 one side or to history and economics on the other, the further 
 
 20 Education as Adjustment, p. 115.
 
 7$ THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 we get from the position whence the subject appears in true 
 perspective. But the perspective of subjects is not the 
 aim of adjustment so far as the boy or girl is concerned. It 
 may be for the philosopher as such, but he is hardly the man 
 we want. We want one who, through adjustment, is able to 
 live, to play his part, to realise Herbart's many-sided interest 
 in, and, we may add, a many-sided contribution to, life, both 
 his own and that which he shares with his fellows. We need 
 not isolate geography. The world does not isolate geo- 
 graphical facts. 
 
 It is an obvious truth, though teaching and exposition 
 often overlook it, that we must get the habitat of a people 
 into focus if we would read its history aright ; just as one 
 learns much of a man from his house and garden, as also 
 from his poise and physical bearing. Words such as en- 
 vironment, background, and setting imply a mechanical 
 relationship and perpetuate the superficiality of common 
 thought which makes of a people and its native-land, a man 
 and his home, two and not one. We have suggested one 
 and not two as the meaning of what we call experience in 
 which man — the individual and the nation — and his environ- 
 ment fuse. So that, as Dewey says, " while geography 
 emphasises the physical side and history the social, these are 
 only emphases in a common topic, namely, the associated 
 life of man.'"'' It is, indeed, only the constantly-increasing 
 store of knowledge which makes it necessary to separate the 
 two. They naturally form a unity, for they describe a unity, 
 the experience of humanity. And it is just because their 
 separateness in books and school time-tables leads us to for- 
 get their oneness in reality, that such a note as this is 
 necessary. Moreover " in the beginning history is all 
 geography."" The life of a people is parallel in this with 
 the life of an individual. Adjustment to nature is the first 
 step, adjustment to the "transparent world of minds" the 
 second, adjustment to the moral order the last. Each step 
 gives a footing for the next. It follows that we must fre- 
 quently get back to the first if we are to interpret aright the 
 social and moral progress of a people. South Africa affords 
 a good instance. Born out of voyages of discovery, its early 
 
 21 Democracy and Education, p. 247. 
 
 22 Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, p. 231.
 
 NATURE STUDY 79 
 
 history is largely shaped by Table Bay, Table Mountain and 
 the country as it was opened up to the north, south, and east 
 of that centre. The history of the inland provinces, of the 
 Free State and Transvaal, originates in the natural features 
 and conditions met and surmounted during the Great Trek. 
 So it is with the history of every country. It begins in a 
 struggle with the unconquered wild. As the background of 
 history and the foreground of nature-study and science, 
 geography is indispensable to adjustment. 
 
 §7. The beginnings of that side of adjustment which 
 we call learning geography must, like nature-study, lie in 
 direct perceptual contact with the real. Nothing else will do. 
 As we shall in a moment see, progress in the subject will 
 largely depend on the interpretation of signs, diagrammatic 
 as in maps, and symbolic as, mainly, in written descriptions. 
 Improvement in means of locomotion and communication has 
 not done a great deal to increase the area of the earth known 
 directly and intimately by the great mass of the population ; 
 save under the abnormal circumstances of a world war. 
 Those who travel on public or private affairs, pleasure, or 
 education, are normally few. The limits of the part of the 
 earth perceptionally known are for the majority narrow. It 
 follows that geography for most of us can only mean a rough 
 approximation to adjustment, so far as the world as a whole 
 goes. And the degree of approach to accuracy will mainly 
 depend on the decoding of representative signs, varying from 
 the closest fidelity to fact, as in the case of photographs, to 
 the merely symbolic, of which the best example is furnished 
 by words themselves. The key to the code can only be 
 forged by perceptual experience. On that alone interpreta- 
 tion must ultimately depend. In this sense Leibnitz's say- 
 ing : L'eloigne est exprime par le prochain^^ applies with 
 special pertinence to geography. We must begin with the 
 real then : with hill-top and cliff-head, with street and water- 
 way. We must approach the map through slopes and 
 dongas, through boundary-walls and bridges, roads and rail- 
 ways. Records of rainfall, temperature, wind and weather 
 generally, made after direct observation, and kept by the in- 
 dividual himself, will give him the key to many geographical 
 diagrams which might otherwise be just glanced at, and 
 
 -^ See Venn, Empirical Logic, p. ii.
 
 8o THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 passed by as meaning little or nothing. The way to an 
 understanding of political or administrative facts is through 
 the same gate. A tram terminus, a sign-post marking a 
 municipal boundary, a natural frontier, such as a mountain 
 range or stretch of sea, recognised as such, will give meaning 
 to administrative and national symbols on the map. So in 
 general the way to the map is by drawing one on a large 
 scale after practical measurement, by observing and record- 
 ing daily, monthly, and seasonal phenomena of earth, sky 
 and sun. 
 
 The near and the far are, as a matter of fact, reciprocally 
 related in respect of interpretation. We have quoted 
 Leibnitz, but Tennyson's reflection on the " flower in the 
 crannied wall "^* is equally pertinent. And we can add the 
 scientist's conviction to the poet's. Huxley said : " Step by 
 step the conviction dawns upon the learner that, to attain to 
 even an elementary conception of what goes on in his parish, 
 he must know something about the universe. "^^ This is par- 
 ticularly true of geography. We begin at home because 
 "conception without perception is empty, "^® we look out 
 beyond home because "perception without conception is 
 blind. "^' And for distant phenomena we have to rely, and 
 can well rely, on maps. They retain perceptual constraint, 
 though they are at the third remove from reality, photographs 
 occupying the second. This is one of the distinguishing 
 features of geography, and by no means the least valuable as 
 a medium of adjustment. Most of us can only know the 
 world beyond tramping radius in maps, contour maps for 
 preference. They are stimulating productions, with certain 
 distinct advantages over photographs. They are a spur to 
 the imagination and, what is more important, to that power 
 of intellectual synthesis which, while it is organically related 
 to imagination, and perhaps is evolved out of it, yet 
 transcends it. " The distinctive character of this intelligible 
 form or synthesis lies then in the fact that it is selective. In 
 this respect it differs from the synthesis of association, which 
 unites together whatever occurs together."** Imagination, 
 
 2* In the poem beginning " Flower in the crannied wall; " 
 
 25 Quoted by Stephenson in Broad Lines in Science Teaching, p. 122. 
 
 26 See p. 58. 
 
 27 Cf. Barnett in Common Sense in Education and Teaching, pp. 250, 251, 
 and Dewey,' Democracy and Education, p. 248. 
 
 3S Ward, Psychological Principles, p. 302.
 
 NATURE STUDY 8i 
 
 synthetic though it is, is yet in bonds; it is the captive of 
 presentations. Intellectual synthesis is free. It roams at 
 will over the details of presentation, ignoring this and annex- 
 ing that, and reaching out to the bounds of the universe to 
 find a clue to the meaning of what it annexes. It is the 
 activity of mind as the master element in adjustment. And 
 maps stimulate it. The very simplicity and definiteness of 
 contour lines, of coastal boundaries, of mountain frontiers, 
 and of river-ways, afford the opportunity for the synthetic 
 activity of the ego. Freed from the mists that obliterate real 
 contours, and the colours that cloak real boundaries, the ego 
 sets boldly about the task of synthetic manipulation. Only 
 very occasionally does the pedestrian on the moor or the fore- 
 shore realise human ascendancy. In the glamour of nature 
 he loses himself and no doubt with moral and aesthetic profit ; 
 but in the study or the classroom, with a regional geography 
 open before him, say Mackinder's " Britain and the British 
 Seas," he finds himself again. He sends the water-courses 
 down the flanks of the divide, he sees the still surface of the 
 lakes in the rift-valleys, he paints the grasses on the uplands 
 and the cornfields on the lowlands. With the map open 
 before him he becomes architectonic. Nature controls him ; 
 even landscapes and seascapes on the w-alls, do so in a less 
 degree. Maps are contributory : in reading them he feels 
 himself master of circumstance. Stay-at-home though he 
 perforce must be, he has the advantage over many a sailor 
 who has traversed all the seas and many a wanderer who has 
 penetrated all the continents. 
 
 Adjustment to the first world implies, then, being at 
 home in maps. Let us now look at the stages by which such 
 familiarity can be reached. Three may be distinguished : at 
 the first the translation of signs by means of perception and 
 conception is the aim ; the second is the classilicatory and 
 descriptive stage, occupied by w-hat is known as comparative 
 geography ;" while at the third inference is central, regional 
 geography being the sphere in which it operates. They are 
 not to be artificially and rigidly separated. Remoter aims 
 will throw their shadows backward. Thus, in translating 
 
 29 By comparative geography we mean that in which the political, 
 national, or administrative unit is the point of departure, e.g., the county, 
 province or country. Of course the unit may be — and should be — treated 
 regionally.
 
 82 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 contour shading into perceptual and conceptual fact the 
 first glimmerings of regional and comparative geography 
 will appear. The Witwatersberg for Transvaal children, as 
 the Pennine Chain for those of Lancashire and Yorkshire, 
 will not merely rise pictorially from map-markings ; they will, 
 in the fringe of presentation, be watersheds and divides. So 
 also the first elementary notions of mountain, river, plain, 
 and estuar}^ will be schematic, to be gradually filled out as 
 progress is made through comparative to regional geography. 
 The wise teacher is always looking both forward and back- 
 ward. The first steps are determined by the ultimate goal, 
 and the first conceptions only become adequate when the goal 
 is reached. The blend of the empirical and the rational in 
 every stage of progress towards the latter is as sound in 
 geography as in any other medium of adjustment. Concen- 
 tricity in method means two things : a common centre, the 
 ego, and the inclusion of the first area of presentation, in an 
 ever-widening circumference. We must bear in mind this 
 fan-like characteristic of adjustment when we are considering 
 its stages. The radii are continuous. They are the axes of 
 presentation. 
 
 The stages mentioned are the same as those distinguish- 
 able in the whole course of which nature-study forms the 
 primary and science the secondary part. This obviously 
 must be so, inasmuch as geography is a branch of science. 
 The first stage we have called translation, reading the signs 
 on the map in the language of real and adequate ideas. A 
 lot of nature work will be necessary in order to acquire that 
 language. If the natural features in the neighbourhood of 
 the school are few, we shall have to depend mainly on pic- 
 tures and bird's-eye views : but in these days of cheap 
 excursions, the school-journey should be in most cases a 
 possibility. The advantage of open-air work is that the unity 
 of natural phenomena is preserved and the foundation is laid 
 for those causal relations which are the essence of regional 
 geography. The mountain-range, river-course, tributaries 
 and sea-estuary are all of a piece; as are sea, shore, cape, 
 inlet, and tide. Also proportion and perspective are pre- 
 served. These two things, the unity and relative magnitude 
 of natural features, it is one of the main aims of geography 
 to bring out. Even at this stage a great deal can be done to
 
 NATURE STUDY 83 
 
 develop precision of quantitative and spatial conceptions. 
 Conceptions of scale are usually attempted far too early, 
 whereas appropriate and extremely useful exercises in rela- 
 tive position, direction, and magnitude can be devised in the 
 open and in the class-room with plan or map, and can be 
 given from the beginning of the course. Real arithmetic 
 can be based on them. It used to be the practice to set out 
 in geography, as in geometry, from definitions. The better 
 way has been found in both subjects. It lies in preliminary 
 survey and measurement, followed by the recording of results 
 with such a degree of precision as is attainable. After this 
 preliminary work has been done, there is no reason why a 
 pupil should not roam at will over a map of the world or 
 globe, discovering for himself instances of all the main land 
 and sea features. If he has a grip of the whole in outline, it 
 will help him to pass to a study of the parts in detail. 
 
 §8. Comparison is the clue to adjustment at the second 
 stage. The points of view from which countries may be 
 compared are, of course, numerous. Latitude is one of the 
 most useful, because inferences from it are so many and so 
 far-reaching. The sentence " Africa extends from 37 degrees 
 north to 34 degrees south," enables us to contrast it with 
 Europe, Asia, and North America, and assimilate it to South 
 America and Australia, in respect of more points, perhaps, 
 than any other single fact. It will be essential, therefore, to 
 follow up the implications of latitude as far as possible. The 
 fundamental fact, of course, is that the altitude of the sun at 
 noon at the equinox is the complement of the latitude of the 
 place. Thus for London Lat. 51° 30' N, that altitude is 38° 
 30', and for Pretoria, Lat. 25° 45' S, it is 64° 15'. Or, put 
 in another way, for every degree of latitude the sun at the 
 equinoxes is removed one degree from the zenith. This 
 primary fact, taken along with the inclination of the earth's 
 axis to the plane of its orbit, is the fundamental factor in 
 climate and thus in all that follows from the climatic zones. 
 A good start has been made with adjustment to the first world 
 when a pupil can draw legitimate though, of course, qualified 
 inferences about the climate of a place, and unqualified ones 
 about the sun's altitude and the length of day and night at 
 different seasons of the year, from the figure which gives its 
 latitude. Progress in geography will, generally speaking,
 
 84 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 consist in combining other factors such as altitude, proximity 
 to the sea, nature and configuration of the surface, with this 
 one. Comparative geography will largely consist in observ- 
 ing how the human habitat differs from country to country 
 or how it is reproduced as a consequence of such general 
 factors as these. 
 
 At this stage too, what is called political geography will 
 emphasise the co-existence of certain forms of settlement, 
 industry and development, with the occurrence of these 
 physical conditions. Sparsely-populated uplands, towns on 
 river-ways and plains, manufacturing industries on coal- 
 fields, agricultural industries as soil and climate determine, 
 these and other like human features will appear as empirically 
 known combinations of circumstances. They will be fixed 
 by the comparative method and will so far mark an advance 
 in the organisation of facts. The rational element will be 
 present in the connecting of physical with political and indus- 
 trial conditions. It will be present also, marginally, in the 
 gradual adumbration of economic relations as dependent on 
 physical conditions. In the mere enumeration of trade routes 
 on land and sea, and of products and commodities borne 
 along them, the way will be paved for the economic aspects 
 of the regional geography which is to follow. So, too, the 
 ground will be prepared for the relations of geography and 
 history by incidental references to historical associations 
 which are appropriate to the comparative stage of geography. 
 The very name Cape of Good Hope calls for a reference to 
 those hardy adventurers who carried the fame of Portugal 
 round Africa to the East, and thus introduces the idea of the 
 historical genesis of the age of exploration. So also Grimsby 
 and Lincoln are an index to Norse and Roman expansion 
 respectively which no teacher would knowingly miss. Com- 
 parative geography, though its facts are welded mainly by 
 association, is thus also the natural transition to that syn- 
 thesis of the intellect which is the aim of adjustment to the 
 first world, and makes clear important factors of adjustment 
 to the second. 
 
 §9. The geography and nature-study we have so far 
 indicated, are eminently suited to boys and girls up to the 
 twelfth or thirteenth year of age. Physical activity and 
 mental activity on the side of memory and imagination, keen-
 
 NATURE STUDY 85 
 
 ness on the exploration of a wide field rather than con- 
 centration on a narrower one, are characteristic of these years 
 of childhood. With the dawn of adolescence mental life 
 deepens and the opportunity for a more serious investigation 
 of natural phenomena in their relation to the needs and 
 aspirations of men, has arrived. No better field for it dur- 
 ing the next two years of school life than regional geography, 
 with physiography as a parallel and illuminating study, can 
 be found. Regional geography is essentially rational 
 geography. The region as a physical and an economic and 
 perhaps a political unit is held together by casual relations. 
 Study of it is an opportunity for going into the why as well 
 as the where of geographical facts. Within it physical 
 features such as contour, river-basins, and soil, climatic con- 
 ditions such as temperature, rainfall, and prevalent winds, 
 organic and inorganic products, such as plants, animals, and 
 minerals, and the distribution and industries of man, are all 
 bound up, not merely by bonds of contiguity, but by the 
 stronger cement of cause and effect, evolutionary forces being 
 traceable both in the natural and the economic sphere. His- 
 tory, too, as a product in no small part of natural environ- 
 mental conditions, becomes to that extent powerfully interest- 
 ing. For like geography it becomes intelligible. It ceases 
 to be mere description. It takes on in some degree the 
 character of inevitability. The effect of Britain's insularity, 
 as described by George,^" in promoting nationality, is a good 
 example. It is not the only factor, of course, but it is a very 
 important one. " Other causes besides insular separateness 
 no doubt contributed to preserve and develop in England the 
 old Teutonic institutions, little affected by the feudalism of 
 the continent. The wisdom of William I and Henry II was 
 necessary to build up on this foundation a system which 
 welded England into a coherent nation, centuries before any 
 nation worthy of the name existed on the continent."'^ It is 
 not suggested that pupils of thirteen to fifteen can pursue 
 such a topic as the relation of nationality to environment to 
 any depth. There is good reason, however, to seize every 
 opportunity which occurs of relating history and geography. 
 The regions of England and their relation to the distribution 
 
 •'•" The Relations of Geography and History, pp. 132-136. 
 31 Ibid, p. 135.
 
 86 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 of the Angles and Saxons, for example, is a topic well within 
 the comprehension of pupils of this age. 
 
 In regional geography, then, the point of departure is 
 the natural unit, that which nature has made a whole of; 
 while in comparative geography it is the political unit, the 
 home of a nation. There is, perhaps, room for argument as 
 to which should come first, but it is argument in the vacuum 
 of logic. And for a theory of education the fundamental 
 criterion is obviously the psychological one. As between the 
 teacher with scientific leanings and the one whose eye is for 
 ever directed to the humanities, there may be battle-ground. 
 But the issue only concerns them as experts. With the child 
 as the deciding factor controversy evaporates. His experi- 
 ence makes Transvaal or England or Scotland — his home in 
 the wide sense — the familiar unit, and the transition to Cape 
 Province, France, or Canada, as circumstances and choice 
 may decide — the home of contemporary boys and girls — the 
 natural one. The region is a natural unit to the scientist, but 
 it is artificial to the young pupil, at any rate relatively to the 
 national one, because the bonds which make it a whole are 
 but dimly and empirically appreciated. Even among 
 geographers there is difference of opinion. For example, 
 Professor Lyde, in the preface to his work on " The Con- 
 tinent of Europe," says: "Much emphasis is laid on the 
 political unit, because 1 find it just as difficult to picture 
 clearly the precise limits of a natural region — in Professor 
 Herbertson's sense — as I find it easy to picture the delimited 
 frontier of a civilised state. It is almost always the political 
 control that gives the dominant note in the most important 
 areas ; and, as the method of treating such areas should in each 
 case, as far as possible, be appropriate to the dominant note, 
 the political unit cannot be made subordinate without more 
 being lost than is gained. Besides, to most of us geography 
 seems to have neither meaning nor value apart from Man ; 
 and so we usually think in political units as far as human 
 activities are concerned. For the name of a political unit, 
 e.g., France or Japan, is far more than a mere label of an 
 atom of artificially partitioned land ; it contains a whole world 
 of suggestion and association, and is an epitome of all that 
 makes a nation — of things achieved — of a type of art and 
 literature, in science and politics — of an ideal, the passionate
 
 NATURE STUDY 87 
 
 desire to preserve and perpetuate which is the only thing 
 deserving the name of patriotism."" This is eloquently said 
 and most teachers would subscribe whole-heartedly to it. It 
 does not, however, destroy the value of a course such as that 
 outlined in Reynold's Regional Geography of the World, 
 and no doubt Professor Lyde would be the last to suggest 
 this. It does strongly support the view that regional 
 geography should follow a preparatory course in comparative 
 national geography. 
 
 §10. Regional geography follows naturally on com- 
 parative geography because it develops the presentation of 
 the whole which is schematic, and does so by explaining 
 similarities and differences causally. It is an onward step to 
 rational adjustment. Professor Lyde gives us a sound prin- 
 ciple of method when he states the "conviction that geo- 
 graphical details are illuminating only when viewed as 
 instances of world-processes."" In other words we are to 
 select and deal with particulars and details in so far as they 
 illustrate law and the universal. We may, perhaps, profit- 
 ably note a few aspects of the universal which regional 
 geography can readily reveal. One we have mentioned 
 already, latitude. Here we have the logic of what we might 
 call solar position. It is pregnant with inferences of a far- 
 reaching character. It would not be a bad rule to open con- 
 sideration of the geography of a political or a regional unit 
 with an exercise in deductions from its mean latitude. The 
 altitude of the sun at the equinoxes and solstices, the varying 
 length of day and night, the length of shadows and the dura- 
 tion of twilight, follow directly and inevitably. And what a 
 wealth of secondary deductions : housing, dress, food, habits 
 of life, for example ! The Herbartian would welcome with 
 enthusiasm the opportunity which a degree of latitude, with 
 all its certain implications, offers, as a " preparation stage " 
 for further progress, for further inferences which would need 
 to be made more cautiously. The region is dominated by its 
 solar orientation, and adjustment to this would be an ex- 
 cellent start. 
 
 Then there is the logic of atmospheric currents also fer- 
 tile in inference, just as the movements themselves are fertile 
 
 3 2 Preface, p. v. 
 33 Preface, p. vi.
 
 88 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 in consequences. As to the latter, Professor Lyde says : 
 " The most important single phenomenon in World-climate 
 is probably the swing of the wind-system with the sun, lead- 
 ing to a swing of the rain belts and rain seasons."^* Let us 
 glance at it from the point of view of presentation and the 
 adjustment of the individual to it. There is the updraft with 
 consequent low-pressure under the sun, save as modified in 
 monsoon areas which would be presented separately. The 
 physics of the phenomenon, so far as it could be followed up 
 at this stage, would be dealt with in the parallel physiography 
 course, to be referred to presently. The inflow from north 
 and south is an easy deduction, although the westerly twist 
 which gives the trade winds their permanent N.E. and S.E. 
 direction, is by no means an easy one. In fact, only being 
 properly cleared up by the conception of relative velocity, a 
 conception which the average pupil of, say, 14 years cannot 
 adequately grasp, it will have to remain temporarily at all 
 events on the surface, a fact known empirically, with, per- 
 haps, a rational clue in the margin of consciousness. That 
 need not be a matter of regret, as we have seen. A firm 
 empirical footing is better than a shaky rational one, and the 
 first easterly voyage of Columbus provides a fixing associa- 
 tion. That the northerly trades carried him steadily across 
 to America, as they carry sailing tramps to-day, will appeal 
 to boys not ripe for relative velocity. It is the sort of asso- 
 ciation which links physics and physiography on to 
 geography. The compensatory swing to the temperate 
 zones : the south-west winds which carry North Atlantic 
 vapour to the British Isles, and the "brave west winds" 
 which carry the same harvest of the South Atlantic to the 
 south-west corner of Australia, will, perhaps, be caught up 
 in the conception of atmospheric equilibrium. Its main- 
 tenance by monsoons in eastern seas is also within the logical 
 comprehension of pupils of the age we are considering. The 
 more complex conditions of cyclonic and anti-cyclonic move- 
 ments — the "wind-whirl" and " wind-wyr " as Professor 
 Lyde prefers to call them'^ — are far less easy to handle in- 
 ferentially and are best familiarised through a study of 
 meteorological records. They are a good instance in the 
 
 ** The Continent of Europe, p. 3. 
 
 '3 Ibid, pp. 2, 3 and Preface, pp. vii, viii.
 
 NATURE STUDY 89 
 
 case of pupils living in Northern Europe of the fallacy of 
 always beginning at home and working outwards.^® 
 
 Then again, the logic of precipitation, involved, of 
 course, in what has just been written, is well within the com- 
 pass of pupils of fourteen to sixteen years of age ; and the 
 fact satisfies Lyde's criterion of universality. It has, more- 
 over, a personal interest, originating antithetically for pupils 
 whose homes are in different zones : in its uncertainty for 
 English boys ; in its regularity and periodicity for those who 
 live here in Transvaal. The saturation-point, its variation 
 with temperature, the effect of the ascent of an air column on 
 its temperature, the up-current when moisture-laden winds 
 strike a mountain face, the mists and rain on its flanks and 
 summit, and sometimes, where circumstances of soil are 
 favourable, as with us in the case of Table Mountain, the 
 otherwise unintelligible verdure which clothes them — to all 
 these our pupils can be rationally adjusted. The logical step 
 to snow, hail, the snow-line, glaciers, icebergs, and snow-fed 
 rivers is an easy one, and one which enables reason to annex 
 what may never be perceptually known — a truth appreciated 
 by us, many of whose pupils have never seen the miracle of 
 snow. 
 
 Contour and configuration, wearing and weathering, 
 erosion by w-ind and water, the sculpture of valleys and river- 
 ways, dongas and washaways, alluvial plains, the silting up 
 of river mouths, tides and tidal rivers, all these are material 
 ready to hand, ready for logical manipulation. It is un- 
 necessary to multiply examples further. But an emphatic 
 word of warning is necessary. There is a tendency among 
 writers of text-books on regional geography intended for 
 schools, and among enthusiastic teachers of the subject also, 
 to heap up bases of inference and details inferred from them, 
 regardless of the capacity of school-pupils. Geology especi- 
 ally seems to offer an irresistible temptation. Some of the 
 basic principles of this fascinating subject, in their general 
 implications, such as folding, faults and rift-valleys, up- 
 heaval and subsidence, volcanic thrusts and depository 
 agencies, are appropriate enough. On the other hand the 
 following extract illustrates that the boundary of the appro- 
 priate has been passed : " Geologically, the African plateau 
 
 36 Cf. Stephenson in Broad Lines in Science Teaching pp. 127, 128.
 
 go THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 seems to be an expanse of ancient crystalline rocks, covered 
 in places by sedimentary rocks also of great age. The great 
 Karroo formation in South Africa belongs to the early Meso- 
 zoic period. Apart from the alluvium of the Congo Basin 
 the younger rocks seem almost to be confined to the northern 
 edge of the continent, where in the Atlas region there are 
 great beds of cretaceous rocks, and further to the east rocks of 
 tertiary age."" Real adjustment is impossible here without 
 presupposing a systematic course in geology. Regional 
 geography does not seem to have shaken down so as to give 
 us a clear rift between school and college sections of the sub- 
 ject. It is the old fallacy of a logical rather than a psycho- 
 logical criterion of curricula. The school course is not a 
 mere attenuation of the college course. There is a distinct 
 danger of overloading rational geography, as the irrational 
 geography of our early days was overloaded with discon- 
 nected facts. 
 
 §11. We have to note what is, indeed, a commonplace 
 among geographers that the subject must end with man. 
 The fascinating study of natural features and phenomena is 
 for geographical adjustment transitional. Their focus is 
 humanity. Room must be found in any rational scheme for 
 economic geography. And the geographers are agreed upon 
 the method of approach. It could hardly be otherwise, since 
 the claim of the subject, as recently developed, is its 
 rationality. From the environment as conditioned by struc- 
 ture and climate, the activities and modes of life of men are 
 to be deduced. The latter are explainable as products of 
 evolution conditioned by the former. Only, when the decid- 
 ing factor of adjustment is introduced, the warning that we 
 must keep to broad lines and inferences appreciable by youth, 
 must be repeated. The material is so abundant, and also so 
 fascinating since it combines the attractiveness of science and 
 the humanities. That perhaps explains the enthusiasm of 
 most students of the subject. From the firm ground of 
 science, and freed from the mists of metaphysics, it faces the 
 organic unity of two worlds, nature and civilisation. The 
 bold sweep characteristic of the works of Herbertson,^' 
 Mackinder,^* and Lyde,*° for example, is a fine index of the 
 
 3T Webb, A Systematic Geography of Africa, pp. 6-S. 
 
 3* The Oxford Geographies. 
 
 •■'8 Britain and the British Seas. 
 
 *" The Continent of Europe.
 
 NATURE STUDY 91 
 
 treatment necessary. But even in such company the teacher 
 must not hesitate to exercise his inalienable right of selection, 
 and to choose text-books which square with the limitations 
 of boys and girls. Chisholm*^ may be mentioned as a mine 
 of information for reference. 
 
 The line of approach to economic geography is indicated 
 in the summary description of the natural regions of the 
 world contained in Herbertson's Senior Geography in the 
 Oxford series.*- Natural products are shown as the effects 
 of environmental conditions, and the industries and activities 
 of men as the evolutionary effects of both. The first sketch 
 is general and schematic, to be filled in gradually as the 
 regions are examined in detail. That is a general principle 
 of method insisted on throughout this essav. In respect of 
 that detailed development of the subject one or two sugges- 
 tions may be offered. The underlying theme is the economic 
 life of men. That will, therefore, be the guiding principle 
 of presentation. As subordinate and derivative principles 
 we may note, first, the food of men and animals. The relation 
 of the cereals such as wheat, oats, barley, maize, and rice to 
 sustenance and thus to economic welfare, will give them a 
 real peg of adjustment. It will come as a revelation to most 
 pupils to learn that " wheaten bread was a rarity even in 
 some parts of England within the last hundred years,"*^ and 
 that "it is still a rarity at least for the poorer classes over a 
 large part of the European mainland."" It will interest 
 them to learn that we in South Africa never went short of 
 sugar during the great war, while they were on scanty 
 rations. Secondly, clothing will serve to give reality to facts 
 about wool, cotton, and flax. Thirdly, housing will 
 illuminate many products and industries : timber and lumber- 
 ing, stone and quarrying, clay and brick-making. It will in- 
 terest pupils to know that we can only build our houses and 
 schools at a rate dependent, in part, on the supply of window- 
 frames from Scandinavia. This suggests, fourthly, the 
 economic importance of the exchange and distribution of 
 products and the consequent significance of locomotion by 
 roadways, waterways, riverways, and seaways, to which air- 
 
 *^ A Handbook of Commercial Geography. 
 
 *2 pp. 1-19. 
 
 *8 Chisholm, op. cit, p. 67.
 
 92 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 ways may now be added ; and of communication by post and 
 telegraph. Fifthly, the conception of efficient labour, a fac- 
 tor co-ordinate in importance with natural products them- 
 selves, will lead to many ramifications : the growth of towns 
 in industrial and commercial centres, the distribution of 
 population, the conditions of labour as exemplified in the 
 contrast between an English factory and a rubber plantation, 
 for example; and many more. Sixthly, and perhaps most 
 important of all, the inverse ratio between ease of life and 
 luxuriance of natural products and virility of national charac- 
 ter which the history of modern civilisation seems to have 
 established, should be constantly emphasised. Such deriva- 
 tive principles, ranging from simple to profound, can all be 
 made operative in rational adjustment. No scientifically-con- 
 structed text-book ignores them, of course, but their pro- 
 found importance for the illumination of economic geography 
 perhaps justifies the mention of them here. 
 
 We may now summarise the theory of adjustment as it 
 concerns geography. The subject is vital as the meeting 
 place of nature and civilisation, of science and the humani- 
 ties. Its differentia is nature as the home of man. A 
 geographical fact may be arresting by its natural impressive- 
 ness or its historical associations. The submarine plateau 
 from which Britain emerges is an instance of the former, and 
 the Cape of Good Hope of the latter. We need not hesitate 
 to isolate natural or historical significance occasionally, 
 although our usual point of view must be one which enables 
 us to envisage man and his environment in their geographi- 
 cal relation of unity. Adjustment must start out from per- 
 ception and end in conception and inference. The first and 
 last will be mediated by imagination ; and from the nature of 
 the case the filling out of representation in maps by imagina- 
 tive and inferential activity will be a central feature of adjust- 
 ment. The near and the far are reciprocally related from the 
 point of view of interpretation. Excursions in the open air 
 and excursions over the map of the world, are complemen- 
 tary. To these subjective stages of perception, imagination, 
 and inference, correspond objective stages which we may 
 distinguish as preliminary, comparative, and regional 
 geography. Both subjective and objective stages overlap 
 and interpenetrate. In comparative geography the political
 
 NATURE STUDY 93 
 
 or national unit is the point of departure, though it may be 
 developed regionally. In regional geography the natural 
 unit is the point of departure, though political units as com- 
 binations or subdivisions of natural units will emerge. The 
 preliminary and comparative stages are suitable for pupils up 
 to twelve or thirteen years of age, and the regional for those 
 from twelve or thirteen to fifteen or sixteen. A further de- 
 velopment is possible carrying pupils to the completion of 
 the secondary course at eighteen or nineteen. Here the 
 science would be studied in detail and intensively.** The 
 regional treatment is pre-eminently rational, although it must 
 necessarily remain, to a considerable extent, descriptive also. 
 Inference will take two main directions : the linking of 
 natural features and phenomena with vegetable and animal 
 products, and the linking of both with man in his economic 
 and, incidentally only, his historical relations. Nature study 
 in the narrow sense will be ancillary to and parallel with the 
 course we have called comparative, and physiography will 
 stand in the same relation to the regional course. Stories of 
 exploration and discovery, and descriptive accounts of natural 
 phenomena and economic conditions and activities, should be 
 available in the school library. The subject should retain 
 the glamour of romance, and retention is assured by unitary 
 rather than fragmentary treatment. In this respect nature 
 study, geography, and physiography are alike. 
 
 §12. Physiography was the third department of nature 
 study mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, and a note 
 on the way it can mediate adjustment will bring it appro- 
 priately to an end. It can be brief, for physiography is con- 
 tinuous with early nature study and parallel with geography, 
 and has much in common with them. The reasons for in- 
 cluding it in the school course and the method of attack are 
 in most respects identical with those which apply in the case 
 of the other two subjects. It is the concrete open-air science, 
 or should be, and thus is in contrast with the more abstract 
 science of the classroom and laboratory. It is the real intro- 
 duction to science. Geography should, as we have seen, 
 exhibit scientific method; but physiography, while it is in 
 
 ** In the writer's opinion this further development is better left over for 
 a university course. It requires a basis of systematic work in physics, 
 chemistry, biology, and geology.
 
 94 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 one sense subordinate to geography, is, in another, the gate- 
 way or vestibule to science as we commonly understand the 
 term. Though the transition from nature-study is con- 
 tinuous, here for the first time the world of nature is 
 approached so as to be conquered. Through knowledge it is 
 to be made subordinate to mind. The rational standpoint is 
 the permanent one. Physiography has this in common with 
 all other sciences. Its differentia is catholicity of interest, 
 and it is surely good that the introduction to science should 
 be after this fashion. In exploring the continuum of presen- 
 tations which mediate the first world, we shall do well to look 
 out over the whole field before we trouble too much about the 
 boundaries and organisation of the sciences. We shall cer- 
 tainly be following nature's plan if we do. Psychology un- 
 questionably points that way, with its now well-established 
 hypothesis of a continuum of presentations which becomes 
 gradually more and more clearly differentiated. Moreover 
 there is something particularly and even epistemologically 
 appropriate about getting hold of the great elemental facts 
 first : the daily procession of the heavens, the sun, moon, 
 planets, and stars, day and night, winter and summer, wind 
 and rain, light and heat, frost and snow, the continents and 
 the oceans. We shall begin where we ought, in actual con- 
 tact with reality; for, as Dr. Ward asks: "Is it not plain 
 . . . that reality consists in the concrete things and events 
 that science sets out from, and not in the network of relations 
 which is its goal?"*^ 
 
 Physiography must thus be handled largely and familiarly 
 rather than through the artificial and isolated procedure of 
 the laboratory. The Natural Science Committee says : 
 *' One of the advantages of this subject is that it gives oppor- 
 tunities for out-of-door observation, to which we attach great 
 importance, not only at this stage but throughout the school 
 course; it is unfortunate if pupils are left with the impression 
 that physical principles operate only in a physical laboratory ; 
 it should be the object of the teacher to train the pupil to see 
 illustrations of these principles in the experiences of every- 
 day life. The course in physiography should include the 
 simpler astronomical phenomena, which in the hands of a 
 
 *^ Naturalism and Agnosticism, Vol. II, p. 279.
 
 NATURE STUDY 95 
 
 good teacher may be made an excellent training in reasoning 
 and observation."^* Out-of-door work is particularly valu- 
 able. Education is so often associated with rooms, desks, 
 and the sitting, listening posture; that is one reason why 
 young people often try to escape it. If it were more often a 
 process of interpreting natural phenomena themselves in the 
 midst of them it would grow on to life and experience and 
 not, as often, be divorced from it. The inclusion of simple 
 astronomical observations and experiments is wise for a 
 special reason. To feel at home in the firmament; to be able 
 to fix axes and planes of reference in it by simple means, to 
 follow and foretell movements of sun, moon and stars, to 
 pass from shadows to positions and altitudes, to get an idea 
 of rotation about an inclined axis and of revolution in a fixed 
 orbit — all this is specially valuable as exploration of the real, 
 just because it is the victory of mind over infinite space, the 
 synthesis of apperception, and, as Dr. Ward maintains, of 
 conation,*^ reaching out to the confines of the physical uni- 
 verse. The reference to conation suggests the place of prac- 
 tical work. The Natural Science Committee says: "At this 
 stage (that of physiography) there should be practical work 
 involving measurements of simple physical quantities, while 
 a valuable introduction to some important branches of 
 physics can be given if the manual training includes the mak- 
 ing of some simple practical instruments and machines such 
 as electric bells, small induction coils, telescopes, pumps, and 
 so on."** Conation may be defined as the tension of the self 
 towards self-realisation and practical work is the best '* con- 
 ductor " of conation. The utility and practical applications 
 of science will harness a boy's real interests when he is set- 
 ting out on the subject. The time of purely scientific interest 
 is later. 
 
 Science masters are inclined to belittle physiography. 
 They maintain its inevitable scrappiness, but their main 
 objection seems to be that it is a bad start, an unscientific in- 
 troduction to science. They feel, too, that science, having 
 for its main object the ingraining and fixing of scientific 
 method, rather than the communication of facts, however 
 
 *^ Report, p. 24. 
 
 47 Op. cit, Vol. II, p. 186 ff. 
 
 *» Report, p. 24.
 
 96 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 interesting, must be in the hands of experts. There is a great 
 deal in the objection ; but much, indeed most, of it appears to 
 be traceable to the tradition of discipHne as the end of school- 
 ing. The wider conception of adjustment would strengthen 
 the argument for physiography, for it would bring out the 
 need for objective continuity between nature study and 
 science proper which physiography is fitted to mediate, and 
 for subjective continuity best secured by a glance at the 
 whole before the parts are examined. Certainly all teaching 
 should be expert, and the training course for teachers should 
 secure that the majority at all events can handle physi- 
 ography effectively. A good plan is for the science master 
 to take it himself. This requires a transfer of pupils from the 
 primary to the secondary school soon after twelve years of 
 age, a period which, as will be urged later, is on all grounds 
 the most appropriate. To take a subject at the beginning 
 and the end is often the specialist's best course. He sees it 
 well launched and gives it final unity.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 SCIENCE 
 
 §1. We have now to consider that stage of adjustment 
 which science represents and the first step is to define it. It 
 should by this time be clear that all adjustment is a develop- 
 ment within experience. How, then, is experience modified 
 when there is a step forward to the point of view of science ? 
 Following the method adopted in this essay, an answer in 
 general terms may first be given and then its implications 
 may be unfolded. Generally we may say then that advance 
 to the scientific standpoint means a shifting of the centre of 
 gravity, or more appropriately, since we are dealing with a 
 process, the dynamic centre of experience from the objective 
 to the subjective pole. We had better repeat that experience 
 is the dynamic unity within which these factors are comple- 
 mentary. If we isolate them for a moment so as to see how 
 first one and then the other becomes the predominant partner, 
 we must not forget that such isolation is an artificial abstrac- 
 tion and that in reahty each is necessary to the existence of 
 the other. It is through their inter-action that experience 
 develops or, what is the same thing, adjustment proceeds. 
 But the dynamic centre is constantly shifting in what Bergson 
 would call the real duration of conscious process. We have 
 not to do here with anything analogous to a mechanical re- 
 distribution of force or energy but with a change of emphasis 
 in what is an organic whole. Nevertheless the change is 
 real. The genesis of constraint, so to call it, lies at one 
 moment with nature ; it lies without us, as we say when we 
 are oblivious of the refinements of epistemological or educa- 
 tional theory. The lightning darts, thunder follows, and 
 they oust our musings with scant ceremony, switching the 
 mental current on to themselves. The dynamic centre is 
 with nature. But only for a moment. The subject or ego 
 takes apperceptive control of flash and crash and, after this 
 momentary constraint, resumes its sway over conscious pro- 
 
 97
 
 98 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 cess. So the pendulum swings back and fore. When a foot- 
 ing in science is secured it remains more or less permanently 
 at the subjective end of the swing. 
 
 On the whole we may say that at the stage of nature 
 study, of geography so far as we have followed it, and of 
 physiography, the dynamic centre is objective. Constraint 
 is from without. There is, as we have seen, a constant and 
 gradual movement towards the position whence the pupil can 
 envisage phenomena — precipitation, climatic zones, soil and 
 vegetable products, for example, and man's activities in rela- 
 tion to these and other natural conditions — with clear insight 
 into their causal connections; towards that phase of adjust- 
 ment when he begins to wrestle with them logically and 
 brings them within the sway of reason. There is no break in 
 the continuity of adjustment. The transition from con- 
 templation to organisation is gradual. Nevertheless we may 
 safely say that so far he has only reached the frontiers of 
 science. Our argument has, indeed, been that this period of 
 adjustment is preparatory and probationary. It would be 
 wholly improper and futile for him to presume to pronounce 
 with any authority on the mechanism which confronts him. 
 Wonder, curiosity, reverence, may well accompany a grow- 
 ing sense of affinity with this first great world, but not pos- 
 session or mastery. On balance, the victory goes to nature. 
 He remains a spectator although coincidences and sequences 
 become, within his lights, more and more intelligible. 
 When, however, he passes the frontiers and enters the terri- 
 tory of science the significance of the step is just this, that 
 while remaining a spectator he begins to busy himself with 
 organisation. He begins, as we say, to put two and two 
 together. This putting together may be purely mental ; he 
 may just add phenomena together in thought as in the case 
 of the lightning and the thunder referred to above, or he may 
 apply his new knowledge, for example, by seeing whether the 
 lightning-conductor has good earth contact. In either event, 
 whether manipulation be merely intellectual or both intel- 
 lectual and practical, it begins to originate with him. He 
 begins to take the business of adjustment in hand himself. 
 It is nature that is constrained. 
 
 We have here, then, one distinguishing characteristic of 
 the stage of science and it applies to the neophyte as well as
 
 SCIENCE 99 
 
 to the gray-beard who has given his hfe to the task. The 
 pupil entering the territory and the expert at home in it are 
 alike in that they are engaged on the survey and organisation 
 of it. The dynamic centre is within the subjective element of 
 experience. But each entrant into this world must forge his 
 own key. It consists of the same material as anybody else's : 
 perception, imagination and intellect, which must be tem- 
 pered by care, patience, precision and the glow of enthusiasm. 
 Its forging is made easier, as we shall presently see, by the 
 experience of others, which becomes available by intercourse 
 through the spoken and written word. But the first essential 
 for us to note, interested as we are primarily in what is neces- 
 sary to the actual process of adjustment, is that each must 
 make his own key. No borrowed one will do. We are back 
 at the uniqueness of individuality again. So many men, so 
 many worlds, and each must make good his own entry. 
 Adjustment means just this fundamental fact of forging and 
 fitting his own key. When for the first time the wards of the 
 lock move : when the sea breeze is not merely a glow in the 
 cheek, but a factor of atmospheric equilibrium, when plants 
 in a garden are watered, not merely "to refresh them," but 
 to make soil-food assimilable, when the moon's age is not 
 merely linked on by association to its shape, but is a function 
 of its position with regard to the sun, then the stage of 
 scientific adjustment has been reached. Then tenure in the 
 first world will be freehold and all the delights of possession 
 will accrue, the greater because they spring from spiritual 
 ownership. This last point needs strong emphasis. It is 
 commonly supposed that the reward of science is material. 
 Betterment of the material conditions of human life is, of 
 course, usually an immediate consequence of successful 
 scientific investigation. But men do not pursue science for 
 purely utilitarian ends. It is the joy of spiritual progress, 
 of the victory of mind, of the gradual extension of the sway 
 of the human intellect and volition over the non-ego which is 
 their true reward. So that schooling must keep in the very 
 forefront this idea of adjustment as freehold tenure through 
 spiritual conquest of the natural world. How far the hold- 
 ing of each will extend depends, of course, on native capacity 
 and given opportunity. But be the area small or great it can 
 only be won by progress outwards from a centre which lies
 
 loo THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 in the ego. And he must extend his own clearing. What- 
 ever the philosophers may say of Bergson's conception of 
 creative evolution as a world-process, it is fundamental for 
 the process of human adjustment. 
 
 §2. It will be well to look at this stage of what we have 
 called freehold tenure a little more closely. Let us compare 
 it with its alternatives which are, first, no tenure at all, and 
 secondly, what is comparable with leasehold tenure. A rail- 
 way journey will illustrate them. A., B. and C. are occu- 
 pants of the corner seats of a compartment. A is, we will 
 suppose, an unfortunate whose scant schooling ceased at 
 twelve years, since which time a struggle to live has ener- 
 vated his intellectual and emotional energy. Phenomena of 
 nature and man : mountain and tunnel, river and bridge, pass 
 almost unnoticed. The series of presentations fall, as it 
 were, on a screen and disappear, leaving no trace, save the 
 possibility of revival in the same detached and fleeting way 
 as they occur. They touch experience but become no real 
 part of it. B. is more fortunate. He stayed longer at 
 school and has tried to get a footing in the world of nature by 
 reading and attending popular lectures. His series of 
 presentations is not wholly detached. Now and again they 
 arouse a feeling of familiarity. He remembers something of 
 the theory of the snow-line as he sees the white mantle on the 
 hills, but is puzzled by the fact that it is late spring and no 
 snow has fallen for three months. So with other features he 
 observes. It is a more or less familiar, but yet, an un- 
 chartered country that he looks out upon. His tenure is 
 leasehold. His knowledge is hearsay. It is unreal, and his 
 presentations form something not unlike a pale broken 
 secondary spectrum. He has none of the real delights of 
 spiritual possession. C. is a freeholder. He completed a 
 secondary course at school, and it was a real medium of 
 adjustment. Inter alia it included science under a wise 
 master. He takes in the flat-tops or rugged granite intru- 
 sions of the hills, the sedimentary plains, the dark conifers 
 on the former and the cornfields on the latter with an intel- 
 lectual glance. The ideal conceptions of denudation and 
 weathering leap out to the lined scarp and that of aqueous 
 deposition to the level plains. The duality of nature and 
 mind is solved for him in the unity of constructive experience.
 
 SCIENCE roi 
 
 If any strange feature emerges it does not drive him non- 
 plussed to his daily paper. He notes it as something whose 
 alien character is to be reduced in the laboratory of his mind. 
 If it baffles him now he will annex it later. It remains on the 
 outer edges of experience to be woven into its organic unity 
 in due time. Something of this sort is what is meant by the 
 series no tenure, leasehold tenure, and freehold tenure. 
 
 We have then in this polarisation of the environment to 
 the self, as illustrated in the case of C, what is to be under- 
 stood by the science stage of adjustment. It is mediated by 
 the intellect, but not by the intellect only. Conation may, 
 indeed, be said to throw the shuttle. Without the forward, 
 charged attitude of the ego, data are not woven into the fabric 
 of experience. The difference between this stage and the 
 previous, nature study, stage is, we may repeat, first this 
 emergence of the ego as the dynamic centre of adjustment. 
 It was there before as a factor ; and we may add as an d priori 
 postulate, for an inert ego in experience is a conception which 
 does not satisfy reason. But the time was not ripe for its 
 emergence. Its activity at previous stages, the "thing" 
 stage of object lessons and the " whole " stage of nature 
 study in the narrow sense, even with its causal implications 
 and emotional colouring, could not be isolated. At this 
 stage, however, we can distinguish (a) the data, e.g., the flat- 
 tops and igneous intrusions of our example, and (b) the con- 
 ceptual addition, e.g., denudation, which throws the web of 
 the ego over the given, attaches it, annexes it, brands it, 
 makes it organic in experience. It is the victory of mind ; 
 and though matter does not become mental because mind 
 thus takes hold of it, it does somehow offer lines for the net. 
 And since the net consists of an ideal conception, matter 
 must be at least susceptible of ideal manipulation. It is in- 
 telligible. Dr. Ward has no doubt where intelligibility 
 leads. "We find implied," he says, "that essential one- 
 ness of thought and being that recognition of the intelligible 
 by intelligence that greeting of spirit by spirit, for which 
 idealists have always contended . . . what is essential 
 to every true idealism or spiritualism — the spontaneous 
 activity of the greeting intelligence."^ The reader can exer- 
 cise the freedom which is his. He can accept or reject the 
 
 1 Naturalism and Agnosticism, Vol. II, p. 254.
 
 I02 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 inference of the ultimate spirituality of reality from its intel- 
 ligibility. Only if he rejects it the onus will be on him to 
 account for the latter. 
 
 This contribution of a conceptual bond holding together 
 the data of experience we must repeat is not the first indica- 
 tion of the synthetic activity of the subject. Our starting- 
 point was the unity of experience with the subject at one pole. 
 At an early stage we found the source of the unity of things 
 in the unity of experience. Kant's theory of space and time 
 as forms into which the manifold of sense falls and thus gets 
 coherence, is now generally discredited. It involved a 
 mechanical adjustment of subject and object, and this could 
 not bridge the Cartesian gulf between mind as thinking sub- 
 stance and matter as extended substance. Perhaps no more 
 could be expected, for even the greatest of thinkers cannot 
 wholly shake ofif the pervasive influence of the thought of 
 their time; and in Kant's day mechanical and mathematical 
 conceptions held the field. When biological science de- 
 veloped and man's relation to his environment was con- 
 ceived organically rather than, or at any rate as well as, 
 mechanically, when the doctrine of evolution extended its 
 sway, when psychology began to be treated after the manner 
 of biology, when psychoplasm took its place alongside proto- 
 plasm, and Dr. Ward taught us to regard psychical develop- 
 ments as the differentiation of a continuum, when, finally, 
 Bergson came forward with his theory of creative evolution, 
 then it was possible, not, indeed, to bridge the gulf, but to 
 do more, to eliminate it as a first postulate. So that from the 
 very genesis of experience the subject and object are but two 
 aspects of a unity. The contribution of the subject to the 
 coherence of experience may be assumed from the start of 
 conscious life. The science stage of development is dis- 
 tinguished from previous stages, not by the appearance of a 
 new element, but by the fact that this element now becomes 
 articulate. We can clearly distinguish it at this stage of 
 adjustment. Phenomenal data are explicitly appropriated 
 and woven into the texture of experience by means of a scien- 
 tific conception. It is no exaggeration to describe this stage 
 as a mental revolution. Law and universality are adum- 
 brated. They are not at first grasped in their full implica- 
 tion, of course, but the rubicon which divides chance from
 
 SCIENCE 103 
 
 order, the mysterious from the intelHgible, the empirical 
 from the rational, has been crossed. The foothold is that of 
 freedom, the first world is a freehold heritage and the student 
 can confidently set about the task of adjusting his holding to 
 himself. 
 
 §3. It is important to note also that in entering on his 
 freehold heritage in the world of nature the student also 
 enters a world of thought, the world of scientific achieve- 
 ment. Indeed his adjustment to the world of nature will 
 have been made possible by the environmental effect of the 
 " transparent world of minds." The scientific conception 
 which clinched his real adjustment to the natural world was 
 already there in that transparent world. His teacher or a 
 text book may have put him on the track of it, or some 
 analogy or suggestion operative in his own mind may have 
 evoked it, how we cannot say. But whatever its immediate 
 source, its reality for him means also real membership of the 
 community whose knowledge he now shares, in however 
 small a degree. The mental revolution has been both indi- 
 vidualistic and social. This passport carries him into the 
 world of scientific thought — a social possession — as well as 
 into the world where law and uniformity obtain. " Human 
 life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere stage- 
 setting for the enactment of its drama. "^ He awakes to find 
 that he shares the common mind which modern psychology 
 is beginning to investigate, a community of spiritual wealth 
 which, however, detracts in no way from his own individual 
 and freehold possession. We are here, indeed, face to face 
 with the fact that the first and second worlds are organically 
 related in the unity of experience. Scientific knowledge is a 
 common social possession. The student is adjusted to both 
 worlds at once. We begin to see what the individual and the 
 common mind really are, and how they are related. It is not 
 the huddling together of the unadjusted which overcomes the 
 isolation of individuality. There is no common mind in a 
 herd of cattle, only a common sensitivity. It is through the 
 jostling of the thoughts of free men, thinking conceptually, 
 that the common mind emerges. 
 
 Bergson says: "The evolution of life in the double 
 direction of individuality and association has . . . 
 
 2 Dewey, Democracy and Education, p. 267. 8
 
 I04 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 nothing accidental about it : it is due to the very nature of 
 life."^ He is here speaking of hfe in the widest sense, i.e., 
 that of biology. We are considering a mental fact, one of 
 psychology, and the ' double direction ' applies to it with 
 special emphasis. Dewey puts the point plainly and forcibly 
 from the educational point of view. He says : " Every indi- 
 vidual has grown up, and always must grow up, in a social 
 medium. His responses grow intelligent, or gain meaning, 
 simply because he lives and acts in a medium of accepted 
 meanings and values. Through social intercourse, through 
 sharing in the activities embodying beliefs, he gradually 
 acquires a mind of his own. The conception of mind as a purely 
 isolated possession of the self is at the very antipodes of the 
 truth. The self achieves mind in the degree in which know- 
 ledge of things is incarnate in the life about him ; the self is 
 not a separate mind building up knowledge on its own 
 account."* 
 
 §4. But the self has to emerge. That is another aspect 
 of what a real freehold footing in the two worlds of nature 
 and mind means. Scientific adjustment to nature implies 
 two things at one and the same time. Objectively an ordered 
 universe comes into being potentially if not actually. Its 
 unity, continuity, and uniformity emerge, in embryo of 
 course, through this revelation to the individual that its 
 phenomena are amenable to logical manipulation. As the 
 embryo develops, as experience becomes more and more 
 rational, as the logical grip becomes more certain, so the 
 area of order, of subjective conquest, extends; and even if it 
 does not extend very far, the idea of the first world as a realm 
 of law will become real. Subjectively there is correlative 
 development of the same vital and far-reaching character. 
 The pupil finds himself in finding a world amenable to his 
 thought, and, what is equally important, responsive to his 
 conative and emotional needs. His curiosity has found a 
 satisfying goal ; his wonder is no longer that of the savage, 
 tinged with fear, but that of the pioneer, tinged with what 
 Dr. McDougall calls positive self-feeling. In the victory of 
 thought and conation, with its accompanying emotional 
 thrill, the higher self is realised. The reduction of the world 
 
 ^ Creative Evolution, p. 275. 
 
 * Democracy and Education, p. 344.
 
 SCIENCE 105 
 
 to order means the exaltation of the self to power. Man's 
 worth and dignity emerge and the transforming power of 
 this experience is heightened by the thought of membership 
 in the " transparent world of minds." By virtue of its foot- 
 ing in this spiritual sphere, gained by wrestling in the natural 
 sphere, the rational, social and ideal self comes to the birth. 
 This double-edged process through which an ordered 
 material world emerges on the one side, and the self which 
 has given it order on the other, is, of course, the central posi- 
 tion of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. As Dr. Caird says : 
 " It makes us regard the external world as not only revealed 
 to mind but as coming to self-consciousness in it, and the 
 mind as coming to the consciousness of itself only as it goes 
 out of itself to determine objects."' The external world 
 coming in and the mind going out are perhaps difficult ideas 
 to grasp. The meaning is that in any bit of experience which 
 may be called scientific, reading running water into rounded 
 pebbles for example, this give and take occurs. And we 
 may say, as we please, either that the fact owes something 
 to the thinker, or the thinker owes something to the fact. 
 Both statements are true, for they reflect two facets of reality. 
 We can hardly help inferring, too, that mind and nature 
 must be very closely related for this dove-tailing to go on. 
 To quote Caird again : "It must explain the world as the 
 self-manifestation of a spiritual principle ... a mani- 
 festation not only to but in spiritual or self-conscious being."' 
 §5. It is clear that this forward movement to the scien- 
 tific position means a much surer foothold for the thinker. 
 Whichever of the two facets we look at, the world ordered by 
 the thinker, or the thinker finding himself in the very act of 
 being adjusted to the world, that point is evident. And the 
 educational advantages do not stop here. A surer foothold 
 in the first world gives confidence and self-reliance in the 
 second, and may do the same for the third. It is incon- 
 ceivable that a student who has learnt how to adjust himself 
 firmly to nature and it to him, by means of the grip which 
 science gives him over its data, even if the area of conquest 
 be small, will be blown about by every wind of doctrine, and 
 be in the same danger of losing his equilibrium when tempta- 
 tion comes. We have, indeed, what may be called a common 
 
 5 The Critical Philosophy of Kant, Vol. I, p. 433. 
 « Ibid, Vol. I, p. 425.
 
 io6 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 measure of our three worlds in the subjective fiat which makes 
 a natural fact, a historical event, or a moral end, a pupil's 
 own. We may note, too, that he is more likely to develop 
 this habit of branding the objective with his own mark, a yea 
 of acceptance or a nay of rejection, in the first world than in 
 the second. The reason is that it is so much more easy for 
 him to manipulate. He can shape it, create, more or less, his 
 own conditions for it. Moreover it is impersonal. History, 
 on the other hand, is not only the story of the acts of his 
 fellows, done, like his own, from motives which it is very 
 difficult to assign with certainty ; but being a story, and thus 
 confined to the medium of language, it comes to him at one 
 remove from reality. In other words, nature-study and 
 science may without any forcing of theory be said to be natur- 
 ally and logically prior to human-study and history. The 
 former is the high road to all-round stability of adjustment. 
 Plato was following a sound instinct when he decided to 
 keep a close watch over the poets and a close censorship over 
 literature. The very variety, flexibility, and subjectivity of 
 literature, and to a less but still real degree of historical 
 records, makes adjustment difficult, if the pupil has not first 
 learnt to stand on his own feet in the world of nature. If he 
 has, he will be far less likely to be carried away by the arti- 
 ficial and the conventional in history, or by the transitory and 
 the fragmentary among moral values. Of course these will 
 not be immediate results of nature study and science. There 
 is no royal road to stability of adjustment. It may be safely 
 said, however, that if real scientific annexation is practised at 
 the lower end of a secondary school, rational stability is more 
 likely to be a characteristic of the upper end of it. That 
 science should go before history, that adjustment to the first 
 world should be, so far as possible, made good before the 
 second is explored, is an order of procedure also suggested 
 by the history of human thought. First mechanics and 
 mathematical science, then chemistry, and finally history and 
 the evolutionary sciences, has been the order of development 
 in modern times. The static, all-given, intellectual stage 
 preceded the dynamic, progressive and evolutionary stage. 
 If the history of human thought is a safe guide for order of 
 treatment, as is so often asserted, adjustment to the first 
 world should be the vestibule to adjustment to the second.
 
 SCIENCE 107 
 
 Apart from the question of order, this passing over from 
 nature to society and civilisation, is of fundamental import- 
 ance because it almost compels us to think of adjustment as 
 a single process. We have distinguished three directions in 
 it if only because so large a unity as reality has to be split 
 up in order to be dealt with. But we shall see all along the 
 course of treatment that adjustment to one order implies or 
 involves adjustment to one or both of the others. If the dis- 
 tinction of separate worlds, necessary though it may be, has 
 yet always to be looked at critically lest artificial rifts appear 
 where continuity really is, how much greater is the danger 
 if the unit of treatment is not a world but a subject of instruc- 
 tion. There is, indeed, what one might call an atomistic 
 fallacy in much educational theory corresponding to the 
 psychological fallacy of faculties. Subjects are dealt with as 
 independent units by independent specialists so that the cur- 
 riculum is a mechanical mixture rather than an organic 
 whole. Professor Sadler is emphatic on this point. Of 
 secondary schools, and especially those for boys, he writes : 
 " Science has secured a place in their curricula, a firm place 
 and respectful recognition, but scientific method and the 
 spirit of science have not yet influenced the whole of the in- 
 tellectual life of the schools, have not yet remoulded the ways 
 of teaching in other than what in the narrower sense of the 
 words are called scientific subjects. There is still in these 
 schools (and in many others affected by their example) a dis- 
 continuity which indeed is in some degree unavoidable, 
 between the subject-matter of the scientific courses and that 
 of the other parts of the curriculum. But worse than this, 
 there is a conflict of presuppositions, a difference in intellec- 
 tual focus which could be greatly lessened, and which, even 
 when not consciously realised, is injurious to those who 
 learn. "^ In a word, Professor Sadler would counteract the 
 atomistic tendency by making each side of schooling identical 
 in one fundamental respect : each should offer a freehold foot- 
 ing for the individual. He speaks of "a passion for intel- 
 lectual freedom " and of " indignation at obsolete restraints 
 upon the mind."* Can any one fail to share them? The 
 difficulty is to shake off the inertia of tradition and cpnven- 
 
 ^ Broad Lines in Science Teaciiing, Introduction, p. xxiii. 
 " Ibid, p. XX.
 
 io8 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 tion. The conception of free individual adjustment, if trans- 
 lated into dynamic life, would give unity to a dozen artificially 
 disparate subjects, let alone to three perhaps artificially 
 disparate worlds. Half a dozen specialists seated round a 
 table with the head of the school in the chair, if all were 
 really in earnest, would evolve a modus operandi. They 
 would resolve that conflict of presuppositions which Pro- 
 fessor Sadler deplores. 
 
 §6. Something like a quarter of a century ago a revolt 
 against dogmatic methods was led by Professor Armstrong, 
 and other eminent scientists, as well as a large number of 
 teachers of science, aroused from their dogmatic slumber, 
 joined in the crusade. It was perhaps natural that the move- 
 ment should start among enthusiastic students of nature, for 
 in this particular sphere a better way was easy to discern. 
 It was nevertheless unfortunate that the area of reform was 
 not broadened so as to include the question of the teaching 
 of all subjects or, as we should prefer to put it, of the adjust- 
 ment of the individual to all the conditions under which his 
 life as a rational being must be lived. Dogmatism is an 
 obstacle to free development and adjustment in all spheres, 
 and if the humanist had developed the critical attitude along 
 with the scientist, the differences of intellectual focus to which 
 Dr. Sadler refers might well have been diminished if not 
 entirely removed. There is no question, however, that par- 
 tial as it was, if we think of adjustment of the whole indi- 
 vidual to the whole universe, material and spiritual, as the 
 aim of schooling, the reform advocated was sound and went 
 down to fundamentals. Certainly far-reaching changes were 
 urged. Where exposition, authoritative statement, and the 
 dominance of the text-book had been, discovery, free 
 criticism, and individual records were to be. Where pre- 
 viously all had been taken for granted, now everything was 
 to be sifted and tested by the individual for himself. He was 
 to set out upon an independent search after truth ; and it fol- 
 lowed that at least to some extent and so far as befitted his 
 capacities and so far as opportunities permitted, he would 
 take the same track as the pioneers had trodden. The quali- 
 fication is necessary, for no sane protagonist of what was 
 perhaps unfortunately labelled the heuristic method, ever 
 urged that every step should be repeated by every pupil.
 
 SCIENCE 109 
 
 Understood within rational limits we think the reform 
 emphasises an essential element in the adjustment of the 
 individual to the whole of reality which he shares. 
 
 It was natural that enthusiasts whose work and interests 
 lay mainly in the physical sciences should find inspiration 
 for the details of reform in the history of their development. 
 The experimental and mathematical work of Galileo, 
 Huyghens and Newton had laid the foundation on which 
 the vast modern superstructure of these sciences rests 
 securely. A boy could not do better than begin with work 
 in the laboratory, with weighing and measuring things, and 
 through such experimental and quantitative manipulation 
 find his own way to truths and formulas which his predeces- 
 sors had to accept without question. Theory and practice 
 support this view. Professor Dewey sees a cardinal principle 
 here and generalises it with the philosophic sweep and pene- 
 tration which characterise his great work entitled "Democracy 
 and Education." Distinguishing direct or immediate from 
 "mediated" or representative experience, he observes: 
 "Direct experience . . . must be of a sort to connect 
 readily and fruitfully with the symbolic material of instruc- 
 tion. Before teaching can safely enter upon conveying of 
 facts and ideas through the media of signs, schooling must 
 provide genuine situations in which personal participation 
 brings home the import of the material and the problems 
 which it conveys."' This puts the truth universally. It 
 applies to, say, the direct method of approach to a foreign 
 language as well as to the introduction to science. Of the 
 latter he says: "The first and basic function of laboratory 
 work, for example, in a high school or college in a new field, 
 is to familiarise the student at first hand with a certain range 
 of facts and problems — to give him a ' feeling' for them."" 
 In our phraseology he must be adjusted to the first world of 
 nature and then we may hope that he will be adjusted to 
 science as a strand in the fabric of the second world. 
 
 So that we may rejoice at the spread of laboratory pro- 
 vision in secondary schools which was the first fruits of the 
 work of our own reformers in the field of science teaching 
 and which is the outstanding feature of the development of 
 
 9 p. 273. 
 10 pp. 273, 274.
 
 no THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 these schools during the last twenty years. It provided the 
 essential condition for the first step in scientific adjustment to 
 nature. We may here quote from the Report of the Natural 
 Science Committee : " In the last twenty years circumstances 
 have altered ; laboratories have multiplied, and it has become 
 the practice to make laboratory work the central feature in 
 school science. This change of point of view has had both 
 good and bad results. On the one hand it has brought home 
 to many boys and girls the fundamental notion of an experi- 
 mental science, that the answers to questions on its subject- 
 matter can be got directly by experiments which they can do 
 themselves : they have seen how a series of experiments leads 
 up to a result, how the result of one experiment suggests 
 that another is needed ; they have, in fact, learnt something 
 of the experimental method of the sciences. Such teaching 
 and experience is of the greatest value, and any change 
 which would diminish its effectiveness would be a step in the 
 wrong direction. "^^ Again venturing to translate into our 
 own terms, we should say that the extension of laboratory 
 work has, or should have, given the pupil a freehold footing 
 in nature. That is the fundamental thing, prior to an 
 acquaintance with the experimental method of the sciences. 
 The two aims, adjustment to nature and adjustment to 
 science, must, we maintain, be kept distinct, at any rate in 
 the mind of the student of educational theory. No doubt 
 they are attained more or less contemporaneously. The 
 focal and marginal activities of presentation make their unity 
 secure. But nature as a focus comes first in the logic of 
 adjustment. 
 
 It is perhaps through oversight of this fundamental 
 truth that the extension of the laboratory method has failed, 
 as it would appear, to bear the full fruit which might have 
 been expected. The harvest seems to have been nothing like 
 the promise. We must be permitted a lengthy extract from 
 the report of the Committee on this point: " On the other 
 hand there have been unfortunate consequences; many 
 teachers have become so dominated by the idea of the 
 supreme value of experimental work that they have left on 
 one side and neglected those sciences which do not lend them- 
 selves to experimental treatment in school : the tendency has 
 
 11 p. 21.
 
 SCIENCE 1 1 1 
 
 been to restrict the work to parts of physics and chemistry in 
 which the boys can do experiments for themselves. We are 
 driven to the conclusion that in many schools more time is 
 spent in laboratory work than the results obtained can justify. 
 We do not underrate the importance of such work ; on the 
 contrary we regard it as an essential part of science teaching. 
 But sometimes the performance of laboratory exercises has 
 been considered too much an end in itself — such an exercise 
 loses the educational value of a real experiment when it be- 
 comes a piece of drill ; often exercises succeed each other 
 without forming part of a continuous or considered scheme 
 for building up a boy's knowledge of his subject. Some- 
 times a very imperfect experiment is done by all the pupils, 
 when the point which it brings out could be better illustrated 
 by an experiment performed by the teacher, on a scale and 
 in a manner which would not be possible for the whole form. 
 Insistence on the view that experiments by the class must 
 always be preferred to demonstration experiments leads to 
 great waste of time and provides an inferior substitute. The 
 time gained by some diminution in the number of experi- 
 ments done, and especially by avoidance of unnecessary repe- 
 tition of experiments of the same type could be well used in 
 establishing in the pupils' minds a more real connection 
 between their experiments and the general principles of the 
 science or the related facts of everyday life. Much of this 
 waste of time is due to a conscientious desire of the teachers 
 to encourage the spirit of enquiry by following the so-called 
 heuristic method ; the pupils are supposed to discover by their 
 own experiments, with little or no suggestion from the 
 teacher, the solutions of problems set to them or of problems 
 which they themselves suggest. The spirit of enquiry should 
 run through the whole of the science work, and everything 
 should be done to encourage it, but it seems clear that the 
 heuristic method can never be the main method by which 
 the pupil acquires scientific training and knowledge. He 
 cannot expect to re-discover in his school hours all that he 
 may fairly be expected to know ; to insist that he should try 
 to do this is to waste his time and his opportunities."^^ 
 
 §7. This is a weighty indictment, but it is to be noted 
 that it is directed against the abuse of a principle and not 
 
 12 pp. 21, 22.
 
 112 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 against the principle itself. The spirit of enquiry and dis 
 covery is emphasised as essential to what we should call real 
 adjustment. It is indeed a case of that shifting of the centre 
 of gravity of interest and conation from end to means which 
 is a common psychical phenomenon, and which points to the 
 paramount need for a constantly alert critical attitude. We 
 might call it obsession of the instrument. And its danger is 
 increased by the tendency of educational theory to lean un- 
 duly towards the disciplinary ideal, towards the boy or girl 
 hypostatised, towards the individual pole of experience cut 
 off from its natural inherent relation to the worlds which ex- 
 perience contains. It is the corruption of a sound principle 
 through natural inertia combined with uncritical enthusiasm. 
 Seeing in the mechanical multiplication of instances the 
 essence of the logic of induction, searching for the key to 
 literary appreciation in minute and constant analysis of 
 figures of rhetoric, hoping for moral development from the 
 cumulative effect of details of disciplinary routine, are 
 instances of analogous obsessions. Dewey lays his finger 
 unerringly on the point. " Exaggerated devotion to forma- 
 tion of efficient skill irrespective of present purpose always 
 shows itself in devising exercises isolated from a purpose. 
 Laboratory work is made to consist of tasks of accurate 
 measurement with a view to acquiring knowledge of the 
 fundamental units of physics, irrespective of contact with 
 the problems which make these units important ; or of opera- 
 tions designed to afford facility in the manipulation of experi- 
 mental apparatus. The technique is acquired independently 
 of the purposes of discovery and testing which alone give it 
 meaning. "^^ And again : " Our attention may be devoted 
 to getting skill in technical manipulation without reference 
 to the connection of laboratory exercises with a problem be- 
 longing to subject matter. There is sometimes a ritual of 
 laboratory instruction as well as of heathen religion."^* In 
 the words of Professor Bateson : " The splendid purpose 
 which science serves is the inculcation of principle and 
 balance, not facts'';^' still less should it serve the purpose 
 of mere drill and discipline. 
 
 1' Democracy and Education, pp. 232, 233. 
 
 1* Ibid, p. 259. 
 
 15 Cambridge Essays on Education, pp. 134, 135.
 
 SCIENCE 113 
 
 It is no doubt due to the enthusiasts in the field of the 
 biological sciences, in part at any rate, that there is a strong 
 reaction against the formalism towards which laboratory work 
 appears, in some measure at least, to have degenerated. 
 Their point of view is, in one sense, diametrically opposite 
 to those whose sphere lies in the physical sciences. They 
 see the essence of reality in the evolution of new forms. It 
 is life on its dynamic side which they have in focus. No 
 doubt they hold largely to the theory of the mechanical basis 
 of physical life, to determinism, and to the conceptual possi- 
 bility of forecast as Huxley maintained it. And so far they 
 are on terms with the physicists. But it seems safe to say 
 that there is a radical difference of emphasis. For the 
 biologist change, congenital variation, the evolution of new 
 types is the fundamental feature, while for the physicist it is 
 permanence, the old in the new, and uniformity. Recent 
 developments of psychological, sociological and historical 
 science, also emphasise the dynamic, evolutionary, biological 
 aspect. It is thus easy to understand the obvious impatience 
 which is sometimes displayed towards discovery as a prin- 
 ciple or method of adjustment. " Not merely to the investi- 
 gator," writes Bateson, "but to the pupil the interest of 
 science is strongest in the growing edges of knowledge. The 
 student should be transported thither with the briefest pos- 
 sible delay. Details of those parts of science which by 
 present means of investigation are worked out and reduced 
 to general expressions are dull and lifeless. Many and many 
 a boy has been repelled, gathering from what he hears in 
 class that science is a catalogue of names and facts intermin- 
 able."" 
 
 §8. So the pendulum swings from one extreme to the 
 other, and the student of education who has no basic and 
 coherent theory to stand by is also in a position of mental 
 oscillation. Everything points to the need for a science and 
 philosophy of education developed from an independent edu- 
 cational position. As was pointed out in the introductory 
 chapter, it must from the nature of the case be flexible and 
 adaptable, evolving abreast of the development of the natural 
 and the humanistic sciences and philosophies on which it must 
 draw and to which it looks. But it must decide on and stand 
 
 1* Ibid, pp. 136, 137.
 
 114 ^^HE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 by its own theories of value. Only thus can it remain stead- 
 fast amid the battles and controversies of rival protagonists. 
 It seems to us that the conception of adjustment does provide 
 a beacon whose light is distinguishable through all the 
 smoke. The problem, like most, turns on a clear definition 
 of terms. If we give to discovery the meaning of real 
 annexation, branding phenomena with the hall-mark of 
 individuality, gaining a freehold footing in the world of 
 nature first and the world of science next, it is not a method 
 of adjustment, but adjustment itself. Then the question how 
 far back we start is a derivative one, relative to the material 
 with which we are dealing. The biologist may find it more 
 stimulating to get quickly to the growing edges of experience 
 but he must follow the beaten track in order to arrive there. 
 If we remember the boy and the girl, whom the enthusiasts 
 are so often inclined to forget, we shall be chary of taking 
 short-cuts. There is a very real sense in which the main 
 stages of experience must be repeated in individual as in new 
 social and national developments. So that the teacher of the 
 mechanical sciences will stand by his weighing and measur- 
 ing, and his quantitative manipulation generally. After all, 
 the laboratory is the institution which represents more con- 
 vincingly than any other the downfall of dogmatism and the 
 victory of free thought. Only he must be aware of obsession 
 of the instrument. And it does seem that adjustment is a 
 light which shows up the pitfalls. 
 
 It throws light, too, on what is, after all, a matter of 
 common sense, and may safely be left to the discretion of 
 the alert and critically-minded teacher : the question, that is, 
 whether discovery, in the sense of adjustment is to be un- 
 aided. Manipulation of the material of presentation by the 
 teacher should stop short, finally short, of dogmatism. But 
 does he vitiate the method of discovery if he throws out a 
 suggestion or an analogy as a clue ? Surely not. If it is 
 from the pupil that the spiritual flash comes : the final clinch 
 in adjustment, the making of the object one with the subject, 
 the weaving of the nexus so that nature becomes organised 
 in the tissue of experience, cognitively, aesthetically and most 
 important of all — conatively, we seem to have the essence of 
 the heuristic method. As Dewey puts it: "We are con- 
 cerned with originality of attitude which is equivalent to the
 
 SCIENCE 115 
 
 unforced response of one's own individuality not with 
 originality as measured by product. No one expects the 
 young to make original discoveries of just the same facts and 
 principles as are embodied in the sciences of nature and man. 
 But it is not unreasonable to expect that learning may take 
 place under such conditions that from the standpoint of the 
 learner there is genuine discovery. "^^ There may be any 
 degree of suggestion, from zero to what the master feels to 
 be appropriate and called for. That is a secondary and a 
 derivative point, one of method. But the individual clinch 
 is what constitutes adjustment and it is fundamental, a point 
 of principle. Bateson says that " agnosticism is the very life 
 and mainspring of science." That is the same principle put 
 in a negative but more arresting way. A contrast with what 
 we take to be the desirable initial attitude towards literature 
 may help. It will be developed more fully in the second 
 book. All we need say here is that it is the direct opposite of 
 agnosticism. Nevertheless the final attitude to literature, 
 history, and the second world generally is the same as the 
 initial attitude to the first world. Borrowed opinions, second- 
 hand pronouncements, to whatever sphere they refer, are the 
 negation of adjustment, 
 
 §9. It will perhaps be helpful to summarise the con- 
 clusions so far reached in this chapter before proceeding 
 further. The stage of adjustment to the world of nature 
 which science represents means a shifting of the dynamic 
 centre from the objective to the subjective pole within experi- 
 ence. At the nature-study stage constraint is mainly from 
 without, as the common expression goes; at the science stage 
 it is mainly from within. This shifting is a critical phase in 
 individual development : it implies a freehold footing in the 
 first world, the emergence of the ego as the primary pole of 
 adjustment. It implies also a footing in the second world, 
 for science is a social possession. It does not, however, 
 mean the appearance of a new element in experience : it is a 
 modification of emphasis. And a double-edged modifica- 
 tion : objectively an ordered world, subjectively a synthesing 
 power, mind as a constructive agency, self-realisation. This 
 synthetic power may pass over into the second and third 
 worlds; it may give stability amid the flux of opinion and the 
 
 1' Ibid, p. 354.
 
 ii6 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 constraint of the lower self. As a common measure of adjust- 
 ment to three worlds, it may do something to remove arti- 
 ficial divisions, atomicity, among subjects of instruction. 
 The so-called heuristic method was a sound reform because it 
 started out from the individual as the dynamic centre in 
 adjustment, and the laboratory was, and is, an instrument 
 directed against dogmatism. That an obsession of the in- 
 strument developed is no valid indictment of the method : 
 the development of biological science and the application of 
 its principles to humanistic sciences perhaps accounts, in part, 
 for the reaction against the method of discoverv. If the 
 latter is defined as a means of gaining a freehold footing in 
 nature it is the equivalent of adjustment. How far back we 
 go, and to what extent discovery is to be unaided, then 
 become secondary and derivative questions. The conception 
 of adjustment seems to give us an educational standpoint 
 from which rival theories of method fall into a true perspec- 
 tive of value. 
 
 §io. We shall have to return to the central and cardinal 
 question of the interaction of subject and object through 
 which nature becomes an ordered whole within experience 
 and, in particular, to the contribution of the subject to that 
 order. It will be convenient, however, to postpone it until 
 we have considered what aspects and features of the fabric it 
 will be possible and profitable to investigate during the time 
 available for schooling. A selection from its totality must 
 clearly be made. Adjustment means nature becoming intel- 
 ligible, becoming really alive and organic within the con- 
 tinuum of experience. But time and opportunity are circum- 
 scribed, while nature and science are infinite; so that a choice 
 of material is inevitable. At the same time the amount of it 
 is not the ultimate criterion of success. That is rather poten- 
 tiality and promise at the growing edges of experience. The 
 pupil must, by schooling, be brought to realise that his ex- 
 perience has developed grappling power which he can exploit 
 as impulse and opportunity call. If that is the result of his 
 training in science, adjustment will have been so far achieved. 
 In addition to the area actively explored the alien will have 
 become so far potentially akin. That is a fundamental point 
 in a theory of education. It would be foolish, of course, to 
 say that the area of adjustment, the number and nature of the
 
 SCIENCE 117 
 
 objective foci, do not matter. But of far greater importance 
 is potentiality for further adjustment. In other words, power 
 rather than sum of attainment is what we want, at all events 
 at the school stage. Bearing this in mind we may pass to 
 the question of selection. Put quite simply and plainly it is 
 this : With what aspects of nature and science can the pupil 
 be put en rapport during school years? Before considering 
 it at the level of the different sciences it will be well to look a 
 little deeper. They have their protagonists who are scientists 
 before they are educationists and the inertia of tradition is 
 great. We may as well take a leaf out of the scientist's book 
 and try the " tonic of agnosticism " which Bateson recom- 
 mends. 
 
 Let us glance at the problem of selection as educationists 
 without predisposition or prejudice, and close our ears for a 
 moment to the clamant voices of the enthusiasts, at any rate 
 until we have found our own foothold. On the one hand 
 we have the individuality of the pupil. Why not apply the 
 conception of individuality to nature ? It may give us a clue 
 to the adjustment of the two. Her framework or skeleton at 
 once emerges. We see a mechanical system of which the 
 parts are in unceasing action and reaction. They form a 
 whole whether separated by millemetres or by distances 
 measured in light years. The genius of Newton has extri- 
 cated and estimated the force of the gravitational link. We 
 see next a complex of physical energy ; sound, heat, light, 
 magnetism and electricity, for every playing through the 
 mechanical framework. It is an individuality whose shivers 
 are tempests, whose twitch is the lightning and rustle the 
 thunder; whose eyes are the sun, moon and stars, whose 
 glance is light and heat, whose nerve tension is electrical. 
 When we shorten our focus and look down we see, thirdly, 
 affinity and repugnance among elements, union and dis- 
 union, marriage and divorce. Fourthly, we realise that this 
 mechanical and physical framework has been clothed with 
 the miracle of life. The inorganic and the organic have been 
 fused. ■ And we discern something which looks uncommonly 
 like the purpose which we are conscious of as moulding our 
 own progress. We ponder over this feature of adaptation 
 and the Darwinian, Lamarckian and Bergsonian interpreta- 
 tions of it occur to us. Is it just mechanism or is there
 
 ii8 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 teleology also? xA.t any rate there is individuality, a whole 
 which gives meaning to the functioning of the parts. And 
 the evolution which is shaping its future, has been at work 
 in the past. What we see is a product as well as a process. 
 It looks both backward and forward. This is the indi- 
 viduality of nature, in all its complexity. How are we to 
 select points of attachment, foci of adjustment, in such a 
 totality ? 
 
 But the complexity is what, for our purpose, must be 
 ignored. If attention halts before the infinity of parts and 
 their relations, the problem of adjustment seems insoluble. 
 The universe as a whole, in its undividedness, can be taken 
 hold of by the mind, its immensity notwithstanding. And it 
 is to this aspect of it, its unity, that such adjustment as is 
 possible at the school stage should be made. As has so fre- 
 quently been said, we must, for the purposes of theory, of 
 clear thinking, keep nature and science distinct. A coherent 
 body of scientific doctrine, that of chemistry, physics, or 
 botany for example, is not the objective, but a coherent 
 universe. Put in another way, it is not the complete investi- 
 gation of such a phenomenon as the root-feeding of plants or 
 the path of a projectile — the scientific ideal — which is the 
 aim. We shall, of course, take care to proceed scientifically, 
 and to make sure of the facts and factors, so far as we go. 
 But it is the significance of the phenomenon as an expression 
 of some aspect of the individuality of the universe which is 
 of importance for us. It may be urged that we are propos- 
 ing something more difficult. That is a misunderstanding. 
 It is a question of the degree of abstraction. Too great a 
 measure of it is to be avoided. It is not so much the mystery 
 of osmosis as the dependence of organic development on in- 
 organic materials which should be emphasised in root-feed- 
 ing; similarly, it is not so much the elements of the 
 parabolic curve as the broad universal fact of the composition 
 of velocities which is the point of the path of a projectile for 
 school pupils before they are capable of specialisation. His- 
 tory courses for schools are elaborated, or should be, so as 
 to throw light on the evolution of humanity as a whole, 
 although the focus may be a single nation ; so science courses 
 should be developed so as to give the pupil a point of view 
 from which he can appreciate the physical universe as a
 
 SCIENCE 1 19 
 
 whole. Applying this principle we may assert that school 
 science should subserve the adjustment of the individual to 
 the universe as a sphere (a) of mechanical and physical 
 energy, (b) of chemical reaction, and (c) of organic life and 
 evolution. These are fundamental aspects and revelations of 
 its individuality and a place should be found for all of them. 
 If this is to be done, however, science must divide the 
 available school time with the humanities, just as life is 
 divided between adjustment to nature and to men. We 
 agree entirely with the view put forward by Mr. Badley : 
 "We are now in a position," he writes, "to answer more 
 definitely the question how large a place science should 
 occupy in the school curriculum. It is assumed that it 
 should form a part, and a considerable part, for all, during 
 at least a part of the school course. If together with science 
 we reckon mathematics — taught in the earlier stages at least 
 as an experimental science in which nothing is accepted 
 without direct evidence, and submitted to the fullest possible 
 verification — and also the various kinds of practical work 
 (gardening, cookery, care of animals, woodwork, measure- 
 ment of all kinds, and so on) out of which science should 
 grow, and which should be intimately connected with it 
 throughout the whole course, this group of subjects should, 
 it seems to me, in the earlier or general stage of education, 
 up to the age of sixteen or so, occupy as large a place in the 
 school time-table as the other equally important group of 
 studies dealing with language, literature, and the arts.'"* 
 We may add that the whole course, the nature lessons of the 
 kindergarten, the nature study, including geography and 
 physiography, of the transition stage, and the science, as we 
 have attempted to define it, of the secondary course up to 
 the age of about sixteen, with, finally, some more specialised 
 study at the end of it — must be organised and dovetailed so 
 as to form a coherent whole, with the same care as has been 
 devoted to humanistic studies. Bateson's position is un- 
 assailable. "We plead," he says, "for the preservation of 
 literature, especially classical literature, as the staple of 
 education in the name of beauty and understanding : but no 
 less do we demand science in the name of truth and advance- 
 
 J® Broad Lines in Science Teaching, p. 10.
 
 I20 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 ment."^* If anyone should say that it is impossible to com- 
 pass both effectively we may answer in the words of Dean 
 Inge : " The aim of education is the knowledge not of facts 
 but of values."^" In this case it is the value of phenomena 
 as features revealing the unity of nature. 
 
 Bearing in mind, then, that it is phenomena on their 
 representative side, that is, as revealing the working of 
 nature as a whole, in its individuality, rather than as details 
 of the doctrine of any special science, which should be the 
 aim of school teaching, we may go on to the question of 
 selection. The features which point to this individuality 
 most plainly are first, its working as a physical mechanism, 
 secondly, its chemical structure and reactions, and, thirdly, 
 its organic and evolutionary processes. These we were able 
 to discern by means of the comprehensive glance a moment 
 ago attempted, in order from our own educational point of 
 view, to find foci for adjustment. For the investigation of 
 each of them we have the support of the Committee on 
 Natural Science. It appears that the third, nature on its 
 organic and evolutionary side, has been generally neglected, 
 so far, at all events, as boys are concerned. To that point 
 and to the overwhelming arguments for including it, if 
 adjustment is to be in any sense adequate and complete, we 
 shall return. Before dealing with the problem of selection as 
 it concerns the first two, we may be allowed a further word 
 about the principles to be observed in dealing with the 
 material selected. Of the vital principle of discovery in the 
 sense of real individual annexation nothing more need be 
 said. The representative character of phenomena, that is, 
 their meaning and value as clues to nature as a coherent 
 whole, referred to above, is, however, also vital and funda- 
 mental. It will be necessary constantly to cut out phenomena 
 from their context in reality. That is what experimental in- 
 vestigation means, and abstract investigation generally, 
 whether accompanied by experiment — the creation of con- 
 ditions—or not. But we must replace after cutting out. We 
 must dovetail the truth we reach in abstraction into the fabric 
 of nature again. When, for example, the mechanical effect 
 
 19 Cambridge Essays on Education, p. 145. 
 
 20 Ibid, p. 12.
 
 SCIENCE 121 
 
 of running water has been observed, and the chemical effect 
 of solution examined in the laboratory, we must step over to 
 the erosion of river channels and, say, caves in dolomite 
 beds. When the law of sines disclosed by the refraction of 
 light has been proved at the optical bench, we must pass on 
 to the real and apparent positions of the sun and the other 
 stars. When the parallelogram of velocities is clear on the 
 blackboard we must search until we find it in the moon's 
 orbit or the path of a projectile. The fabric of nature must 
 be the focus of final adjustment, behind the coherent body of 
 scientific truth and giving the warmth of concrete realitv to 
 it. The point cannot be emphasised too strongly. The 
 discipline of really scientific thinking we shall see that we 
 get, but from the point of view of school science it is an 
 incident of the march. That objective is adjustment to a 
 world. The logic of investigation is a bye-product of the 
 process of making the individual a freeholder in his environ- 
 ment. This principle seems to us to run through all the 
 recommendations of the Natural Science Committee's Report. 
 It is clearly to be seen in the following for example : "A 
 course in science for boys up to the age of sixteen should be 
 . . . designed so as to give special attention to those 
 natural phenomena which are matters of every day experi- 
 ence, in fine, that the science taught in it should be kept as 
 closely connected with human interests as possible. "^^ 
 
 §11. To bring the question of selection to a focus it will 
 be convenient to examine one or two actual syllabuses. There 
 seems to be grave doubt, an almost unnatural hesitancy, 
 about putting a complete syllabus forward to be considered. 
 The feeling is healthy. The science master, and indeed 
 every master, whether of science or any other subject, should 
 be free and ready to work out his own line of approach. If 
 he is not, his presentation will not carry the hall-mark of 
 mdividuality. He will feel that he is using borrowed tools, 
 manipulating an artificial medium, and his work will inevit- 
 ably lack living artistic quality. Moreover, since the first 
 aim is the organic unity of his pupils with such features of 
 their immediate environment as can be woven into the fabric 
 of experience, it is clear that the first condition of success will 
 be a local survey, an estimate of possibilities, undertaken and 
 
 21 p. 23.
 
 122 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 worked out by the master himself. But that is no reason why 
 the details of a scheme worked out under other circumstances 
 should not be a help. Medical men and lawyers follow up 
 the records of cases to the last detail without detriment, it 
 may be assumed, to their power to analyse and diagnose a 
 new case in its own history and setting. If it is clearly 
 understood that a syllabus is but an orderly survey of the 
 ground to be covered and a clue to possible ways of approach, 
 there should be no danger of loss of freshness and originality 
 from a careful consideration of it. It may indeed show what 
 to avoid or what to modify. The important thing to know is 
 whether it has been thoroughly tried and proved to be a 
 practical scheme. 
 
 The following is a course developed for the guidance of 
 teachers in Transvaal schools. In the words of this essay it 
 is intended to indicate the range and possible stages of 
 adjustment to nature. So far as range goes we are limited 
 by the requirements of the Joint Matriculation Board for the 
 three universities of South Africa. A scheme for a Leaving 
 Examination for secondary schools under departmental con- 
 trol has been worked out which, if it is accepted, will give the 
 freedom from externally-imposed restrictions which we think 
 ought to obtain. As to stages of adjustment, teachers are 
 given a free hand in respect of the last four years of the 
 course. The following is the departmental instruction bear- 
 ing on this question of freedom : " It is necessary to state in 
 the plainest possible terms that these courses are typical and 
 illustrative only, and that it is not intended to take away 
 anything whatever of the freedom which teachers, especially 
 those doing secondary work, have hitherto enjoyed. . 
 In the years beyond the sixth especially both sequence and 
 detailed content will remain at the discretion of the teacher. 
 The final examination will, of course, determine the total 
 content." It should be explained that the complete school 
 course comprises the ten years referred to in the syllabus, 
 with, in addition, a preparatory period usually occupying one 
 and a half or two years. The first year of the ten is taken 
 up with the work of what is known as Standard I and the 
 last is the matriculation stage. The primary course extends 
 to the end of the sixth year, but it is intended to introduce a 
 change and make the end of the fifth year the point of
 
 SCIENCE 123 
 
 transition to the secondary course — a reform for which 
 reasons are given elsewhere." The age of admission to 
 pubHc schools is six years, so that a pupil taking one and a 
 half years for the preparatory course and a full year for each 
 of the ten would be seventeen and a half at the end of his 
 schooling. Progress is, of course, in some cases accelerated; 
 but owing to the difficulty of keeping abreast of requirements 
 — a difficulty common to all young countries — it is often re- 
 tarded and eighteen may be taken to be an average leaving 
 age. Boys and girls are usually taught together during the 
 primary course, although there are numerous cases in the 
 larger schools where a sex classification is adopted. In the 
 larger towns separate secondary schools for boys and girls 
 exist, whereas in the smaller urban centres the two sexes are 
 usually taught together at the secondary stage as well as the 
 primary. But separate science arrangements are usually 
 made for the girls. Speaking generally the following course 
 is an indication of what both boys and girls may attempt up 
 to and including the sixth year and boys only from the 
 seventh to the tenth inclusive : 
 
 A. — Nature Study and Physical Geography 
 Second, Third, and Fourth Years. 
 During these earlier years courses of lessons on simple natural 
 phenomena or other media for developing the power of observa- 
 tion and, so far as is possible and appropriate, of inference must 
 be followed. These form a natural and an interesting introduction 
 to the more exact methods of science. Lessons constituting a 
 series must be drawn up by teachers themselves. The series will 
 vary between district and district, and even between school and 
 school. There are two main reasons for this. One is that the 
 lessons should bear upon the immediate environment, and the 
 other is that they should reflect the teacher's own predisposition. 
 At this stage the method of treatment is far more important than 
 the object selected for treatment ; and concreteness and vivacity 
 are more likely to be characteristic of a course of lessons when 
 they are selected by the teacher. 
 
 Fifth Year. 
 Land. — The distribution of the continents. Comparison of 
 salient features. The distribution of the principal mountain 
 ranges of the world. Comparison of salient features. Valleys, 
 plains, and deserts. The chief differences and the relation between 
 mountains and plains. 
 
 22 See pp. 251, 252.
 
 124 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 Water. — The distribution of the oceans. Comparison of 
 salient features. Movements of the ocean and the effect of these. 
 Tides. Varieties of coast line. The distribution of the chief 
 rivers of the world. Comparison of salient features. The work 
 of rivers, denudation and deposition ; donga, canyon and delta, 
 with famous instances of the last mentioned. The distribution of 
 the chief lakes of the world. Comparison of salient features. 
 Evaporation and condensation ; cloud, mist and fog-. Rain and 
 the most striking varieties of rainfall throughout the world. Snow 
 and ice. The effect of frost on the soil. 
 
 B. — Physical Science. 
 Sixth Year. 
 
 I. Practical exercises on and history of the principal units of 
 the British and metric systems and comparison of the same, 
 specially centimetre and inch, metre and yard, kilometre and mile, 
 kilogram and pound, litre and pint. 
 
 II. Measurement of lines. Measurement of area of triangle, 
 rectangle and parallelogram, circle, surface of right cylinder and 
 cone. Practical demonstration of the validity of the formulae for 
 the calculation of these areas. Area of the sphere. Volume of 
 cube, rectangular prism, pyramid, cylinder, cone, and sphere, with 
 practical demonstrations. 
 
 III. Latitude and longitude; meaning and measurement. 
 The simple and direct effects of differences of latitude and longi- 
 tude. Observation and recording of the movements of sun, earth, 
 and moon ; changes of season, of length of day, of altitude of sun, 
 and of appearance of moon. 
 
 The following indicate what is required : — 
 
 Observation of the altitude of the sun at mid-day in 
 summer, winter, and at the equinoxes. 
 
 Observation of the position of rising and setting of the sun 
 in summer, winter, and at the equinoxes. 
 
 Observation of the length of time the moon is visible at 
 each of the four quarters. 
 
 Observation of the time of rising and setting of the moon 
 at each of the four quarters. 
 
 Observation of the position of the moon relative to the sun 
 at each of the four quarters. 
 
 Observation of curvature and position of points of the 
 waxing and waning moon. 
 
 Seventh Year. 
 
 I. Use of vernier, screw-gauge, spherometer, pipette, 
 burette. Volumes of irregular solids. Weighing. Difference 
 between mass and weight. Weighing methods for areas. Abso- 
 lute density. Archimedes' principle. Specific gravity. Definition 
 and determination for solids insoluble in water and heavier than 
 water. 
 
 II. Air pressure : pump, syphon, barometer. 
 
 III. Heat and temperature : constnictinn, graduation, and 
 comparison of readings of thermometers.
 
 SCIENCE 
 
 125 
 
 Eighth Year. 
 
 I. Variations of pressure in a liquid with the depth ; weight 
 and pressure of air; the barometer; Boyle's law. Determination 
 of specific gravities of solids insoluble in water and of liquids. 
 Hydrometers. 
 
 II. Units of time. 
 
 III. Force : illustration and measurement of. Parallel forces 
 and moments. Lever, balance, capstan, wheel and axle, pulley, 
 and inclined plane. Hooke's law, bending- of beams. 
 
 IV. Simple processes of filtration, solution, crystallisation, 
 distillation, separation of simple mixtures of soluble and insoluble 
 substances. 
 
 Effects of heat on common substances, introducing physical 
 and chemical changes. 
 
 I. Heat: ^'"'^^ ^^^^- 
 
 Expansion of air. Charles's law. Calorimetry. Specific 
 heat and its measurement. Liquefaction and solification ; melting 
 points ; latent heat of fusion and its measurement in the case of 
 ice. Vaporization and condensation ; boiling points, effect of 
 pressure; distillation, latent heat of vaporization, and its measure- 
 ment in the case of water ; cooling of air by expansion and 
 formation of cloud in rising air. 
 
 II. Chemistry : 
 
 Physical and chemical changes. Elements and compounds. 
 Combustion and the products of combustion. Oxidation. Water, 
 its properties and decomposition. Purification by lime and by dis- 
 tillation. Forms of natural water. Solution of solids, liquids and 
 gases. Preparation and properties of hydrogen and oxygen. Air 
 and its composition. Nitrogen. Nitric oxide and ammonia. 
 Nitric acid, chlorine and hydrochloric acid. Sulphur. Sulphurous 
 oxide ; carbon, graphite and diamond. Carbon dioxide. Lime. 
 The characteristics of the metals. Acids, bases, salts ; neutralisa- 
 tion. 
 
 T r-u _• i Tenth Year. 
 
 I. Chemistry : 
 
 Laws of conservation and laws of chemical combination. 
 Laws of gaseous combination, reduction of gaseous volume to 
 standard temperature and pressure. Outlines of Dalton's atomic 
 theory and Avogadro's hypothesis; calculations of chemical 
 equations. 
 
 Bromine and iodine, sulphuric oxide, sulphuric acid, and 
 sulphuretted hydrogen. The oxides of nitrogen. Phosphorus and 
 its common oxides. Orthophosphoric acid ; carbon mon-oxide. 
 Marsh gas. Flame. 
 
 II. Physics : 
 
 An elementary knowledge of the chief physical properties of 
 matter. Distinctive characters of solids, liquids and gases. 
 Pressure of water-vapour. Conduction and convection of heat. 
 
 (b) Force of gravity. Newton's and Galileo's experiments. 
 Experimental study of the relation between the period of a 
 pendulum and its length.
 
 126 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 (c) Composition and resolution of forces acting- at a point. 
 Parallel forces acting- on a rigid body. Centre of gravity and its 
 experimental determination in simple cases. 
 
 A few comments may be offered. It will be seen that a 
 course in nature study, including physical geography, is pre- 
 scribed as an introduction to science. This plan has, as we 
 have seen, the strong support of the Natural Science Com- 
 mittee and, indeed, is generally approved by all who realise 
 that adjustment to nature must be a fundamental part of the 
 education of all." The general principles which should be 
 observed in selecting material for this stage have already been 
 considered.^* We may add that Professor Bateson is a 
 strong advocate of the biological line of approach. He says : 
 " For most boys the easiest and most attractive introduction 
 to science is from the biological side. Admittedly chemistry 
 is the more fundamental study, and some rudimentary chemi- 
 cal notions must be imparted very early, but if the framework 
 subject-matter be animals and plants, very sensible progress 
 in realising what science means and aims at doing will have 
 been made before the things of daily life are left behind."" 
 And again : " From natural history the transition to the other 
 sciences, especially to chemistry and physics, is easy and 
 again natural."^® Certainly natural history should be a main 
 constituent of the nature-study introductory to science. 
 Biology should also find a place parallel to physics and 
 chemistry as we shall presently urge. Although there are no 
 hard and fast lines of demarcation, nature study begins to 
 taper off after the end of the fifth year. It occupies a fair 
 portion of the course for the sixth. It is not mentioned in 
 that for the seventh but the units of time in the eighth follow 
 naturally from the observations of sun and moon included in 
 the sixth. We may say that the fifth year course forms the 
 transition to science which emerges in the sixth in the intro- 
 ductory form of units and measurement now more or less 
 general. Thus, leaving out of account overlapping meant to 
 secure continuity, four years' work in nature study and five in 
 
 2S Cf. Essays by Von Wyss, Thomas, and Lalta in Broad Lines in Science 
 Teaching, and by Nunn in J. W. Adamson's Practice of Instruction. 
 2* See pp. 63-72. 
 
 25 Cambridge Essays on Education, pp. 137, 138. 
 
 26 Ibid, p. 139.
 
 SCIENCE 127 
 
 science are provided for. The latter include some general 
 physics and chemistry, but no sound, light, or electricity and 
 magnetism. If a course of elementary biology is to be taken 
 parallel to the one now being considered, the three last-named 
 physical sciences must be omitted or substituted in whole or 
 part for the three first-named. Too much is far worse than 
 too little if we are to give effect to the representative principle 
 referred to above ; and the course does provide for adjustment 
 to nature on its mechanical side and also brings the pupils 
 into contact with it as a manifestation of physical and chemi- 
 cal energy. 
 
 In the sixth year provision is made for both laboratory 
 and open-air work. The one is meant to be complementary 
 to, and indeed corrective of, the other. Both mediate adjust- 
 ment. In the laboratory it is less direct, since the pupil is 
 occupied in filling out perceptually the units he will have to 
 apply and in assuring himself of the validity of the common 
 quantitative formulae. He may be said to be familiarising 
 himself with and testing the tools he will have to use. In the 
 open air or even in the class room when he is drawing infer- 
 ences from his open-air observations, he will be in more direct 
 contact with nature herself. In the seventh year his labora- 
 tory work passes naturally from volume to weight, whence 
 conceptions of mass and specific gravity arise. From the 
 weight and specific gravity of solids the transition to the pres- 
 sure of the atmosphere and the instruments depending on it 
 is easy. Moreover he keeps in direct touch with nature. 
 In this year also the introduction to physical energy in the 
 form of heat is made. In the eight year the mechanical sec- 
 tion is continued and developed so as to include the common 
 machines. Siderial, solar and lunar units of time preserve 
 the direct open-air relation, or ought to do so. Heat is fol- 
 lowed up a little further while certain simple physical and 
 chemical reactions are examined. At this point we may say 
 that the extensive is replaced by a more intensive method of 
 procedure. The ninth year is divided definitely between heat 
 and chemistry, the latter being systematically taken up and 
 continued through the tenth year, during which the heat of 
 the ninth year is followed by physics of a more general 
 character. In this last year, as will be seen, a more com- 
 prehensive treatment is proposed so that the pupils may get
 
 128 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 an idea of those great generalisations and hypotheses on 
 which the structure of the physical sciences rests. 
 
 Many masters modify this order either substantially or 
 in respect of details. Some prefer to begin the chemistry 
 earlier and postpone the mechanics. Others prefer to gather 
 the heat topics together and deal with them in closer con- 
 nection, in two consecutive years. Each is free to follow the 
 line of approach which seems to him best. The course as 
 outlined does, however, satisfy certain general conditions 
 which theory suggests and experience proves to be sound. 
 Extensive is gradually replaced by more intensive treatment. 
 Taking up a branch, mechanics, heat or chemistry, during 
 three and even four years makes it easy to arrange topics in 
 the order of difficulty. Not more than one new science need 
 be introduced in any year, and, what is even more important, 
 no year's work will be confined to a single branch of science. 
 The Natural Science Committee is emphatic on the last point. 
 "It is very undesirable that the work of a form should be 
 confined for a whole year to a single branch of physics; at 
 least two of them should be taken ; further, the scheme 
 of work should provide for the recurrence of the various 
 branches of physics in the course, to afford opportunity 
 not only for revision of what has been previously done 
 but for extension of the ground covered."-' It is 
 possible in the last year and to some extent in the last 
 but one, with a good deal of the detail out of the way, to bring 
 into focus the uniformities of most far-reaching application. 
 To quote the committee again : " A general course in science 
 should fulfil two functions : (a) it should train the mind of 
 the student to reason about things which he has observed for 
 himself and develop his powers of weighing and interpreting 
 evidence; (b) it should also make him acquainted with the 
 broad outlines of great scientific principles, with the way in 
 which these principles are exemplified in familiar phenomena 
 and with their applications to the service of man. The 
 evidence we have received shows that there is a tendency to 
 over-emphasise the first of these functions and to neglect un- 
 duly the second."^® 
 
 §12. Nothing that has so far been said needs to be 
 
 27 Rei>ort, p. 25. 
 
 28 Ibid, pp. 22, 23.
 
 SCIENCE 129 
 
 qualified when we consider the problem in relation to girls, 
 save, perhaps, as regards selection of material. As to that, 
 tradition and convention have demarcated a special field, in- 
 deed only slowly and even reluctantly has the appropriate- 
 ness of any been recognised. While the inorganic sciences 
 have been, in the main, the objective chosen for boys, botany 
 has been the one generally selected for girls. This division 
 is based on expediency rather than principle. No doubt 
 some of the deciding factors have weight. The manual work 
 of the laboratory and the workshop which is necessarily asso- 
 ciated with the physical sciences seems to be more suitable 
 for boys, although it would be difficult to prove, at any rate 
 of the delicate and exact manipulation which the former calls 
 for. The vocational criterion — the final and ultimate one if 
 liberally interpreted, as we hope to show in a later chapter — 
 has no doubt been decisive. Physics, chemistry, and mathe- 
 matics are, in the majority of cases, in more direct relation to 
 the life of the future bread-winner, than to that of the future 
 mistress of the home. But with the incursion of women into 
 the arts and professions, teaching and medicine for example, 
 the vocational criterion will have to be revised. Again, 
 there is much to be said for stress on utility for boys and on 
 the aesthetic and the artistic for girls. If, however, we look 
 at the question broadly from the point of view of adjustment 
 we seem justified in saying that the spheres which have been 
 marked out are both too narrow. Certainly it does not seem 
 necessary to adduce any arguments to prove that for so much 
 of physics and chemistry as are necessary for a rational 
 approach to botany and hygiene, a place in the curriculum of 
 girls should be found. And hygiene is an indispensable sub- 
 stantive addition we should maintain. There is, indeed, no 
 ground of principle for rejecting a course in preparatory 
 physics and chemistry common to boys and girls, for, say, 
 the first two years of a five-year secondary course in science. 
 And not only as an introduction to botany and hygiene but 
 as a postulate of adjustment. The experience of a girl should 
 be orientated to what we have called the individuality of 
 nature. Its physical framework and life should be intelligible 
 to her as to the boy. She shares the inheritance of science. 
 Why should she not enter into it on this side ? Probably the 
 only reply at all convincing will be the difficult}^ of finding
 
 I30 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 time. On those who offer it will rest the onus of proving 
 that a footing of intelligence in the realm of nature is of less 
 import for life than other sides of adjustment. And it will 
 not be an easy task, even if the appeal is in the interests of 
 literature and the fine arts. For they find a perennial spring 
 of inspiration in the " choir of heaven and furniture of 
 earth." Even for their sakes the girl must carry a passport 
 implying intelligent appreciation of the machinery of this 
 sphere. 
 
 The following is a syllabus in hygiene.^' It may be 
 more helpful than one in botany in which the ground has 
 already been thoroughly broken. It is proposed as defining 
 the content of a course suitable for those girls who desire to 
 present this subject at the final secondary school examination 
 qualifying for matriculation. It is divided into three stages 
 the details of w^hich would be spread over the last four years 
 of the secondary course following on an introductory course 
 as outlined above for the sixth and preceding years. 
 
 A. — First Stage. 
 I. Preparatory Physics. 
 
 Density. Specific gravity. Principle of Archimedes. Deter- 
 mination of the specific gravity of simple solids, liquids, powders. 
 Law of floating bodies. Hydrometers. Pressure of the atmos- 
 phere. Its measurement by barometer — Aneroid barometer. 
 Pumps, syringes, siphons. Thermometer. Marking of fixed 
 points. Thermometric scales (Fah. Cent.). Maximum, minimum 
 and clinical thermometers. Expansion of solids, liquids and 
 gases, illustrated by simple experiments. Charles' Law. Experi- 
 mental proof. Absolute temperature. Change of state. Deter- 
 mination of latent heat of steam, and of water. Change of 
 volume accompanying change of state. (Illustrative experiments.) 
 Simple cases of such change in volume — ice to water, water to 
 steam, paraffin wax : solid to liquid. Evaporation. Draughts. 
 Effect of change of pressure on the boiling point of water. Con- 
 duction, convection and radiation. Illustrated. Good and bad 
 conductors — application to clothing — ice chest — packing of pipes. 
 Methods of heating a building on a large scale. Ventilation — 
 winds — diffusion of gases. Good and bad radiators and absorbers 
 of heat. Heat capacity of liquids — simple illustrative experiment. 
 Water vapour in atmosphere. Dew-point. Wet and dry bulb 
 thermometers. Relative humidity. 
 
 2« It has been prepared under the supervision of Miss E. Aitken, head- 
 mistress of the Girls' High School, Pretoria.
 
 SCIENCE 131 
 
 II. Physiology. 
 General build of Body. 
 
 Form and relative position of the bones of the body. Position 
 in body and general form of the following- internal organs : brain 
 and spinal chord ; pharynx ; gullet ; stomach and intestines ; 
 salivary glands ; liver and pancreas ; posterior nares, larynx ; 
 trachea and lungs ; kidneys and bladder ; heart and great vessels. 
 Blood and its Circulation. 
 
 Form and general structure of the corpuscles of the blood. 
 General composition of blood. The course of the circulation 
 (systemic, pulmonary and portal). 
 Respiration. 
 
 Structure forming walls of thorax. Organs contained in 
 thorax. Structure of lungs. The respiratory movements. Com- 
 parison of inspired and expired air. Change brought about in 
 blood, in lungs and capillaries during circulation of blood. 
 Muscular and Nervous Systems. 
 
 Description in outline of voluntary and involuntary muscles. 
 Muscular action. Control by nervous system. General structure, 
 taken in an elementary way, and arrangement of brain, spinal 
 cord and sympathetic system. Functions of sensory and motor 
 nerves compared. Average temperature of body ; sources of heat 
 and body ; loss of heat. Regulation of temperature. 
 
 III. Practical Applications. 
 
 Breathing. Bad effects of mouth breathing. Exercise, 
 fatigue, rest. Sleep, amount required at different ages. Care of 
 skin, nails and hair. Baths ; hot, warm and cold. Use of soap. 
 Teeth ; causes and prevention of decay. Clothing — hygienic 
 values of cotton, linen, silk and wool as clothing materials. 
 Cleanliness of clothing. 
 
 B. — Second Stage. 
 
 I. Preparatory Chemistry, 
 
 Physical and chemical changes. 
 
 Elements and Compounds. 
 
 Preparation and properties of HOH and CO2. 
 
 Law of conservation of matter. 
 
 Laws of chemical combination. 
 
 Dalton's Atomic Theory. 
 
 Avogadro's Hypothesis. 
 
 Acids, bases, salts ; neutralisation. 
 
 Common organic acids, e.g., palmitic, stearic, oleic. 
 
 Salts of these acids. 
 
 Fats and oils. Saponification. Manufacture of soap. 
 
 Emulsions and emulsifiers. 
 
 Action of soap as an emulsifier. 
 
 II. Physiology. 
 
 Food and its digestion. 
 
 Chief chemical compounds making up the body. 
 
 Elements contained in these compounds.
 
 132 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 What constitutes food. Special value of different food con- 
 stituents. Value of water taken as food. 
 
 Examples of foods containing a large percentage of each of 
 the constituents. Behaviour of these constituents under action of 
 water, heat, acids. Commonest food stuffs. 
 
 Detection of proteid in meat, bread, beans, nuts, eggs ; of 
 starch in bananas, potatoes, bread, mealies ; of sugar in milk, 
 beet-root, carrot, fruit ; of fat in yolk of egg, milk, nuts. 
 
 Choice and combination of foods. 
 
 Effect of cooking on the different food constituents. 
 
 Principles underlying the methods of preservation of foods. 
 
 Value as a food of drinks in common use, e.g., tea, coffee, 
 cocoa, mineral waters, beef tea. 
 
 Cow's milk, its composition, comparison with human milk ; 
 sources of contamination, bacteria ; effect on milk of cooling, 
 sterilisation, pasteurisation ; boiling. Action of lacto-bacilli ; 
 curdling of milk by acid ; clotting of milk, effect on character of 
 clot of sodium citrate and barley water. 
 
 Physiological effect of alcohol on body. 
 
 Changes produced in the different food constituents in 
 (i) mouth, (ii) stomach, (iii) small intestines, (iv) large intestines. 
 
 Chemical action of the various digestive juices throughout 
 the alimentary canal tract. 
 
 Structure of a villus. 
 
 Absorption and distribution of the digested products. 
 
 Excretion of undigested material. 
 
 Structure and function of the skin. 
 
 (It is considered advisable that two or three lectures on the 
 " Reproductive System " should be given towards the end of the 
 course by a medical officer. It is not intended, however, that the 
 subject be an examination one.) 
 
 III. Practical Applications. 
 
 Elementary knowledge of soils and their value as building 
 sites. Aspects for dwellings. 
 
 Value of different materials used in house construction. 
 Points of importance in house construction, e.g., foundations; 
 ventilation of space under ground floor ; damp-proof courses, 
 aspect of pantries and kitchen. Air, Composition. Properties. 
 Impurities of air. Principles of ventilation. 
 
 Water. Composition. Characteristics of pure water. 
 Physical changes due to heat. Its solvent properties. Sources 
 of water. Wells. Local water supply. Water as disease carrier. 
 
 Hard water and its causes. Temporary and permanent 
 hardness. 
 
 Advantages and disadvantages of hard water. 
 
 Softening of water on a small and large scale. 
 
 Hygienic value of light in rooms. 
 
 Situation of earth or water closet. Use of earth and ash. 
 
 Disposal of dry refuse. 
 
 Danger of insanitary conditions prevailing in country districts.
 
 SCIENCE 133 
 
 Disease. Simple facts concerning infectious diseases. 
 Mosquitoes, flies, fleas and vermin as carriers of disease. 
 
 Value and use of different disinfectants, e.g., Jeyes' Fluid, 
 Carbolic Acid, Cooper's Dip, Bleaching Powder, Sulphur, 
 Formalin. 
 
 C. — Third Stage. 
 
 I. Hygiene. 
 
 General principles of simple organic chemistr}-. 
 Reasons for distinction between organic and inorganic 
 chemistry. 
 
 The constituent elements of organic chemistry. 
 Classification of organic compounds. 
 Aliphatic compounds (methane series). 
 
 Paraffins or saturated hydrocarbons. 
 
 Addition and substitution. 
 
 Linking of carbon atoms. 
 
 Methane, Ethane. 
 
 The alcohols. 
 
 Constitution. 
 
 Fermentation. Theories of fermentation. Manufac- 
 ture of beer, wines and spirits. 
 
 The fatty acids. 
 
 Acetic acid. Butter and butter substitutes. 
 
 Oils, fats and waxes. 
 
 Manufacture of candles. 
 
 Soaps — saponif action— emulsions. 
 
 The carbohydrates. 
 
 Glucose, fructose, cane-sugar, milk-sugar, maltose, 
 starch, dextrin, cellulose. 
 
 The proteids. 
 
 Composition — classification — albuminoid substances, 
 gelatine. 
 (It is not intended that students shall make a detailed study 
 of the above. Empirical and graphic formulae are not necessary.) 
 
 II. Physiology. 
 
 Fermentation, its causes and prevention. Putrefaction. 
 
 The excretory system. 
 
 Chief waste products of the body and the organs by 
 
 which they are excreted. 
 Teeth. 
 Structure of a tooth. Number and names of milk and 
 
 permanent teeth. Age of eruption. 
 The senses. 
 
 Different kinds of sensations. 
 
 General structure and arrangement of the eyeball. 
 Parts of the eyeball traversed by the rays of light and 
 
 alterations produced in the direction of the rays. 
 Essential facts of structure and arrangement of the ear 
 
 so far as required to explain how sound waves 
 
 are carried to organs of hearing. 
 Structures concerned in a simple reflex action.
 
 134 '^HE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 III. Practical Applications. 
 
 Air. Calculation of quantity of air needed per hour per 
 person. Effects of occupants on air of rooms. 
 
 Overcrowding. Mechanical devices for aiding ventilation. 
 
 Water. Storage of domestic supply. 
 
 Removal of suspended matter. Purification on a large and 
 on a small scale. 
 
 Different methods for heating and lighting a living room and 
 their effects. Construction of earth and water closets with street 
 sewer. 
 
 French drains. 
 
 Hay boxes and grease traps. Vivian Poore trench. 
 
 Sewage disposal for town and country districts. 
 
 The coherence of the parts of this scheme, its progressive 
 arrangement, both extensive in the gradually widening area 
 and intensive in the resumption of topics and deeper investi- 
 gation of them, and its foci of adjustment in the practical 
 problems of life, are self-evident. Little comment is therefore 
 necessary. We may note at the first stage the preparatory 
 physics which is to afford a rational basis for the physio- 
 logical structure of the body and its working as a mechanism. 
 This is followed by hygienic applications. At the second 
 stage selected topics in general chemistry give a rational line 
 of approach to the physiology of nutrition and excretion. 
 Two or three lessons on the reproductive system are to be 
 given (it is to be noted) by a member of the medical inspection 
 staff. A woman would naturally undertake them. The 
 hygiene of ventilation, light, and sanitation is in scientific 
 coherence with the two proceeding sections. Disease, its 
 spread and prevention, appropriately rounds off this stage. 
 At the third and highest, simple organic chemistry is first 
 taken, and related aspects of physiology and hygiene follow. 
 It may safely be said that such a course would serve the 
 double purpose urged as imperative throughout this section. 
 It would mediate adjustment to the individuality of nature on 
 its physical and chemical side, and it would bring science 
 into immediate and practical relation with individual and 
 social well-being. If botany were also taken even the 
 enthusiast for science ought to be satisfied. For nature in its 
 entirety, on its organic and evolutionary as well as its 
 mechanical and physical side, would be envisaged. 
 
 §13. This brings us naturally to the point we post- 
 poned, namely, the need for including some biological study
 
 SCIENCE 135 
 
 in the science course for boys. The facts seem to be clear. 
 " In very few boys' schools is there any attempt to give a 
 knowledge of the main facts of the life of plants and 
 animals."'"' The Committee thinks it should be made. 
 "The main facts as to the relation of plants and animals to 
 their surroundings, the changes in material and in energy 
 involved in their life and growth should form part of a well- 
 balanced school course. There is a considerable measure of 
 agreement among our witnesses to the effect that the course 
 might include the main anatomical features of the higher 
 plants, the elementary physiology of plants, especially their 
 relations to the soil and to the atmosphere, together with some 
 quite general knowledge of animal metabolism. "^^ Reasons 
 for the omission are not difficult to find. Mechanics and the 
 physical sciences were first in the field — a very real advantage 
 as we all know. Inertia, the maintenance of what is, would 
 seem to be the strongest factor in the shaping of school 
 courses, mainly, of course, because the teachers themselves 
 are a product of the system. Thus the Committee points out 
 that very few students save those preparing for medicine or 
 agriculture take biology in the science tripos. Teachers 
 specialise in physics and chemistry, that is in what they 
 have, so to say, been brought up on ; so that teachers of 
 biology are hard to find. It is obvious, too, that the direct 
 bearing of mathematics, the oldest of the sciences, on physics 
 has done much to fix the position of the latter in the cur- 
 riculum. Then the achievements of the mechanical sciences 
 — the bridge, the steam-engine, the internal-combustion 
 engine, the railway train, the dreadnought, and the aero- 
 plane — are more spectacular and impressive, though not 
 more important for human welfare, than those of the histori- 
 cal and evolutionary sciences, the use of anaesthetics and 
 immunity as an effect of the development of bacteriology, for 
 example. Perhaps the main reason is to be found in the 
 obsession of the disciplinary ideal. The physical sciences, 
 with their experimental method of approach, have been taken 
 to be the sole and sufficient means of providing a strict train- 
 ing in the logic of investigation. 
 
 Yet the addition of some biological science to the course 
 
 30 Report of Committee on Natural Science, p. 21. 
 
 31 Ibid, p. 25. 
 
 10
 
 136 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 for boys can be shown to be imperative, if adjustment is to 
 be complete even from a purely representative point of view. 
 They will have no adequate idea what being and reality mean 
 without it. Even if the facts and laws of physics and 
 chemistry are not looked at teleologically with man at the 
 goal, if the goal meaning and purpose of the inorganic are 
 not found in the organic, biology will at all events bring out 
 the truth that organic life is, as a fact, the crown and cul- 
 mination of the inorganic. It is the product whether or not 
 it may be the purpose. Then again biology brings one face 
 to face with phenomena — those of life on its physiological 
 side — which physical and chemical reactions do not com- 
 pletely explain. There appears to be a vital residuum which 
 the interplay of ultimate inorganic elements cannot account 
 for. Such, for example, are the chlorophyllian action of 
 leaves, the osmosis of root fibres, metabolism, and sensori- 
 motor action. " Analysis will undoubtedly resolve the pro- 
 cess of organic creation into an ever-growing number of 
 physico-chemical phenomena, and chemists and physicists 
 will have to do, of course, with nothing but these. But it 
 does not follow that chemistry and physics will ever give us 
 the key to life."^^ So Bergson. His view is that they can- 
 not, since life is a process of continuous creation. It is not a 
 question of re-arrangement of old materials. " Does the 
 state of a living body find its complete explanation in the 
 state immediately before ?"^^ he asks; and his reply is: 
 " Nothing of the sort in the domain of life. Here calculation 
 touches, at most, certain phenomena of organic destruction. 
 Organic creation on the contrary, the evolutionary phenomena 
 which properly constitute life, we cannot in any way subject 
 to a mathematical treatment."" So that here in the 
 phenomena of plant and animal life we are brought up 
 against phenomena of a new order which the laws of physical 
 and chemical reaction, at any rate so far as we know them, 
 do not fully account for. " It will be said that this impotence 
 is due only to our ignorance. But it may equally well express 
 the fact that the present moment of a living body does not 
 find its explanation in the moment immediately before, that 
 all the past of the organism must be added to that moment, 
 its heredity — in fact, the whole of a very long history."" 
 
 '2 Creative Evolution, p. 33. 
 3' Ibid, p. 21.
 
 SCIENCE 137 
 
 Without some biological science, then, the boy will be un- 
 adjusted to half the universe. And that the more important 
 half ; we should add the half which as a purpose or end ex- 
 plains the whole. This might be called an ontological reason 
 for biology in the time-table. It lights up being and reality. 
 There is another which might be called epistemological. 
 It lights up ways of knowing also. The passages just quoted 
 from Bergson bring out the point that, while inorganic 
 phenomena are explained when we know the sum of imme- 
 diately antecedent conditions — a lightning flash, for example, 
 by two oppositely charged electrified bodies, near enough for 
 the tension between them to be brought to the point of dis- 
 charge — most organic phenomena are only explainable by 
 the history of the plant or animal, i.e., by its evolution. We 
 apply the historical category to the inorganic as well as the 
 organic, of course ; in geology, for example. But we do not 
 get the idea of continuity, of what Bergson calls real duration 
 except from the individual plant or animal, unless we look 
 upon the whole universe as an individual. This is just what 
 Bergson does. " Matter, looked at as an undivided whole, 
 must be a flux rather than a thing."" And here it is that we 
 find "a reconciliation between the inert and the living."^* 
 It is duration, continuity, evolution, the creation of ever-new 
 forms which is the essence of reality for him. Intellect, 
 according to him, finds uniformity and repetition, in nature, 
 and explains the new as a re-arrangement of the elements of 
 the old, only because it " cuts out," that is, abstracts, phe- 
 nomena from their actual context in reality. It does so be- 
 cause action is its motive, either actual or possible. It 
 neglects flux, duration, evolution, change, just because action 
 is what it is interested in. " This action," he says, " appears 
 to us, no doubt, in the form of movement. But from the 
 mobility of the movement we turn away as much as we can ; 
 what interests us is . . . the unmovable plan of the 
 movement."^* Even if flux and change is the essence of the 
 inorganic it is, of course, slow enough not to affect the eff'ec- 
 tiveness of the action based on the assumption of immobility 
 or the validity of the physical laws which we formulate on 
 the same assumption. On this remarkable theory science 
 
 ■"••i Ibid, p. 196. 
 '•■> Ibid, p. 319.
 
 138 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 and philosophy must, as we have ah'eady said, pronounce 
 and the student must form his own conclusions about it. 
 What it does seem to point us to, however, is the necessity 
 of adding the dynamic categories of life — change, continuity, 
 duration, evolution, whether it be creative or not — to the 
 static categories — uniformity, permanence, repetition — which 
 the inorganic, whether "cut out" or not, seems to fit into. 
 The Bergsonian doctrine does bring into perspective the 
 necessity, if adjustment is to be adequate, of adding the in- 
 vestigation of the organic to that of the inorganic. 
 
 This necessity emerges also from another point of view. 
 It is urged for physics and chemistry that they are not only 
 valuable in themselves but also for the logical discipline they 
 afford. The argument is that the habit and ideal of rigorous 
 logical investigation which they develop is of the utmost 
 value in other fields, that of history for example. Scientific 
 method and scientific ideals are to be followed and striven 
 after, whatever the object of adjustment may be. Indeed 
 what we have called the first world, nature, has no monopoly 
 of science. Science both as a method of investigation and 
 as a body of coherent doctrine should be realised on all fields 
 of enquiry, in history, sociology and economics, for example, 
 as well as in the world of natural law. That needs no 
 demonstration. But it is equally certain that science in the 
 latter sphere, that is, in the narrower and common meaning 
 of the term, has set the standard. And it would seem, if 
 Bergson is right, that the standard from the epistemological 
 point of view, the point of view, that is, of knowledge, needs 
 reconsideration. At any rate w^e may say without hesitation 
 or qualification that the dynamic categories we have men- 
 tioned above are the ones which will help us most if we wish 
 to get at the essence of history. We may even go so far as 
 to say that the static categories of the inorganic sciences will 
 lead us astray. The theory of the interaction of individuals 
 and the social order would be darkened rather than clarified 
 by any analogy drawm from physics or chemistry. Biology 
 supplies the sounder analogue here. " Society has none of 
 the impassivity of nature. So far from being blankly im- 
 pervious, its very essence is intercourse : on the extension and 
 increasing intimacy of this its whole progress depends. "^"^ 
 
 38 Ward, Psychological Principles, p. 419.
 
 SCIENCE 139 
 
 So that if we want to get hold of the development and pro- 
 gress of society, if in a word we want to understand history, 
 it is not any atomistic conception which will help us. A 
 nearer parallel will be the development of a living organism. 
 We need some biology in our science courses, then, for boys 
 as well as girls, in order to mediate adjustment to the second 
 world as well as the first. For there, too, as we shall try to 
 show in the third book, the weaving of moral ideals into the 
 texture of conscious life is a vital process, indeed the highest 
 form of life and evolution. So that with the ultimate object 
 of giving to adjustment to our three worlds the unity which 
 they have in reality, we ought to add organic to inorganic 
 science. We may add that the category of accumulation, 
 " capitalisation," as Dr. Ward calls it, both physical as in 
 the conception of organic growth, and mental as in the con- 
 ception of character, in the life of the individual and through 
 heredity, and in the life of a social organism like a nation 
 also, does not emerge from the inorganic sciences. The con- 
 servation of energy is, by contrast and indeed essentially, a 
 static category. 
 
 §14. The predominant position of mathematics in 
 school courses is due to several causes. It is the oldest of 
 the sciences and has long centuries of tradition behind it. 
 Quantity is an aspect, at any rate, of all material reality and 
 of spiritual reality also so far as this has the characteristic of 
 intensity — a point we are perhaps apt to lose sight of when 
 we refer to the abstract nature of mathematics. And at the 
 other end of the scale, that is to say when we are thinking 
 philosophically and are trying to explore the innermost 
 sanctuaries of truth, mathematical ideas are often the most 
 fruitful, as the history of philosophy — Descartes, Leibnitz, 
 Newton, Clarke Maxwell, and Poincare are names that come 
 to mind at once — abundantly shows. Then there are the 
 marvellous achievements of the science and the rigid logic 
 of its discipline which makes it so attractive to some minds. 
 We may perhaps add, from our point of view, the ease with 
 which its subject-matter can be organised into coherent and 
 progressive schemes — a logical quality not without its 
 dangers." All these powerful factors have combined to 
 give it a position almost of independence in school courses. 
 
 37 See pp. 66-69.
 
 I40 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 We should maintain, however, that it ought to be tried by 
 the criterion of adjustment equally with all other school sub- 
 jects, and that for lack of some such criterion, rigorously 
 applied, it has become, like the discipline of classics and the 
 laboratory, to some extent, what we have described as an 
 obsession of the instrument. 
 
 Just as at the primary stage we assigned to arithmetic a 
 place ancillary to nature-study, so we think that at the 
 secondary stage mathematics should be paired closely with 
 empirical knowledge of scientific facts as a means of gaining 
 a freehold footing in the realms, whether of nature or 
 humanity, where law obtains. It is obvious that the advance 
 to quantitative precision is the ideal of adjustment in what 
 we call the natural sciences and their applications, and it is 
 every day becoming more clearly evident that in humanistic 
 studies, economics, hygiene, psychology, for example, and 
 even in history, statistical records and the expert interpreta- 
 tion of them, are at all events an indispensable buttress of 
 sound theory. Clearly, then, all schools must find a place 
 for this instrument, and we should add for all pupils until the 
 last one or two years of the secondary course. This part of 
 educational theory has been so thoroughly ventilated that we 
 shall confine ourselves to two observations. The first is that 
 at all stages of the school course mathematics should retain 
 the characteristic of direct instrumentality, it should as fre- 
 quently as possible maintain its actual contact with physical 
 reality : mere potentiality of contact, i.e., its development as 
 a wholly self-coherent deductive science, is only appropriate 
 at the university stage. The correlation of mathematics and 
 science is a point insisted upon by the Natural Science Com- 
 mittee. It gives " point to the mathematics and precision to 
 the physics."^® The second is that manipulation of mathe- 
 matical theorems and formulae need not, indeed should not, 
 wait upon a full appreciation of their import or of the reason- 
 ing on which they are based. A sound balance of the 
 empirical and the rational as phases of adjustment is a point 
 of theory emphasised throughout this essay, and it is nowhere 
 more pertinent than here. The full implication of mathe- 
 matical truths is a late and a rare product of investigation in 
 this fascinating and fertile field. And it is not a condition 
 
 ^8 Report, p. 22.
 
 SCIENCE 141 
 
 of real adjustment of a proximate and very valuable kind to 
 the natural and the social orders.'" 
 
 §15. Having now tried to indicate the area and depth to 
 which boys and girls ought to be adjusted if they are to under- 
 stand nature, and if they are to carry over to the discovery 
 and investigation of the social order conceptions and ways of 
 thinking which will be helpful, we may return to the process 
 itself. We began by saying that the essence of the stage of 
 science was the clear emergence of the subjective factor. 
 That pole became the dynamic centre. We have seen the 
 area of adjustment widening and the depth increasing. The 
 National Science Committee recommends that this extensive 
 and intensive process should go on until some idea of nature 
 in its unity and individuality has been developed. It is to be 
 carried to a point at which such general hypotheses as the 
 conservation of energy and evolution can at any rate be 
 appreciated. This can only be done, as we have seen, by 
 selection, by taking up representative phenomena and aspects 
 of nature. We have tried to show how it may be attempted. 
 But the reader may conclude that we are all the time getting 
 away from the subject of experience and deeper into the 
 labyrinth of objective reality. It would seem that the further 
 we go in extension and intension the more constraint nature 
 seems to exercise and the less room there is for what we have 
 called the synthetic function of the ego. 
 
 Let us face this inference squarely. The radius of adjust- 
 ment lengthens, the area increases, and we are to add depth 
 to extent. Does it not follow that the synthetic function of 
 the ego diminishes proportionately ? Does not external con- 
 straint become more imperative, wonder more intense till 
 it culminates in reverential awe, and adjustment more a 
 matter of inevitability and of the impotence of the ego? It 
 would seem so at first sight. As the complex of nature is 
 unfolded the role of the ego is limited to an attempt to keep 
 pace with the unfolding. The conception of freehold tenure, 
 of contribution, of construction, gets more and more unreal 
 as we advance. The ego is just appercipient of the order, 
 causal coherence, and unity of nature which confronts it. All 
 it can hope to do is to catch and formulate in such conceptions 
 and terms as it can command the universe which is being dis- 
 
 39 Cf. p. 59.
 
 142 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 played, polarised to itself though it may be. The victory of 
 constraint is finally and inevitably with the objective world. 
 The ego, the millions of egos, are, like the atoms, just 
 material it moves and shapes at will. Our theory of the shift- 
 ing of the dynamic centre from the objective to the subjective 
 pole, as the differentia of science, would seem to be a vanish- 
 ing dream. Each step forward in science instead of estab- 
 lishing it, dissipates it. The centre of adjustment is without 
 and we contribute less the further we advance. 
 
 Such seems to be the inference. But it is just at this 
 point, confronted by this philosophy of naturalism which is 
 buttressed by the unreflective thought of the vast majority 
 of men that we must exercise our right of free criticism. As 
 soon as we do so, the fallacy of the inference will appear. 
 The error lies here. We have assumed that while the objec- 
 tive element has been growing steadily in extent and in com- 
 plexity the subject has not developed at all but has been, so 
 to say, overwhelmed by the accumulating momentum opposed 
 to it. The circumference of adjustment has been growing, a 
 continuously-increasing sphere of content has been develop- 
 ing while the subject has remained static, a mere central 
 point. In a word we have for a moment and inadvertently 
 abandoned the position we took up at the outset. Without 
 realising it we have fallen back on the standpoint of ordinary 
 unreflective thought from which nature, ever extending its 
 boundaries, seems to get bigger and bigger until it reaches 
 the infinite, while the ego gets relatively smaller and smaller 
 until it appears to be like the atoms completely subservient to 
 natural law. But the moment we reflect we see that we are 
 back at undiluted dualism again. Let us rid ourselves once 
 more of the incubus. The truth is simple. The extensive 
 and intensive development of scientific knowledge has taken 
 place within experience. Growth at its edges and in its depth 
 has been conditioned at every step by the active, acquisitive, 
 synthetic development of the ego itself. It is the very anti- 
 thesis of the truth to suppose that there has been objective 
 accretion before the weight of which the subject has been 
 reduced to passivity. The centre of accretion has throughout 
 been the subject. Every addition has been by acquisition 
 irom within, not by imposition from without. Every unit of 
 area acquired — to adopt for a moment a quantitative illustra-
 
 SCIENCE 143 
 
 tion — has been the effect of an additional unit of dynamic 
 power which the ego has developed. The victory is not with 
 objective reahty but with subjective organising power where- 
 by the confines of what is akin are for ever being extended 
 and the alien is being absorbed. The area of a forest clear- 
 ing grows from the centre where the woodman's house stands 
 and is regulated by the blows of his axe. The area of scien- 
 tific adjustment depends on the dynamic power of the ego 
 from which it radiates. 
 
 §16. It may be urged that all this is just dogmatism 
 with no more valid claim than the naturalism which finds the 
 genesis of constraint and adjustment in nature, outside us. 
 We must, therefore, try to justify our position. We can 
 only glance at fundamentals. For a coherent and compre- 
 hensive argument for the contribution of the subject in the 
 shaping of reality and thus, as we are trying to show, to the 
 adjustment to nature which science as a subject of education 
 mediates, the reader must consult such a work as Dr. Ward's 
 " Naturalism and Agnosticism."*" It will repay him a 
 hundred times over, whatever view he may ultimately adopt. 
 If he is a teacher who honestly wishes to base his profession 
 four-square on rational insight, he cannot evade this enquiry 
 into fundamentals. They will not shape the routine but they 
 will bring out the essentials of adjustment. 
 
 The essence of the process at every stage is the union of 
 man and his world and the offspring is nature as science con- 
 ceives it, that is, as a realm in which order reigns. The 
 possibility of such a union points to a thorough-going com- 
 munity between the two, and, indeed, to their ultimate unity, 
 as we shall presently see. We may now indicate the stages 
 at each of which that union seems to be reached and at the 
 last of them consummated. At the first the causal connection 
 of phenomena emerges. Let us look separately at the objec- 
 tive and subjective elements out of which this link is forged. 
 We may take spring tides as the phenomenon. Objectively 
 we have earth, sun and moon in a certain spatial relation ; 
 their centres in line. This relation recurs fortnightly. 
 Coincidently we have spring tides. To simplify the problem 
 let us eliminate what we know of gravitation. Let us put 
 ourselves at the stage before Newton had given men this 
 
 "*<* Chapter XIX is especially helpful in connection with this section.
 
 144 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 interpretative idea, or that of the pupil to whom it is not much 
 more than a name. Then the objective elements are reducible 
 to two : the three bodies in a certain spatial relation and the 
 coincident spring tides. Objectively there is just concomit- 
 ance, order, system. There is no causal coherence as yet. 
 Fortnight after fortnight the coincidence recurs. But if 
 attention is directed to it, by the practical stress of fishing, 
 say, or by the teacher, consciousness gets to work on it by 
 way of organisation. This is not the only coincidence in ex- 
 perience. The pupil has made a tide for himself by throwing 
 stones into a pond. He has felt one in the stern disapproval 
 of his father after some sin of omission or commission. The 
 spring-tides as they recur begin to swim in a fringe of rela- 
 tions in the words of James. Association, here originating 
 in analogy, begins to be active. And sooner or later the ego 
 fuses the objective elements by adding to bare concomitance 
 a causal relation. Adjustment has advanced a step — a vital 
 step — by subjective contribution. To order, to concomitance, 
 there has been added causal coherence, and added by the ego 
 from the mine of experience. How long that mine has been 
 working, whether its tunnels run back into pre-natal days, or 
 whether the experience of a life-time has been sufficient to 
 shape them, we cannot say. The causal conception comes 
 and by the activity of the subject it is woven into the new 
 tissue of experience, the tissue in which order and causal co- 
 herence are one. In the words of Dr. Ward : " It is not then 
 in the relation of one objective change to another that we first 
 find causation ; that is rather where we put it, in order intel- 
 lectually to assimilate or synthesise."" And again : " What 
 we call the interaction of subject and environment, we trans- 
 fer by parity of reasoning to what we regard as the interaction 
 of object and object in universal experience."" We chose 
 adjustment to the tides to illustrate this transfer because it 
 does seem possible in this case to distinguish coincidence and 
 causality as steps in it. Logically it is at all events possible. 
 Usually, of course, the net of causality is thrown over the 
 objective elements of a phenomenon as soon as coincidence is 
 observed. Often too soon for logical requirements. Coherence 
 of fact is thus transformed into causal coherence by the sub- 
 
 -'1 Naturalism and Agnosticism, Vol. II, p. 238. 
 *- Ibid, p. 239.
 
 SCIENCE 145 
 
 ject. And organisation does not stop there. To clinch the 
 union the subject proceeds to peg the net of causation down 
 at various points. Its manipulation of gravity as a cause 
 illustrates the process. This was Newton's original contri- 
 bution of course, but it is equally the contribution, possible 
 through his genius, which every disciple of his must make if 
 he is to take this further step in adjustment. The general 
 conception of causal relation becomes more precise as the sub- 
 ject isolates, first, the direct effect of mass and, next, the 
 inverse effect, according to the law of squares, of distance. 
 And it is obvious that this advance in precision is solely due 
 to subjective activity, to intellectual organisation of objective 
 fact. We certainly begged this question when we called it 
 Newton's interpretative idea a moment ago. But the logical 
 sin, if such it be, is surely pardonable. The formulation of 
 the law in terms of mass and distance is man's share in 
 adjustment. If there had been no Newton, tides would have 
 remained just an objective coincidence. They would have 
 recurred, but would not have become intelligible and cal- 
 culable. And we may generalise and say that all scientific 
 laws are man's mark or impress on phenomena. In a word 
 we may say that when casual coherence has been recognised, 
 when the pegs, especially if quantatively sharpened, have 
 been driven in, when phenomena become foretellable and 
 adaptable to man's needs, the victory of the ego has been 
 made more secure. Scientific laws are man's formulation of 
 what he finds in nature. Professor Pearson says: " One of 
 the greatest of German physicists, Kirchoff, thus commences 
 his classical treatise on mechanics : ' Mechanics is the 
 science of motion ; we define as its object the complete 
 description in the simplest possible manner of such motions 
 as occur in nature.' In this definition of KirchofY's lies, I 
 venture to think, the only consistent view of mechanism and 
 the true conception of scientific law.'"'^ This is what Mach 
 says : " There is no cause nor effect in nature; nature has but 
 an individual existence; nature simply is."^* And again: 
 " In nature there is no law of refraction, only different cases 
 of refraction. The law of refraction is a concise compendious 
 rule, devised by us for the mental reconstruction of a fact."*^ 
 
 '^^ Grammar of Science, p. 1 15. 
 •''' Science of Mechanics, p. 483. 
 ^''' Ibid, pp. 485, 486.
 
 146 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 So that there does not seem to be any point in controversy 
 whether the most general conceptions of science, e.g., ether, 
 are objectively true. So long as they organise reality that is 
 all the truth we want. Truth, as adjustment, is progressive 
 rather than relative. 
 
 If it be asked, secondly, whence comes this conception of 
 law, if not, as uncritical thought would assert, from the con- 
 straint of nature, the answer is that it comes from subjective 
 experience, like the conception of cause, only it is experience 
 of a different character. We may follow Dr. Ward in our 
 attempt to clear up this point.*® The origin of the idea of 
 natural law is social law. As members of society we feel con- 
 straint working through custom, convention and tradition 
 and also, over a narrower area of conduct, through the laws 
 which society has formulated and enforces for its own and its 
 members' well-being. We come gradually to realise that the 
 order, organisation and even existence of societ}^ depend on 
 the maintenance of law. Its regularity, and inevitableness 
 become woven into the texture of our social consciousness. 
 When, therefore, we find order and regularity in objective 
 phenomena like the tides we transfer to them the necessity 
 and inevitability which we find accompanying the operation 
 of civil and jural law. So that as the conception of natural 
 causes is derived from individual experience, so from social 
 experience we get the conception of natural law. Our first 
 and second worlds are one at all events in this fusion. Dr. 
 Ward clinches the point by urging "the analogy between 
 civil law and natural law, and the certain fact that the concep- 
 tion of the latter is derived from the former. If man had 
 never made laws he could never know law."^' In this con- 
 nection he quotes the saying of Kant that "the intellect 
 makes nature, though it does not create it.""* This apparent 
 paradox is resolved if we understand making to mean 
 organising objective fact, mapping it out and making it 
 amenable by means of science. There is, of course, no ques- 
 tion about the reality of objective fact or its constraining 
 power over us. There is equally no question about the 
 organising power of the intellect. It is the marriage of these 
 two which gives us nature as known to science. Our special 
 
 •"■ Naturalism and Agnosticism, Lecture XIX, and especially pp. 248-253. 
 ■17 Ibid, Vol. II, p. 251. 
 •** Ibid, Vol. II, p. 253.
 
 SCIENCE 1^7 
 
 point here is that in that marriage the conception of law 
 derived from the spiritual world we call civilisation is carried 
 over to the material world of nature. "We animate what 
 we can and we see only what we animate."*® 
 
 §17. And, thirdly, from phenomena like the tides which 
 are, so to say, plastic under the manipulation of individual 
 laws, the transition to nature as the realm of law is an inevit- 
 able one. The Natural Science Committee considers that 
 school science can and ought to mediate that transition by 
 finding room for the widest generalisations such as the con- 
 servation of energy and evolution under which the fabric of 
 nature as a whole can be organised.'" Thus separate causes 
 and laws are taken up into the unity and individuality of 
 nature. We may with profit dwell for a moment on this con- 
 ception of individuality which takes up and at the same time 
 transcends the conception of law. Dr. Bosanquet has de- 
 veloped it in his work entitled " The Principle of Indi- 
 viduality and Value. "'^ It is a principle exemplified in any 
 system consisting of parts or members each of which ex- 
 presses the meaning and vitality of the whole and is a function 
 of it. A tree is an example on a small scale and the universe 
 as a mechanical system is another on a large one. In the 
 spiritual universe a human being, a school, or Christianity as 
 a community of souls, are examples. Both the natural and 
 the spiritual worlds are made up of such systems, " concrete 
 universals," and the life or functioning of the whole is ex- 
 hibited in the relations obtaining between the parts or 
 members. Thus in a tree it is organic life which pervades 
 the relations of part to part, in a school it is its spirit or 
 ethos, in Christianity it is personal religion. The participa- 
 tion of the member or part in the spirit or life of the whole is 
 its universality, literally the stress or tension towards the 
 whole. The relations of the parts are expressed in general 
 laws or uniformities : those of the tree in the laws of biology, 
 of matter in the law of gravity, of a school in its customs, 
 traditions and regulations, of Christianity in moral and 
 religious truth. It will be seen that this principle of indi- 
 
 *'J Emerson, Essay on Experience. 
 50 Report, pp. 24, 25. 
 *i See pp. 120, 121.
 
 148 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 vidualitv is a step beyond law in the direction of ultimate 
 explanation. Law is indeed a corollary of individuality : it 
 expresses the relations of parts which follow from member- 
 ship of the whole. 
 
 Put in another way law is abstract while individuality is 
 concrete. A law expresses a co-existence or sequence apart 
 from any particular setting of place and time. In our appli- 
 cations of law we are driven through stress of economy of 
 thought and words, to the incomplete as well as to the abstract. 
 We think and talk of the earth revolving round the sun, not 
 of both revolving round their centre of gravity. That, how- 
 ever, is economy rather than error. But the abstractness of 
 law leads to the actual ignoring of truth. We talk and think 
 of repetition and uniformity, whereas in the concreteness of 
 reality there is no such thing. No stone falls quite perpen- 
 dicularly, no projectile describes a perfect parabola. In each 
 natural event there is uniqueness which is a result of its 
 adjustment to the individuality of the universe as it at that 
 moment exists. There is always resemblance, of course, be- 
 cause there is always partial identity ; but it is identity fol- 
 lowing on membership of the system which is primary and 
 fundamental and resemblance which is secondary and deriva- 
 tive. This is what the conception of individuality brings 
 out. It presents reality in its concreteness and the phe- 
 nomena of reality in their uniqueness. It thus corrects and 
 completes the partial and abstract view of reality to which 
 the conception of law commits us. Dr. Bosanquet suggests 
 that, on this account relevancy is a term preferable to uni- 
 formity as applied to phenomena. Thus, in the examples 
 given the stone or the projectile would be said to express the 
 law of gravity in a relevant rather than in a uniform way. 
 We may note that the philosophy of Bergson also carries us 
 beyond the conception of uniformity. His fundamental 
 thought is the reality of time, change, and creative evolution. 
 Hence uniformity and repetition do not exist for him. " Real 
 duration is that duration which gnaws on things, and leaves 
 on them the mark of its tooth. If everything is in time, 
 everything changes inwardly, and the same concrete reality 
 never recurs. Repetition is therefore possible only in the 
 abstract : what is repeated is some aspect that our senses, and
 
 SCIENCE 149 
 
 especially our intellect, have singled out from reality."*^ We 
 thus arrive finally at the individuality of our first world, the 
 world of nature. It is a conception which, great as it is, has 
 its genesis like cause and law in subjective experience. 
 "The Unity of Nature is the ideal counterpart of the actual 
 unity of each individual experience — an ideal towards which 
 we advance when intersubjective intercourse and reasoning 
 begin ; and an ideal which becomes clearer and more distinct 
 as mythology gives place to science, and, I will venture to 
 add, as science in turn is taken up into philosophy."" So 
 that we seem to have been justified in describing adjustment 
 at the science stage as a freehold footing in the world of 
 nature. And it is not only an intellectual advance. It is an 
 emotional, an aesthetic development also. And here we see 
 why literature should march evenly with science. It may be 
 said to be the vehicle of intuitive adjustment, that of the 
 emotional and conative self, as science is the medium of in- 
 tellectual adjustment. Perhaps by this living correlation the 
 schools can consummate, within their limits, that union of 
 intuition and intellect on which Bergson insists. To the 
 truth which science reveals may be added the " Wisdom and 
 Spirit of the universe,"^* which Wordsworth found. And, 
 as in his " Ode to Duty," moral law may be identified with 
 natural law and both with God : 
 
 " Stern Law-giver ! yet thou dost wear 
 
 The Godhead's most benignant grace ; 
 Nor know we anything so fair 
 
 As is the smile upon thy face : 
 Flowers laugh before thee on their beds 
 
 And fragrance in thy footing treads ; 
 Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 
 
 And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong." 
 
 Here our three worlds coalesce again. And we may note 
 — what Dr. Ward is so careful to insist on — that the three 
 sides of the subject — cognitive, affective, and conative — 
 coalesce also. The contribution of the subject is cognitive in 
 organising nature, affective in finding beauty in it, and cona- 
 tive — we may now add — in selecting for organisation and 
 appreciation those aspects which interest it." 
 
 *2 Creative Evolution, p. 48. His point of view is, of course, the very 
 opposite of that of Bosanquct, whose doctrine of individuality is derived ulti- 
 mately from the static conception of the world of Plato's Ideas. 
 
 :,:s Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, Vol .II, p. 235. 
 
 •'■* Influence of Natural Objects. 
 
 *^ Naturalism and Agnosticism, Vol. II, p. 131, f.
 
 I50 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 We thus arrive at the view that the ideal of adjustment 
 to the first world is the fusion of the whole man with *he 
 whole universe. We recognise limitations, of course, both 
 objective and subjective. Objectively there is an infinite 
 extent and the best we can do is to make a really representa- 
 tive selection of topics, and to see that the pupil arrives at 
 the point where he can appreciate the individuality of nature. 
 Subjectively there is congenital bent, capacity, and interest, 
 and on this side we can but see that opportunity is wide and 
 tenure is freehold, so far as it is achieved. One inference 
 from adjustment we seem justified in drawing. The subjec- 
 tive and objective elements, man and nature, do fuse : they 
 become one, a unity or continuum of experience, blended in 
 <:ognition, emotion, and conation. The question then is : Is 
 nature fitted to man or man to nature ? Is it spirituality or 
 materiality which accounts for the dove-tailing of the subjec- 
 tive and objective facets of experience ? Dr. Ward has no 
 doubt: "This unity and regularity of Nature proves that 
 Nature itself is teleological, and that in two respects: (i) it is 
 conformable to human intelligence and (2) in consequence, it 
 is amenable to human ends.'"' For us there is no escape 
 from the logic of adjustment. Spirituality and not materi- 
 ality is ultimate. The student will, of course, decide for him- 
 self. It is doubtful whether he will find consolation in any- 
 thing short of spirituality. It is certain that he will not go 
 wrong in regarding adjustment as, on the one hand, explora- 
 tion and conquest, the grasp of material reality by the self, 
 and, on the other, its absorption in that reality which, what- 
 ever its ultimate essence may be, is at least not alien, but 
 kindred with all that is best within him. 
 
 56 Ibid, Vol. II, p. 254.
 
 BOOK II. THE WORLD OF CIVILISATION 
 
 II
 
 BOOK II. THE WORLD OF CIVILISATION 
 CHAPTER 1 
 
 PRELIMINARIES 
 
 §1. In this book we are to consider adjustment to the 
 second world, the social order. The conclusion we reached 
 at the end of the preceding book was that social experience, 
 involving the observation of law, gives us the conception 
 which enables us to organise the first world, the natural order. 
 As spheres of law the two worlds meet. We concluded, too, 
 that this union of matter and mind, of nature and science, 
 means, at all events, the affinity of the former with 
 spirituality. The practical business of adjustment will, 
 however, be carried on at the level where the two worlds are 
 distinct. And we shall give reasons at the beginning of the 
 third book for distinguishing, at this same level, a third, the 
 moral order. The education of the philosopher will, no 
 doubt, aim at reducing the three to one ; and, indeed, most 
 men will now and then feel, even if they do not articulately 
 realise, the unity of all reality. For moments of insight, of 
 aesthetic fervour, and of religious inspiration are not the 
 monopoly of the highly educated. But for all of us, including 
 the philosopher, most of our life means adjustment now to 
 nature, now to humanity, and now to the ideal world of 
 morality. In other words, every one will have to learn to 
 find his way about the natural world, to discover the tissue 
 of human relations within which his individuality develops 
 and from which it draws so much sustenance, and, as we hope 
 to show in the third book, to recreate for himself the moral 
 order. 
 
 We must examine the structure of this social order. In 
 the introductory chapter we glanced at it as a whole. Now, 
 following the method adopted in the first book, we must de- 
 velop the details. The conclusions reached in the preliminary 
 chapter of the first book are, mutatis mutandis, generally per- 
 
 153
 
 154 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 tinent here also. It will be best to consider, first, differences 
 which the social environment presents when compared with 
 nature's order, and then features they have in common. 
 This second world, the social fabric, is the world which 
 originates in the inter-play of instincts, emotions, and senti- 
 ments and in the actions and conduct of men which are the 
 outcome and expression of these impulsive forces. The first 
 world, the arena of our activity, is shaped and controlled by 
 physical forces which are, as we have seen, amenable to the 
 organising power of science. But science can only use the 
 material it finds and the modifications it can effect are, after 
 all, modifications of something external and given. The 
 social world, the fabric of civilisation, is wholly man's 
 creation. It is the outward sign and manifestation of the 
 activity of his instincts and his emotional impulses and 
 aspirations. This manifestation may take visible form in a 
 house of parliament, a cathedral, a pier, a railwav-station, a 
 school, or a political document. It may remain invisible in 
 the form of the customs, laws and traditions of a nation, or a 
 section of a nation such as a trades union or professional 
 association. Whether visible or invisible it is the embodi- 
 ment of the impulses — innate and acquired— and aspirations 
 of man translated into behaviour and conduct. It is man- 
 made ; and, as such, stands over against and in contrast to, 
 the first world which is the product of forces working inde- 
 pendently of man, though becoming more and more subject 
 to the control of his intelligence. Much of the natural uni- 
 verse remains, and will remain, however, outside the range 
 of his practical manipulation. The social fabric extends with 
 the progress of his activity. It is essentially his world both 
 -in substance and in form. He does not work upon some- 
 thing given ; his instincts, his intelligence, and his aspirations 
 evolve it. 
 
 Spirituality is thus the fundamental differentia of the 
 ■social order. Dr. Ward speaks of •' this addition of a trans- 
 parent and responsive world of minds to the dead opaqueness 
 of external things.'" Now it is just this transparency, and 
 consequent elusiveness, of the spiritual world which we call 
 .citvilisation that is the first point to be grasped when adjust- 
 
 . i Psychological Principle?, p. 286, f oot^cte.
 
 PRELIMINARIES 
 
 155 
 
 merit to it is to be the topic. Materiality and extension give 
 to the natural order an advantage in this respect over the 
 social order. We are able to get a grip on the one ; the other, 
 attenuated, so to say, in its spirituality easily eludes us. For 
 we must distinguish carefully between the social order and its 
 occasional embodiment. A church, a school, or even such a 
 social complex as the constitution of a country has a two-fold 
 aspect, analogous to the body and mind of an individual. 
 When we speak of the social order we do not mean the build- 
 ings or even the association of human beings in the first two 
 cases, or the legal instruments, the acts of parliament, in the 
 third. These correspond to the body of the individual. The 
 essence of all three, their mind or soul, consists of the social 
 and moral facts, ideals and aspirations which they stand for 
 and which live in the consciousness of their members. That 
 is what we mean when we speak of the spiritual texture of the 
 social fabric. It consists of what belongs to the world of 
 mind and spirit as contrasted with the extended world of 
 matter. Its objectivity is, of course, not affected. A school, 
 a trades union, a professional association, or a nation, is no 
 less real and objective than a range of hills. It does, how- 
 ever, from the very fact of its essential mentality as an 
 organisation elude us in a way the material world does not. 
 That is why we described adjustment to it as, in part at all 
 events, discovery. 
 
 There is, no doubt, force and truth in the assertion that 
 " we live in a social world more than in a world of physical 
 objects."^ A home, a school, an office, a street, or even a 
 workshop may be, for some persons, an environment whose 
 fabric contains more of the social warp than the physical 
 woof ; more, that is, of constraining power over the content 
 and colour of experience. But it is easy to over-estimate 
 social consciousness and tension as felt by the individual. 
 Enthusiasts for social evolution, stirred perhaps by the recent 
 striking developments of psychology and sociology, are in- 
 clined to overlook the inertia and the egoistic obsession of the 
 individual. The subjective pole must inevitably be the 
 stronger in this arena of instincts and emotions, played upon 
 
 2 The Educational Review, February, 1919, p. 97. Article entitled " Thfe 
 Reconstruction of Education on a Social Basis," by C. A. Ellwood.
 
 156 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 though it may be all the time by influences originating at the 
 objective pole of society and civilisation. Self-realisation 
 seems to involve that. The social fabric is a constantly- 
 operative factor in adjustment but it is none the less elusive, 
 having to win its way to the light through a cloud of egoistic 
 instincts and emotions. And the more these become 
 organised about permanent bent and sentiment, the more the 
 social order will recede, unless, of course, adjustment can by 
 education be brought to a focus in it. As age advances the 
 danger is of withdrawal into a world of which the self is the 
 centre and the circumference also. No doubt in the heroic 
 temper of adolescence we have a tide which will carry far, if 
 we catch it. No doubt youth 
 
 " By the vision splendid 
 Is on his way attended" 
 
 but it is equally true that 
 
 " Shades of the prison-house begin to close 
 Upon the growing Boy," 
 
 and we may, without unduly straining Wordsworth's mean- 
 ing, think of the vision splendid as the social order and the 
 prison- house as egoistic development. There is a very real 
 sense in which the spirituality of the former is its weakness. 
 We shall certainly do well to think of adjustment to it as 
 largely a question of discovery. The task is just the opposite 
 of that we had to face in considering adjustment to the first 
 world. There it was to find the soul or meaning ; here it is to 
 find the substance. 
 
 §2. Spirituality has another consequence which is often 
 overlooked. We are here comparing the social with the 
 natural environment, though the former is in one sense, that 
 of growth and evolution, as natural as the latter. But is the 
 term environment appropriate to the social order? There 
 appears to be some confusion of thought in the way such 
 terms as social tissue, environment, organism, or order, are 
 used. Reference is not made here to the question whether 
 they stand for a fact or for a metaphor. There seems to be 
 no doubt that individual A is, as a matter of fact, organically 
 related to individual B. Instinctive reactions, e.g.^ those ex- 
 pressing pride, shame, or sympathy, seem to be sufficient
 
 PRELIMINARIES 157 
 
 proof of that. But it is not always made sufficiently clear 
 that the social organism has its existence within the experi- 
 ence of individuals and nowhere else. There is no school 
 tradition^ for example, except what individual members, 
 masters and pupils, have felt and are feeling. It may be 
 thought that the fact hardly needs stating. A fairly wide 
 and lengthy experience of students leads us to think that it 
 does. It is, indeed, necessary to be quite precise about this 
 point. The real objective existence of the traditions of a 
 school as at once a social and a moral order is, of course, not 
 being questioned. What needs emphasis, however, is that 
 they live only in the experience of the members of the school. 
 It is desirable to avoid the use of the terms inside and outside 
 as a general rule in any discussion of details of the theory of 
 education, because it is better to keep altogether within the 
 confines of experience ; but this particular point may per- 
 haps be made clearer if we say that there is nothing outside 
 the experience of individuals corresponding to the social 
 organism, in the same way as there is a physical world out- 
 side experience. The social self is part of the texture of the 
 individual self. The social organism lives, and lives only 
 within the experience of individuals. We may quote an 
 authority or two in support of this fact. Mackenzie says:^ 
 " Society is not an entity apart from the individuals who 
 compose it." He is referring to society as a moral arena and 
 stimulus. On the psychological aspect of the question 
 Bosanquet says : " According to James our social selves are 
 other people's ideas of us ; but to this we should add that they 
 are other people's ideas of us as reflected into our oivn 
 ideas. "^ And again : " Self-consciousness as we experience 
 it, is for the most part social."* Leslie Stephen, one of the 
 earliest English exponents of the idea of the social organism, 
 is emphatic on the point. "Society," he says, "is not an 
 organism with a single centre of consciousness. It is not 
 something which has any existence apart from the existence 
 of the individual members."^ This limitation of the sphere 
 of existence to consciousness and experience — the conse- 
 quence of its spirituality — is just what such terms as environ- 
 ment and order are likely to hide, unless we are forewarned. 
 
 3 Manual of Ethics, p. 425. 
 
 ^ Psychology of the Moral Self, p. 51. 
 
 •'" Science of Ethics, p. m.
 
 158 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 It is worth while anticipating and meeting at this point 
 the objection that if the social order only exists within the 
 experience of individuals, it cannot have the continuity which 
 such a term as environment implies. This is a real difficulty 
 but it can be solved. Nature stands over against us one and 
 unbroken, at any rate in respect of space or extensity, it will 
 be said ; and while it is polarised to the individual, revealed 
 within the confines of experience, and thus acquires what 
 might be called emphasis of continuity, this emphasis is of 
 the given. How are we justified in clothing the social order 
 in the same garb and applying the conception of continuity 
 to it also ? The answer is at once simple and profound. 
 The human being is born into a social and spiritual world as 
 well as into a material one. The one is as necessary to his 
 mental existence as the other is to his physical existence. He 
 can no more escape or withdraw from the spiritual envelop- 
 ment than from the atmosphere. Its continuity is that of in- 
 fluence ; and it is unbroken. 
 
 Bosanquet says: "Historically speaking, no doubt the 
 human individual does not originate in isolation, but reflects 
 some sort of community, so that from the first the self goes 
 beyond the bodily unit."^ And again : " From the first the 
 core of experiences identified with feeling probably includes 
 more than the body group ; it includes whatever has not been 
 separated by special division, such as experiences of the home 
 and family, and there seems no reason to think these would 
 be sifted out as we go back to more primitive stages where 
 discrimination is less."^ In these passages he is discussing 
 the genesis of self-consciousness and they support the view 
 that there is a polarisation of the social order to the indi- 
 vidual, corresponding to, and developing pari passu with, 
 the polarisation of the physical environment ; and that we are 
 justified in applying the term environment to social phe- 
 nomena as to physical phenomena, within experience. They 
 form a continuous texture within which instinctive reactions, 
 summed up under such conceptions as sympathy, imitation, 
 suggestibility — the phenomena of gregariousness generally— 
 find room, so to say, for play and activity ; just as the cogni. 
 tive functions find room in the continuum of nature. The 
 
 8 Op. cit, p. 87. 
 
 7 Op. cit, pp. 51, 52.
 
 PRELIMINARIES 1 59 
 
 social nature of language points in the same direction as we 
 shall presently see. So that we have in this spiritual envelop- 
 ment into which a child is born what corresponds to the ex- 
 tensity of the natural order. Again, in the continuity of 
 development which the history of social life and social insti- 
 tutions exhibits, we have further and, indeed, what seems to 
 be complete justification for the use of such a term as social 
 environment in a real and not merely a metaphorical sense. 
 Here, if anywhere, as it seems to us, Bergson's doctrine of 
 real duration is indicated ; and dynamical continuity can be 
 superimposed upon what might be called the static continuity 
 of the social order at any given moment. 
 
 It must be repeated, however, that while we seem to be 
 able to justify the use of the terms social organism, order or 
 environment, alike from the instinctive and higher social re- 
 actions found within individual experience and from the 
 continuity of social development, yet they stand for no exist- 
 ence outside individual experience. The social continuum 
 exists and is felt within individual consciousness. In this 
 fact it is, perhaps, that the resolution of the opposition 
 between individualism and the conception of a social 
 organism may be found. That, perhaps, is the way in which 
 we may see the truth as well as the falsity of the philosophy 
 Arnold gives expression to in the poem from which we quoted 
 in the introductory chapter.* The following passage from a 
 recent essay on education shows that the idea of isolation is 
 still dominant : " Either Divinity teaching is a mockery, or 
 else it will strike a note deeper than that struck by any other 
 subject. It will go beyond the political instinct, beyond the 
 artistic instinct : it will touch the human individuality — that 
 is, the human soul imprisoned in the human body ; the shiver- 
 ing human soul with its own awful problems ; its own august 
 destiny, lonelier in its house of clay than any prisoner in any 
 Bastille in the world. The true teacher will recognise in each 
 of his pupils an individual human soul, distinct and different 
 from every other human soul that has ever been fashioned 
 by God, miles and miles apart from the soul that is nearest 
 and most akin to it, craving, indeed, comradeship and 
 sympathy and pity, needing also, it may be, discipline and 
 
 * See p. 4.
 
 i6o THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 guidance and a restraining hand, but imperiously demanding 
 to live its own life, to be allowed to bring itself to its own 
 perfection.'"* 
 
 The reply which social psychology,! and philosophy, 
 even such a philosophy as is developed by James in "A 
 Pluralistic Universe," would be that the distinctness and 
 difference of every human soul is not inconsistent with the 
 existence within every human soul not only of social tension 
 but of social continuity, instinctive, intellectual, and aesthetic; 
 and the business of education is to discover to the individual 
 and develop this social environment which is part of his 
 mental equipment. At the same time it may be remarked 
 that there probabl}' never was a principle, emerging as the 
 real conviction of a sincere thinker, or school of thought, 
 which did not contain a solid kernel of truth. The evolution 
 of thought is in this respect, perhaps, different from the evolu- 
 tion of physical life. The biologists tell us that the evolution 
 of species has left many derelicts, fungi and parasites, for 
 example, whose place in the sphere of things seems hard to 
 justify. It may, perhaps, be said that this is not so in the 
 evolution of philosophy. Truth in this sphere seems many- 
 sided and principles, even if superseded and modified by 
 subsequent research and discovery, do not become derelict, 
 mere flotsam and jetsam. They live on to contribute their 
 quota to the sum-total of truth. There is this kernel of truth 
 in the philosophy of individualism, pluralism, and isolation, 
 that every one must win by discovery and realisation, with 
 the help of such educational direction as it is his good fortune 
 to enjov, his inheritance of participation in the social environ- 
 ment, if he is to win it at all. 
 
 §3. We come now to the second differentia of our 
 second world, society and civilisation. It is a corollary of 
 the first, but is important enough to be considered co- 
 ordinately with it. We mentioned it in the introductory 
 chapter and shall revert to it in the third book. It is potenti- 
 ality for what Dr. Ward appositely calls capitalisation.^" In 
 the social order, and by virtue of its spirituality, achievement, 
 be it intellectual, artistic, moral or religious, is fixed, held in 
 
 » GoUancz and Somervell, Political Education at a Public School, pp. 96, 97. 
 10 Psychological Principles, p. 419.
 
 PRELIMINARIES i6i 
 
 safe keeping, and handed on as the accumulating inheritance 
 of succeeding generations of men. This potentiaHty for 
 accretion is wanting in the realm of nature. It is the realm 
 of birth and death. Old elements are recombined in ever- 
 new forms, but the totality of its substance does not increase. 
 Such is the teaching of science. Substantially at all events, 
 tout est donne, in Bergsonian phrase. It is otherwise in our 
 second and third worlds. " In the social environment . . . 
 there is no complete inertia, no bare conservation of energy, 
 no law of diminishing return."" On the contrary we find 
 there the inherent dynamic power, the expansive energy, the 
 cumulative returns of spirit. We can find evidence of this 
 in the various directions of social organisation and activity. 
 We shall have to consider this evidence in succeeding chap- 
 ters, as presented in the area of government and law, of 
 economic relations — though here disappointment will be 
 mixed with satisfaction — of literature, of nationality, of 
 morality, and of religion ; and we have already come across 
 it in the field of science. In this sphere of social evolution it 
 supports Bergson's doctrine of real duration and creative 
 evolution. Without any of what Bateson calls " all-for-the- 
 best claptrap, "^^ we shall be entitled to direct the adjustment 
 of the young to the second world which exhibits this poten- 
 tiality for social heredity in a spirit of optimism. It should 
 be made clear, of course, by every teacher that this capital- 
 isation of spiritual assets does not go on without struggle and 
 sacrifice. But it does seem possible to say that evolution in 
 the social medium is a process of refinement and not a mere 
 struggle for survival. There is purpose in it and the track is 
 not strewn with mere wreckage. The evolution of political, 
 economic, national, and religious freedom has the mark of 
 teleology, however fierce the struggle is and has been. We 
 have indeed a basis for faith in the evolution of a better social 
 world. We can believe that the capitalisation of its spiritual 
 forces means progress and betterment. Our examination of 
 this progress in the next two chapters will reveal this. And 
 a school as a developing social and moral organism ought to 
 reveal it as we shall try to show in the third book. 
 
 There is a third difference which, borrowing from Dr. 
 
 *i Ibid, p. 419. 
 
 12 Cambridge Essays on Education, p. 140
 
 1 62 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 Ward again, we may call plasticity/^ Like the second it is a 
 corollary of the first. There is more give and take in adjust- 
 ment to the social order. We may, indeed, see compensation 
 in its plasticity for the inflexibility of the physical universe. 
 We have only to think of the way the social order catches the 
 rhythm of new impulses in literature and art, or in morality 
 and religion, in order to realise its essential plasticity. Even 
 more readily can this be felt in the way what we call the 
 tradition of a school takes up and transmits new standards of 
 value. The double-edged nature of adjustment when the 
 social order is in question, is a point which the theory of 
 education must assert in unqualified terms, and at the level 
 of fact as well as at that of value. The physical universe is 
 given and the adjustment of individuals to it does not affect 
 its form or content. It is not so with the spiritual orders. 
 Their shape and substance change ceaselessly just as they 
 in turn shape the individuals in whose experience they live. 
 What we are apt to overlook is that we have the making of 
 the second and third worlds in our own hands. They are 
 man-made though they help to make men. They are plastic, 
 being of the same substance as ourselves. We all take a 
 hand in the making of history. 
 
 §4. These three qualities, then, spirituality, accretion, 
 and plasticity — the first fundamental, the other two derivative 
 — distinguish the social from the natural environment. We 
 have now to note what they have in common. They are both 
 polarised to the individual ; experience in respect of both is 
 unique. So many men so many worlds is an aphorism which 
 is true of both orders. Also Bateson's hard physiological 
 fact of congenital variation is a factor to be reckoned with in 
 social as well as scientific adjustment. One individual may 
 carry about with him, like a shadow, an environment which 
 he ignores, while another may turn to it as the arena which 
 his real self most of all needs. History reveals egoists like 
 Napoleon, trades unions and political associations have to 
 stimulate lukewarm members, and every schoolmaster knows 
 the boy who loves to walk alone. The existence of an en- 
 vironment, polarised though it must be — that is the only 
 rational meaning of the term — does not imply any emotional 
 or conative stress towards it. It may just adhere as a shadow 
 
 13 Psychological Principles, p. 419.
 
 PRELIMINARIES 163 
 
 does. All that has been said about the organisation of 
 adjustment to nature applies to the social order. But the task 
 is more difficult because this order is more elusive. We have 
 no course in sociology to offer, comparable in respect of 
 articulateness with that we have suggested for nature-study 
 and science. We shall indeed try to show how the strands 
 of the social web may be extricated in history lessons and 
 how the school can itself weave the web in miniature. And 
 so far as history lessons go our humanistic efforts will run 
 parallel with our efforts to secure for our pupils a footing in 
 the natural world. So far adjustment will be the same in 
 both spheres. But the lines of organisation of material will 
 not be so clean-cut. That is a consequence of the difference 
 between spirit and matter. Even while asserting likeness — 
 polarisation — we are thus driven back on difference. 
 
 Just as polarisation, carrying with it uniqueness, is 
 common to both worlds, so also is constraint, carrying with 
 it universality. Natural selection is operative in both spheres 
 although we believe it to be tempered by teleology in the 
 social order. It is, however, likeness, identity, we are con- 
 cerned with at the moment. If we are thinking superficially 
 we may fall into the error of supposing that the second world 
 in which instincts, emotions, sentiments, and action have free 
 plav, is one where, by contrast with the world of nature, law, 
 uniformity, and objective constraint are absent. We see 
 men apparently doing as they please, apparently exercising 
 individual choice regardless of social obligations; showing 
 courtesy or discourtesy, being indifferent to the interests of 
 their trade or profession or zealous for them, voting or 
 abstaining from voting on local or national issues, choosing 
 nationalism or internationalism as their guiding principle, 
 belonging to a church or openly scoffing at membership of 
 •at. Superficial observation might support the inference that 
 while adjustment to the physical world is a final and inevit- 
 able fact, adjustment to the social world is a matter of com- 
 'promise and choice. Very little serious reflection is neces- 
 'Sary to convince us that such an inference is fallacious. Th€ 
 ■social world is not a chaos of which we cannot predict the 
 next phase. It is not, it is true, a world of uniformity of 
 which we can predict its constituents and their relations a 
 lianndred or even a thousand years hence, as the physicists
 
 1 64 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 can predict the material universe. Nevertheless there are 
 very real bonds : traditions, customs, conventions of all sorts 
 conserved in the social texture which we cannot escape if we 
 would. And of course there are human laws to disregard 
 which means extinction. We may think of the laws of man 
 as artificial and changeable in comparison with the laws of 
 nature. That does not alter the fact of their constraint. 
 The adjustment of man to his social environment is as neces- 
 sary as that to his physical environment. The one world is 
 as real and imperative in its constraint on the individual as 
 the other. Dr. Ward says : " As to the social environment, 
 here again we find what we may call a negative or restrictive 
 element — the counterpart of the stability which is practically 
 absolute in the abstract physical system. Some stability is 
 essential to any plasticity; but absolute stability would be 
 fatal : it is as impossible to mould water as to mould 
 adamant. The laws and customs of Society — what we may. 
 call its routine — tend to be no respecters of persons (as dis- 
 tinct from classes) ; they simply leave — what society conceives 
 as — the fittest to survive, and are often as pitiless as nature 
 itself."^" 
 
 §5. Finally, it is evident that language stands in a very 
 close and intimate relation to this second world. The rela- 
 tion is, indeed, not incomparable with that of space to the 
 world of nature. As space is the vehicle or medium of the 
 first so language is the vehicle or medium of the second. 
 This is explainable from two or three paramount considera- 
 tions. Language is the medium of intercourse on which the 
 whole social fabric rests. The very existence of gregarious 
 animals in their wild natural state depends on the possibility 
 of communication and interpretation of signals of danger. 
 Out of the social needs and desires of man language arose 
 and its evolution must have kept pace with the development 
 of social life. The enforcement of a custom or the preserva- 
 tion of a tradition would depend primarily on the possibility 
 of enshrining it in language. All progress in political or 
 economic organisation, or in hygienic and moral directions, 
 must have been largely dependent on the development of 
 language as a social vehicle. This function of language as 
 a means of giving objectivity and permanence to social cus- 
 
 14 Psychological Principles, pp. 418, 419.
 
 PRELIMINARIES 165 
 
 toms and institutions, has its counterpart in its subjective 
 function as a means of giving form and content to the 
 instincts and emotions of the individual. This is, indeed, 
 the same function because the social fabric exists, as 
 has already been pointed out, within the consciousness of 
 individuals, and nowhere else. Then again language is the 
 vehicle of suggestion through which the traditions, conven- 
 tions, customs, and ideals of a society at any stage of its 
 development are brought to bear upon each individual from 
 the time when he can understand, to the end of his life. 
 Once more, language is the depository where the achieve- 
 ments of a society, e.g., its laws, and its history, are held in 
 safe keeping, while it is in literature that the contributions of 
 individuals to the common heritage of inspiration are 
 enshrined. While, therefore, language is indispensable to 
 the investigation of the first world it is indispensable to the 
 existence of the second. Other forms of expression such as 
 music, painting, and sculpture may stimulate through asso- 
 ciation, articulate or inarticulate, the common sentiments of 
 a nation, but language and literature are on a different foot- 
 ing. They embody its soul and constitution. 
 
 In dealing with the problem of adjustment to this second 
 world we shall depart somewhat from the procedure followed 
 in the first book. There, after having examined preliminary 
 questions, we approached the problem directly. We were 
 able to take for granted the structure of the natural world or 
 to deal with points requiring elucidation pari passu with the 
 problem of adjustment. Here we shall proceed differently. 
 The first step will be to examine the structure of society. We 
 shall have to consider in turn the different strands in the 
 fabric. They are comparable with the mechanical, chemical, 
 and biological bonds holding together the physical universe. 
 But they are less commonly discriminated and less generally 
 realised as bonds or strands of the web. In the next chapter, 
 therefore, we shall examine in order the political or govern- 
 mental, national, and religious strands. Then economic 
 bonds will occupy a separate chapter. Occasional references 
 to adjustment will be made in these two chapters but they 
 will be devoted mainly to a consideration of the bonds them- 
 selves. Then, after this long digression, we shall take up 
 again, the specific problem of adjustment in the fourth
 
 1 66 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 chapter. In the fifth vocational adjustment will be con- 
 sidered, and this will enable us to bring the various elements 
 of the social structure to a focus in life. Finally a chapter on 
 language and literature, as mediating social adjustment in a 
 peculiarly intimate manner, will bring this second book to a 
 close.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 POLITICAL, NATIONAL, AND RELIGIOUS STRANDS IN THE 
 SOCIAL FABRIC 
 
 §1. In this and the following chapter we have to con- 
 sider the main strands in the social fabric. In the previous 
 chapter we considered its nature and some of its chief charac- 
 teristics as a whole. We examined its claim to be regarded 
 as an environment or world, seeing that it is spiritual in tex- 
 ture and has no independent and separate existence outside 
 the experience of individuals, and compared it with the 
 physical world in respect of continuity and stability of exist- 
 ence. We found it to be a man-made order, the manifesta- 
 tion and embodiment of his instincts, emotions, and aspira- 
 tions as a social being, and the depository of his achieve- 
 ments in what we call civilisation. We noted the part 
 played by language as its medium or vehicle. We are safe 
 in concluding from this general review that the web of social 
 relationships, the product of man's gregarious impulses 
 operative throughout the whole of his history, will be vast in 
 extent and infinitely intricate in the detail of its structure. 
 We have now to consider the principal strands or threads of 
 connection which permeate the whole fabric and give it its 
 stability. They will be comparable with the physical and 
 chemical forces which sustain the fabric of nature. 
 
 The first question is the political structure of society, 
 which we may regard as its scaffolding. Its relevance to a 
 theory of education should be clear enough. If we are to 
 guide and direct the adjustment of the individual to this 
 second world we must have a general idea of its framework. 
 Only a bare outline is proposed ; for the whole theory of 
 government lies behind this particular section. The student 
 who is keen on this part of the subject, as most historical 
 students will be, must have recourse, for detail and historical 
 development, to the authorities on the theory of government 
 and the wider science of sociology. Our object is the less 
 
 167 12
 
 1 68 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 ambitious one of directing attention to one of the bases of 
 society, its political or governmental framework, so that the 
 teaching of history and such training in civic duties as is 
 possible in schools — the latter will be dealt with in a later 
 chapter — may be approached with rational insight. 
 
 We may ask, first, why this scaffolding is necessary ; 
 and a sufficient answer seems to be that not otherwise can 
 order and organisation be introduced and maintained in the 
 life of the community. Order we may describe as a state of 
 things which secures a balance of the rights of individuals 
 and organisation as the means of maintaining those rights. 
 We can at once draw the inference from these descriptions 
 that there is, and can be, no finality about the nature and 
 disposition of the scaffolding. The essence of the life of a 
 society is progressive adaptation to conditions which are for 
 ever developing. It is not only that no balance or 
 equilibrium of the rights of individuals or groups of indi- 
 viduals has been reached — that is the ever-present and ever- 
 pressing task of statesmanship. There is the further fact that 
 equilibrium, if it could be reached, would never be permanent 
 and stable. It is not desirable that it should be; for in the 
 political and social world, just as in the moral order which 
 we shall consider in the third book, the law of progressive 
 and, we may well believe, creative evolution, as Bergson has 
 conceived it, obtains. We cannot discuss the great question 
 what the rights of man are. We may summarise them, for 
 our purpose, under the conceptions of justice and freedom of 
 opportunitv to live the best and fullest life that the individual 
 is capable of. It is essential to note, however, that, since the 
 order and organisation of society ought to secure these great 
 human postulates impartially for all its members, a certain 
 measure of limitation and restriction of such individualistic 
 impulses, good and bad, as, if they issue in action, may be an 
 obstacle to the realisation of the rights of others, is inevitable. 
 Individual rights imply individual obligation to respect and 
 observe the rights of others. Further, we cannot escape the 
 conclusion that opposition between the rights of the indi- 
 vidual and the claims of society as a whole may arise. The 
 phenomenon of the conscientious objector to participation in 
 the duty of defending his country by taking up arms, is an 
 obvious instance. The delicate question of the extent to
 
 POLITICAL, NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS STRANDS 169 
 
 which a government, acting for the community as a whole, 
 can impose restrictions on the individual aimed at securing 
 public health, is another. This balancing of private and 
 public rights is a perennial problem. And alertness to it is 
 necessary for a proper reading of history and for an intel- 
 ligent and humane control of a school as a social community, 
 and one which should provide opportunities for preparation 
 for later civic life. 
 
 That right is an individualistic conception as duty is a 
 social one, is a truth which is also a warning. The French 
 Revolution, ostensibly justified by the rights of man, paved 
 the way for the trampling of those rights underfoot by the 
 autocratic rule of Napoleon. The French people achieved 
 freedom only to find themselves exploited to serve the 
 ambitions of the first Bonaparte and the intriguing activities 
 of the third. They were used to baulk the democratic 
 aspirations of Young Italy. Mazzini laid hold of this in- 
 trinsic weakness in the conception of the rights, as such, of 
 man with unerring instinct. "Right," he says, "is the 
 faith of the individual. Duty is the common collective faith. 
 Right can but organise resistance; it may destroy, it cannot 
 found. Duty builds up, associates, and unites; it is derived 
 from a general law, whereas right is derived only from 
 human will."^ This is, perhaps, superficial as political 
 theory. Right and duty are correlative aspects of the same 
 conception which is only filled out when we pass on to the 
 more comprehensive ideal of general and progressive wel- 
 fare. They are like the convex and concave aspects of a 
 curve and the curve itself must be interpreted by a centre and 
 a radius. Nevertheless the danger of stress on the indi- 
 vidualistic conception of right is a real one. "The fact that 
 the reformers of 1789 laid stress upon the Rights of Man pro- 
 duced at once the wrong kind of impression both on the 
 deputies and the people at large. They were led to regard 
 politics as a struggle in which you seize what you can for 
 your class and yourself."^ The conception we want is that 
 of the balance or equilibrium of rights and duties or obliga- 
 tions which can only issue from a rational and whole-hearted 
 regard for the common weal. 
 
 1 " Faith and Freedom," quoted by Holland Rose in " Nationality in 
 Modern History," p. 88. 
 
 2 Holland Rose, op. cit, p. 89.
 
 I70 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 The next point after the necessity for authority or govern- 
 ment as a guarantee and safeguard of rights and as a means 
 of approximating, as far as possible, to an equilibrium of in- 
 dividual and community welfare, is the basis on which it 
 rests. We may dismiss the ideas of force, divine right, and 
 the social contract as conceptions which we have outgrown. 
 The operation of the two former will, of course, be traced in 
 any course of historical study, for they have shaped, in a 
 considerable measure, the destinies of nations. The latter is 
 merely interesting as an exploded theory " unfortunate in 
 every aspect, historical, ethical, and even legal, "^ although 
 the idea has still a certain currency in political discussions. 
 It is almost self-evident that there can be no ultimate basis 
 for an authority which should be able to claim unswerving 
 loyalty and adherence, than the free choice and consent of 
 the members of a community themselves. This is the only 
 theoretical guarantee that justice and liberty will be safe- 
 guarded. An external and arbitrary authority resting on, 
 say, force or superstition, and not upon the free choice and 
 consent of the governed, may and, as history abundantly 
 shows, will, from time to time, exploit the rights of the 
 governed for selfish, ambitious, superstitious, or other ill- 
 advised, irrational, or immoral ends. It is clear, too, that 
 hereditary authority, in itself and as such, is logically in 
 opposition to the conception of authority constituted by the 
 free choice and consent of the governed. The growth 
 of civic freedom and the enfranchisement of the members of 
 a political community will therefore be a historical thread on 
 which the details of the development of a people must neces- 
 sarily be strung. 
 
 §2. After the necessity for and the basis of public 
 authority comes the question of its form or nature. The in- 
 stinct of filial love, experience of parental and other forms of 
 control bv individuals in schools and early life, the personal 
 character' of religious feeling, the dominance of individual 
 characters in history and fiction, all tend to an unreflecting 
 acceptance of personal rule and authority. The leader, be he 
 general, chieftain, patriarch, priest, president or king, seems 
 to be part of the natural or divine order of things. The 
 
 3 Amos, "The Science of Politics," p. 45.
 
 POLITICAL, NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS STRANDS 171 
 
 family organisation into head and subordinate members is 
 accepted as the natural organisation of society. Direct 
 teaching and experience of direct and responsible participa- 
 tion in the life of a social unit will, therefore, be necessary 
 before the logical stringency of the principle of democratic 
 government is felt. The theory of government by force and 
 divine right as expounded by Hobbes, for example, is deep- 
 rooted in nature, history, and tradition ; hence, perhaps, its 
 tenacity as compared with the theory of a social contract 
 which, historically without foundation as it is, in the 
 conception of voluntary relinquishment of individual rights 
 has yet much in common with the free choice on which 
 democracy rests. Yet the logic of democracy as the only 
 rational theoretical basis of government must be driven home 
 if the framework of society as a political organism is to be 
 appreciated. The six possible forms of government enumer- 
 ated by Aristotle, three good and three bad, viz. : monarchy 
 and tyranny, aristocracy and oligarchy, and commonwealth 
 and democracy, are, of course, exemplified in history, and 
 the evolution of government will necessarily supply another 
 main thread of historical study. But it must lead on to the 
 goal of democracy as the ultimate form of government. 
 
 It is necessary to note, however, that what is logically 
 best may not be without serious drawbacks and dangers when 
 translated into the sphere of public affairs. " There still re- 
 main sternly antithetical to each other two inconsistent views 
 of the true basis on which a constitution ought to be 
 founded; namely, that of procuring the absolutely best law 
 and administration, and that of procuring law and adminis- 
 tration which, if perhaps not the best, yet is the best expres- 
 sion of the clearly ascertained will of the people, or of the 
 preponderant majority of the people at the time."* Put 
 simply this means that the logically best government may not 
 govern best, and conversely. Napoleon, autocrat though he 
 was, never interfered with the peasant proprietorship of land ; 
 Henry the VIII, the claimant of divine right, laid the 
 foundations of religious liberty for his subjects. The Eng- 
 lish commonwealth was marked by much oppression, the 
 American commonwealth, we are told, is marked by much 
 
 * Amos, op. cit, p. 183.
 
 172 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 corruption. Illogical forms of government have succeeded 
 while logical forms have failed. 
 
 The logic of democracy is one thing, the translation of 
 its logic into actual fact, through the evolution and organisa- 
 tion of the machinery of government is another. The 
 problem on its domestic side, as distinct from its international 
 side — the relation of nations to one another in the great 
 family of humanity — is the problem of embodying ethical 
 ideals and such mutual obligations as the history of a com- 
 munity has shown it is necessary to make imperative, in the 
 form of law. Both factors must be taken into account, and 
 the peculiar genius and traditions of the British make it 
 necessary to do so in the inverse order to that in which they 
 have been mentioned in the preceding sentence. The 
 lessons of experience and history must be the basis of the 
 structure : the practices, customs, and traditions which the 
 life of the nation through the centuries has shown to be essen- 
 tial to its continuity and well-being. It will, however, be 
 an essential part of the statesman's task to extricate the uni- 
 versal elements which transcend the conditions of time and 
 place in which they are found, those perhaps inarticulate 
 impulses and tensions towards a better order of things which, 
 in the corporate life of a community, correspond to the 
 fringe — the universal element — accompanying individual 
 psychoses. And nol; only to extricate them but to weave 
 them together into a constructive ideal policy whose aim is 
 progress and betterment. " A law is ... a sentiment 
 and something more, viz., the point of view of social good."' 
 Again, " the law itself must be created by the social spirit it 
 aims at creating."^ 
 
 Thus, on one side there is the problem of weaving collec- 
 tive experience and the ideals it adumbrates into the texture 
 of law imperative on all. On the other side is the ever-pro- 
 gressing problem of applying or administering it. And 
 merely to name its two aspects brings home the extraordinary 
 difficulty of making democracy a reality, of translating logic 
 into practice. The very complexity of modern political 
 units, the locality, the nation, the commonw^ealth of nations, 
 with the far-reaching ramifications of the mutual interests of 
 
 •"• Bosanquet, " Philosophical Theory of the State," p. 39. 
 c Rousseau, quoted by Bosanquet, op. cit, p. 40.
 
 POLITICAL, NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS STRANDS 173 
 
 the constituent members, as well as the inherent difficulty of 
 that adjustment of poHtical experience and political ideals 
 just referred to, enhances the task enormously. We have 
 gone some way towards evolving tiie machinery of repre- 
 sentation. But the double task of educating the people up 
 to an appreciation of the responsibility involved in repre- 
 sentative government, and educating the representatives up 
 to it, the first the problem of the schools and life, the second 
 that of the universities and life, has been but begun. We 
 have but embarked on that great enterprise, the root problem 
 inherent in democracy. 
 
 Our immediate aim is the theory of education as the 
 adjustment of the individual to this second world rendered 
 stable by human law as the first is by natural law. The 
 question of the sphere of law and government arises. It is 
 clear that the sphere has boundaries and limits, changing 
 with the developing organisation of society and especially 
 with the growth of impulse to social obligations, but always 
 leaving a region of actions and activities where moral and 
 religious sanctions alone can have sway. Were it otherwise, 
 there could be no truth in the view that the state is the organ 
 of freedom as well as of order. " The fundamental idea of 
 Greek political philosophy, as we find it in Plato and Aris- 
 totle, is that the human mind can only attain its full and 
 proper life in a community of minds, or more strictly in a 
 community pervaded by a single mind, uttering itself con- 
 sistently, though differently, in the life and action of every 
 member of the community."^ If this fundamental idea is to 
 be an ideal towards which, making allowance for the wide 
 discrepancy between Greek and modern political life, we 
 should progress, law and prescription must leave room for 
 individual freedom and choice. It is, of course, not the task 
 of an essay like this to define the sphere of law. We are con- 
 cerned only with the broad features of the political structure. 
 This much is clear, however, that the structure of society on 
 its political side must leave scope for freedom as on its 
 economic side it must leave scope for initiative. Indeed 
 freedom and initiative are logically prior postulates to the 
 conservation of which legal and economic restrictions must 
 be subordinate. 
 
 7 Bosanquet, op. cit, p. 6.
 
 174 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 For the details as to the way representation is secured, 
 so far as it is secured, the student must be referred to the 
 appropriate authorities. The progress of enfranchisement, 
 the tardy recognition of the right of woman to share directly 
 the responsibilities of citizenship, the relative claims of 
 majorities and minorities under a democratic system, the 
 problem of party government, and related political questions, 
 will emerge in any rational scheme for the teaching of his- 
 tory. So also will the constitution and procedure of parlia- 
 ment, the nature and extent of the control which the legis- 
 lative authority can exercise over the executive authority. 
 Of fundamental importance, too, is the question of the 
 system of national finance, involving public debt and its re- 
 demption, public revenue and expenditure, as well as the 
 whole question of taxation and national services. These 
 problems should all be envisaged from the point of view of 
 the reality or artificiality of that participation in self-govern- 
 ment for self-realisation which democracy implies or ought to 
 imply. Real responsibility and a real opportunity for all to 
 live the best and fullest life should be the poHtical aim, and 
 the educational aim must consequently be the adjustment of 
 the individual to this social life, an adjustment first of intel- 
 ligent understanding, then of enthusiastic participation. 
 
 §3. So far we have only noted the scaffolding of the 
 structure of society. Now we have to look at it as a com- 
 plete bit of architecture ; or rather, since any metaphor carry- 
 ing a static implication would be seriously inadequate and 
 misleading, as a developing organism. The relation of soul 
 to body, of wind to sails, of life to structure, is helpful at 
 this point. We want to know whence the life, the wind, the 
 soul of the whole is derived. As has been suggested, the 
 laws of a country embody at once its history and the aspira- 
 tions which transcend history and reach out towards an ideal 
 polity ; while in its economic existence, as we shall later see, 
 we are face to face with its very life blood. Still, more is 
 needed to create its individuality and that we find in the 
 conception of nationality. That conception we must now 
 briefly consider. 
 
 It would be untrue to say that there is any necessary 
 connection between democracy and the first stage in the de- 
 velopment of nationality ; but nationality will not develop its
 
 POLITICAL, NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS STRANDS 175 
 
 possibilities as a moral force until a nation is responsible for 
 its own destiny. It is like an individual in this respect. It 
 comes to a consciousness of itself while yet in leading-strings 
 but it does not begin to realise its full self until self-govern- 
 ment is added to self-knowledge. Edward III. and Henry 
 V. are alive to-day, not because of French conquests, but be- 
 cause beneath their banners England was consolidated. The 
 unifying process was quickened and vitalised when Eliza- 
 beth's sailors saved England, for defence is greater than 
 offence as a factor of this process. It was not, however, until 
 the seventeenth century that it was consummated, and the 
 consummation was reached when the fight for political free- 
 dom was won. In this connection we may quote a modern 
 historian : " There are two political movements at work in 
 Europe in the half-century following Waterloo. One, the 
 birth of the French Revolution, is the popular demand for 
 the expression at least of the popular voice in the govern- 
 ment. The other is the nationalism which has been 
 quickened by the Napoleonic wars; a demand in part for 
 national independence of alien control, in part for the unifi- 
 cation of broken-up and divided nationalities. The two 
 movements are found working simultaneously in some 
 regions ; but there is no law of association between them. 
 Italy in her struggle for liberation and unity succeeds not 
 under republican leadership but under the constitutional 
 monarchists. German unity is achieved by statesmen who 
 have no popular leanings. But in 1871, fifty-six years after 
 Napoleon's sun had set, when the later Napoleon's sun had 
 set also, Germany was at last a consolidated empire, Italy 
 was a consolidated and constitutional kingdom, Greece and 
 Belgium were constitutional kingdoms, and the release of the 
 Slavonic states of the Turkish Empire from Mohammedan 
 control was in the near future ; while in Great Britain the 
 balance of political power had passed first from the land- 
 owning class to the manufacturers, and then from the manu- 
 facturers to the ' working ' classes. The only countries in 
 Europe where unqualified despotism survived were Russia 
 and Turkey."* We appear, then, to be justified in asserting 
 that the higher developments of nationality will be con- 
 ditional upon the development of self-government. 
 
 ^ Innes, "General Sketch of Political History," p. 376.
 
 176 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 That the evolution of nationality is closely connected 
 with the evolution of democracy appears, indeed, both from 
 a priori and from a posteriori considerations. A nation, 
 whatever else it may be, is a social unit conscious of itself, 
 confident of itself, and determined to pursue its own life. It 
 possesses individuality and we should assume, without the 
 teaching of history, that this stage of development, this 
 measure of self-knowledge, self-reverence, and self-control, 
 this conscious, if in some respects inarticulate, determination 
 of its own destiny, could only have been reached through the 
 experience of some measure of democracy. History sup- 
 ports the assumption, in its general outline at all events. The 
 nineteenth century is generally distinguished as the era of 
 the rise of nationalities. It is also the age when the partici- 
 pation of the people in their own government became a 
 feature of European history. 
 
 When the grip of Rome loosened and its partially dis- 
 integrating influence on the tribes and peoples which had 
 fallen under its dominion was no longer felt, segregating ties 
 of blood, language, and traditions, together with geographi- 
 cal frontiers, laid the foundations of future nationalities. The 
 rise of monarchs and dynasties, resting on the feudal system, 
 gave added coherence to communities. It was, however, an 
 artificial coherence based on force ; and nationality is a 
 growth from below and within, not from above and without. 
 Moreover, the new spiritual order of Rome was, like the 
 temporal order, in its political effects disruptive. The re- 
 naissance and the reformation were forces working in the 
 direction of emancipation and freedom, but the old monarchi- 
 cal order was too firmly entrenched in ignorance and power 
 and, it may be added, in some cases in potentiality for the 
 betterment of peoples, to yield readily to the new. So that 
 two thousand years elapsed after the dismemberment of the 
 Roman empire before the possibilities of true national de- 
 velopment which it left behind came to fruition. 
 
 We may take it, then, that real and fundamental unity 
 and solidarity appear first in a political unit when the politi- 
 cal freedom of its members is secured by self-government, 
 whether in the form of constitutional monarchy or democracy. 
 Freedom, the power and the opportunity to realise the highest 
 aspirations of the individual self, is the most valued of
 
 POLITICAL, NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS STRANDS 177 
 
 human possessions, and the poHty which is based upon it, is 
 the one Hkely to be most permanent. A poHty founded on 
 freedom may be coherent enough to include different 
 nationaHties. The British Constitution embraces English, 
 Scotch, Welsh and Irish, although the pathetic case of the 
 latter is a negative instance, many of its members would 
 hold, of a polity based on freedom. The Dominion of 
 Canada embraces British and French communities. The 
 Union of South Africa embraces British and Dutch. The 
 federal polity of Switzerland has been able to hold people of 
 French, German, and Italian descent in proud amity. Many 
 nationalities have been absorbed in the political freedom of 
 the United States. 
 
 While, therefore, the political unit based on political 
 freedom may be greater than a nation it must be noted that 
 nationality is among the most powerful unifying forces. 
 This follows, of course, from the fact that it is ultimately a 
 tie of blood. Out of blood-relationship has sprung com- 
 munity of language and all those warm and intimate asso- 
 ciations from which the habits, customs, and traditions of a 
 nation emerge. So strong and intense are these ties of 
 blood, language, habits, and traditions, that the coherence 
 of a polity based on political freedom would be immediately 
 endangered if national ideals and aspirations were in any 
 way infringed or thwarted. On the other hand, however, 
 the world war just concluded has furnished the most signal 
 example in the history of the world of the way in which dif- 
 ferent nations can unite under the banner of freedom and 
 pour out their blood and their treasure for the sacred ideal of 
 liberty. It would seem, indeed, that it should not be 
 beyond the possibility of wise statesmanship to find room for 
 national ideals and to harmonise national aspirations within 
 a single polity. And the justification for the hope is that ties 
 of blood and language, strong and intense as they are, are 
 not final and ultimate like the ideals of freedom and human 
 worth, on which religious impulse and inspiration rest. 
 When the flag of freedom flies over a political organism its 
 unity, coherence and solidarity appear, indeed, to be made 
 more permanent by the inclusion within it of different 
 nationalities. The solidarity of the British Commonwealth 
 taken as whole, tried and proved in the crucible of war, seems
 
 178 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 a positive proof of this, just as the comparative lukewarmness 
 of the French province of Quebec in its response to the call 
 of thg blood, appears to be a negative proof. Cleavage in 
 national unity, in this case perhaps due to the rock of 
 religious ideals, may, like a family feud, obliterate the 
 straight path of common duty. 
 
 §4. If freedom is to be the effective cement of different 
 nationalities in one political union at least two conditions 
 must be fulfilled. One is the bond of a common earth and 
 sky, the other the bond of a common history and destiny. 
 The first stands in the same intimate relation to the soul of 
 a people as a man's body to his individual soul. The effect 
 of national frontiers in consolidating political unity is proved 
 by history, and by what is even a surer guide than history, 
 namely, national poetry. Who can doubt that the isolating 
 effect of the sea has contributed to British solidarity? The 
 United Kingdom, "that precious stone set in a silver sea," 
 Switzerland, and Spain, are instances which immediately 
 come to mind. Their physical compactness cannot but have 
 contributed to that unity of sentiment which finds its highest 
 focus in the ideal of freedom. If it is wholly or relatively 
 incomplete, one condition favourable to centrifugal social and 
 political tendencies, is present and is bound to be operative. 
 Ireland is an obvious case. Even were there no historical 
 memories, and no religious differences, working in the direc- 
 tion of disunion, the Irish Sea would remain a physical 
 obstacle which community of political interests would have 
 to surmount. A negative instance is supplied by the artificial 
 boundary which, for a thousand miles, separates Canada 
 from the United States. Is not much of French history in 
 its international relations, and particularly in its earlier rela- 
 tions with the German States and in the nineteenth century 
 with the German Empire, to be interpreted by the aspiration 
 that the Rhine may wash French soil ? Is there not a factor, 
 favourable to the permanence of the Union of South Africa, 
 in its geographical unity? Within natural political frontiers 
 there are also the strong associative links of recurrent physi- 
 cal features. Karroo and veld in South Africa, forests, 
 rivers, and plains in Canada, highlands, rivers, and lochs in 
 Scotland, mountains, streams, and moors in Wales, hills, 
 downs, plains and tidal reaches in England, what are they all
 
 POLITICAL, NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS STRANDS 179 
 
 but the very substance and framework on which national 
 solidarity rests? Climate, again, is a background against 
 which the edges of distinct national or provincial elements 
 shade off and disappear. It is not a mere fancy to suppose 
 that the United Kingdom owes much of its unity to the 
 magnificent sequence of its seasons, and that South African 
 unity will be furthered by nature's gift of bright sunlight and 
 blue skies. The songs of the poets may be called in evidence. 
 The second condition is a measure of historical con- 
 tinuity, the time factor in the development of pohtical unity. 
 Here we are face to face with spiritual forces, and they are, 
 perhaps, more powerful than physical conditions because 
 their strength is cumulative along the Hne of history. The 
 coherence of the various elements in the British polity is 
 largely due to the fact that through many centuries they have 
 combined, in spite of national and provincial differences and 
 jealousies, in the struggle for political freedom. Every vic- 
 tory of enfranchisement has been won, not so much by the 
 clear vision and tenacity in moral purpose of this or that 
 political leader, as by the accumulated momentum of the 
 tradition of centuries of struggle and sacrifice for the great 
 cause of liberty. It must not be forgotten, however, that this 
 same force of tradition and political memory may act in the 
 opposite direction by cherishing and accumulating sentiment 
 which makes for disruption. The pathetic case of Ireland 
 may be again referred to in illustration. Herein lies the 
 danger of bigoted and short-sighted partizanship of sectional 
 claims and aspirations, whether local or national. It may 
 be that, in the end, higher moral and political ideals will pre- 
 vail, but the period of struggle and clashing between 
 narrower and wider aims is, as history abundantly shows, 
 one fraught with the gravest danger to the stability of a state 
 and to the highest welfare not only of the polity as a whole 
 but also of sections, provincial or national, included within it. 
 In support of our immediate point, namely, the dependence 
 of political stability on the time factor we may quote Amos. 
 The reference is to the stability of the system of local govern- 
 ment in England but it applies with equal force to central 
 government. Writing of the " pre-eminence of England as 
 an authoritative precedent on the theory and practice of Local 
 Government," he says: "One reason is that the primitive
 
 i8o THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 circumstances of the political settlement of England . . . 
 concurred to bring the Local Government of parishes and 
 counties into a special relation with the Central Government 
 of the King and the King's Council which has had no parallel 
 elsewhere. The other reason is that this special relation has 
 been maintained intact, in spite of all sorts of modifications 
 and developments in point of detail for 800 years without 
 interruption from civil strife or external foe."® By contrast 
 we may refer to the extraordinary progress towards political 
 unity made in the Union of South Africa during a space of 
 less than twenty years from the termination of the Anglo- 
 Boer War. But the teaching of history cannot be neglected, 
 and those who refer optimistically to this truly remarkable 
 historical phenomenon will be well-advised to remember that 
 the time factor is Vianting and that true and permanent politi- 
 cal solidarity can only rest securely upon the accumulated 
 experience of the benefits of union extending over at least 
 several generations. The priceless possession of political 
 freedom has been gained, and it has geographical unity and 
 an almost unique pervasive brilliance of sun and sky to rest 
 upon, but its security lies ultimately in mutual racial toler- 
 ance, respect, and magnanimity, growing and deepening 
 with the march of the years. 
 
 §5. We may, perhaps, appropriately refer to the 
 Union of South Africa in a further brief elucidation of the 
 point we are here concerned with, namely, the element of 
 nationality as one of the strands in the social and political 
 fabric. We described it as the soul compared with the body, 
 wind with sails, life with structure. " The newer aspect of 
 political independence" (to quote Amos again), "which 
 may be assumed to be the permanent one, rests upon real and 
 not upon fictitious, accidental, and temporary, foundations. 
 It has deep roots in distinct geographical lines of demar- 
 cation, in language, in race, in community of religion, and of 
 political antecedents."^" Of these five roots the first and the 
 two last may, from a wide point of view, be said to exist in 
 South Africa. The first certainly does; community of 
 religion may be claimed also, for omitting the small minority 
 of Roman Catholics, differences are only those which exist 
 
 s Op. cit, pp. 281, 282. 
 10 The Science of Politics, p. 352.
 
 POLITICAL, NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS STRANDS i8i 
 
 within the broad bounds of the Protestant faith ; and Britain 
 and Holland, the dual ancestors of the two European races 
 of South Africa, can boast the longest rivalry in the struggle 
 for political liberty. The two remaining factors, ultimately 
 one, undoubtedly present an obstacle to complete political 
 unity which it would be idle to under-estimate. Such an 
 authority as Dr. Holland Rose is of opinion that it is not an 
 insurmountable one. He writes: " In the Swiss House of 
 Parliament at Berne . . . there are men who speak 
 French, German, and Italian ; but the feeling of unity . . . 
 transcends mere diversities of tongue, and merges the frag- 
 ments of those now warring peoples in a fervidly Swiss 
 nationality, which bids fair to outlast even the divulsive influ- 
 ences of this war. It is true that the strain just now on Swiss 
 nationality is very severe ; and the sharp tension which pre- 
 vails between the German and the Latin portions reveals the 
 strength of the tie of language. But here lies the interest of 
 the case of Switzerland. The Swiss cherish a collective sen- 
 timent which far transcends race and language, a sentiment 
 springing from pride in a glorious past and love of the 
 mountains around which they cluster. The Swiss will, I 
 believe, remain a nation, and will not merge into the three 
 great peoples that surround them. Their keen historic sense, 
 their romantic attachment to their mountains and rivers, will 
 keep them united. In this respect they are the ' earth-born 
 souls ' at whom Fichte scoffed ; and this clinging to the soil, 
 this pride in their achievements, will, I venture to say, help 
 to keep Switzerland a united whole. "^^ 
 
 Britain, the United States, and Belgium, furnish irre- 
 futable evidence of the unity and coherence of different 
 nations, or of citizens of different national ancestry, under 
 the flag of freedom. There are, indeed, historical as well as 
 moral grounds for the belief that, not only will the irrational 
 friction of racial aspirations disappear in the serener atmos- 
 phere of political, social, and moral freedom, but that diverse 
 elements are a source of strength. The language problem is 
 one which can be solved if it is approached in a spirit of toler- 
 ance and magnanimity. Can it be doubted that the exist- 
 ence of two sources of literary inspiration instead of one will 
 
 11 Nationality in Modern History, pp. 47, 48.
 
 1 82 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 ultimately be a gain to the whole political community ? There 
 can be no doubt that acquaintance with two languages in- 
 stead of one is a gain in intellectual alertness and vivacity. 
 The difficultv of intercourse is a real one, as any observer of 
 parliamentary, legal, and commercial procedure must admit. 
 But it can be removed by being surmounted, and it can be 
 surmounted if each citizen is determined to be proficient, 
 within the limits of his capacity, in both. What is before 
 all things necessary is the conviction that a man's native 
 language, the language he learns at his mother's knee, is a 
 thing sacred to him, and entitled, because of its sacredness, 
 to the fullest and most complete recognition and respect. It 
 remains true, however, that race and language are sub- 
 ordinate to the higher calls and claims of citizenship. For 
 citizenship, membership in a political organism founded and 
 rooted in freedom, means the opportunity to develop the best 
 that a man has in him. And after all humanity is broader 
 and greater than race or nationality. There is, indeed, every 
 reason to believe that Briton and Boer can find room for their 
 racial aspirations, and at the same time join their strength, 
 tried and proved in history, in maintaining a great South 
 African nation. 
 
 We must quote again to support the view that the unity 
 of a polity based upon a high ideal of freedom and the value 
 and claims of the individual, may be and should be strong 
 enough to overcome the disintegrating influences of race. 
 " In proportion as the culture of a people advances, identity 
 of race and blood exercises less power on it, and historic 
 memories exercise more power. Above ethnical nationalities 
 there are political nationalities formed by choice (one may 
 say) rooted in love of liberty, in the cult of a glorious past, 
 in accord of interests, in similarity of moral ideas, and of all 
 that forms the intellectual life."'' We are here in the 
 presence of the moral order, which transcends in its concep- 
 tions and ideals the narrower conceptions and ideals of race, 
 and carries them over into the purer moral atmosphere of 
 humanity. For the prejudices, jealousies, and rivalries of 
 race cannot be overlooked, and the danger that the great and 
 inspiring influence of nationality may be prostituted in the 
 
 12 Laveleye, quoted by Rosp, op. cit, p. 145
 
 POLITICAL, NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS STRANDS 183 
 
 service of the lust of domination is a real one, as history, 
 ancient and modern, too abundantly proves. Few nations 
 have escaped the taint. Nevertheless strength and indi- 
 viduahty in nations, as in individuals, is essential to the 
 welfare of humanity. The citizen is a stepping-stone between 
 the householder and the man. " This widening outlook, this 
 pride in the country instead of merely in the county, opens 
 up an immense store of vital energy. There passes through 
 these diverse groups and classes a thrill which makes them 
 one body politic — not a corpus vile on which kings and law- 
 givers may work their will, but a conscious powerful entity 
 which bends them to its will."^^ The thrill of patriotism has 
 behind it the pulse of humanity and will carry a people on 
 into the higher order if only education, in the widest sense 
 of the term can point to the goal. It is the sound doc- 
 trine of real universality which is pertinent here again. 
 Patriotism is not a particular, from the instances of which 
 among the nations we are to pass to some detached universal 
 of humanity; it is humanity; it is the embodiment and ex- 
 pression of the universal, caged perhaps within the confines 
 of the inarticulate or even the perverse, but always ready and 
 struggling to escape from its trammels and limitations, and 
 to expand and purify the potentiality which is its verv 
 essence and being. The way to the ideal of civilisation is 
 not through any senseless frittering away of the aspirations 
 of nationality; those aspirations are the thrill of humanity 
 itself born in the earth and the sky we love as our home, and 
 in the history and the traditions which are our inheritance 
 from the past. We may repeat that nationality is the life 
 and soul of the social structure, and add that it is the force 
 which, if properly directed, can extend the roof until it is 
 wide enough to embrace humanity itself. 
 
 §6. We thus arrive naturally at the point where we 
 may briefly refer to religion as one of the strands of the social 
 fabric. Here we have to take account of what is perhaps the 
 most powerful of human sentiments, capable of overcoming 
 by its impelling force ties of blood, patriotism, and the fear 
 of death. The martyrs of the Roman amphitheatre, the vic- 
 tims of Alva's brutal soldiery in the Netherlands, the English 
 
 13 Rose, op. cit, p. 142. 
 
 13
 
 1 84 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 Bishops who fearlessly faced the tortures of the stake, and 
 thousands of whose readiness to face torture and death history 
 has left no record, all bear witness to the constraining power 
 of this sentiment of religion. It explains, too, partly at all 
 events, the fanatical zeal of reformers which led to the em- 
 ployment of such means as the horrors of the Inquisition, St. 
 Bartholomew's Massacre, and to every fiendish device for 
 attempting to secure the recantation of religious principles. 
 It explains, further, the failure of all efforts of compulsion 
 and the gradual progress of civilised nations in the direction 
 of liberty. No doubt the focus of the sentiment in the con- 
 ception of happiness in this life and everlasting salvation in 
 the next, is what has made it the support of the persecuting 
 zeal of fanatics on the one hand and the ready self-sacrifice of 
 the martyrs on the other. 
 
 It is evident that a sentiment of such constraining power 
 will cut across bonds of nationality and political unity. The 
 dominance of the Vatican sustained for nearly a thousand 
 years, the growth since the reformation of the opposing 
 forces of Protestantism, the devastating wars of religion, are 
 the testimony of history to the all-pervasive effect, sometimes 
 unifying but far oftener disruptive, of this factor in the 
 development of the common life of peoples and states. Dur- 
 ing the last century and a half political and economic forces 
 have ousted it from its predominance, but it was certainly one 
 of the most potent influences in the earlier history of Europe, 
 whether by reason of its own intrinsic constraint over the 
 impulses and actions of individuals or as exploited by the 
 leaders of men. At the present time its tendency is rather 
 to create or sustain religious associations within the unity of 
 peoples and states than to be a bond crossing their political 
 boundaries and to any appreciable extent obliterating them. 
 That at least is its positive tendency ; and, from a political 
 point of view, its force is certainly diminishing, save where, 
 as in Ireland and Quebec, it serves, or is deliberately used, 
 to accentuate and perpetuate historical animosities. In 
 France, for example, its association with the national polity 
 has been deliberately severed. 
 
 There is, indeed, little doubt that the harnessing of the 
 religious sentiment to political or national policy, is, ulti- 
 mately, an unwise and a shortsighted step. The proper
 
 POLITICAL, NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS STRANDS 185 
 
 sphere of the churches is the sphere of humanity just because 
 that sphere is the apotheosis of the nation and the state. As 
 we noted above there is no opposition between nationality 
 and humanity as moral ideals; the first embodies and ex- 
 presses the second, it may be in an inadequate and imperfect 
 manner and degree, but none the less really and truly just as 
 every instance of a scientific truth expresses and exemplifies 
 that truth within the limitations of circumstance. It is, how- 
 ever, the peculiar and the morally pre-eminent function of 
 religion to purify the ideals of nationality and state and so 
 carry them on towards the higher ideals of the moral order 
 of humanity. It should transmute the inevitable stage of 
 division and intolerance by the alchemy of a common pur- 
 pose and destiny. We may and must admire the nobilitv 
 and tenacity of the sentiment which carried the Pilgrim 
 Fathers to New England and the Huguenots to South Africa, 
 but religion has a higher purpose and destiny than the segre- 
 gation of its adherents. That purpose and destiny is to be at 
 once the basis and the goal of a league of humanity. For an 
 interpretation of that part of the past which is subsequent to 
 the birth of Christianity we must look to the preponderating 
 and often disruptive force of religion in the sequence of 
 political development ; for the progress of the future we may 
 look to it as the motive force of true civilisation. 
 
 §7. Our aim being to show how religion sometimes 
 crosses and strains, and sometimes intertwines with and 
 strengthens, the other strands of the social world, we must 
 now go into a little more detail. ^^ The first point to note is 
 the contribution which the organisation of the church of 
 Rome made to the organisation of society. As a conse- 
 quence of the amazingly rapid spread of Christianity among 
 the pagan peoples of Europe and the fact that its spiritual 
 and temporal interests were administered — to borrow a 
 modern conception — by "a regular governing hierarchy, "^^ 
 it became, in relation to the order and stability of society, 
 the not unworthy heir of the Roman Empire itself. 
 Although in its organisation it had to embrace the citizens 
 of the kingdom of Christ, and was thus not primarily con- 
 
 11 Acknowicdi^ment is duo for what follows to Hayes' lucid " Political and 
 Social History of Modern Europe," Vol. I, Chap. IV, especially. 
 15 Ibid, Vol. I, p. 113.
 
 1 86 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 cerned with their segregation in monarchical and feudal 
 units, the main Hnes of its geographical organisation 
 marched evenly with those of the latter. The Anglican 
 Church, the Gallican Church, the Spanish Church, the 
 Neopolitan Church and the Hungarian Church are men- 
 tioned in papal documents or letters.^® The weight and 
 authority of the church organisation was used to supplement 
 such political and legal organisation as developed slowly and 
 spasmodically through the Middle Ages. Amos points out 
 that "the result of all the investigations of M. Guizot, of 
 Mr. Hallam, and of later writers, into the history of the 
 modern institution of Representation is that this institution 
 is rooted partly in the representative Councils of the Chris- 
 tian Church."^' We may note in this connection also that 
 to the model parliament held in England in 1296 King 
 Edward summoned a complete body of representatives of the 
 Church ; and although the archbishops, bishops, and greater 
 abbots attended not as such but in their capacity of feudal 
 lords, we have here the origin of the association of lords 
 spiritual in political government which remains a feature of 
 the English constitution to this day. That great authority 
 Stubbs may be quoted in this connection. "It is scarcely 
 necessary to point out the special importance of this portion 
 of history " — he is referring to the period just preceding the 
 Norman Conquest — " in its bearing on our constitutional 
 growth. The Church of England is not only the agency by 
 which Christianity is brought to a heathen people, a herald 
 of spiritual blessings and glorious hopes in another life; it is 
 not merely the tamer of cruel natures, the civiliser of the rude, 
 the cultivator of the waste places, the educator, the guide and 
 the protector, whose guardianship is the only safeguard of 
 the woman, the child, and the slave against the tyranny of 
 their lord and master. The church is this in many other 
 countries besides Britain; but here it is much more. The 
 unity of the church in England was the pattern of the unity 
 of the state; the cohesion of the church was for ages the 
 substitute for the cohesion which the divided nation was un- 
 able otherwise to realise. ... It was to an extraordinary 
 degree a national church, national in its comprehensiveness 
 
 i« Ibid, Vol. I, p. 148. 
 
 17 The Science of Politics, p. iS";.
 
 POLITICAL, NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS STRANDS 187 
 
 as well as in its exclusiveness. . . . The unity of the 
 church was in the early period the only working unity.'"* 
 It is, indeed, extremely interesting to observe how in the 
 early establishment of political order in Europe the role 
 played by the church was so important, whereas its footing 
 in that domain is now so precarious, even where it has been 
 maintained in the form of a state church. It remains where 
 it began as a cosmopolitan agency, but freed for its great 
 work of consolidating, inspiring, and firing the moral order, 
 by its almost complete emancipation from purely political 
 responsibilities. 
 
 Thus the church began as the handmaid of authority. 
 It may also be that she began as the champion of the people. 
 Mr. Chesterton says: "The church, with whatever other 
 faults, worked of her own nature towards greater social 
 equality ; and it is a historical error to suppose that the 
 church hierarchy worked with aristocracies, or was of a kin 
 with them. It was an inversion of aristocracy; in the ideal 
 of it, at least, the last were to be first.'"® How far the ideal 
 shaped policy and practice is for the historians to decide. 
 It is established that, as might have been conjectured, the 
 rivalry of church and state dignitaries in the race for power 
 and possessions led to mutual jealousies between monarchs 
 and nobles and popes and prelates, and the first stages in 
 the final cleavage of interests were early in evidence. This 
 final cleavage was confined mainly to Teutonic Europe. The 
 external factors which contributed to it were economic and 
 political. While the church no doubt was a potent means by 
 which the enlightenment and spiritual enfranchisement of 
 the people were furthered, through its religious and educa- 
 tional ministrations and the impetus thus given to the spread 
 of a knowledge of native languages, its estates embodied the 
 feudal system, and in its association with that system it in- 
 evitably strengthened the barrier which that system pre- 
 sented to any effort of the peasantry to escape from economic 
 and political thraldom. The internal factor was the 
 attempt, always doomed to failure, to suppress liberty of 
 thought, by claiming infallibility for its interpretations of 
 questions of dogma and authority equal to that of the Bible 
 
 18 The Constitutional History of England, Vol. I, pp. 266-268. 
 
 19 A Short History of England, p. 14.
 
 1 88 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 itself; and by suppressing the spirit of scientific enquiry into 
 the phenomena of nature. Every such attempt has failed 
 because it tries to dam a stream of spiritual impulse which is 
 inexhaustible, because it has a perennial fountain in the 
 minds and souls of men. It was certain to fail in this case 
 because of the moral degeneracy of many of the members of 
 the very body, the church itself, which claimed these pre- 
 rogatives of authority and suppression. This degeneracy 
 was due to the immorality attendant on monasticism and 
 celibacy, and to the greed and dishonesty which developed in 
 the struggle for place and preferment. Thus it came about 
 that the reforming zeal of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin 
 spread to prince and peasant and the end of the sixteenth 
 century saw the North German States, Denmark and the 
 Scandinavian Peninsula, the Netherlands, England and 
 Scotland liberated under the banner of Protestantism from 
 the dominance of the Roman Church. In one century the 
 power which had held sway for a thousand years was shaken 
 to its foundations. 
 
 1 8. The effect of religious developments on the spirit of 
 nationality is bound to be great because each of them rests 
 upon a sentiment of great unifying power. There can be no 
 doubt that the Anglican, Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, and 
 Lutheran Churches have been amongst the most powerful 
 factors in the unification of the English, Scotch, Dutch, and 
 North German peoples. In these cases religious and national 
 forces have been concurrent. In the case of English and 
 Dutch this double bond of union was strengthened by sue- 
 cessful resistance against the opposing force of Roman 
 Catholicism championed in vain by Philip II of Spain. 
 Negative proof of the same truth is to be found whenever 
 different nationalities one or more of whom adhere to 
 Protestantism and the rest to Roman Catholicism, are in- 
 cluded in the same polity. In such a case religious differ- 
 ences are always likely to precipitate political schism. Great 
 Britain and Ireland, the Northern and Southern States of the 
 German Empire, France, and to a less degree Switzerland 
 and Canada, are instances in point. In Italy itself we have 
 the extreme case of conflict between national and religious 
 organisations, a conflict which has proved disastrous to unity
 
 POLITICAL, NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS STRANDS 189 
 
 and security tliroughout its modern history even down to the 
 four and a half years of the devastating European war. 
 
 While the relation of religion to nationality may be said 
 to be fundamental and even organic, that of religion to 
 economic facts may be said to be, relatively at least, acci- 
 dental. It is, however, a recurrent accident in history. Two 
 instances will suffice. The German peasants rallied to 
 Lutherism. They " had grievances against the old order 
 compared with which those of the knights and townsfolk were 
 imaginary. For at least a century several causes had con- 
 tributed to make their lot worse and worse. While their taxes 
 and other burdens were increasing, the ability of the emperor 
 to protect them was decreasing ; they were plundered by every 
 class in the community, especially by the higher clergy. 
 Thus, under the influence of social and economic conditions, 
 various uprisings of the peasants had taken place during the 
 latter part of the fifteenth century. . . . When Luther 
 urged the princes to assail the ecclesiastics, to seize church 
 lands, and to put an end to financial abuses, the peasants 
 naturally listened to his words with open ears and proceeded 
 with glad hearts to apply his advice themselves."^" The 
 Peasants' Revolt was crushed, fifty thousand of them lost 
 their lives and the lot of the survivors was " worse than that 
 of almost any people in Europe." " Another result was the 
 decline of Luther's influence among the peasantry in Southern 
 and Central Germany. "^^ The English parallel was the 
 Pilgrimage of Grace. The monasteries, whatever the short- 
 comings of their members, were a focus of education, 
 sanctuary and charity for the English peasantry. Their 
 closing led to the peasants' rising called the Pilgrimage of 
 Grace, suppressed with a cruelty which rivalled that with 
 which the peasants' revolt in Germany had been put down. 
 And the pity of it was that the wealth of the monasteries 
 brought no common relief comparable with the real benefits 
 their dissolution took away. It did not pass to the nation but 
 to many aristocratic houses, some founded on the spoil, under 
 circumstances which Mr. Chesterton has with happy irony 
 described as the Rebellion of the Rich.^^ These two in- 
 
 20 Hayes, op. cit, Vol. I, pp. 133, 134. 
 
 21 Ibid, Vol. I, p. 135. 
 
 22 Op. cit, Chap. XI.
 
 igo THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 Stances point to the same truth. The German peasants 
 wanted to escape from despoliation ; they wanted a share in 
 the material comforts of hfe; they wanted a place, perhaps 
 not quite in the sun, but at least in the penumbra rather than 
 the umbra of the shadow ; and they thought Protestantism 
 would help them to get it. That was their error. They did 
 not realise that zeal for the salvation of souls does not neces- 
 sarily imply zeal for the amelioration of bodies. The six- 
 teenth century was not ready for the idea just as the twentieth 
 is not yet ready for the fact. The English peasants faced the 
 same bitter social truth from the other side, so to say. It was 
 not a coming blessing which they were disappointed of, but 
 an existing blessing which they were deprived of. Their pro- 
 test or revolt met the same fate. They, too, found to their 
 cost that liberation from Rome was no guarantee of liberation 
 from thraldom. 
 
 It is to be noted, too, that tolerance was no more a charac- 
 teristic of Protestantism than of Roman Catholicism. Neither 
 the English nor the Scotch adherents of Calvinism and John 
 Knox fell far short of the inquisition in terrorism and perse- 
 cution. Religious freedom, like political freedom, does not 
 necessarily follow on a change in the controlling authority. 
 Bolshevism has proved as tyrannical as Czardom, just as 
 Oliver Cromwell was as intolerant as Philip of Spain. As a 
 matter of fact, tolerance, magnanimity, and freedom cannot 
 take root in a narrow, pent, and intensive social life. The 
 strands of society may be drawn too tightly. It is a political 
 unity which embraces a variety of forms of social life and 
 interests, and within which there is opportunity for the 
 mental and spiritual growth of the social groups composing 
 it, that is the home of toleration. For this is perhaps the last 
 of the products of civilisation. At any rate it will only grow 
 and thrive in a community where all the varied educative 
 forces have long been free to play and have, so to say, en- 
 riched and made fertile the soil. Tolerance is a function of 
 three variables, length, breadth and depth of culture. It is 
 not surprising, therefore, that its direct opposite was the 
 characteristic of both the religious forces of the sixteenth 
 century. " Religious intolerance had driven Puritans to 
 New England and Roman CathoUcs to Maryland."" 
 
 23 Hayes, op. cit, \'ol. I, p. 301.
 
 POLITICAL, NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS STRANDS 191 
 
 We know how intolerance and religious oppression led to 
 the foundation of the New England States of the American 
 Confederacy. The interesting point for us is the way the 
 religious sentiment burst the bonds of home and nationality. 
 The history of that American seaboard since the beginning 
 of the seventeenth century affords, indeed, an excellent illus- 
 tration of the way religious, political, and economic factors 
 contribute to the character and cohesion of the social tissue. 
 The Virginian settlers in the South had found their way there 
 under a trade charter. The same commercial impulse had 
 led to the foundation of New Amsterdam, afterwards New 
 York, by the Dutch. Thus the United States had both 
 economic and religious ancestry. The latter proved the 
 stouter fibre of the fabric as appeared in the predominant part 
 the Northern States took in the struggle for political inde- 
 pendence and in the victory they won for political morality 
 and freedom over the reactionary elements of the South in 
 the civil strife of i860 and 1861. The victory of right in the 
 nineteenth century as well as the Declaration of Rights of 
 the eighteenth may safely be ascribed to the same tenacity of 
 purpose and stoutness of heart which, in the seventeenth, 
 had rallied their forefathers to the cause of religious freedom. 
 
 The isolated settlements due to religious oppression and 
 the consequent bursting of the bonds of nationality were, how- 
 ever, like a rivulet compared with the tidal wave of religious 
 fervour which carried the Cross of Roman Catholicism out- 
 wards and westwards over the Atlantic until it ebbed out on 
 the shores of the Pacific. In the Catholic Empire itself it 
 swept back the counter-wave of the Crescent from Spain, 
 although the eastern arm had run over the Balkan peninsula 
 and threatened the Austrian part of the Holy Roman Empire 
 and was destined to exercise its pernicious influence until the 
 world-war ended in 1919. The focus of Roman Catholic 
 energy was the Iberian peninsular and Prince Henry the 
 Navigator. Missionary enterprise was afterwards linked 
 with, and, in the event, choked by, commercial enterprise, 
 but it was the cult of the Cross that started the wave. Central 
 America, Mexico to the north, and Peru to the south of the 
 equator, were overwhelmed by it. The refugees on the 
 Atlantic seaboard found the long arms of the Roman Church 
 enclosing them along the Mississippi and the St. Laurence.
 
 192 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 •Vlthough the system based on dominance was doomed to de- 
 cadence and ultimately fell before the forces of freedom, the 
 social world of to-day still bears the marks of that great out- 
 burst of proseletyzing zeal. Livingstone in Africa repre- 
 sented the same spiritual agency.-^ Wherever we turn to 
 examine that part of the social texture, at any rate, which we 
 call western civilisation we find evidence of the working of 
 this master-sentiment, now dividing nations and states, now 
 extending their frontiers or spheres of interest. From family 
 to humanity its ramifications are to be seen sometimes march- 
 ing evenly with lines of social demarcation and consolidating 
 the social units they enclose, sometimes crossing them and 
 dividing their constituents, but only to unite some of them 
 again within a wider spiritual polity. To this astonishing 
 social phenomena Mr. Kidd has applied his illuminating con- 
 ception of projected efficiency, a teleological idea that in 
 religion, as in other forms of social development, progress is 
 determined by an ideal, though but inarticulately realised, 
 which lies in front. ^^ Without further illustration or proof 
 we may conclude that the religious sentiment, to whatever 
 focus it is attached, has woven and will continue to weave 
 one of the main strands in the social fabric. 
 
 §9. There remains to be noted one other way in which 
 religion affected, and continues to affect, the social fabric, 
 and that is through its educational influence. We are not 
 concerned here, primarily, with religion in its relation to 
 morality as a means of raising individuals to a higher and 
 more ideal life. That matter belongs to the third book. 
 Here our point is rather its relation to the foundations of 
 society, of which education is clearly one of the surest. It 
 is, indeed, a platitude that social stability will only ultimately 
 be secured through enlightenment, and this is true whether 
 we regard society as a political, an economic, or a spiritual 
 structure ; or as all three which it assuredly is. The political 
 enfranchisement of the ignorant would hardly be urged by 
 the most short-sighted socialist ; freedom has its complement 
 in responsibility and a sense of responsibility implies both 
 enlightenment and training. Economic welfare rests on 
 
 24 See Lucas, Historical Geography of the British Colonies, Introductory 
 Volume, pp. 10-19. 
 
 25 Western Civilisation, p. 67 and passim.
 
 POLITICAL, NATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS STRANDS 193 
 
 general efficiency, which is the product of many-sided educa- 
 tion or force to the enlightenment of the people. In this 
 when its members are fitted by insight and impulse for the 
 higher ideal life. We have, then, to take note of the fact 
 that the churches have throughout the christian era con- 
 tributed, directly and indirectly, more than any other institu- 
 tion or force to the enlightenment of the people. In this 
 respect they have maintained an unbroken tradition and prac- 
 tice. Thoughout the middle ages the monastery and the 
 cathedral schools were practically the only ones available for 
 the common people, and the missionary monks were itinerant 
 teachers as well as officers of the church. The Catholic 
 Reformation saw the colleges of the Jesuits established. That 
 famous order took one of its main functions to be " to en- 
 lighten and educate the young." As schoolmasters they had 
 no equals in Europe for many years. No less a scholar and 
 scientist than Lord Francis Bacon said of the Jesuit teaching 
 that " nothing better has been put into practice."^® Their 
 system spread over most of western Europe and penetrated 
 the new world. It lasted over two hundred years, from the 
 end of the seventeenth till well into the nineteenth century; 
 and the traditional influence of the Roman Catholic Church 
 has been carried on, if the order has gone, especially in the 
 British colonies where convent schools are widely scattered. 
 The activity of the Anglican Church in connection with 
 primary schools especially since the early days of the nine- 
 teenth century, is also to be noted. 
 
 Before the age of printing, "through the work of the 
 monks in the copying of manuscripts . . . most of the 
 writings of the past that we now have were reproduced fre- 
 quently enough to prevent their annihilation."^^ Again, 
 "one service which monasticism performed for learning can- 
 not be gainsaid. Whatever of ancient learning and literature 
 we have preserved to us to-day, is largely owing to the 
 monks."^^ The work they did in consolidating and spread- 
 ing a knowledge of the vernacular through prayers, sermons, 
 and direct teaching was also a contribution to solidarity. 
 Thus, directly and indirectly, in early days and later days, 
 
 23 Hayes, op. cit, Vol. I, pp. i6i, 162. 
 
 27 Monroe, A Brief Course in the History of Education, p. no- 
 
 2* Ibid, p. I >o.
 
 194 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 the power of religion and religious organisations helped to 
 lay the educational foundations of society. That the aim 
 was church-membership and that in its prosecution individual 
 freedom of thought was restricted, no doubt admits of the 
 fullest proof. But it must not be overlooked that two results 
 of profound social importance were reached, although the 
 second was not intended. One was the recognition of indi- 
 vidual value and work. That is, of course, the fundamental 
 of Christianity. The second was that through the educational 
 work done by the churches the individual was prepared, in a 
 measure at all events, to take his place as a responsible mem- 
 ber of society. By preparing their pupils for a common- 
 wealth of souls the churches paved the way for a common- 
 wealth of citizens.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE ECONOMIC STRAND IN THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY 
 
 §1. The economic element in the foundations of the 
 social world, which we must now briefly consider, stands in 
 the most intimate relations to the other elements. If we pic- 
 ture society as an organism, its political unity may be said to 
 correspond to the skeleton, its economic life to the blood, its 
 national and religious spirit to consciousness and soul. But 
 the moment we have separated the elements we feel that the 
 skeleton figure is altogether inadequate, though it may be 
 apposite as far as it goes; for political freedom is of dynamic 
 quality and an expression of the soul of a polity. Still the 
 parallel serves our purpose, which is to point out the inter- 
 dependence and inter-relation of the elements. In particular 
 it is desirable that to the economic history and life of a people 
 a theory of education should assign a place no less important 
 than that which it, as a fact, occupies in social development. 
 " We cannot sever the merely secular from the purely 
 spiritual and contrast them one against the other. "^ Not 
 only is it true that we cannot do so but that we ought not to 
 do so. It is just within the political and economic spheres 
 that the mind and soul of a people must find room for its 
 uplifting influence. Man does not live by bread alone it is 
 true, but neither does he live without it. The soul of a 
 people is as truly reflected in its political and economic life 
 as in its literature and religion. The latter are not ultimately 
 more appropriate media for spiritual purpose and habit, 
 whether aesthetic, moral, or religious, or all three, than the 
 former. 
 
 We may conveniently, and, indeed, appropriately, begin 
 our attempt to isolate the economic strand in the fabric of 
 society by noting the transition through which the tied-man 
 
 1 Cunningham, Western Civilisation, MediaDval and Modern Times, p. 142. 
 This work will be found most suggestive in connection with the problems 
 touched on in this chapter.
 
 196 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 became the free-man. We shall have to look back to the 
 second half of the middle ages and the economic structure of 
 society in England.^ How far this epoch revealed a fresh 
 start economically or how far it was a continuation of a sys- 
 tem existing under the Roman Empire, seems to be a point 
 which historical research has not yet decided.^ Similar un- 
 certainty appears to exist with regard to another matter, 
 namely, whether the economic subordination of the villein to 
 the life of the manor, which we are to take as our starting 
 point, was a development from a previous condition of free- 
 dom/ Whether it was a fresh start or a survival, and 
 whether a development from freedom or not, the system 
 under which the life and welfare of the villein on the manor 
 and the craftsman in the town, were subordinate to and de- 
 pendent on an economic unit which encompassed and 
 absorbed the individual, is a prominent landmark in economic 
 history from which we can well begin. 
 
 And we may look at the country unit, the manor, first. 
 " Till nearly the end of the fourteenth century, England was 
 a purely agricultural country. Such manufactures as it 
 possessed were entirely for consumption within the land; and 
 for goods of the finer qualities it was dependent on importa- 
 tion from abroad. The only articles of export were the raw 
 products of the country, and of these by far the most im- 
 portant was the agricultural product, wool. To understand, 
 therefore, the life of rural England during this period, is to 
 understand nine-tenths of its economic activity."^ And rural 
 England was only geographically one. Economically and 
 socially it consisted of practically isolated and self-contained 
 units or foci called manors. For a description of the cor- 
 porate life of these units the student must consult history." 
 We can only glance at the central figure, the villein, in his 
 relation to the manor and the lord, and at the process by 
 which he became the free labourer, tenant, or proprietor of 
 the land which at first held him bound fast to itself. 
 
 2 Cf. Cunningham in the Cambridge " Essays on the Teaching of His- 
 tory," pp. 47, 48, for the advantage of dealing with one countr}-. 
 
 3 Cunningham and McArthur, Outlines of English Industrial History, 
 p. 36. 
 
 4 Ashley, Economic History, Vol. 1, Pt. I, pp. 13-16. 
 •'' Ibid, pp. 5, 6. 
 
 6 The works of Ashley, Cunningham, and Cunningham and McArthur, 
 quoted, will be found very stimulating.
 
 ECONOMIC STRAND IN THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY 197 
 
 The manor was the property of the lord. About two- 
 fifths or one-third, called the demesne, was cultivated for his 
 immediate benefit. The rest was villenage and was culti- 
 vated by the villeins for subsistence. They " formed a class 
 socially equal among themselves, and all of them, in any 
 particular manor, with the same obligations of service to the 
 lord."^ This service consisted of labour for two or three 
 days every week on the demesne with additional days during 
 ploughing and harvest time, when food and drink were sup- 
 plied. They also had to serve the lord in such ways as 
 carting. They were, moreover, required to contribute in 
 small money dues and in kind to the lord. In return they 
 enjoyed a free holding of usually thirty acres, on the pro- 
 ducts of which they lived. The holding passed from father 
 to son. While, therefore, the manor was the property of the 
 lord, they were the property of the manor. They were not 
 slaves but they were tied to the earth. 
 
 Each of these communities formed a little self-contained 
 world shut off from the rest. " Each group had an inde- 
 pendent life economically. The authorities in each manor 
 aimed, so far as possible, at rendering it self-sujflcing, 
 although they did not disapprove of the disposal of surplus 
 commodities to outsiders. To supply all the wants of the 
 inhabitants from the resources of the manor was a sign of 
 good management, though it was of course occasionally 
 necessary to buy some articles at markets or fairs, or from 
 travelling chapmen."^ Also the villeins of each group 
 " formed a sort of community on the estate. They appear 
 to have been collectively responsible for the work, so that if 
 one failed, the others had to make up for his deficiencies. 
 The praepositus was their own elected officer, who ruled them 
 in their own interest, and was their spokesman with the lord 
 or his steward. Though they were, in some ways, in a ser- 
 vile position and astricted to the land, they had yet a definite 
 social status which they may well have valued. Outsiders 
 who were dependent on casual employment, and who had 
 little, if any, land to work, were in a certain sense free, as the 
 villeins were not, but it hardly seems that the free labourers 
 
 " Ashley, op. cit, Vol. I, Pt. I, p. 8. 
 
 " Cunningham and McArthur, op. rit, ]). 30.
 
 198 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 were a superior class till after the agricultural revolution 
 which followed the ravages of the Black Death in 1349."® It 
 may be added that the manor formed a military, judicial and 
 fiscal unit as well as an economic one. 
 
 It is possible to paint the life of the peasantry, as we 
 now call them, under these conditions, in either rosy or 
 sombre colours. No doubt there were times of plenty ; and 
 to have a stretch of earth to cultivate, even though it owned 
 you instead of you owning it, must have sometimes suggested 
 to the villein something of the nature of human worth and 
 dignity. No doubt also there were times of want and even 
 famine ; and the tales of the pedlar as well as the sermons of 
 the monk, must have carried his thoughts beyond the con- 
 fines of the manor to a world of wider chances if also of 
 greater risks. What must have galled, from time to time, 
 were the economic conditions which so hedged in and circum- 
 scribed life. The only competition those conditions them- 
 selves, as distinct from loyalty in service, evoked, must have 
 been a competition to evade obligations. It is not to be ex- 
 pected that the sickle of the villein swished as quickly and as 
 resolutely through the grass of the demesne as through that 
 of the villenage. What security and comfort in life there was, 
 must have been, to a large extent, that of the stalled ox. 
 There was neither liberty nor competition as we understand 
 them." 
 
 The first step out of this condition of servility was taken 
 when the villein gained the right to substitute a money pay- 
 ment for personal service. And it was a vital step. It was 
 a step across the line which separates bondage and freedom. 
 There is no doubt that the command over a villein's body 
 and strength, which the lord of the manor had by right and 
 not by contract, gave a servile character to the former's posi- 
 tion. It was an immense step in emancipation, therefore, 
 when his time and strength became his own. This commu- 
 tation of labour and service for a money payment was wel- 
 come to the lord also. Not only did he cease to have to 
 drive an unwilling worker, but money enabled him to regu- 
 late labour to the needs of his demesne. Emancipation was a 
 
 " Ibid, pp. 39, 40. 
 10 Ashley, op. cit.. Vol. I, Pt. I, p. 42.
 
 ECONOMIC STRAND IN THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY 199 
 
 gradual process depending partly on the growth of popula- 
 tion and of a supply of labourers. Slow as it was, however, 
 it was sure; and at the end of it there emerged a free tenant 
 and a free labourer. And it was hastened by a visitation of 
 the plague known as the Black Death. This " killed off, 
 roughly speaking, about half the population, "^^ and inci- 
 dentally it killed the manorial system. Labour being scarce 
 and thus in a position to ask for wages which the estates 
 could not carry, the inevitable result was the breaking up of 
 the demesne into holdings to be let. First land and stock 
 were leased; then land and buildings only. The rural revo- 
 lution destroyed the last traces of villenage. The signs of 
 the economic freedom and the religious freedom of the 
 individual made their appearance in English history during 
 the same epoch, that of the Reformation. 
 
 §2. Thus the barriers which had kept the manors in 
 the position of self-sufficing and independent economic 
 units were gradually broken down, and they became more 
 dependent on the economic life of the realm as a whole. 
 Tenants arose where villeins had been, with a tenure gradu- 
 ally safe-guarded by the king's judicial officers, the justices 
 of the peace, and not by manorial courts ; and the same pro- 
 cess set free a body of agricultural labourers. A process 
 which in its general economic tendency was of a similar 
 character was going on in the towns, though here it was 
 evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Towns and manors 
 reached the same gaol, that of central, and ultimately 
 national, regulation rather than local control. Whether 
 they started from the same point, that of free association 
 among their members, is a matter about which history has as 
 yet made no final pronouncement. It is certain, however, 
 that the towns threw off many of the feudal and ecclesiastical 
 shackles which in some cases originally encumbered them, at 
 an earlier period, and attained a considerable measure of 
 corporate strength. In their case, fiscal, judicial and 
 economic self-control were early landmarks on the road to 
 the freedom of representative government and to corporate 
 action. Nevertheless they too, like the manors, passed from 
 the stage of relatively independent and self-controlled 
 
 11 Cunningham and McArthur, op. cit., p. 41. 
 
 14
 
 200 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 economic nuclei to that of more general subordination to the 
 economic life of the realm as a whole. They were dis- 
 tinguished from the manors from the beginning by the very 
 fact that in so far as they were commercial units, their threads 
 of connection were longer and stronger ; in some cases 
 stretching through the agency of alien merchants to the con- 
 tinent and even to the distant east. And the sharpening of 
 wits which commerce at first and industry to a greater extent 
 later, brought about, developed a spirit of enterprise lacking 
 in the more backward, because narrower and more restricted, 
 life of the manors. Still, looking at their development 
 broadly and generally, it carried them to the same goal as the 
 manors : a goal exemplified by representation in the model 
 parliament of Edward I. 
 
 We must glance at the details of this development. It 
 followed the course from the homogeneous to the hetero- 
 geneous which Spencer thought to be the cardinal principle 
 of all evolution. In the beginnings of urban life the same 
 individual was a citizen, a trader, and a craftsman. The 
 terms connote a stage of development which came later, but 
 the germs of civic, commercial, and industrial life were 
 there, and they were there at first, if the practically servile 
 elements are excluded, in each member of the community. 
 Burgher, trader and craftsman were one. " The work of 
 the later centuries was not to separate functions w^hich had 
 never really existed, but to bring out of an undifferentiated 
 industrial activity the various classes with their separate 
 functions that are indicated by our present economic phrase- 
 ology."^^ It was an economic and a political condition 
 which offers a fertile field for the imagination. Mr. Chester- 
 ton has cultivated it and has given us an alluring sketch in an 
 optimistic vein." Whatever the sober historians may have 
 to say about his rendering of the meaning of Merrie England, 
 there seems to be no doubt that the towns were the centre of 
 much communistic vigour. The merchant guilds succeeded 
 in getting civic and monarchic recognition of their claim to 
 trade monopolies, and they guarded and developed their 
 privileges with zealous if also exclusive partizanship. They 
 were particularly watchful of the activities of the alien mer- 
 
 12 Ashley, op. cit., Vol. I, Pt. II, p. loi. 
 
 13 A Short History of England, Chapter VIII.
 
 ECONOMIC STRAND IN THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY 201 
 
 chants who brought the products of France and Flanders as 
 well as the luxuries of the Eastern trade, to the annual fairs. 
 They shut them out from retail traffic. This negative activity 
 had its complement in their positive support of their own 
 members who went forth to prosecute the advantages of inter- 
 municipal trading. They took care as zealously for the 
 London trader in Norwich as they watched suspiciously the 
 activities of the Bruges merchant in London. And the 
 merchant guild was a religious, social and philanthropic 
 organisation as well as a commercial body. It watched over 
 the general welfare of the members as keenly as it looked 
 after their commercial integrity. 
 
 Perhaps more interesting economically was the early 
 identity of making and selling, of the craftsman and the shop- 
 keeper, to use terms which only at a later stage became really 
 applicable. The same individual was artificer and trader. 
 The workshop was also the shop. At a very early stage even 
 manor and town coalesced. The artificer and trader was also 
 a villein of a feudal or monastic manor. Gradually differen- 
 tiation took place. Value in utility was followed by value in 
 exchange : '* a process accelerated by the existence of coins. 
 The craftsman in leather emerged and he became also the 
 dealer in leather. His capital was his tools and his skill, 
 but with the establishment of market days, when manor and 
 town met for purposes of exchange, it is easy to see how the 
 stall and shop came into being. The day of the English 
 middleman arrived and he was to follow to the uttermost parts 
 of the earth in the tracks which the Pha?,nician, the Arab, the 
 Jew, and the Italian and Flemish merchants had opened up. 
 As an element in the social fabric contributing to its life- 
 blood, his position was secured. And its importance con- 
 tinued to increase with the centuries. The decay of the 
 merchant guilds was but an incident of evolution of which 
 the next was the mercantile system. The middleman, the 
 intermediary between producer and consumer, had come to 
 stay, and his function is now vital to economic life. 
 
 §3. The civic cleavage which produced the merchant 
 also brought the craftsman into being as a distinct economic 
 unit. The story of the rise of the craft guilds and their 
 
 1* Ashley, op. cit., Vol. I, Pt. I, p. 93.
 
 202 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 decay, or rather their absorption in the national economic 
 Hfe, to emerge again as trades unions, is an interesting 
 chapter in economic history. A detailed and penetrating 
 account of it will be found in Ashley's Economic History. ■** 
 They resembled the merchant guilds in many ways. There 
 was the same strict supervision, the same zeal for the welfare 
 of the guild as a corporation and for the welfare of individual 
 members, and the same exclusiveness and particularism. 
 " The distinguishing feature of a craft gild was not merely 
 that its members all practised one and the same craft, but 
 that they had authority to supervise that craft within some 
 definite area. The craft gilds had very extensive powers for 
 the regulation of their trade. The wardens had the right of 
 search, and exercised it to see that good materials were used, 
 and that the processes of manufacture were properly per- 
 formed."^" Their importance for us is the effect they had as 
 economic units on the social fabric. They held together the 
 craftsmen as a series of social groups whose members had the 
 same material interests, were alive to the necessity of main- 
 taining a high standard of efficiency, and of excluding, as 
 we shall in a moment note, an increasing class of unskilled 
 workers from all opportunities of competition with them. 
 
 We have to look at economic history primarily as " con- 
 cerned with the evolution of social organisation."^^ That 
 phrase expresses exactly our point of view. We must now, 
 therefore, note that the evolution of the craft guilds gave rise 
 to a working class, the journey-men, in much the same way 
 as the evolution of husbandry gave rise to a class of agricul- 
 tural labourers. They came into existence through the 
 natural jealousy of the master craftsman for his own material 
 interests. It was a division among the ranks of what we 
 should now call labour itself, and has its modern parallel in 
 the distinction between the artizan and the unskilled labourer. 
 So far as such a division is based on craft efficiency, it is 
 likely to commend itself to students of sociology. It must, 
 however, be balanced by another social principle of equal 
 importance, namely, that of equality of opportunity for 
 ability proved in free and unrestricted competition. There 
 
 15 Vol. I, Pt. I, Chap. II, and Pt. II, Chap. II. 
 
 16 Cunningham and McArthur, op. cit., pp 60, 61. 
 
 17 Ashley, op. cit., Vol. I, Pt. II, p. 2S5.
 
 ECONOMIC STRAND IN THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY 203 
 
 seems to be no doubt that journeymen appeared, or rather 
 their number was increased and the class perpetuated, mainly 
 through the restriction of the operation of this latter prin- 
 ciple. No doubt the former was a positive operative factor, 
 but the main one was the natural, if selfish, desire of the 
 master craftsmen to keep their industrial rights and privi- 
 leges within their own hands, and to make of the crafts guild 
 a close corporation, fenced in as securely as possible. The 
 lingering on of the feudal spirit, even when the feudal system 
 was dying, no doubt helped to fix this industrial hierarchy, 
 justifiable and laudable on a basis of efficiency, but unjusti- 
 fiable and condemnable on a basis of exclusiveness. At any 
 rate, the journeyman appeared and he has remained, an ever- 
 present social and educational problem. 
 
 Apprenticeship is also a social phenomenon which 
 emerged from the guild system ; and here economic evolution 
 rises to a higher moral plane. The regulation of the institu- 
 tion of apprenticeship seems, on the whole, to have been long- 
 sighted and to have envisaged the all-round welfare of the 
 boy. There can be no doubt that the high standard of crafts- 
 manship reached and maintained during the later middle 
 ages, was mainly, if not entirely, due to the long and 
 thorough training which each apprentice had to go through. 
 It is true also that the patriarchal and family relationship into 
 which the apprentice was admitted, meant a close supervision 
 of his general and moral well-being. Indeed it is a modern 
 educational problem of vital importance how, under changed 
 industrial conditions, something of the thoroughness and 
 liberality which characterised the guild apprenticeship sys- 
 tem can be revived. That point will be dealt with in a later 
 chapter. 
 
 §4. For an estimate of the economic value and import- 
 ance of the guild system and a summary of its general 
 features we may be allowed a lengthy quotation from Ashley. 
 "It has been well said," he writes, "that no great institu- 
 tion — such as the Gild System — can satisfy every side of 
 human nature; that, while satisfying some, it necessarily 
 hampers and injures others. Thus the Gild System was 
 never an ideal system, in the sense of meeting all the needs 
 of all the men of any epoch. In its essence a system of con- 
 trol, it was bound up with its very nature that it should hinder
 
 204 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 to some extent freedom of enterprise and independence of 
 individual initiative; in its essence a system of restriction, it 
 was inevitable that while protecting those within, it should 
 bear itself harshly and repellently towards those without. 
 . Speaking generally we may say that in the later 
 Middle Ages the time had not yet come for the free play of 
 individual enterprise. It was rather a time when elementary 
 conceptions of good and honest work needed to be driven into 
 the general conscience by minute rules rigidly enforced ; 
 when what was required was discipline rather than spon- 
 taneity. Then, again, it was a time when in the absence of 
 a strong national government, the individual artizan or trader 
 needed the support of an organised body to protect him 
 against the violence of the powerful ; and with protection 
 necessarily went control. A tree is known by its fruit; and 
 by its fruits the Gild System may well be judged. Within 
 it grew up a wide middle-class of opulent traders and com- 
 fortable craftsmen ; and it was the appearance of this class 
 by the side of, and, in a sense, between, the lords of the soil 
 and the tillers of the soil that led to the transformation of 
 feudal society into the society of modern times. . . . 
 Then, again, it is the merit of the Gild System that it did 
 for a time, and in a large measure, succeed in reconciling the 
 interests of consumers and producers. . . . The gild 
 legislation kept steadily before itself the ideal of combining 
 good quality and a price that was fair to the consumer, with 
 a fitting remuneration to the workman."^* 
 
 The effect of the economic evolution of commerce and 
 industry in towns up to the close of the Middle Ages was 
 thus similar in its general tendency to that which agriculture 
 experienced. That tendency was to break down more or less 
 isolated units and to merge their interests in the economic 
 life of the realm as a whole. The tied-man, of guild or 
 manor, gave place to the relatively free tenant, artisan, and 
 labourer. Local regulation and supervision was superseded 
 by central ; and we have now to consider, again broadly and 
 in outline, what the change meant for that process of adjust- 
 ment of the individual to the social order which we are trying 
 to understand. 
 
 18 Op. cit., Vol. I, Pt. II, pp. 167-169.
 
 ECONOMIC STRAND IN THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY 205 
 
 §5. We saw in the decay of the manor and the guilds 
 as economic institutions this important phase and feature of 
 that adjustment, namelv, the transition from tied-man to free- 
 man : to a free tenant, artisan or labourer. And it was un- 
 doubtedly a great move onward. Freedom, however, is 
 always relative. It is freedom within certain limiting con- 
 ditions; and this is as true in the economic as in the moral 
 sphere. We have noted that these conditions were now of 
 wider circumference, for their radius was that of the realm 
 instead of that of the town or manor. We have now to con- 
 sider their nature, and we may take the policy of Edward III, 
 first, as an example of them.^^ His economic principle 
 appears to have been that of free exchange of surplus pro- 
 ducts between England and France and Flanders. This is 
 the idea of free trade to which modern England has returned 
 and which has been the source of so much of her prosperity. 
 The conception of nationality, another of the strands of the 
 social fabric, as we have seen, is here subordinate. The pre- 
 dominant idea is that of plenty. Two other results of it may 
 be noted. It failed to stimulate national industry because the 
 surplus products of the time were raw materials in wool, wool- 
 fells, hides and lead.'" It also had the effect of handing 
 over the shipping trade and wholesale commerce to aliens. 
 England was not ready for it, and fell behind in the com- 
 petition. Moreover, the adoption of the system of staple 
 towns as avenues for English imports and exports, was, it 
 appears, a fiscal rather than an economic measure. That is 
 to say it was a convenience for the collection of revenue, in 
 the shape of customs, rather than, or at any rate as well as, 
 a commercial convenience. The policy of Edward III was 
 consequently short-lived. However liberally conceived, it 
 aroused the natural opposition of English traders and it 
 failed to stimulate English industry. The idea of plenty was 
 superseded by that of power and economic activity was there- 
 after destined to be shaped, for several centuries, by this 
 policy of national greatness and expansion. In this way the 
 English mercantile system, to be referred to later, developed. 
 It will be convenient to look at the broad features of agricul- 
 tural, industrial, and commercial development in the order 
 
 19 Cunningham and McArthur, op. cit., pp. 74-7S. 
 30 Ibid, p. 7«.
 
 2o6 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 named, under the new national conditions; and then at the 
 food problem. 
 
 The land which had been the framework to which the 
 rural community had remained attached at its manorial foci, 
 ceased, after the Black Death, to afford an anchorage to the 
 surviving smaller villeins and cottars who had supplemented 
 the products of their small allotments by their wages as 
 labourers. The scarcity of labour, the difficulty of paying 
 the wages asked, and the demand for wool for export to the 
 low countries made the proprietors of the manors turn their 
 attention to sheep farming. The enclosure of common lands, 
 by the buying of small holders or their compulsory and some- 
 times, it appears, illegal ejectment began. Sheep began to 
 eat men.-^ The agricultural labourer gained his freedom but 
 too often at the price of pauperism and vagrancy. The clos- 
 ing of the monasteries shut off the main source of alms. 
 Vagrancy, beggary, and theft became rife and the problem 
 of poor relief began to be a national concern, and one which 
 has not yet been solved. An incidental difficulty was that of 
 the food supply, which will be noted separately. Some 
 measure of relief came from industrial development, which is 
 also touched on below. Meanwhile, the revolution which 
 changed the land from a means of subsistence to capital used 
 for purposes of profit, divided the rural community into two 
 classes whose interests had previously been one, but were 
 now opposed, namely, the landed class and the labouring 
 class. The antagonism then initiated has remained as a per- 
 manent danger to the stability of the social fabric. It is an 
 economic problem, one of the most serious, which faces 
 young countries as well as old. In South Africa, for in- 
 stance, the bijwoner class without any sure anchorage on the 
 land, and yet without inclination or training for industrial 
 life, a rural derelict, so to say, presents one of the most 
 serious problems for the statesman. The rural victim of 
 economic development is, perhaps, the most pathetic of all, 
 for he is without means of sustenance in the midst of nature's 
 opulence. In England the condition of the agricultural 
 labourer was subsequently improved owing to the greater 
 demand for his services which arose from a partial return to 
 tillage and the development of a more intensive system of 
 
 21 Chesterton, op. cit., p. 135.
 
 ECONOMIC STRAND IN THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY 207 
 
 agriculture. The point for us to note is the dependence of 
 the welfare of this element of society on the system of land 
 tenure and on the way, through the working of economic 
 factors, the land is used. The story of the more or less futile 
 measures of poor relief which have been tried, shews that 
 on this side of the national life nothing like a solution has 
 been reached. Whether we shall revert to the manorial 
 system of allotments to enable the labourer to eke out his 
 scanty wage is an interesting problem. Schemes for such 
 settlement are being developed in South Africa. 
 
 §6. Industrial development presents a brighter picture. 
 The four recognised stages are the family system, the guild, 
 the domestic system and the factory system. The two first- 
 named are local products, the third developed under the 
 central control of industry, while the last is the outcome of 
 the unrestricted competition of the nineteenth century which 
 is, however, now being brought under central supervision 
 and regulation. The nationalisation of industry is a develop- 
 ment urged by labour. Our concern is, not the economic 
 value of the various developments, but the import of the 
 economic factor in the social fabric. From that point of 
 view we have noted the guild system and may now glance at 
 the domestic system. Its evolution is connected with the 
 agrarian revolution on the one hand and the commer- 
 cial revolution which we have yet to comment on, on 
 the other. We may say summarily here that the former pro- 
 duced the raw article, wool — for it was the woollen industry 
 on which industrial England was mainly based in the period 
 from the end of the Middle Ages to the age of invention at 
 the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth 
 centuries — and the latter found the markets for manufactured 
 woollen goods. The domestic system meant spinning and 
 weaving wool in the homes, and later on a larger scale in the 
 buildings, e.g., derelict monasteries, which formed the 
 transition to the factory. It was differentiated from the guild 
 system in the fact that, broadly at any rate, it meant free 
 participation and competition for all who were capable of 
 producing. There was restriction and regulation, e.g., as 
 to the period of apprenticeship. But the system was a dis- 
 tinct step towards economic freedom, and it was not accom- 
 panied by such disastrous effects as the agrarian revolution
 
 2o8 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 brought in its train. Moreover, it found employment for 
 many of those who were squeezed out of a Hving on the land 
 by the process of enclosure of common lands. They became 
 apprentices and journeymen of the woollen industry. We 
 may clinch this point by quoting Ashlev again : 
 
 " It is when we turn to the industrial conditions which took 
 the place of the gild system, and to the agricultural changes 
 with which the transition was accompanied, that we begin to 
 understand how great a part the woollen manufacture has 
 played in English social history. For the extraordinary and 
 rapid success of that industry brought about not only the 
 downfall of the gild organisation within its range, but also a 
 far-reaching change in English agriculture. Now that there 
 was a constant and increasing demand for wool, it became the 
 interest of the landowners to raise sheep rather than to grow 
 corn, especially as the great increase in the cost of labour 
 since the Black Death had already made tillage unremunera- 
 tive. The writers of the sixteenth century, and modern his- 
 torians following them, have dwelt on the far-reaching conse- 
 quences of the introduction of pasture farming — the super- 
 fluity of labourers, the amalgamation of farms, the increase 
 of rents, and the dispossession of customary tenants. What 
 we are here specially concerned with is the fact that the 
 growth of the new manufacture helped to alleviate the evils it 
 had itself caused, by giving employment to those whom the 
 agricultural changes had deprived of work. Indeed, the 
 wealthy graziers were themselves very commonly clothiers 
 also, in the sixteenth century ; the wool grown upon their 
 own land they employed men and women of the neighbour- 
 hood to make into cloth, and then sold it to the London 
 drapers or dealers. It must not be forgotten, moreover, that 
 where peasant proprietorship and small farming did main- 
 tain their ground, this was largely due to the domestic indus- 
 try which supplemented the profits of agriculture. "-- 
 
 Internal economic cleavage in the woollen industry, aided 
 by the accumulation of capital, produced the rival classes of 
 merchants and artisans,, dealers and producers. Drapers 
 and clothiers emerged dealing in cloth and to a very con- 
 siderable extent they controlled the lives and fortunes of the 
 
 22 Ashley, op. cit., Vol. 1, Pt. II, pp. 222, 223.
 
 ECONOMIC STRAND IN THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY 209 
 
 craftsmen. The self-contained and relatively undifferentiated 
 economic activities of the members of craft guilds, who were 
 at once masters and men, traders and craftsmen, gave place 
 to that inter-dependence which is characteristic of a division 
 of labour and employment. The dealers or merchants were, 
 moreover, themselves dependent on variations in foreign 
 trade, which again fluctuated with inter-state relations." 
 Employment, prices, wages, everything which constitutes the 
 material interests of a trading and manufacturing community, 
 became involved in fiscal considerations, in national com- 
 mercial rivalry and in international relations. We may note, 
 too, how lines of economic relations and connections cut 
 across national bonds whether material, as in the case of 
 boundaries, or both material and spiritual, as in the case of 
 race and religion. The development of the woollen trade in 
 England was largely due to the immigration of alien, mainly 
 Flemish, weavers; and that immigration, encouraged by 
 English kings and parliaments for economic and fiscal pur- 
 poses, was accelerated by the political and religious perse- 
 cutions to which the immigrants were, in their own land, 
 subjected. They did not escape the friction of trade jealousy 
 in their new home. But the point we wish to make clear is 
 the interplay of the forces which bind together the social 
 fabric. 
 
 §7. The commercial revolution is, perhaps, the most 
 amazing feature in modern history. Whether we can go so 
 far as to say that "the economic factor is . . . the 
 ruling factor in human history,"^* is open to question. 
 Religion was a primary factor in the colonising adventures of 
 Spain. The political ideal of liberty, fraternity, and equality 
 fired the armies of France, before dazzling visions of con- 
 quest under Napoleon obliterated it. Religious fervour or 
 fanaticism carried the forces of Islam far into Europe. But 
 the spread of western civilisation over the new world and the 
 unexplored portions of the old, has been in the main a conse- 
 quence of commercial enterprise. We have now to look at 
 the part, the conspicuous and finally predominant part, which 
 England played in it, from the point of view which is ours. 
 
 The commercial revolution meant two primary things, 
 
 -3 Ibid, pp. 231, 232. 
 
 -* Kidd, Western Civilisation, p. lo.
 
 2IO THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 one geographical and one political. Geographically it meant 
 the development of sea routes west and south which were to 
 supersede, or at any rate to rival and suppress, the difficult 
 and dangerous land routes by which Europe had been con- 
 nected with the East since very early times. Politically it 
 meant the transfer of the centre of gravity of commerce from 
 the great mediaeval cities of Italv, Germany, and the Nether- 
 lands, to the nations on the western seaboard of Europe : 
 Portugal and Spain, Holland, France, and England. The 
 Mediterranean seaboard gave place to the Atlantic. First 
 one and then the other of the nations named took the lead in 
 commercial and colonial rivalry. The causes of their suc- 
 cess, such as it was, and their failure, such as it was, are the 
 subject of an illuminating chapter in Cunningham's 
 " Western Civilisation."" The decay of the colonial pros- 
 perity of all but England seems in all cases to be reducible to 
 one ultimate principle. Their commercial enterprise was 
 not woven into the texture of their industrial and economic 
 life. Portuguese and Spanish overseas empires became a 
 strain which their home economy could not bear. The par- 
 ticularism of Dutch cities and their commercial circles left no 
 national fabric to which their foreign stations could be per- 
 manently and securely attached. The centralisation of 
 French nationality in the king and governing forces pre- 
 vented the issue of that individual enterprise which is at the 
 back of emigration and commercial expansion. The fibres 
 were, in all cases, too weak or too taut to stand the tension 
 which a world-wide commerce and empire produces. 
 
 How, then, did England succeed when the rest failed, 
 relatively speaking? Let us hear what answer Cunning- 
 ham gives. "The success of England," he writes, "be- 
 comes less astonishing when we see how closely it was con- 
 nected with the political conditions and economic system 
 which had determined the aims of the Government and the 
 habits of the people. The English overtook and surpassed 
 their competitors, not because they had any special genius 
 for the work, still less because they were the mere favourites 
 of fortune, but because they were true to themselves, and 
 eager to learn from their neighbours. They were ready to 
 
 25 Pp. 183-224-
 
 ECONOMIC STRAND IN THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY 211 
 
 be guided by the experience of others; to imitate their suc- 
 cesses and to profit by the lessons of their failure. England 
 secured an empire in the East, such as Albuquerque had 
 desired for Portugal ; while her commerce abroad reacted on 
 her internal development so as to encourage the pursuit of 
 agriculture as a profitable calling by resident gentry and to 
 promote the manufacture of the products of the realm. This 
 practical wisdom, combined with the soundness of the 
 economic policy which was adopted, conspired to place this 
 country in the front rank of European nations. The French 
 had been the representative of mediaeval Christendom in its 
 struggle with Mohammedanism in the East ; but in the 
 eighteenth century England took the lead among the rising 
 nationalities, and it is by means of the influence of English- 
 speaking people that Western Civilisation has spread 
 through the world in modern times. "^® This is a sober 
 summary, and it leaves out of account the spirit of adventure, 
 initiative and enterprise which has carried the individual 
 Britisher across the seas into the furthermost parts of the 
 earth. It leaves out of account also that strong national 
 sentiment which has bound those individuals together by one 
 of the strongest of ties. These factors must be added if we 
 are to understand how Britain first, and English-speaking 
 peoples as a whole next, discharged the task laid upon them 
 mainly, perhaps, by economic evolution, of spreading 
 western civilisation through most of the new and some of the 
 old world which the tide had not reached. 
 
 The story of that spirit of adventure, enterprise and 
 initiative which animated individual sailors, traders, and 
 administrators during the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
 turies, which was the primary cause of the expansion of 
 England and which laid the foundations of the British 
 Empire, is one of the brightest pages in history. They set 
 out, it is true, in most cases to seek their own fortunes, and 
 no doubt in that pursuit stopped short of little, and used 
 means to gain their ends which, from the detached stand- 
 point of twentieth century criticism, appear culpable. But 
 on the whole the spirit of fair-play pervaded their enmities 
 with foe and stranger ; and certainly courage, endurance and 
 
 26 Western Civilisation, p. 224.
 
 212 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 tenacity of purpose were theirs. Through the exercise of 
 those qualities in distant lands and distant seas, as often as 
 not without the certainty of national backing, they accom- 
 plished the ever arduous task of pioneers, and it was through 
 their individual enterprise that England awoke to find her- 
 self, almost in spite of herself, the nucleus of the greatest 
 empire the world has seen. It was these qualities which 
 stiffened explorers, merchant adventurers, and the pioneers 
 of the empire in the East and the West. 
 
 §8. Of economic policy we may note two features. 
 Eirst, the East India Company illustrates at once commercial 
 expansion in commission, so to say : that is, entrusted to the 
 energy and initiative of private merchant adventurers; and 
 the principle of joint-stock trading. It was a form of 
 monopoly which is comparable with that enjoyed, at an early 
 epoch, by the guilds in the industrial sphere. Like all 
 monopolies it aroused criticism and strenuous opposition, as 
 every obstacle to economic freedom must. And, like the 
 guilds, it was doomed for that very reason to ultimate aboli- 
 tion, which may be said to have been practically achieved 
 when in 1813 the trade to India was formally thrown open.^^ 
 " In old days, when adventurers could look for little effective 
 support from the home Government, and were forced to pro- 
 vide for their own defence themselves, there was much excuse 
 for conferring a trading monopoly on those who undertook 
 the difificult position. The practice of chartering monopolist 
 companies for distant trades with half-civilised peoples, did 
 on the whole justify itself."^* Apart from economic theory, 
 it justified itself in its contribution, indirect though it may 
 have been, to the development of the empire and to the indus- 
 trial prosperity of the home land. The second feature is the 
 victory of the mercantilists over the bullionists. The guid- 
 ing principle of the latter was the accumulation and hoarding 
 of bullion, that of the former was the using of it. The vic- 
 tory meant that Britain, in striking contrast to Portugal and 
 Spain, reaped the fruits of the commercial revolution in the 
 shape of an enormously expanded industrial life. The 
 fluidity of capital and its ready employment in commercial 
 enterprises laid the foundation of the empire's industrial 
 greatness. 
 
 27 Cunningham and McArthur, op. cit., p. 117. 
 
 28 Ibid, p. 118.
 
 ECONOMIC STRAND IN THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY 213 
 
 The way economic development was seconded by king 
 and parliament may be illustrated by reference to the Navi- 
 gation Acts. One of their main objects was to stimulate the 
 development of the mercantile marine, to be followed inevit- 
 ably by the development of the navy as its guardian on the 
 sea-ways of the world. One of their immediate effects was 
 to sacrifice the interests of British consumers and also those 
 of British and Colonial producers. Like all economic 
 measures and developments, indeed like the process of 
 evolution in every sphere, the Navigation Acts involved some 
 immediate sacrifice. But the ultimate gain was immense. 
 " Under their influence, and apparently in consequence of 
 them, the mercantile marine of England developed from 
 being merely insignificant till it attained the supremacy of 
 the world. The acquisition and maintenance of power was 
 the end at which the framers of the Navigation Acts aimed, 
 and power they succeeded in securing. The marine of Eng- 
 land decided the issue of the struggle between France and 
 England in India and America. The mercantile marine of 
 England rendered her superior to all the military strength of 
 Napoleon ; she found the sinews of war in a world-wide com- 
 merce, which extended over seas where none but the English 
 flag was ever seen."'^ The mercantile marine, with the navy 
 to guard her, has brought Britain triumphantly through the 
 great contest of 1914-1919, when the whole fabric of her 
 empire was threatened. 
 
 One more illustration of the relation of its economic 
 activity to the whole life of society may be taken from the 
 problem of its food supply. It is a problem which arises 
 when that first, most fundamental and far-reaching effect of 
 the operation of the principle of the division of labour and 
 employment, namely, the separation of the population into 
 two great classes, those who work on the land and those who 
 work at trades and commerce, has become an accomplished 
 fact. At first it is a local, almost a domestic, problem. 
 With the growth of towns as a result of commercial and in- 
 dustrial expansion, with the growth of population, and in 
 consequence of such an economic phenomenon as the 
 agrarian revolution, it becomes a national problem. There 
 are, of course, two ways of solving it. A country may be 
 
 29 Cunningham and Mc Arthur, op. cit., p. 124.
 
 214 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 self-sufficing and self-supporting in respect of food. Its 
 natural resources such as the extent and fertility of its work- 
 able soil and a favourable climate, together with a sufficient 
 population given over to agricultural pursuits, may give it 
 independence in this respect, or it may have to depend wholly 
 or in part on supplies from without its boundaries. The his- 
 torv of the food problem in England up to the close of the 
 eighteenth century is the history of efforts after the first solu- 
 tion. Up to that time corn laws and regulative measures of 
 the central authority aimed at making England self-support- 
 ing. After that period the importation of foreign corn 
 began, paid for through the value of textile fabrics exported. 
 From that time the people of England have been dependent 
 for their bread in an ever-increasing measure on the success 
 of her commerce and her industries. The Corn Law of 1815 
 had an aim entirely different from that of earlier enactments. 
 That aim was, not the subsistence of the English people, but 
 the subsistence of a section, the corn-growers, who were suf- 
 fering from foreign competition. It was achieved by an arti- 
 ficial restriction securing English corn-growers a minimum 
 price, eighty shillings per quarter, before importation was 
 permitted. It helped the farmers but hit the labouring poor. 
 Its inevitable repeal in 1846 was the assertion of the principle 
 of free trade in the first necessity of life. " From 1793 on- 
 wards . . . England became permanently and regularly 
 dependent on foreign countries for a supply of food.'"" The 
 effect of free trade in food on the stability of the national 
 fabric needs no emphasis. " A country which has its own 
 resources of food and the materials for its own manufactures 
 within itself, is liable to fewer risks and dangers than one 
 which is dependent on outside supplies for the very neces- 
 saries of existence."^" The reality of this danger has been 
 driven home with stern emphasis by the experiences of the 
 world war. 
 
 y §9. There are two general principles which these illus- 
 trations of the bearing of economic conditions on national life 
 bring out. The first is the tendency of economic develop- 
 ment towards freedom from artificial restrictions. In this 
 respect it resembles the tendency characteristic of political 
 
 30 Ibid, p. 89.
 
 ECONOMIC STRAND IN THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY 215 
 
 and religious development. If we consider what ought to be 
 as well as what is, policy as well as history, morality as well 
 as fact, the resemblance seems to be deeper. It is to be 
 found in the limit within which, or perhaps it would be 
 better to say the condition under which, freedom is desirable. 
 This condition is that the freedom of one individual or one 
 section must in no way infringe upon the freedom of any 
 other individual or section ; the right and the privilege must 
 be the inalienable heritage of all. We have not thought it 
 necessary to draw- upon the history of the industrial revolu- 
 tion, and the industrial and commercial conditions which 
 emerged as a consequence of it during the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, because these developments are generally familiar and 
 need no illustration. They do, however, throw vivid light 
 on the principle we have now before us. There is no ques- 
 tion that the laisser-faire policy which modern economic doc- 
 trine has favoured, has been marked by a crudescence of 
 blind and seliish individualism. There is no doubt that in 
 the race for wealth which economic freedom has brought in 
 its train, there has been an exploitation of one section, repre- 
 sented by labour, by another, represented by capital. The 
 division of employment has confined the worker within a 
 groove which means a narrowing of interests and a greater 
 dependence on the vagaries of demand. Unrestricted competi- 
 tion has tended to keep down wages. Perhaps most of all, 
 the development of industrial and trading corporations has 
 tended to eliminate the personal factor in the relations of 
 employer and employed. And the retaliation of labour has 
 frequently been marked by crude individualism ; sometimes 
 running to reckless destruction of capital. The remedy will 
 require the wisest and most far-sighted statesmanship. It 
 will only be found by the application of the principle that 
 economic freedom must be limited by the condition that it 
 does not infringe upon the right of every individual to what 
 is picturesquely called a place in the sun, but which may be 
 more precisely defined as the right to live decently and to 
 develop the best that a man has in him. The principles of 
 doctrinaire economists must be tempered by philosophic in- 
 sight into human worth and dignity. It is within the 
 province of wise government to impose such restrictions on 
 both capital and labour. We cannot escape the working of 
 
 15
 
 2i6 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 economic forces, for they are the forces which make and cir- 
 culate the blood of the body politic. But we can recognise 
 that there are other factors of human welfare. 
 
 Unbridled economic individualism cleaves national 
 unity, causes class hatred, and may induce revolution and 
 civil strife. In international relations it is pregnant with 
 possibilities of war. Dr. Holland Rose finds in it one of the 
 sources of Germany's aggressiveness which led to the war 
 which has devastated a large part of Europe. " Bismarck's 
 policy of protecting home industries (supplemented by that 
 of von Bulow respecting agriculture) had very important re- 
 sults, far beyond the limits of commerce and industry. For 
 there were two alternatives before Germany ; either to con- 
 tinue in the path of Free Trade, which implies peaceful inter- 
 course or to adopt a protective or narrowly national policy. 
 Bismarck chose the latter, and Wilhelm accentuated the 
 choice, his aim being to make the nation as far as possible a 
 self-sufficing unit. The result was that Germany in forty 
 years of peace piled up great stores of industrial energy 
 which threatened to burst their bounds. ... If Ger- 
 many had persevered w^ith the system of free exchange which 
 makes the whole world an open market, the present cataclysm 
 would probably have been averted. . . . The artisans of 
 Germany . . . have been led astray from international 
 ideals by a narrow commercialism . . . over-specula- 
 tion and over-production probably prompted the mad plunge 
 of August 1914 . . . commerce therefore joined hands 
 with militarism. "^^ The inference seems to be that the 
 League of Nations can justify itself as an economic tribunal. 
 §10. The second principle brings the evolution of the 
 social world, in its economic aspect as well as in its political 
 and national aspects, into the closest relation to the evolution 
 of the moral order which we shall deal with in the third book, 
 and to the evolution of nature which we have touched on in 
 the first. It is the principle that progress to a higher order 
 of things is inevitably accompanied by struggle and sacri- 
 fice. The central conception of the survival of the fittest in 
 biological evolution implies the sacrifice of the unfit. Dr. 
 Bosanquet has worked out the virile and stimulating concep- 
 
 31 Nationalitv in Modern Hi-tory, pp. 196-198.
 
 ECONOMIC STRAND IN THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY 217 
 
 tion that in the evolution of a better moral order struggle and 
 sacrifice are of the essence of the process." We have noted 
 instances, in our illustrations of economic evolution, of death 
 for the laggards and life for the economically fit. And it 
 does seem that any attempt to remove or even unduly to limit 
 healthy rivalry and evolutionary competition, for example by 
 the nationalisation of wealth and industries, is an attempt in 
 the face of both history and penetrating thought. This man- 
 made world can be regulated by man, but the regulations 
 must be long-sighted. We want to preserve the strong virile 
 individuality of economic units if there is to be healthy evolu- 
 tion towards economic perfection. It is only in a struggle 
 that a man can prove and assert his worth. A hierarchy of 
 intrinsic ability is the economic gaol and it will only emerge 
 from free competition, assauged by the fullest recognition of 
 human worth and dignity, and made sane and just by the 
 most liberal educational opportunities. Mr. Kidd's concep- 
 tion of projected efficiency has much in common with Dr. 
 Bosanquet's conception of struggle and sacrifice as the 
 essence of moral evolution. We may well conclude this sec- 
 tion by quoting him : '* The very essence of the process of 
 order represented in our western world must be that there is 
 within it some organic principle effecting the continued sub- 
 ordination and sacrifice, not only of individuals and of parties 
 but of whole generations and of entire periods of time to the 
 ends of a larger process of life.""^ And again : " The 
 gradual organisation and direction through the State . . . 
 of the activities of industry and production, moving slowly 
 not to any fixed condition of ordered ease, but towards an era 
 of such free and efficient conflict of all natural forces as has 
 never been in the world before, is no dream of excited 
 imaginations. Divested of all cruder proposals of confisca- 
 tion and of the regimentation of society, divorced from the 
 (hreats and not unnatural exaggerations of classes wronged 
 and oppressed in the past, it is no more than a simple and 
 sober reality of the future, which must, by necessity inherent 
 in the evolutionary process, ultimately prevail amongst the 
 winning peoples."'** 
 
 "'^ It is the basic conception in his " Value and Destiny of the Individual." 
 .13 Western Civilisation, pp. 77, 78. 
 ''* Ibid., p. 469.
 
 2i8 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 There is another constituent of the social world, different 
 in nature from the four we have briefly considered. It is 
 language and literature. We may regard it as the medium 
 of this man-made structure, enshrining his achievements and 
 aspirations in what is his almost unique vehicle. It will be 
 the subject of a separate chapter.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 ADJUSTMENT TO THE SECOND WORLD 
 
 §1. Now that we have some idea of what that second 
 social world is to which the individual must be adjusted, 
 whether well or ill, we may turn to the process itself. And 
 we may begin by noting that it is constant and unending. 
 Not only is it of the essence of family life and school life, but 
 of the essence also of every phase of the life of manhood and 
 age. A man may be on a clifif-head or an Alpine peak alone 
 as he thinks with nature; or he may be alone with himself at 
 a moral crisis in his life ; but neither the moral nor the natural 
 order can obliterate the social order even for a moment. The 
 thoughts that come, the ends that clash, have a reference 
 beyond himself, if only for the reason that they are fitted 
 into a social medium, language, and without it would remain 
 inarticulate. The medium is not his alone but is common 
 property. And as he passes from one phase of experience 
 to another he is passing from one form of adjustment to the 
 social order or civilisation to another. We may note, too, 
 that this process of adjustment is a double-edged one. He 
 modifies this second environment while it modifies him. The 
 environment is at any moment just w^hat this double-edged 
 process has made it. It is perpetually being re-created by 
 the countless acts and impulses of individual men in their re- 
 action upon the complex of civilisation which evolution has 
 brought to bear upon them. There is no end to schooling in 
 this vital sense. "For the historian nothing is, but every- 
 thing is becoming."^ 
 
 Nor are there special social forces and activities through 
 which schooling exclusively operates. This side of educa- 
 tion, adjustment to the second world, is as wide as that world 
 is wide. Forces which are directly educational are often 
 distinguished from those which work indirectly. The distinc- 
 
 1 Committee of Seven, History in Schools, p. 47. 
 219
 
 220 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 tion, thougli convenient, is artificial. Ultimately all social 
 forces and agencies have double-edged adjustment as their in- 
 evitable effect, for better or worse. Churches, parliaments, 
 provincial councils, school boards, the press, the theatre, 
 chambers of mines and commerce, trade unions, have their 
 educational responsibilities equally with education depart- 
 ments, universities, colleges, and schools. They have at any 
 rate one educational function in common which is to pro- 
 mote adjustment. They are the representatives and agents 
 for civilisation of poHtical, economic, aesthetic and religious 
 forces and aspirations. They are spheres of educational 
 demonstration and application, and should be linked by 
 unity of purpose to class-room and laboratory. There is 
 identity, existent amidst difference of course, in all the 
 adjustments whereby the fabric of the second world, the 
 world of man as a social being, is for ever being woven. All 
 the world's a school and all the men and women contributory 
 scholars. All articles of association, from vestry rules of 
 procedure to the constitution of the League of Nations, should 
 be scrutinised from the point of view of their educational 
 possibilities. They are all instruments of adjustment linking 
 individuals to the great social structure from which their 
 material and spiritual sustenance is drawn, and to whose 
 stability and betterment they must contribute through alert 
 insight combined with ready service. So far as the second 
 world goes we can fill in Bergson's real duration with the 
 functioning of every power which gives unity and continuity 
 to the complex of social life. 
 
 §2. We must turn, however, to the specific task of the 
 schools. The question is how they can facilitate this 
 supremely important business of social adjustment. The 
 answer is, in a word, by revealing the social world and by 
 stimulating the impulse to social activity. For the social 
 world has first to be discovered to both young and old. It 
 is like the air, all-enveloping, a source and sustainer of life, 
 yet not only invisible but unappreciated by many at most 
 times and by all during frequent intervals. Indeed the rela- 
 tion of the individual to the social whole which envelops him 
 and penetrates him is comparable with the relation of mind 
 and body in respect of organic unity, though we must always 
 be careful to remember that it is a relation between spiritual
 
 ADJUSTMENT TO THE SECOND WORLD 22. 
 
 terms. It is a unity within the miracle of experience, for 
 that is what real adjustment means. And we may put the 
 problem of the schools in this way. It is to extricate the 
 objective element, the social world, in this side of experience, 
 to unfold it to view, and to extend it as far back as possible 
 so that its continuity through history is realised, and as far 
 outward as possible until its continuity through existing 
 humanity is felt as a reality. Success will be in varying 
 degrees, according to the duration and liberality of school- 
 ing. For all, should be unfolded far enough backwards to 
 secure some appreciation of the evolution of its present form, 
 and far enough outwards for some appreciation of its national 
 and international contacts. But there will be no real success 
 unless there is living connection within experience between 
 the individual nucleus, whether we regard it as a pure or an 
 empirical self, and the ramifications of society backwards and 
 outwards. There must be living connection along these two 
 dimensions if adjustment is to mean intelligent appreciation 
 and active co-operation, insight and service. 
 
 This simultaneous projection of the social world and 
 connection of it by organic bonds with the individual nucleus 
 is a vital point in the theory of education, and we shall do 
 well to dwell on it a little longer. The unity and continuity 
 of history is an extremely important fact and conception, and 
 we may call it either according as our point of view is objec- 
 tive or subjective. We have, indeed, ventured to assert that 
 it gives the second world pre-eminence in stability over the 
 first, the world of nature, which is, by contrast, the world of 
 birth and death ; and that in this second world we have 
 treasured up the acquired characteristics which training 
 develops, and which, according to the now generally-accepted 
 theory, cannot be transmitted by heredity from individual to 
 individual. It is possible, however, to appreciate that unity 
 and continuity as an objective fact, to realise, for example, 
 the unbroken line by which the British constitution, as it 
 exists to-day, is connected with the remote past, or how the 
 economic conditions of the twentieth century have their roots 
 in the eleventh ; and yet to miss the educational import of 
 real adjustment. For that means not merely the continuity 
 and unity of the various phenomena of different sides of his- 
 tory with themselves and of the sides themselves within the
 
 22 2 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 whole, but their living relation to the individual within his 
 experience. If this has not been achieved adjustment does 
 not exist. " Cape Verde not only juts out into the Atlantic, 
 but stands forth as a promontory in human history," the 
 Committee of Seven observed.^ The geographical fact is a 
 reaUty for me, because I have several times seen the Cape 
 from the deck of a steamer. The historical truth was not on 
 the same plane of reality until the pregnant observation of 
 the Committee had, as we say, brought it home. It is the 
 business of education first to project the social world and 
 then bring it home. The first aim may be achieved and the 
 second missed. 
 
 There is something like the same incompleteness of 
 theory in all discussion of the educational value of history, 
 whether it be instructional value or cultural value. It is 
 really not a question of value at all, but of life. " Since 
 education is not a means of living, but is identical with the 
 operation of living a life which is fruitful and inherently 
 significant, the only ultimate value which can be set up is 
 just the process of living itself."'^ We don't talk in a 
 detached way about the value of air ; we see that we get as 
 much of it pure as we can. It is a question of healthy or 
 unhealthy life, or, indeed, of death. So with the social 
 environment. It is an element in normal healthy spiritual 
 life and the question is not an academic one as to value but a 
 practical one, whether that side of the spiritual life is to be 
 stunted or vigorous; whether, indeed, we are in this respect 
 to be spiritually alive or dead. In fact we can consider the 
 second world precisely as we considered the first, as polarised 
 to the self, and the educational aim as the making polarisa- 
 tion first a reality of experience, and secondly a reality of the 
 widest possible circumference. " When so much has been 
 said of the necessity of studying the natural sciences, in order 
 that one may come to some realisation of the physical and 
 vital world about him, and may know himself better as he 
 kno-ivs his surroundings more thoroiighly ... it seems 
 strange indeed that the same method of argument has not 
 been used on behalf of historical work."* The italics are 
 
 2 History in Schools, p. 31. 
 
 3 Dewey, Democracy and Education, p. 281. 
 * History in Schools, p. 16.
 
 ADJUSTMENT TO THE SECOND WORLD 223 
 
 ours because we think they contain the crux of the argument. 
 And we should go further than the Committee of Seven and 
 say not only that he may know himself but that he may live 
 his life more fully. Children make historical scenes real by 
 play-acting. Men ought to weave the past into the present 
 by real action. 
 
 §3. Next we must note thai it is the life of society as a 
 whole which is to be projected or made objective in experi- 
 ence. Of course we must in practice attend to one thing at 
 a time; and attention will naturally seize the promontories or 
 landmarks of history and social life. A king, a general, a 
 parliamentary leader, parliament itself, an act of parliament, 
 a voyage of discovery — some person, thing, or event, will be 
 in focus, or it may be a larger issue like the French Revolu- 
 tion, the agrarian revolution, or the industrial revolution. 
 Indeed it will frequently be necessary, as we shall presently 
 see, to consider one side or aspect of the life of a people, in 
 abstraction from the whole. History is, of necessity, falling 
 into separate departments such as ecclesiastical, constitutional 
 and economic. All these abstractions and specialisations, 
 necessary as they are in the economy of things, are, however, 
 to be regarded as such. Each person, event, or side of life, 
 should be constantly referred to the whole background, apart 
 from which it has no meaning, and of which it is but an ex- 
 pression. This principle should be the main guide to the 
 order of treatment and the selection of topics. But there is 
 far more than order and selection in question. Its relevance 
 to the development of the people as a whole, as a social 
 organism at once political, economic, national and human, 
 must be the criterion of the value of any particular historical 
 detail or course. A biography, an epoch, an aspect of de- 
 velopment are not merely to be treated in relation to their 
 circumstances; they are part of the life of the whole, within 
 it, expressing it and reacting upon it. The difiference 
 between one man and another, one event and another, or one 
 side of life and another, as factors in social evolution, is only 
 one of degree. Of course there are these differences of 
 degree. The contribution, both positive and negative, to 
 that evolution made by such a character as Napoleon is hardly 
 comparable with that of one of his grenadiers. On the other 
 hand, the cumulative and permanent effect of the interchange
 
 224 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 of ideas between all the privates of his army was probably 
 far greater than his own. The conflagration of the French 
 Revolution, as a flame of real emancipation, soon died down. 
 Trades unions have probably done far more to fan and feed 
 it. The spectacular has influenced the making of history 
 books more than the making of history. The unobtrusive 
 elements of society and the great cumulative effect of the 
 pulsing of its life as a whole, have received scant, or at any 
 rate altogether inadequate, notice. It is to the evolution of 
 the whole that events on the surface of the stream should be 
 referred. 
 
 These two principles, then, to bring the social world 
 home to the student, and to bring it home to him as a whole 
 to which great and small contribute, must pervade the study 
 and teaching of history. And there are two others on the 
 same plane of importance. They are the two alluded to at 
 the end of the preceding chapter as underlying economic 
 development in particular ; but all sides of social evolution 
 exhibit them. One — here the third — we may call the price 
 and the postulate of progress. It is the sacrifice of indi- 
 viduals and of interests which have had their day. The 
 martyrs in the Roman amphitheatre, amongst others, paid 
 the price of the evolution of Christianity ; the evolution of 
 nationality meant the decay of some of the strength and 
 vitality of local life ; the industrial revolution almost destroyed 
 home industries; the latest reform of the British Constitution 
 meant an attenuation of the duties and responsibilities of the 
 second chamber; during the great peace celebrations of 1919 
 it w^as the invisible host of the gallant dead which was upper- 
 most in the minds of most of us. Progress inevitably leaves 
 loss and sometimes death in its tracks. The brighter picture 
 is its complement, the gain, the betterment towards which on 
 the whole, as we must believe, evolution ever moves. The 
 other — here the fourth — principle is what we mean by the 
 evolution of freedom. Politically it means true democracy; 
 economically it means an application to industry of the 
 Kantian conception of man as an end and not a means; 
 nationally and internationally it means the honourable rivalry 
 and interplay of sound traditions and aspirations. That is 
 the goal. And through all the mist of strife, revolution, and 
 war, we surely can discern some measure of prpgress towards
 
 ADJUSTMENT TO THE SECOND WORLD 225 
 
 it along the line of history. May it not be that in all these 
 respects, we have the ideal pervasive of and operative in the 
 real ? 
 
 We have, then, these four general principles: social 
 evolution as (a) a living thing projected and revealed within 
 the experience of the individual, as (b) carried forward by the 
 contributions of all and as affecting the life and destiny of 
 all, as (c) involving struggle and sacrifice, and as (d) moving 
 towards the ideal of freedom. The first states the nature of 
 that adjustment of the individual to the second world, so far 
 as it is cognitive and aesthetic ; adjustment of will, passing 
 over into zealous participation, we shall consider at the end of 
 this chapter. The second states the scope and sweep of the 
 evolutionary process and the third and fourth together its 
 nature. Again, the first we may take to represent the spirit 
 in which history is to be interpreted and the otheMhree as the 
 general criteria of interpretation. The four have this in 
 common that they may all be used to test the real educative 
 value of effort at interpretation. We have now to glance at 
 each of those four elements or strands of the social fabric 
 which we examined in the preceding chapters from the same 
 point of view, namely, that of interpretation. They differ 
 from the four general and all-pervading principles we have 
 just referred to in this, that one or more, but not necessarily 
 all, will illuminate the particular event or topic to be inter- 
 pretated. 
 
 §4. It will be convenient to proceed, at this point, by 
 way of illustration. Suppose the topic is the repeal of the 
 Corn Laws. Economic development will obviously be the 
 first principle of interpretation. The need of cheap and 
 abundant food offers a convenient point of departure. One 
 way of securing food is to make the country self-supporting. 
 Here the second principle, that of national stability and de- 
 velopment would be relevant. The other way is by purchase 
 of food supplies from other countries. The effect of this 
 policy is to encourage industries so as to acquire the means 
 of purchase. The rival claims of the agricultural and the 
 manufacturing sections of society would emerge and the need 
 for their reconciliation and adjustment by legislative enact- 
 ment. This might elucidate society as an organism for 
 whose healthy life central regulation by a representative par-
 
 226 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 liament is necessary. The repeal itself would illustrate 
 movement towards economic freedom. The food problem 
 during the late war and the present general demand for 
 governmental limitation of profits in the interests of society 
 as a whole, might afford instructive parallels. 
 
 The emigration of the Pilgrim Fathers may be chosen 
 to illustrate the working of the social impulse towards 
 religious freedom. The first temporary halting-place in 
 Holland is more than an incident. It shows first religion 
 bursting the bonds of nationality, and then the imperative 
 call of blood and language in response to which the dangers 
 and hardships of the unexplored West w^ere faced. New 
 England and Virginia would be contrasted as, respectively, 
 negative and positive products of the spirit of English 
 nationality as it at that time flamed : religious intolerance 
 being the mother of the former and adventure of the latter. 
 The revolution of 1688 illustrates the impulse to political free- 
 dom, together with that to religious freedom, dominating the 
 national aversion to an alien ruler. Further examples are 
 unnecessary. The educator who feels the currents — political, 
 economic, national and religious — sometimes congruent, 
 sometimes mutually repellent, which contribute to the on- 
 ward flow of social evolution, will have no diflficulty in extri- 
 cating them from historical events, and in explaining the 
 latter to his pupils by reference to them. 
 
 §5. The problem of arranging the sequence of a school 
 historv course is ultimately a question of the interpretation 
 of the evolution of the life of a community. The solution 
 will varv with the community. It will be different, for 
 example, for Transvaal schools and for English schools. 
 There are three factors to be considered, the period of time 
 to be covered, the selection of topics, and the order of treat- 
 ment. They must all be considered in relation to that adjust- 
 ment of the individual to the social world which we have 
 taken to be the end and aim of the study of history. So far 
 as the period, the range to be comprehended, goes, the solu- 
 tion is clear. We must go far enough back to make it pos- 
 sible to follow the working of those factors in the evolutionary 
 process which are still operative. We say working rather 
 than genesis and working. It would be better, of course, if 
 we could get back to absolute origins. But leaving out of
 
 ADJUSTMENT TO THE SECOND WORLD 227 
 
 account the question of what is practicable, there remains the 
 problem where the actual genesis of modern states is to be 
 fixed. Are we to put it, for most school purposes at all 
 events, at that part of the middle ages when, under the joint 
 organising agency of the church and the feudal system, order 
 was evolved out of the chaos in which the disruption of the 
 Roman Empire had left Europe? Historical research is 
 bridging the gap of the Dark Ages but it is not clear that 
 there is any marked continuity between Roman and mediaeval 
 civilisation, if we omit the outstanding exceptions of law and 
 literature. We may put it this way. While it is eminently 
 desirable to base a course of modern history on the story of 
 Greece and Rome, it is not perhaps necessary for the pur- 
 poses of intelligent adjustment to the social world as it exists 
 to-day to go further back than the time when in the later 
 middle ages the states and nationalities of modern Europe 
 began to take shape. That the Greek and Roman civilisations 
 offer a fruitful field of parallels and analogies which throw a 
 flood of illumination, sometimes by similarity, oftener by 
 contrast, on modern history, is, of course, a truism.^ That 
 Greek and Roman and, indeed, oriental history must be the 
 foundation of the study of modern history for the fortunate 
 ones who can prosecute the subject at the university stage, is 
 also beyond argument. The individual we have to consider, 
 however, is the future average citizen, and the problem is how 
 far back he should be able to see in order to make his citizen- 
 ship active and intelligent. And the answer we suggest is 
 the one given above. 
 
 Mr. Barnett says that "any hard and fast distinction 
 that has yet been made between ancient and modern history 
 seems to have little value except as a means of marking off 
 the histories of political societies that still live from those that 
 have become extinct or, as has happened generally, have been 
 merged in others. History is one."* It is just to this living 
 continuity that adjustment should be made. The truth is 
 that, for school purposes, exactly where you begin is of less 
 importance than where and how you end. The end should 
 
 5 See the article on Ancient History by the late Professor Witliers in 
 Teaching and Organisation, edited by Barnett. 
 
 ^ Common Sense in Education and Teaching, p. 262. The title of this 
 booli is, from one point of view, a misnomer. In its penetrative insight and 
 broad sweep its sense is the very opposite of what is common.
 
 228 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 be the present and it should be felt as the actuality of the past 
 and the potentiality of the future. The Bergsonian idea of 
 real duration is cardinal for history. And a test of a good 
 starting-point might well be its reality as a phase in the 
 duration which ends with the present. It is clear that, speak- 
 ing generally, the older the pupil and the more advanced the 
 course the further back real origins may be traced. And the 
 further the belter of course. 
 
 The selection of topics really means emphasis of some 
 and leaving others in the background, unattended to. It is 
 a question of perspective rather than selection and omission. 
 The point is not unimportant, inasmuch as the unity, inter- 
 dependence, and inter-relation of all parts and sides of social 
 life are apt to be overlooked. The departmental treatment of 
 history, e.g., constitutional, dynastic, economic, is subject to 
 the same drawback. The unity of history as a record, is, of 
 course, the consequence of the unity of social evolution, but 
 the whole is apt to fade from view when one side or aspect is 
 in focus. The point has been referred to above and may be 
 left. The question of treatment is perhaps one of method 
 and thus falls outside the scope of this work. This much 
 may be said. Treatment like selection is a question of 
 emphasis. The doctrine of interest may require the treat- 
 ment at one stage to be largely biographical and picturesque, 
 having for its immediate object outstanding critical events 
 rather than the steady current of national life out of which 
 they emerge and into which they recede. It may require that 
 stories, biographies, historical novels and literature, shall be 
 the media of interpretation. But this is only a stage and a 
 preliminary and preparatory one. True it serves a very 
 necessary purpose, that of stimulating imagination ; for it is 
 largely through the instrumentality of the penetrative insight 
 which a lively imagination mediates, that the social world is 
 revealed. The part which observation plays in the explora- 
 tion of the first world is paralleled by that of imaginative in- 
 sight in the unfolding of the second. It is but a stage, how- 
 ever, the " thing " stage. And we have to get beyond it to 
 that higher plane, the plane of organic relations, at which the 
 unity and continuity of national and social life is revealed. 
 That revelation comes, if at all, when events and develop- 
 ments, whatever their nature— military, religious, economic,
 
 ADJUSTMENT TO THE SECOND WORLD 229 
 
 political, or what not — are viewed in their relation to the on- 
 ward movement of the life of the social organism. The unity 
 of social life is in this sense the same as that of individual 
 life whose critical happenings we must interpret as products 
 of the past and portents for the future, if we are to realise 
 their full meaning. 
 
 §6. It may be said that the organic plane in history is 
 one which school pupils cannot rise to, that the attempt to 
 deal with historical events in their organic relations would 
 make the subject unattractive and even distasteful, and that, 
 in any case, the majority of pupils leave school before this 
 aspect of histor}' can be developed. To take the last objec- 
 tion first, we may point to the general tendency to lengthen 
 school life and to remove the artificial boundary which has 
 for so long and with such futile effects broken the natural 
 and organic continuity between primary and secondary edu- 
 cation. And even if this were not so, it is surely sound 
 theory to lay down principles which apply in the normal 
 case ; that is, in the case of the pupil who will proceed beyond 
 the foundations to the structure for which the foundations 
 exist. It is essential that we should look at education as a 
 whole and not attempt to truncate and round off a scheme 
 artificially, to put barriers and limits where none exist in the 
 nature of things. We must go to work on the assumption 
 that even if, unfortunately, some, even the majority, will not 
 reach the goal which reason sets up while they remain at 
 school, they will develop the impulse to use their hours of 
 leisure to carry on the work the schools have begun. There 
 is no more fertile source of error than the common idea of the 
 limitation of education to school, and school years. We have 
 called the barrier between primary and secondary work arti- 
 ficial. We ought not to put up a second between education 
 in school and education out of it. Continuation work will be 
 largely a result of the voluntary impulse the schools develop, 
 whatever element of compulsion may be introduced. We 
 shall be on firmer ground if we start from the assumption that 
 all are going on, in school or out of it, at any rate to the 
 stage which the completion of the secondary course denotes; 
 and a good few to the end of life. 
 
 And there is no question that pupils of fifteen and over 
 seize suggestions of the organic relation of isolated events
 
 230 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 and developments to the whole current of social progress with 
 avidity. The " thing " stage is not the attractive stage when 
 reason is developing. The tendency is to under-rate the grip 
 of early adolescence. Moreover, it is to be remembered that 
 isolated events, like " things," are just those which are 
 abstract. Concreteness increases in proportion as links in 
 the world of reality increase. And events gain in constrain- 
 ing power with every increase in concreteness. Of course 
 the teacher will exercise his common sense. He will not push 
 his attempts to establish links of connection to the point when 
 remoteness discourages efforts to grasp them. But the ex- 
 perience of thoughtful schoolmasters will, it may be con- 
 fidently affirmed, corroborate the conviction that average 
 pupils will reach out with avidity and zest towards sugges- 
 tive interpretations which link events on to one or other of 
 the strands of the social fabric which we have endeavoured to 
 indicate. The curve of a cricket-ball is not less interesting 
 when it is envisaged as the resultant of the force of projection, 
 the pull of gravity, and atmospheric friction. The glory of 
 the defeat of the Armada is not dimmed when it is seen to be 
 the triumph of religious tolerance and the first great contri- 
 bution of the mercantile marine to England's supremacy of 
 the seas. One has seen the Suez Canal become richer in 
 significance for boys and girls of fourteen as its importance 
 as a sea-way between East and West has been revealed to 
 them, and every teacher could multiply instances. Napoleon 
 does not lose constraining power when he is shown to be first 
 the instrument then the exploiter of democracy. Even Luther 
 is not less attractive, but more, when he stands out as the 
 father of Protestant churches. Cobden is not a less striking 
 historic figure in the role of dispenser of a cheap breakfast. 
 Whatever objection to the organic aspect of historic events 
 and developments there may be, loss of constraining power 
 over early adolescence is not one of them. 
 
 §7. We are here brought quite naturally to the con- 
 sideration of what is known as civics at an earlier and politics 
 at a later school stage. The great and all-inclusive aim of 
 the teaching of history is, not merely the revelation of social 
 progress, but participation, whole-hearted and sincere, in it. 
 That aim, it may be assumed, is behind the championship of 
 these subjects. But keen protagonists are often blind ; the
 
 ADJUSTMENT TO THE SECOND WORLD 231 
 
 very strength of their convictions is a danger. If our dis- 
 cussion points to any tiling it is to the futility of any attempt 
 to isolate civics and politics from organic history, from the 
 treatment of men, events, and developments in their relation 
 to the current of social life; at all events until that organic 
 process has, through the study of history, become a living 
 reality. We are here face to face with a danger of the same 
 kind as the one we have just been considering. Concrete- 
 ness, we argued, is increased and enriched when events are 
 viewed in their relation to social life in its many and varied 
 ramifications. It is when they are considered apart from 
 these ramifications that we are at the abstract and unhistorical 
 stage. And if we take civics and political relationships out 
 of their concrete and living context and attempt to expound 
 their dry bones we are courting failure if our object is the 
 sentiment of citizenship. 
 
 Public opinion insists that the schools ought to develop, 
 foster, and enrich a warm sentiment glowing around the 
 rights and duties of citizenship. And the opinion is beyond 
 question sound. A sentiment, however, has a nucleus of in- 
 telligent insight and it is questionable whether the method of 
 developing that nucleus, commonly advocated, is sound. 
 That method usually is a course of lessons on the machinery 
 of government and public administration considered by itself 
 and thus in abstraction from the concrete process of history 
 from which it has emerged. No doubt historical illustrations 
 are used. But looking at the question from the point of view 
 of the creation of real and living interest it would seem that 
 the cart often goes before the horse. It would seem that, at 
 all events for younger pupils, who have little or no sense of 
 history as the record of civilisation, of social progress, lessons 
 on the machinery of government are not likely to find real 
 points of attachment in consciousness. The rational course 
 would seem to be to seek them in political events and 
 struggles which have some concrete and perhaps dramatic 
 elements. In a word we should accumulate details incident- 
 ally in the course of history lessons and gradually build them 
 up into a body of more or less systematic doctrine which has 
 its basis in the living facts of history. In this way the theory 
 of the king, lords, and commons as estates of the realm, the 
 growth of parliamentary government, taxation, enfranchise- 
 
 i6
 
 232 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 ment and the like topics, would emerge gradually and the 
 attempt to give them some measure of coherence would be 
 the highly important, and then possibly attractive, task of 
 the highest forms of the secondary school. There is not 
 much civic nurture in an account to, say, fourteen-year-olds 
 of the passage of a bill through parliament. It can only have 
 real meaning and significance for those who can grasp, as a 
 consequence of familiarity with details of social evolution, 
 w^hat parliament stands for, what such an instrument of par- 
 liamentary government as an act implies, and what safe- 
 guards for its full consideration and discussion have, by the 
 stern teaching of experience, been proved to be necessary. 
 Perhaps older boys and girls might be brought to realise the 
 significance of parliamentary procedure by reproducing it 
 actually in the consideration of an instrument of their own 
 making, say the rules of a sports club or a school library. A 
 school discussion on parliamentary lines of some such instru- 
 ment of government of their own miniature society would, at 
 all events, have the element of concreteness and reality which 
 most early lessons in civics inevitably lack. 
 
 §8. So far we have looked at the cognitive side of the 
 adjustment sought. But the sentiment of patriotism, like 
 every other, is a complex in which the momentum of feeling 
 and will is behind cognition. It is a complex which, indeed, 
 involves and absorbs the whole individuality. It is certain 
 that we shall not get that complete absorption, even momen- 
 tarily, if the machinery of government, abstracted from the 
 reality of governing, is what we put before pupils. When 
 insight awakens pride and the resulting momentum carries 
 the boy or girl forward to imaginary participation, we may 
 be satisfied with the measure of adjustment achieved. And 
 pride will awake when the story of struggle and sacrifice for 
 political liberty is dramatically told. There is another 
 source of error, it would seem. After all, government is only 
 the skeleton of the social fabric, while its economic activity 
 is its life blood, nationality is its spirit, and humanity its 
 soul. Do we not err when we limit our conception of civic 
 rights and duties to those which cluster about order and 
 government ? Does not true citizenship include also 
 economic efficiency, the obligations of nationality, and the 
 call of humanity ? In a word, should not our course in civics
 
 ADJUSTMENT TO THE SECOND WORLD 233 
 
 be focussed on service rather than, as usually, on govern- 
 ment? After all, even government is ultimately service, as 
 President Wilson has so frequently and with such simple 
 eloquence reminded the world during these last most critical 
 years. We should do better to direct the sentiments of pur 
 future citizens to the opportunities and the obligations of 
 civic service rather than to the machinery of government. 
 " Knowledge of civics," writes Kerschensteiner, " is not the 
 most pressing need of our schools. The first and most press- 
 ing need is the exercise of civic virtues.*"' 
 
 For such exercise a school afiords an appropriate field. 
 We may note, indeed, that the opportunity afforded for striv- 
 ing after this ideal of solidarity is one of the strongest reasons 
 for organising educational machinery in the form of schools 
 and classes. Education by governess or tutor is likely just 
 to miss this impulse to solidarity. Also it gives us a very 
 good reason for keeping pupils of about the same age and 
 stage of development in the same class or the same school. 
 The boy or girl much above or below the average age — 
 though the younger is less likely to take harm — is unhappy 
 because he or she is outside the current of common life. For 
 the same all-sufficient reason the best organisation of schools 
 is into junior, middle and secondary. 
 
 It is, indeed, a question of vital importance how the 
 school, or to take a handier unit, the form or class, can reflect 
 and prepare the way for solidarity and community of life, 
 and how each member can be made to participate. The 
 physical life of a school presents many opportunities. A 
 school should be a clean community and a vigorous com- 
 munity. The sense of hygienic solidarity can be developed. 
 There can be a community standard of physical sanity calling 
 for contributory adherence and support in a dozen ways which 
 need not be mentioned. A school can be a real preparation 
 for personal contribution, say, to the sanitary conditions of 
 urban life. Habits which may diminish, if they cannot pre- 
 vent epidemics, may be developed in the school community. 
 In cadet camps, school excursions, picnics, and holiday 
 camps, there are all the conditions for developing a com- 
 munity standard of physical sanity and calling for individual 
 
 » Education for Citizenship, translated by Pressland, p. 97.
 
 234 ^^^ INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 contributions to its maintenance and improvement. On the 
 physical side a school can be a real training ground for civic 
 virtues. And the same thing is true of it on the cognitive 
 side. There is room for a much larger measure of com- 
 bination in class-room and school activity. Kerschensteiner 
 emphasises the great opportunity for combined work which 
 the workshop and the school garden present; and rightly. 
 But intellectual activities offer it equally readily. The habit 
 of contributing to the solution of a problem or the elucidation 
 of a knotty point should be developed. Group work in 
 laboratories or domestic science rooms can be undertaken. A 
 school play is civic training. Discussions and conferences 
 by pupils need not be an unpractical dream. They afford 
 social training encouraging the individual to give something 
 of himself to the whole. Why not a form or a class examina- 
 tion paper? It would probably be more searching, as it 
 easily might often be more appropriate, than the master's. 
 Individual knowledge is a miser's treasure until it becomes 
 transmuted into a leaven for social enlightenment. We can 
 encourage healthy competition and transmute it into whole 
 hearted co-operation. With the aesthetic and moral life of a 
 school in this same connection of solidarity it will be more 
 appropriate to deal in the third book.* 
 
 Kerschensteiner has an apposite reference to solidarity 
 of purpose among craftsmen which we may quote here. He 
 writes : " Centuries ago there was a time in Germany when 
 the masters, not only of one trade but of many trades, felt the 
 educative influences of work in common. It was the age in 
 which Romanesque and Early Gothic cathedrals were built, 
 in which work-people and masters combined in the plan of 
 the whole, in which almost all the trades of a town united 
 to construct those monumental edifices that have gained the 
 undivided admiration of our time by the finished unity of 
 their construction. If we could but understand the eloquent 
 silence of these cathedrals our churches and our palaces 
 would once more exert a gentle, harmonious, and exalting 
 influence and the civic edifices — communes, districts, counties 
 and States — would benefit by the study."® 
 
 To sum up, civics or politics, as a school subject, must 
 
 8 See Book III, Chap. II, §§4. 5, and Chap. Ill, §6. 
 3 Op. cit., pp. loi, 102.
 
 ADJUSTMENT TO THE SECOND WORLD 235 
 
 be the unfolding of the meaning of membership of society, 
 national first and then international. And the unfolding 
 must be done as the story of the nations proceeds. The 
 hobby of Greek citizens was politics. Our task is to find 
 what we own and what we owe. Every thrill which the his- 
 tory of social achievement brings will keep the fire burning. 
 There is danger of its extinction by the slag of custom and 
 sectionalism. But the fire will break through and flare up 
 in times of crisis. Privilege will beget obligation. The 
 British empire is a fine nursery for citizenship because of its 
 age and, above all, its reputation for granting the priceless 
 privilege of freedom. There will be no harm in attempting 
 to weave the details of civics into a coherent body of doctrine 
 if the attempt is not made until some acquaintance with the 
 story of their evolution has been gained. Only it is to be 
 remembered that the mere teaching of civics and politics will 
 no more arouse the true civic spirit than direct moral instruc- 
 tion will produce morality. To secure it we must build up 
 habits of social service. The school must be a social micro- 
 cosm to whose welfare every member is called upon to con- 
 tribute according to his capacity. Out of the combination of 
 spirited instruction and spirited participation that adjustment 
 which is true patriotism will emerge. 
 
 §9. There is another aspect of the study of history on 
 which many educationists lay great stress, namely, the 
 weighing of evidence. It is very questionable whether this 
 incursion into what is really the province of the historian can 
 profitably be made by school pupils. The study of original 
 documents or other historical data may, of course, be 
 attempted, within obviously narrow limits, in order that 
 mature pupils may realise how history comes to be written. 
 That is only an application of the method of discovery. It 
 is hardly necessary to add that, so far as such data are used 
 in order to give reality to history teaching, a second sound 
 principle of pedagogy is being applied. Our point, however, 
 is that these appropriate principles of discovery and reality 
 are not to be thought of as subserving the development of the 
 power of historical perspective and judgment. These are the 
 prerogatives of the ripe scholar. It is, of course, desirable to 
 encourage older pupils to read critically, and to compare the 
 statements even of authorities, so as to develop the power and
 
 236 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 the habit of forming independent judgments. Such a power 
 and such a habit are a necessary equipment if adjustment to 
 the social order is to be one of more or less stable equilibrium. 
 We want our pupils to leave school able to detect narrow 
 partizanship, froth, and clap-trap. And it may be said that 
 this is after all weighing evidence. It is, however, quite 
 another thing from the detached impartial attitude of the his- 
 torian justified by the ripe and highly specialised knowledge 
 of the scholar. The difference may ultimately be one of 
 degree, but the degree of difference is so great as to be 
 equivalent to a difference of attitude and method. Honest 
 adjustment to and an impulse to participate in civic life, 
 rather than a detached and critical attitude towards it, should 
 be the single aim of history in the schools.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 VOCATIONAL ADJUSTMENT 
 
 §1. We propose to deal in this chapter with the rela- 
 tion of education to vocational efficiency. It is a vexed ques- 
 tion. There are many for whom the very name vocational 
 education is anathema. Yet when we get down to bed-rock, 
 the adjective is tautologous. All education is ultimately 
 vocational. Even the stoutest protagonist of purely disci- 
 plinary and formal training must admit a teleological aspect. 
 Some final purpose shapes his efforts. It may be the glamour 
 of literature, science or art, some aspect of culture. It may 
 be some aspect of life on its active side, — administration, poli- 
 tics or the church which, without his knowing it, is all the 
 while giving form and substance to his work. There must 
 be some ideal which gives the breath of life to the dry bones 
 of routine. And if he ever takes the trouble to search for it 
 he will find it in citizenship of some sort. For even the world 
 of literature and art is not detached. It is, indeed, co-exten- 
 sive with the world of humanity. Being neither a wild beast 
 nor a god his pupil will not live alone. Citizenship of 
 some sort is his destiny, the call to some common sphere. 
 There will always be a cloud of witnesses and, indeed, a host 
 of fellow-workers. Education is always the avenue to a 
 sphere of common action be the output material or spiritual. 
 
 We may quote Dr. Adams in connection with this point. 
 He writes: "It is interesting to watch how the specific 
 element obtrudes itself in the writings of men who think that 
 they are dealing with education in the most general way. 
 The fact is we cannot think of an education iti vacuo. We 
 have found that an environment is an essential element in 
 education, and an abstract environment is practically a con- 
 tradiction in terms. It is true that we can imagine an en- 
 vironment quite different from that actually existing, but 
 even in our manipulation of existing environment we are 
 naturally limited to the real elements of which it is composed, 
 
 237
 
 238 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 however ingenious we may be in manipulating these elements 
 into new combinations. The theorist sets up before him an 
 ideal of pure cultural education, something that will fit a man 
 to fill any post to which he may be called. The object is not - 
 to turn out a lawyer, a mechanic, a priest, but § man. Even 
 Rousseau speaks of his Emile as a man. But when we look 
 into the writings of the theorists, it will be found that each 
 of them has in view some more or less definite type of man, 
 and that their theories are directed towards the moulding of 
 the educands on this model. Thus it comes about that pure 
 cultural education is much rarer even in theory than is gener- 
 ally supposed."^ We assert that in intelligent practice it is 
 non-existent. 
 
 The conception of economic efficiency seems to narrow 
 the topic down. It would be more correct to say that it at- 
 tenuates it. There is the same stretch, the same extension, 
 but not the same depth. We mean by economic efficiency, 
 efficiency of participation in work, in that side of the life of 
 the social organism which maintains its material existence; 
 contribution to the sustenance and circulation of its life-blood 
 and at the same time, contribution to the circulation and sus- 
 tenance of the individual's own. His vocation we can safely 
 say is co-extensive with his economic activity although it is 
 deeper and fuller. If he is economically inefficient he can no 
 longer fulfil his vocation, although he may be economically 
 efficient and yet fall short of vocational efficiency. You may 
 have an individual without much soul ; but he cannot be con- 
 ceived without a bod)'. 
 
 It seems incontrovertible that education must stand in 
 some relation to vocational efficiency, though there may be 
 difference of opinion whether it is to be immediate or remote, 
 at short or long range, as Dr. Adams would say.'^ The his- 
 tory of educational practice and theory on the whole sup- 
 ports this view.^ Primitive practice, unburdened with 
 theory, was, we may safely assume, directed immediately to 
 adjustment, physical and social. The penalty for non-adjust- 
 ment was death. The first, and in some respects the greatest, 
 attempt at theory, that of Plato in the "Republic," was 
 
 1 Evolution of Educational Theory, pp. 176, 177. 
 
 2 E.g., op. cit., p. 179. 
 
 3 Ibid, Chapter VI may be consulted for details.
 
 . VOCATIONAL ADJUSTMENT 239 
 
 rigidly vocational. The slaves were to be trained for indus- 
 try, warrior-citizens for the maintenance and guardianship 
 of the welfare of the stale, philosopher-citizens for the high 
 office of intellectual surveillance over it. Each class had its 
 function in the polity and was to be educated for its efficient 
 discharge. Roman civilisation, on the whole, reflects the 
 same principle of specific classes for specific functions. 
 Christianity, in theory and to some extent in practice, cut 
 across the rigid caste distinctions of feudalism, but, speaking 
 generally, the doctrine of equality before God was not power- 
 ful enough to remove or even materially to affect economic 
 and social barriers and to achieve equality before men. Crafts 
 and guilds in the urban communities of the middle ages, and 
 agricultural organisation in rural communities, worked, as we 
 have seen, in the direction of class and educational exclusive- 
 ness. 
 
 When humanism became pedantry, when naturalism be- 
 came individual emancipation from social obligations, as in J 
 the theory of Rousseau, when idealism had transferred syn-f 
 thetic function from the phenomenal world to man, as in thej 
 theory of Kant, a tendency to transfer the centre of gravity of 
 education from man in his relation to his environment to man 
 thought of in detachment, as in the theory of formal training, 
 emerged. Our view is that this theory was artificial and that, 
 in reality and in practice, its adherents did not, and could 
 not, give it complete allegiance. They had some vocation, 
 some citizenship, at once behind their practice and in front 
 0f, in organic teleological relation to, their theory. They 
 were vocationalists at bottom. The English public schools 
 have produced magnificent governors and administrators, 
 just because of the liberal sweep of their teleological con- 
 straint. They have sent their alumni to carry justice, honour, 
 and freedom into the vocation of empire, just because they 
 have extricated these qualities from the vocation of humanity 
 and have focussed their daily routine on the development of 
 them. They have been, and are, vocational schools in the 
 highest sense of that much-abused term. 
 
 Now the pendulum is swinging back. There is a real | 
 danger of a return to the theory and practice of a narrow » 
 vocationalism. The wonderful progress of science which the 
 last century and a half has seen, has brought materialism in
 
 240 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 its train. With what result? Surely that which Kant pro- 
 nounced against, namely, the tendency to use men as means, 
 not to treat them as ends. The political revolution, the rise 
 of democracy, has not been, as yet, strong enough to counter- 
 act the effect on the individual of the commercial and indus- 
 trial revolution. Let us quote Professor Dewey : "At the i 
 present juncture,'* he says, " there is a movement on behalf ) 
 of something called vocational training which, if carried into 
 effect, would harden these ideas into a form adapted to the 
 existing industrial regime. This movement would continue 
 the traditional liberal or cultural education for the few 
 economically able to enjoy it, and would give to the masses a i 
 narrow technical trade education for specialised callings."* 1 
 He goes on to point out how a more liberal view of vocational 
 training "would give those who engage in industrial callings 
 desire and ability to share in social control, and ability to 
 become masters of their industrial fate. . . . With the 
 representatives of the more privileged portion of the com- 
 munity, it would increase sympathy for labour, create a dis- 
 position of mind which can discover the culturing elements 
 in useful activity, and increase a sense of social responsi- 
 bility."* 
 
 In dealing with vocational efficiency as a necessary aim 
 of education we have, then, to find a mean between two 
 extremes : the view of those who would keep schooling free of 
 the influence of any specific purpose or vocation, though they 
 cannot, from the nature of the case, ever be completely suc- 
 cessful ; and the view of those who would subordinate school- 
 ing to a narrow and largely economic conception of vocational 
 ends. It seems to us that this is the main problem of adjust- 
 ment to the social order. Civic efficiency does not seem to 
 present the same difficulty as a criterion of adjustment. Not 
 from our standpoint, at all events, which is that every civitas 
 contains within itself the potentiality of the moral order, the 
 third world which we have yet to consider. The problem in 
 this connection is, therefore, to bring, through education, 
 potentiality to actuality. "Just as it is the function of the 
 family to foster the State-idea and to prepare its members for 
 State-citizenship, so it is the function of the State to promote 
 
 * Democracy and Education, pp. 373, 374.
 
 VOCATIONAL ADJUSTMENT 241 
 
 the ' humanity-idea ' of world-citizenship.'-® Citizenship lies 
 ahead, whatever we may think or do, and the problem is to 
 secure that it is citizenship of no mean city. With the voca- 
 tional criterion the case is somewhat different. The question 
 here is whether the criterion itself exercises a cramping or a 
 liberalising influence on the work of the schools. 
 
 §2. Clearly the first essential is to know what vocation^ 
 comprehends, what we are actually called to. The first re-** 
 sponse which instinct and intelligence agree in giving is life 
 itself in all its fulness. Our vocation is to live, and to live 
 means, subjectively, to have full play for all our powers, and, 
 objectively, to have free access to all that we need to enable 
 our powers to function. That at least is what it means before 
 we introduce two vital limiting considerations. One is the 
 conception of moral values, the conception, that is, of a lower 
 and a higher self ; the second is the existence of others who 
 have the same rights as ourselves. Both imply inhibition, , 
 negation. Vocation as life, must be interpreted to mean not/ 
 living on that side which morality would denounce, and not' 
 living for ourselves alone. So we first get determination by 
 negation. When we turn to positive content, economic 
 efficiency emerges at once as a fundamental constituent. It is 
 at all events our vocation to be self-supporting and, ipso facto, 
 to assist in maintaining the economic stability of the social 
 fabric. There is a growing tendency to topsy-turvy dom in 
 regard to this simple principle. It is common to hear and 
 read arguments based on the assumption that the state should 
 support its members ; whereas the obvious truth lies with the 
 converse of the proposition. This particular ramification of 
 the fallacy of hypostasis goes very far. The state is thought 
 of as a self-existent entity within which refuge from economic 
 storm and stress may be found. The ultimate fact that state 
 resources are the resources of its individuals is overlooked or 
 neglected. The state treasury is thought of as mysteriously 
 replenishing itself like the widow's cruise. It is essential 
 that all who have to do with education should keep clear of 
 such foggy thinking. And the more so because the test of 
 economic efficiency is likely to be applied far more relent- 
 lessly in the future. The incompetent and the idle are likely 
 
 * Kcrschensteiner, Education for Citizenship, p. 19.
 
 242 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 to meet with less of easy tolerance than heretofore. Educa- 
 tion, then, must, in the first place, be vocational to this extent 
 at least that it faces towards, and not away from, economic 
 efficiency. 
 
 But making a living does not exhaust life, although, on 
 the other hand, it is poor practical philosophy to set working 
 and leisure hours over against each other. That is another 
 phase of the old atomistic, mechanical fallacy. Good work 
 is often the truest leisure, just as poor leisure is, assuredly, 
 often the hardest work. It is, indeed, the fallacy which lurks 
 behind the arguments for a pure culture theory of education, 
 though it may not often come out into the open. Intellectual 
 and aesthetic delight it would seem is to be sought in the 
 activities which fall outside the muddy current of work. It 
 is in the evening after work hours, and during week-ends and 
 holidays, that we really live. This is not merely foolish, it is 
 highly dangerous. Much work is grinding and soul-destroy- 
 ing, but the task is to improve it and its conditions. To 
 keep all the illumination and fairy lights for the evening and 
 week-ends in the vain hope that they will somehow make it 
 easier to bear with the gloom of the working hours, is to 
 court disaster. The result will be an increasing distaste for 
 work. Effort should be concentrated on the improvement of 
 work and working conditions. Only a small abnormal 
 minority dislike work. The normal man is unhappy without 
 it. The struggle for existence is for the majority the solution 
 of existence, always provided that it is not demoralising. 
 This can be avoided if the conditions of the work and the 
 work itself constantly give scope for a measure of moral and 
 intellectual achievement. We shall deal with this point 
 presently. It is mentioned here in order to emphasise the 
 vital importance of finding a more or less complete vocation 
 in the work itself or at any rate of avoiding the evasive senti- 
 mentality of the theory that our true vocation lies outside our 
 job. Without going so far as to say that the nature of the 
 work doesn't matter, we do assert that there are few tasks 
 that cannot be made interesting if the conditions are what 
 they ought to be, and if education has given a sound pre- 
 paration or continues to give a running commentary. The 
 menial and sordid tasks which are necessary for life and 
 health and which yet cannot satisfy this condition, should,
 
 VOCATIONAL ADJUSTMENT 243 
 
 to the greatest extent possible, be carried out by mechanical, 
 not human, agency. 
 
 Having noted the danger of any unnatural separation of 
 work and interest, we can safely widen the conception ofj 
 vocation so as to let it take in all practicable activities which 
 are sane, which attract, and which promote cognitive, 
 aesthetic or moral expansion. The limitation set by the 
 attractive and the practicable prevents the description from 
 being so wide as to be useless. For one man a concert, for 
 another his garden, for a third his library, for a fourth all 
 three and more, will be vocational equally with the day's 
 work. Here we may note two different aspects of the con- 
 tinuity between school and life. The relation of work to 
 schooling is teleological, that of the interests of leisure to 
 schooling is, partly at least, consequential. Schooling will 
 be shaped in some degree at all events by the future life-work 
 but hobbies will to some extent be the effect of schooling. 
 In other words schooling, if we look upon it as effect and 
 cause, as shaping and being shaped, should prepare for life 
 as a whole, and be the avenue to both work and leisure. 
 This is all somewhat trite, but another point may well be 
 noted. It is that the vocational pull outside working hours 
 should be real. So many people drift by inertia or imita- 
 tion into the bar, billiard room, or bioscope, and the cake of 
 custom is fixed before the unfortunate being has had a chance 
 to find a vocation for his leisure. 
 
 §3. There is one point about which we can safely be 
 dogmatic. It is that the more lines of connection there are 
 between the activities of the school and the vocation which is 
 to follow, the more attractive they will be, especially when 
 adolescence has been reached. There is no question that 
 with the sudden and rapid extension of intellectual power and 
 aesthetic sensibility which is characteristic of that period, 
 there is normally a reaching out towards life as a serious 
 matter, and a strong impulse towards real participation in it. 
 It is indicated by the desire for older companions, by the 
 pride boys and girls take in anything they can do which is 
 of real assistance to their parents, and by the avidity with 
 which they throw themselves into anything which belongs to 
 the sphere of the grown-ups. There is no doubt whatever 
 that this impulse is what makes most children ready to leave
 
 244 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 school early and, among the poorer classes, ready to throw 
 their weight into the scale and decide the parent wavering 
 between "quick returns of profit" in the shape of a few 
 pounds a month, which he sorely needs, and the " far gain " 
 of a craft or a profession for his boy or girl. And among 
 the children of what are called the upper classes it is not cer- 
 tain that the same impulse does not account for the loafing 
 tendency often noticeable in the older pupils of a secondary 
 school, who have not been lucky enough to be called upon 
 for prefects' duties or other special tasks which satisfy their 
 desire for real participation and real responsibility in life. 
 There is no doubt that one way to make primary pupils keen 
 to go on with schooling and secondary pupils keen to make 
 the most of it, is to let them feel that it is a real preparation 
 for a vocation, at longer or shorter range. And parents as a 
 whole are with their children in this matter. Indeed we may 
 say that the advocates of a purely formal and disciplinary 
 training are mainly the teachers themselves. It is so easy 
 and even natural for them to fall into the attitude and habit 
 of looking upon the school as an end in itself. It is so easy 
 for them to forget that the school exists for the pupils and 
 not the pupils for the school, and both for the life, the voca- 
 tion, which is to come after. The realisation of the ideal of a 
 minimum of ten years' schooling for all, depends as much on 
 a real continuity between school and life as on economic 
 factors. The way to get pupils and parents unreservedly for 
 it, is to let them feel what Browning's inspiring grammarian 
 vindicated : 
 
 " Oh ! if we draw a circle premature, 
 Heedless of far gain, 
 Greedy for quick returns of profit, sure, 
 Bad is our bargain ! " 
 
 §4. After these preliminaries, we must turn to the 
 practical problem of giving schooling a vocational bent, or 
 perhaps we had better say, giving it vocational implication. 
 It is to a considerable extent a question of content, of sub- 
 ject-matter and things done, of knowledge and skill actually 
 acquired; but by no means entirely. We may look at the 
 matter from the formal point of view and it is, of course, true 
 that all discipline, whether resulting from merely cognitive 
 exercise, or from cognition combined with construction, is
 
 VOCATIONAL ADJUSTMENT 245 
 
 indirectl)' vocational. This is, however, not the ground 
 taken up by those who defend formal disciplinary schooling. 
 They take their stand on the alleged pre-eminence for formal 
 training of certain subjects, e.g., classics or mathematics. 
 That point is arguable; but it.jis beyond argument that all 
 activity is positively or negatively vocational. There is at 
 any rate this much continuity between school and life that 
 it is with the accumulated momentum of the powers, habits, 
 tastes and volitional force developed in the former that the 
 pupil will embark on life. There is thus, unquestionably, a 
 formal aspect of vocational training, and there is clearly a 
 disciplinary resultant of all school work whatever its nature. 
 We might leave the point with the general injunction that the 
 schoolmaster should apply a running vocational criterion to 
 the efforts of his pupils, a criterion as to the resulting accu* 
 mulation of power. A detail or two may, however, be sug- 
 gested. One is the vocational value of every bit of real work 
 done in schools. It hardly needs saying, and yet the trick 
 of " ca' canny " is so easy to learn in a class of thirty. 
 Another is the need for initiative and autonomy. The habit 
 of leaning is as easy to acquire as the habit of scamping. 
 The point is the more important, because, with the division 
 of labour and the minutiae of the modern organisation of 
 administration and production, whether mental or practical, 
 things tend to run automatically and the sense of direct re- 
 sponsibility diminishes. And there is no more deadening 
 tendency. Then there is the power of weaving details into 
 a coherent whole and bringing them to a focus, whether it be 
 a logical whole or a whole of craftsmanship. This is what 
 adds artistic, aesthetic stimulus to the routine of a vocation. 
 These, and others of narrower scope, an alert schoolmaster 
 will readily weave into what we have called a running voca- 
 tional criterion. Indeed the protagonists of formal training 
 would be in a better position if they shifted their line of 
 defence from special subjects to entirely subjective ground. 
 It is to be noted that we have limited formal vocational values 
 to the development of habits and ideals, in accordance, as we 
 shall presently see, with the findings of experimental enquiry 
 in this sphere. 
 
 The fundamental formal principle on which the prosecu- 
 tion of any task or occupation with lively and sustained in-
 
 246 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 terest depends, is that it shall offer a field of activity within 
 which the individuality can develop. And the development 
 must affect all three sides of mind. There must be increasing 
 command over the difficulties it presents, whether they be 
 cognitive or cognitive and manipulative, enhanced pleasure 
 in its more effective and easier accomplishment, and a grow- 
 ing sense of moral satisfaction in work well done. The first 
 may, and usually will, bring the second and third in its train ; 
 the second almost necessarily. The third may need the 
 stimulus of moral satisfaction gained in another field. Thus 
 the mechanic may come to feel moral pride in w-eek-day tasks 
 in consequence of a glow carried over from something well 
 done on Sunday, for example, taking a class in a Sunday- 
 school. So also cesthetic satisfaction may be transferable 
 and cumulative : a model garden may mean a model shop- 
 bench or a model office-table. This brings out one point we 
 want to make, namely, the organic relation of directly and 
 indirectly vocational work, due, of course, to the fact that it 
 is one and the same individual to whom both fields are 
 polarised. The point we are immediately concerned with, 
 however, is that in regard to the vocational task, development, 
 progress, the expansion of the potentialities of the worker, is 
 an essential condition of sustained interest. If that can be 
 assured effect will be given in the economic sphere to the 
 Kantian principle of humanity as a kingdom of ends. 
 
 The psychologists® lay stress on the systematic unity and 
 the systematic complexity of the process, if conation, as the 
 active and volitional orientation of the whole man to a topic 
 or task, is to be sustained. Of this double-edged process, the 
 first is, in vocational work, usually secured by stern neces- 
 sity. The problem of humane organisation and, as we shall 
 presently see, of education, is to secure the second. Arrest 
 of interest and with it of conation, followed by distaste and 
 tedium — not to put it stronger — is almost always the result of 
 an undeveloping task, mere repetition against which the hand 
 or eye or intellect is powerless to find an outlet for its native 
 impulse to progress and betterment, is what is deadening and 
 destroying. Fortunately there are compensations. One is 
 to be found in the creative activity which is normally native 
 in man. In consequence of this truly divine provision, the 
 
 6 Cf. Stout, Analytic Psychology, Vol. 1, p. 183, ff and passim.
 
 VOCATIONAL ADJUSTMENT 247 
 
 most unskilled work is always being transformed into some- 
 thing a bi* better. One is tempted even to put the same fact 
 objectively and say that apparently the most intractable 
 matter — say coal being loaded from a truck into a cart — will 
 respond to skill in manipulation ; the materialist is of course 
 as free to deny this as the idealist to assert it. A second com- 
 pensation is to be found in the truth which adherents of 
 opposing philosophic schools would agree about, the truth, 
 namely, that there is no such thing as actual repetition ; 
 although the weary controller of an automatic machine or a 
 press reader might find it somewhat thin. We are on firmer 
 ground with the compensating tendency of habit, although 
 this may seem to be a modification of the principle we started 
 out from. Fortunately the fact is, whatever the psychological 
 truth may be, that there is a very real measure of relief in 
 getting back to the known confines of the habitual. We may 
 perhaps instance the engine driver in the mechanical sphere 
 and the editor in the intellectual as men whose vocational 
 tasks afford fortunate combinations of repetition and novelty 
 as factors of conation. The teacher ought to be our best 
 example. 
 
 §5. We have to consider, then, how by choosing^^ 
 organising, and manipulating the subject-matter on which, 
 while at school, the youth is nurtured, in the first place we 
 can bring it into real relation with future tasks so that it 
 will sprout, so to say, and thus meet the needs of the indi- 
 vidual for cognitive aesthetic and moral growth ; and, in the 
 second place, how we can develop interest in non-vocational 
 occupations which may be reflected on to the vocational tasks 
 themselves, and thus give them still more budding points. 
 Ultimately therefore the two aims are one : adjustment which 
 will enrich the whole life of the man, while it promotes 
 economic and social efficiency. The essential thing is to keep 
 the unity of life in focus. As Dewey points out in such a 
 convincing manner educational theory, following tradition 
 rather than leading the way while taking account of it, has 
 tended to separate studies much in the same way as an earlier 
 psychology separated faculties; introducing a factitious set 
 of mutually independent values which reflect the artificial 
 divisions of society, and thus substituting a mechanical con- 
 ception of diverse aims for the organic unity of life. In this 
 
 17
 
 248 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 way cultural and vocational studies, training for work and 
 .training for leisure, even training itself and nurture itself, 
 |have been set in unnatural and unreal opposition. " The 
 situation in education represents the divisions and separa- 
 tions which obtain in social life. The variety of interests 
 which should mark any rich and balanced experience have 
 been torn asunder and deposited in separate institutions with 
 diverse and independent purposes and methods. . . . 
 Unconsciously our course of studies and our theories of the 
 educational values of studies reflect this division of interests. 
 The point at issue in a theory of educational value is then the 
 unity or integrity of experience."^ We may say, indeed, 
 that educational reform and social reform depend funda- 
 mentally on the application of a sound doctrine of the uni- 
 versal to three spheres. The social organism is a universal 
 and each section and member of it fulfils its function 
 within it by furthering its welfare as a whole. The indi- 
 vidual is a universal whose welfare every part of him must 
 sustain by healthy function. And the school is a derived 
 universal within which activities should exist, not in a hier- 
 archy of educational values* but in organic unity. The 
 various types of school and educational agency in any state 
 are not ultimately better or worse, inter se, because of the 
 content of instruction or kind of training they give. They 
 may be better or worse, of course, from the point of view of 
 efificiency, but not from the point of view of the nature of the 
 function they discharge provided it is a function essential to 
 the welfare of the social organism. So with school life and 
 the individual pupil. The criterion we want is whether that 
 life sustains and enriches the life of the individual as an 
 organic whole or — what is really the same criterion — whether 
 it promotes that adjustment to three worlds in which life 
 consists. 
 
 §6. Having suggested what vocational efficiency may 
 be taken to mean and how education on its formal side may 
 prepare the way for it, we pass naturally to the consideration 
 of the content of schooling in relation to the same end. The 
 order of our discussion will be, first, types of school, secondly, 
 the correlation of more directly vocational subjects and activi- 
 
 7 Democracy and Education, pp. 290, 291. 
 
 * Ibid p. 281, " We cannot establish a hierarchy of values among studies."
 
 VOCATIONAL ADJUSTMENT 249 
 
 ties in the one school with those that at all events seem to be 
 further removed from the practical calls of life, and lastly, the 
 manipulation of these subjects and activities. That order has 
 the advantage of gradually narrowing the issue down and 
 thus bringing our discussion to a focus. From what has 
 been said it will be clear that we do not regard the evolution 
 of different types of school as the production of a series at 
 one end of which the purely vocational institution stands and 
 at the other the purely non-vocational. Their actual genesis 
 may have been, perhaps to some extent unconsciously, after 
 this fashion .\ Sound educational theory must maintain the 
 principle of continuity between school. and life after school, 
 and accept the inference that all schooling should be voca- 
 tional, and that the vocational criterion, liberally conceived, 
 should be applied to all educative processes without excep- 
 tion. How, then, are different types of school to be justi- 
 fied ? The answer we offer is by differences in vocational 
 function. The division of labour, or, better perhaps, of 
 occupations, is an economic fact and an economic necessity. 
 It is perhaps necessary to note that its parallel is not social 
 stratification, an artificial and phance product, but classifica- 
 tion according to ability, native or acquired. It is surely 
 unnecessary, in these days, to insist that for the educational 
 ladder we should substitute the educational highway, broad 
 and unencumbered by any obstacle to real potentiality. Two 
 difficulties are real. The first is to find a satisfactory criterion 
 for a division of pupils according to specific ability. Pro- 
 fessor Adams is sanguine about a reliable psychological test, 
 and we do seem to be justified in looking forward to it as a 
 result of analytic, genetic and experimental work in this fas- 
 cinating science. Meanwhile the evolution of the fittest goes 
 on, but by controlling the environment, that is by providing 
 a -wide and varied sphere of educational opportunity, some- 
 thing can be done to minimise the waste and destruction 
 which seems to be inherent in the process. That brings us 
 to our second difficulty. It is that resultant of the forces of 
 selfishness, inertia, and the desire for " quick returns of 
 profit " which on the one hand shortens schooling and on the 
 other narrows it unduly, with the inevitable result that poten- 
 tiality is thwarted or diverted into unsuitable channels. 
 
 At what is called the primary stage, but which ought to
 
 250 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 be universally accepted as and named the preparatory stage — 
 and the artificial barrier between primary and secondary 
 schools, a stumbling block alike to pupils and teachers, is 
 being rapidly breached by economic necessity and more 
 liberal thinking — the vocational focus should be a long way 
 ahead, almost out of sight, though both instruction and 
 discipline should be convergent on it. It is curious how voca- 
 tional stress has been laid by tradition and what seems to us 
 perverse theory, precisely at the wrong end of the school 
 continuum. The primary curriculum has been evolved, 
 mainly at all events, with a distinctly utilitarian bias, while 
 the secondary curriculum has been made to face away 
 from considerations of utility. That may safely be ventured 
 as a broad generalisation, though there are many signs 
 of an awakening. It is justifiable comment on educational 
 theory and practice, as a whole, to say that the nearer the 
 school continuum has approached the threshold of life, the 
 less have its various processes been shaped by a consideration 
 of the problems of life. And the inverse is true of the 
 primary school at the other end ; for it would hardly be urged 
 that its pupils cross the threshold of life when they leave 
 school. They are in the great majority of cases the victims 
 of an educational gap between school and life never bridged 
 save by the stern schooling of premature vocational experi- 
 ence. The first course for all should be preparatory to a 
 further course and its function should be the free and liberal 
 development of potentiality. And if it be asked, as con- 
 sistent theory must ask, potentiality for what? Our answer 
 would be for adjustment — to be mediated more specifically 
 at the later stage, though begun at the first — to the three 
 worlds of nature, man and morality. Even at the prepara- 
 tory stage that should be the focus of theory and the criterion 
 of practice. Intelligently applied it will save us from 
 idiosycrasies and extremes which follow on the heels of either 
 a narrow vocationalism or a theory of discipline left in the 
 air. Obession of the three R's, premature civics, manual- 
 training or what not, is the fate of those who look either too 
 narrowly or without any focus at life, and assume the 
 economic inevitability of a short school course. Healthy 
 physical activity, training of hand, eye, ear, and the organs 
 of speech, using the power of acquisition and retentivity and
 
 VOCATIONAL ADJUSTMENT 251 
 
 the impulse to activity so as to make as rapid progress as 
 possible in the ready use, but not in order to strive after any 
 factitious mastery, of the instrumental arts of writing, read- 
 ing, measuring, and calculating, above all discipline in work 
 and orderliness through the operation of organised routine — 
 these are the essential constitutents of schooling at the pre- 
 paratory stage. 
 
 And it is of vital importance, as we think, to cut it short 
 when its purpose has been served and the pupil is ready, 
 hungry for the formative cultural process of adjustment. 
 Also it would seem that all the weight of argument points to 
 a transfer from the preparatory school to a quite separate 
 higher institution. Transition to such work within the pre- 
 paratory school itself will not satisfy the sudden hunger of 
 adolescence. It is a critical phase of development which 
 almost goes to disprove the universality of the truth that 
 natura non facit saltus. Childhood is left behind and ado- 
 lescence emerges with striking rapidity. The astonishing ex- 
 pansion of potentialities calls for a new environment afford- 
 ing freer play for intellectual activity, aesthetic responsive- 
 ness, and moral responsibility. School organisation should 
 provide an appropriate field for this many-sided blossoming 
 of individuality and transplanting would seem to be the only 
 adequate means. The butterfly stage following on that of 
 the pupa, as we might almost call it, demands the freer air 
 and clearer light of the secondary school. A continuation 
 and liberalisation of the preparatory course, a " top " built 
 on to the same institution, is wholly inadequate to meet the 
 case. The expanding individuality calls for the ceremony 
 and ritual of transfer. Promotion must be from one stage, 
 childhood, now ended, to another, adolescence, now 
 beginning. The dust of the first stage must be shaken off 
 and there must be formal and ceremonial entry into the new. 
 The higher grade elementary school is a hybrid product and 
 its comparative failure might have been anticipated from its 
 makeshift constitution. It is as essential that adolescence 
 should have its own atmosphere and institution as that 
 maturity should. There is as little justification for carrying 
 the preparatory school on into the secondary area as for 
 carrying the secondary school on into the university area. 
 
 That is the conclusion it seems impossible to escape if
 
 252 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 we look at the question from the preparatory side of the 
 school continuum, from the point of view, that is, of the 
 needs of the pupil who has completed it. It is confirmed if 
 we look at it from the secondary side, from the point of view 
 of the pupil on its threshold. There is no reason for delay- 
 ing his entry a moment later than is necessary. There is, of 
 course, no support to be found either in sound theory or in- 
 telligent practice for scamped and hurried preparation ; but 
 it may safely be said that danger lies rather in keeping the 
 pupil back, in underestimating his ability to go ahead and in 
 failing to catch the tide of impulse. The demand of the 
 secondary schoolmaster to get his pupils younger is, we 
 think, sounder than the desire of the preparatory school- 
 master to keep them longer, either with a view to a more 
 thorough drill in instrumental arts or from a natural but 
 short-sighted ambition to encroach on work which he can at 
 best only begin. We are entirely in agreement with the view 
 that there is no break between preparatory and secondary 
 courses. The essential continuity of schooling we take to be 
 a fundamental postulate of education. There is, however, an 
 essential transition of purpose and atmosphere resting on the 
 transition from childhood to youth. And our view is that 
 the danger of arresting the transition is far greater than that 
 of anticipating it. If time is to be lost at all it had better be 
 lost in the station waiting for the train than after it has gone. 
 Assuming that preparatory schooling begins at the sixth 
 year we should advocate transfer to the secondary school after 
 the completion of the eleventh year in the normal case ; that is 
 after the completion of what is widely known as the Standard 
 V course. And we should advocate also that in the organisa- 
 tion of a system of public education the same programme of 
 exercises and studies should be followed in all preparatory 
 schools, on educational grounds, and also to secure equality 
 of opportunity for all to exercise on unimpeded choice of a 
 secondary avenue into life. 
 
 §7. We have now^ to discuss the question of different 
 types of secondary school. Before doing so it is desirable 
 to deal with the argument against specialisation which the 
 existence of such types may be said to imply. Our con- 
 sideration of the purposes of the preparatory school and its 
 limits, brief as it has been, should have established the point
 
 VOCATIONAL ADJUSTMENT 253 
 
 that it ought to be quite free from any directly vocational bias. 
 All-round healthy potentiality should be its aim and purpose. 
 The very fact that we contemplate different types of secondary 
 school implies, however, a deliberate look forward to the life, 
 the vocation which is to follow, a deliberate intention to 
 let the variety of secondary schools reflect and prepare the 
 way for a variety of vocations. And the objection will be 
 raised that this is specialisation and it is premature; that it 
 will be sounder to carry forward the potentiality principle, 
 untrammelled by vocational considerations ; and that voca- 
 tional efficiency is more likely to be secured if secondary 
 work is organised without any regard to it. So far as this 
 view claims to have psychological justification, it may be 
 said at once that experimental investigation appears to have 
 refuted the claim. The theory of transferability of power 
 developed in one medium to another which has few points of 
 identity with the first, appears to be exploded. " The 
 balance of expert opinion is now so solidly against the general 
 dogma of formal training that as an educational force it must 
 be regarded as moribund. It cannot be denied that within 
 certain narrow limits, determined by the distribution of 
 common elements, there is transference of power from the 
 study of one subject to the study of another. But the trans- 
 ference is so small as to make it practically negligible for 
 educational purposes. . . . While the general doctrine 
 of formal training is almost universally rejected, there re- 
 mains a wide belief that there is something in experience that 
 gives colour to the popular notions on the subject. This 
 something may in the last resort be reduced to the power the 
 educator has of building up general concepts of method in 
 the minds of his pupils. ... In short the gains of 
 formal training are to be found in ideals rather than habits.'" 
 That sums up expert opinion on formal training. And the 
 related point, which is often confused with it, that special 
 subjects, e.g., Latin, develop intellectual potentiality better 
 than others, ceases to be of importance if the theory of trans- 
 ference is rejected. Indeed we have already rejected the con- 
 ception of schools and school subjects as a hierarchy of 
 values.^" Our criterion is whether they provide adjustment 
 
 ' Adams, op. cit., pp. 222. 223. Seo also Baglev, The Educative Process, 
 Chaps. XIII and XIV. 
 10 See p. 248.
 
 254 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 to three worlds. So that the objection that different types of 
 secondary school imply premature specialisation has no 
 weight with us because the assumption from which it is 
 launched, that formal training, specially through the medium 
 of certain subjects said to ensure it most effectively, is the 
 best preparation for Hfe, is not borne out by exact investiga- 
 tion. Moreover we do not accept the implication of narrow 
 and illiberal specialisation. On the contrary we maintain 
 that each type of secondary school should be pervaded by the 
 most liberal conception of vocational training. 
 
 We can, therefore, light-heartedly face the question of 
 the vocational organisation of secondary schools. Three 
 general types seem to be called for. The first will be needed 
 in order to prepare recruits for those institutions of social life 
 which subserve the welfare of men in their mutual relation- 
 ships. We may call these institutions the humanities and 
 take them to include the church, letters, law, economics and 
 politics. The second will be needed to prepare men for that 
 branch of social service which is concerned with the adapta- 
 tion of nature and natural forces to the needs, amenities and 
 amelioration of men. We may call this the nature group and 
 take it to include medicine, engineering, agriculture and 
 locomotion. The third will be needed to prepare recruits 
 whose social services will lie in the direction of the actual 
 production and distribution of the things necessary for the 
 life of man, liberally but reasonably interpreted. We may 
 call this the group of crafts and commerce. This classifica- 
 tion is not suggested as one which is exhaustive or final. It 
 is, however, put forward as something more than a con- 
 venient basis for exposition. It is claimed that it reflects 
 the main lines of differentiation of vocation. Another ex- 
 planatory observation is necessary. It might well be objected 
 that the first two social functions here distinguished, what 
 we have described as the humanities and the nature group, 
 are appropriate as suggestions for differentiation within the 
 university rather than the school sphere. Our reply would 
 be, first, that we are not proposing anything so foolish as 
 professional or technological studies in the schools, but 
 merely that we should look ahead and organise their curricula 
 in the light of future vocational adjustment. And, secondly, 
 we should argue for the continuity of education forward as
 
 VOCATIONAL ADJUSTMENT 255 
 
 well as backward. Adult education, whether through univer- 
 sities or other agencies, is a problem which has to be faced ; 
 and, in any case, the schools will have fulfilled an imperative 
 need if they are so conducted, that pupils leave them with the 
 impulse, power and determination to carry schooling on into 
 life of their own initiative if organisation is lacking. Con- 
 tinuation work is not the necessary complement of the pre- 
 paratory school only. Life means continuous and progres- 
 sive adjustment and in the schools we must begin to take 
 account of the fact. 
 
 Before we look at each of the three types of secondary 
 school to which these differences of social function point we 
 may profitably note what they must have in common ; for that 
 they should have much in common follows from the fact that 
 the adjustment they are to promote is to the world which is 
 man's common inheritance. Each individual and each group 
 of individuals has its specific function, but these differences 
 exist against a common background, so to say, a general 
 identity of purpose. So that it follows that secondary 
 schools, while reflecting these differences of function must 
 also reflect something of the general identity of purpose in 
 the midst of which they exist. This identity should extend 
 to three subjects at least and also to the whole routine and 
 atmosphere of the school as factors of social and moral train- 
 ing- To take the three subjects first, language and literature 
 must find a place in every school for reasons which will be 
 discussed in the following chapter, but of which one may be 
 noted here as all-sufficient. " It is the instrument of 
 society. "^^ It is the medium of our second world. We may 
 add that it is the embodiment of our third, the moral order or 
 continuum still to be discussed ; and an indispensable instru- 
 ment for the exploration of the first, the world of nature. 
 Language and literature, then, is a common subject for the 
 sole and sufficient reason that adjustment to the three worlds 
 is impossible without it. The second is science, including 
 some mathematics, to mediate adjustment to the first world. 
 It is clearly necessary for the second of the social functions 
 which we have called the nature group, and for the third, 
 crafts and commerce. It is no less necessary for the humani- 
 
 11 Foster Watson, Vives on Education, Introduction, p. xxxii.
 
 256 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 ties. Adjustment to human relationships implies also 
 adjustment to the physical order in which alone they are 
 possible. Some appreciation of the laws of physical inter- 
 action and the laws of development is essential for every man. 
 The third subject is history in some form, with civic relation- 
 ships and civic service as outlined in the preceding chapter. 
 These three departments of study and active participation, 
 language and literature, science, history and civic or social 
 relationships, must find a place in every secondary school 
 which professes to be orientated towards life. In addition 
 every school should be a training ground, through its routine 
 and atmosphere, for social and moral progress. 
 
 §8. These are the features which all secondary schools 
 will have in common if they are to promote adjustment, and 
 this is what we mean by their being vocational. We may 
 now look broadly and generally at differences, tak/ng the 
 humanistic type, the nature type, and the crafts and commerce 
 type in order. The development of the curriculum of the 
 first, the humanistic type, will be clearly marked out. Look- 
 ing forward to the human relationships in the fabric of society 
 it will naturally turn first to literature, as the depository of 
 the achievements and ideals of men and as consequently the 
 natural avenue of approach to the sources of guidance and 
 inspiration which the past and the present have to offer. 
 To the study of the mother tongue " the instrument of 
 society " will be added the study of one, at least, of the classi- 
 cal languages for its humanistic content and its artistic form. 
 These literary sources will shed illumination on the human 
 problems which are to constitute the vocation of its pupils, at 
 least by way of historic parallels, analogies or contrasts, if 
 not also by way of historic continuity. For such vocations as 
 letters, law, politics, and the church, these classical studies 
 will also be in a measure directly vocational, since much of 
 the substance of what it is necessary that their students should 
 know, is only accessible through them.^^ To the mother 
 tongue and the classics the study of at least one living foreign 
 language and literature will be added. For in these days of 
 close international relations it is evidently essential that these 
 
 12 Cf. Barnett, Common Sense in Education and Teaching, p. 206. " The 
 social reformer, therefore, the politician, the poet, the historian, the lawyer, 
 the clergyman, none of these, to be masters of their tools, can afford to neglect 
 the classics."
 
 VOCATIONAL ADJUSTMENT 257 
 
 schools should offer access to the ethos and practical life of 
 at least one contemporary nation through its language and 
 literature. And it is impossible to over-estimate the value of 
 literature, native, classical, and modern, for aesthetic develop- 
 ment and the rational use of leisure hours, and consequently, 
 as we hold, for the indirect expansion and intensification of 
 the interests of vocational studies. Moreover, these literary 
 studies and the history course will each enhance the value 
 and interest of the other. At least three languages, then, 
 history with such geography as is. necessary to give it its 
 natural setting, and science with ancillary mathematics, 
 might well furnish the substance of the curriculum of the 
 type of secondary school which looks forward to what we 
 have called the humanities as the vocational sphere of its 
 pupils. We should add workshops which, with the science 
 laboratories, would promote adjustment to the first world as 
 the sphere of mechanical forces; and choral music which 
 would promote adjustment to the second as the Great Society 
 of corporate impulses and common aspirations. 
 
 The nature type will find its focus in the first world. In 
 the extension of science and in the development of most of 
 the other subjects in their relation to science, the differentia 
 of this type will be found. In classifying social functions in 
 order to justify types of secondary school we were careful, in 
 distinguishing the nature group, to note that those whose 
 vocation it is to control the natural forces of the first world 
 do so for the ultimate welfare of the members of the second. 
 In this sense the first w'orld is a means and the second an 
 end, while both find their ultimate meaning and significance 
 in their relation to the third. At the school stage, however, 
 the adaptation of natural forces to the needs and the ameliora- 
 tion of men will be a secondary and incidental matter. At a 
 later stage, that of the urjiversity, technical, or professional 
 school, that side of it will become the substantive one. It 
 must be preceded, however, by the investigation, in and for 
 themselves, of natural phenomena and laws. In our view 
 that investigation should include organic as well as inorganic 
 science. We enumerated medicine, engineering, agriculture 
 and locomotion as branches of science with special social 
 implications. From a narrowly vocational point of view it 
 may be thought that while the first and third of these
 
 258 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 spheres call for studies in organic as well as inorganic 
 science, for the second and fourth it may well be limited to 
 the latter. No doubt the engineer can get along without 
 general biology. It is not in the same relation to his voca- 
 tion as the inorganic sciences are to, say, the doctor's. But 
 it is just the narrow mechanical conception of the relation of 
 studies to vocations which is to be avoided. It is as perverse 
 as that negation of relation which the adherents of the theory 
 of formal discipline urge. We should maintain that for the 
 pupil proposing to take up law or letters schooling without 
 classical studies would be inadequate. And even more 
 strongly that for the pupil selecting some application of 
 science for his vocation, schooling which omitted all investi- 
 gation of organic life would be altogether inadequate. In- 
 asmuch as the classics are the product of a remote epoch 
 while biological science is the department of most modern 
 development, Greek or Latin might, in our view, be dropped 
 with less loss to literary equipment, than biology to scientific 
 equipment." It follows also that the literary studies in a 
 secondary school looking forward to the nature group of 
 vocations would lie mainly in the field of modern languages 
 because they record the results of scientific investigation. To 
 the mother tongue we should add French and German at 
 least. Mathematics as ancillary to scientific investigation 
 would also be pushed further. Laboratory work is, of course, 
 essential and well-equipped workshops with facilities for 
 technical drawing are a necessary adjunct. Choral singing 
 is as desirable here as in schools looking forward to humanis- 
 tic social service. History might well take on a more 
 economic character. 
 
 §9. The schools whielfliave crafts and commerce as their 
 objective require even more careful organisation, if only be- 
 cause the temptation to narrower, more intensive work is re- 
 enforced by short-sighted opinion and by the championship 
 of those who would exploit education for their own selfish 
 ends. It is necessary to be on the look out against both the 
 honest friend and the pirate of vocationalism. On account of 
 the importunity of both friends and enemies the via media is 
 more difficult to hold to. We may put it in this way that, 
 
 13 Cf. E. Ray Lancaster, The Kingdom of Man, Chapter I, for a 
 powerful statement of the claims of science, and especially biological science.
 
 VOCATIONAL ADJUSTMENT 259 
 
 while in the two types just considered the problem is to keep 
 life in view, in this third type it is to prevent it from domin- 
 ating schooling. Bearing this precaution in mind we may 
 consider a trades school for boys as typical of this crafts and 
 commerce group. What is sound theory for a trades school 
 applies, mutatis mutandis, to a commercial school and a 
 domestic science school for girls. It seems clear that the 
 centre of gravity of the curriculum must lie in the trade sub- 
 jects and occupations. This is consistent with the principle 
 observed in the suggestions regarding the humanistic and 
 the nature types. In the former it lay, we suggested, in 
 literature, and in the latter in science. In the schools we are 
 now considering it must lie in craft training. That is to say, 
 it must lie in the workshops. In bench-work, and later in 
 machine-work, the focus must be found. But just as accord- 
 ing to recent psychological theory the focus of consciousness 
 gets all its constraining power from its marginal implications, 
 so in these trades schools the workshops must find their mean- 
 ing and illumination in the attached class-rooms. This point 
 is vital. The boy will be found on the side of the short- 
 sighted friend and the long-sighted enemy we have referred 
 to. He will be content to potter about in the workshops all 
 day long. The intrinsic attraction of file, vice, chisel, and 
 lathe is overwhelming for him, itching as he is to participate 
 in the activities of the craft. But this is just the point at 
 which the long-sighted educationist must step in. He knows 
 that, while the novelty of tools and machines has constraint 
 enough now, monotony lurks ahead unless intelligence can 
 create a margin or fringe of scientific interest which will be a 
 fund to draw upon when novelty has gone. So the boy 
 must be carried off, willy-nilly, from the shop to the class- 
 room and the laboratory. He must be given not only 
 mechanical skill but intellectual insight. This might be 
 argued from the point of view of his material interests. If 
 he is to escape from the shop to the drawing-office, or the 
 designing-room, if he is to look forward to becoming a shop- 
 foreman or a works-manager all the mechanical skill in the 
 world will avail him nothing unless there is all round about 
 it, suffusing it with meaning and possibility, the light which 
 mventiveness and organising power, developed by scientific 
 study, alone can originate. But even for the average work-
 
 26o THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 man, the possibility of his craft being a self-satisfying voca- 
 tion, a sphere of self-realisation, depends on his being able to 
 realise the rationale of mechanical processes and, within his 
 capabilities, to reach out towards possibilities of modification 
 and improvement. So we must get the young workman from 
 the bench to the desk whether he likes it or not. 
 
 These crafts schools call for more attention than the two 
 first-named groups. The humanistic schools and the nature 
 schools will take care of themselves. Having a long history 
 behind them they have been the focus of educational thought 
 and controversy, while crafts schools are only now coming in 
 for serious attention. It may almost be said that the stability 
 of society depends on the success which can be achieved in 
 liberalising crafts and making them furnish a vocation within 
 which the craftsman can find room for the expansion of his 
 individuality. We may quote from the Interim Report of 
 the Committee on Adult Education to clinch this point. 
 After reviewing the progress of the evolution of the existing 
 industrial system and the effect that evolution has had in 
 calling for mechanical and monotonous labour, in eliminating 
 the personal factor from the relations of employer and 
 employee, and in lowering the aesthetic standard of craftsman- 
 ship, the report goes on to say : " The ideal industrial system 
 would, in a large measure, obliterate the sharp distinction 
 now made between ' technical ' and ' humane ' education, for 
 it would offer means of self-expression and development 
 which under the existing industrial organisation are too often 
 lacking, and would recognise the educational value of manual 
 processes and the influence of soundly manufactured com- 
 modities upon public taste and social values. If such a sys- 
 tem seems remote, it is the more important to encourage 
 through education the elevation of public taste, the growth 
 of a new pride in workmanship, and the rise of a new spirit 
 of service in industry. Adult education and, indeed, good 
 citizenship depend in no small degree, therefore, upon a new 
 orientation of our industrial outlook and activities. . . . 
 Education is to be measured essentially in terms of intellec- 
 tual accomplishment, power of esthetic appreciation and 
 moral character, and these have little or no opportunity for 
 realisation except through a harmonious environment."^* 
 
 1* Ministry of Reconstruction Report, p. 21.
 
 VOCATIONAL ADJUSTMENT 261 
 
 These words sound a grave warning which all re- 
 sponsible for education must take heed of. " It is a condition 
 and not a theory that confronts us."^'* The object to be 
 attained clearly is to rescue crafts from the grinding monotony 
 which industrial conditions have made, or are tending to 
 make, of them. And the first step is to convert monotony 
 into interest by flooding the craft itself to the fullest extent 
 possible with the light that science can throw upon it. The 
 second step is to give the craftsman social and humanistic 
 interests which will avail him when the interest of the craft 
 fails him, as it at best frequently must. Let us hear what 
 the Committee from whose report we have just quoted has to 
 say on this point. " From a careful consideration of the 
 information we have received, we have arrived at the con- 
 elusion that the effects of monotonous work depend largely 
 upon the strength of the intellectual interests of the worker 
 and upon the nature of the worker's temperament. Some- 
 thing also depends on the pace of working, as where the pro- 
 cess is performed with great rapidity the effects of monotony 
 are intensified. Young workers employed on monotonous 
 processes easily succumb to the deadening influences of their 
 daily work. And if they continue upon work of this charac- 
 ter, the evil results pointed out above appear almost inevit- 
 able. On the other hand, workpeople who already possess 
 wide interests strongly developed when they enter upon 
 monotonous work, may, if the hours be not excessive, not 
 only survive the crushing effects of their labour, but may find 
 counterbalancing advantages in the opportunity for reflec- 
 tion."^*^ 
 
 These counter-balancing advantages it is clearly the 
 imperative duty of the crafts school to provide. The three 
 subjects, literature, science and history must find a place in 
 these schools if anywhere. So important is this question of 
 the curriculum of the crafts or trades school that no apology 
 for a lengthy quotation from an article by one whose voca- 
 tion it is to organise them, is needed. He is Mr. W. J. 
 Home, a colleague of the writer's, charged with the organisa- 
 tion of technical education in Transvaal. He says: " In the 
 trades school the pupil should be actually engaged in the 
 
 IS Quoted by Bagley, The Educative Process, p. 60. 
 !•"' Ibid, p. 14.
 
 262 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 workshop, work-room, field or garden where the simpler 
 stages of productive work are begun, but under the condi- 
 tions of actual production. The phase of the training should 
 be such as to require trade clothing, trade hours, trade 
 standards of production, trade associations as far as possible, 
 knowledge of the trade cost of production, and possibly, a 
 sharing of the value of his (or her) output. Being thus in 
 contact with actual reality, some part of the time should be 
 set aside for the study of the technical and more theoretical 
 side of the trade now being followed. Here, however, it is 
 essential that such necessary subjects as mathematics, applied 
 science, art, history, and civics for citizenship, should not re- 
 quire such a style of presentation as to detach them from the 
 pupil's experience. This has undoubtedly been a serious 
 mistake in many schools and continuation classes for supple- 
 mental education. There has been too great a gulf between 
 the experience of the pupil and school-studies — too few points 
 of contact for real vocational efficiency. The curriculum of 
 the trades school must give the pupils manual dexterity with 
 a knowledge of tools, processes and materials gained through 
 actual practical work carried out under trade conditions as 
 nearly as possible — one of such conditions being that the 
 instructor must be a qualified tradesman with a certain 
 amount of teaching ability. From the class-room instruction 
 a further knowledge of materials, methods, trade calculations 
 and trade drawing must be obtainable. Other class-room 
 subjects would be technical mathematics, to the extent re- 
 quired in the industry in which a beginning as a worker is 
 being made, and the applied science upon which the prin- 
 ciples of the trade depend. Added to these would be such 
 general subjects as office practice, geography of the world 
 mainly as regards the production and transportation of raw 
 materials, history and civics as a guide to citizenship. The 
 ideal ought to be to train for a trade as though it were a pro- 
 fession — to educate the whole boy : to do more than merely 
 produce workers who will render more efficient service to 
 their employers, and to do this by instruction in the relation 
 of the individual to the community, in his civic function, in 
 the laws relating to personal and communal hygiene — in 
 addition to offering the pupils a reasonable prospect of main-
 
 VOCATIONAL ADJUSTMENT 263 
 
 taining themselves in adult lite."^^ The italics are ours. It 
 seems to us that the passage in question sums up the position. 
 Liberalising, humanising studies and activities are indeed 
 even more essential than the acquisition of dexterity in the 
 craft because the latter side of training goes on and may 
 overwhelm by its monotony unless interests are cultivated 
 which we call extraneous, though nothing which concerns 
 "the whole boy" is so. It is, for example, most desirable 
 that social and musical evenings, excursions, summer camps, 
 sports clubs and any organisation whatever which leads to 
 the rational employment of leisure and the expansion of life 
 through self-realisation, should be developed in connection 
 with crafts schools. And self-realisation means, as we shall 
 see later, the realisation of the social self. Economic efficiency 
 will depend, in part, on this awakening of the social self. 
 Scientific alertness to the possibilities of a craft, and wide 
 interests outside it, can do much to dispel the monotony 
 which is often inevitable under modern industrial conditions. 
 But more than that is needed. The craft must be felt to be a 
 real contribution, through economic efficiency, to social 
 stability and welfare. The ship-plate rivetter may find 
 stimulation in the thought that he is doing something for the 
 Unking-up process which must eventually make humanity 
 one. The village postman may go his rounds at all events 
 no less cheerfully for the thought that he, too, has his share, 
 however humble, in that same function. It is not merely a 
 place in the sun but a part in the economic and social univer- 
 sal, befitting his manhood and his powers, that the craftsman 
 can claim. The Kantian conception of humanity as a king- 
 dom of ends, not as a mob of means, is the last word on the 
 matter. The all-round man has gone with the division of 
 labour made necessary by production on a large scale; per- 
 haps some of his lost interest may be restored if the schools 
 can develop the all-round thinker.^* 
 
 1 10. The school facing commercial vocations presents 
 problems identical in nature with those of the crafts school. 
 Certain dangers are accentuated while others are diminished. 
 There is a real danger of " quick returns of profit " and of 
 courses prematurely cut short. It is easy to acquire fair 
 
 17 South African Journal of Science, Vol. XII, No. i8, pp. 706, 707. 
 
 18 Cf. Kerschensteiner, op. cit., Chapter V. 
 
 18
 
 264 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 facility in shorthand, typewriting, and office routine ; to com- 
 mand a moderate salary early ; and to pay the inevitable price 
 in the shape of imprisonment in a blind-alley. The danger 
 is greater than in the case of crafts because it is so easy to 
 forget that the arts just mentioned are purely instrumental 
 and may be called the three R's of commercial education. 
 Craftsmanship is solid and substantive, it requires a five, 
 six or even seven years' apprenticeship, and its portals are 
 jealously guarded by trades unions. When acquired it con- 
 stitutes a real vocation, whereas skill in shorthand and type- 
 writing and the like are merely a sort of first commercial out- 
 fit, not incomparable with a bag of tools. Language and 
 literature not the snippets called "commercial English," 
 Dutch, or what not; science, for commerce is a scientific pur- 
 suit; history and geography in their economic aspects; and 
 a thorough mastery of at least one modern language ; these 
 general studies are as essential in the commercial school as 
 in any other type. Then there is the technical side, properly 
 so called. Accounts as the index of results, bills of ex- 
 change, discounting, the laws of supply and demand : indeed, 
 such an insight into the science of economics as is appro- 
 priate to this stage of education, all these things must be 
 part of the course if the commercial school is to justify its 
 existence as a real secondary institution. The danger of 
 monotonous grinding toil is certainly less than in the case of 
 crafts, although abnormally long hours may sap real voca- 
 tional interest. That detail of organisation is, however, a 
 matter for social rather than educational theory and practice. 
 The main point is that there must be many foci of illumina- 
 tion if commercial schools are to satisfy a liberal conception 
 of vocational efficiency. What was said of social evenings, 
 clubs, excursions and the like applies equally to this type of 
 school. The applications of art, for example, to design, 
 might well be reflected in the curriculum. 
 
 There is another vocation, agriculture, for which train- 
 ing schools have not yet been developed to any extent. Yet 
 this the first vocation of man, and perhaps the most natural, 
 may find recruits in the future, if settlements of smaller hold- 
 ings are developed as an amelioration of industrial con- 
 ditions. Here in South Africa at any rate and probably in 
 the other dominions also, the problem is a pressing one. A
 
 VOCATIONAL ADJUSTMENT 265 
 
 school farm — the term farm-school has been appropriated for 
 a small preparatory school — might well be the rural parallel 
 of a crafts school. It would stand in the same relation to an 
 agricultural college as the crafts school to a technical college. 
 That is to say, it would meet the needs of the rank and file, 
 labour as distinguished from the proprietor, although in the 
 colonies the two frequently, even generally, coalesce. In 
 South Africa the problem is made more real by the existence 
 of native labourers. The direction and oversight of labour 
 falling to the European, the demand for his specific training 
 becomes the more imperative. A school-farm is a big under- 
 taking. Land, workshops, class-rooms and hostels are essen- 
 tial. The character of the farm would depend on the environ- 
 ment it served. A mixed farm — agriculture and stock — a 
 fruit farm, and a tobacco farm, might each form a valuable 
 training-school in Transvaal. Workshops would provide for 
 rough carpentry, smith's work, fitting and so on, to develop 
 handiness with farm machinery. Classrooms, some fitted for 
 laboratory work of a simple character, others to carry general 
 education up to a higher level would be necessary. The aim 
 of the instruction would be to develop scientific alertness and 
 to cultivate literature and other resources for leisure hours. 
 Training in music, instrumental and vocal, might well find a 
 place. Three or four years spent profitably on a school-farm 
 might well lift this vocation to the level of the highest. 
 
 §11. We have had boys in mind in this outline of the 
 essentials of training for vocational efficiency; but most of 
 the theory we have suggested applies equally to the education 
 of girls. And it is clear that while the home is woman's 
 natural field, she is destined to share equally, if in some 
 directions — crafts for example — indirectly rather than 
 directly, the burden and the privilege of social service with 
 men. For the humanistic vocations there seems to be no 
 valid reason for any substantive modification of the curricu- 
 lum. And the same may be said of the nature group save, 
 perhaps, that girls seem, speaking generally, better adapted 
 for final concentration on biological rather than physical 
 sciences. We say final because preliminary grounding in 
 physics and chemistry is, of course, essential. It will usually 
 be found that both theory and experience justify stress on the 
 arts of music and painting in both humanistic, nature, and
 
 266 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 craft schools for girls. In the last-named specialisation on 
 women's vocations would, of course, be made, and we need 
 not emphasise further the importance of going far beyond the 
 area of immediate vocational activity in order to find true 
 efficiency and interest within it. In respect of domestic 
 science and housewifery schools, the same general principles 
 of theory are relevant.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE AS A VEHICLE OF ADJUSTMENT 
 
 §1. Perhaps a word is necessary, by way of introduc- 
 tion, to explain why we propose to give a separate chapter to 
 the subject of language and literature. Our plan so far has 
 been to try and bring out the structure of the world of nature 
 and the world of civilisation so that the educative process of 
 adjustment to them within individual experience may become 
 clearer; and we propose to follow the same course in the third 
 book where the ideal world, the moral order, will be our topic. 
 Here we seem to be proposing to isolate a vehicle or instru- 
 ment, a more or less transparent medium and one, moreover, 
 with embarrassing refracting qualities. It would seem that 
 we are abandoning our synthetic principle and leaving our- 
 selves open to the charge of formalism which we have often, 
 by implication at all events, ourselves levelled. The discus- 
 sion which follows should make it clear that we are proposing 
 no such sacrifice of principle. The aim is to bring out the 
 peculiar and intimate part which language and literature play 
 in that very process of adjustment which it is our endeavour 
 to elucidate. These instruments or media will not be in, the 
 focus of attention primarily as subjects of instruction de- 
 tached from the worlds they mediate. We shall rather regard 
 them as part and parcel, as almost fusing and coalescing with 
 the very substance and fabric, of those worlds. 
 
 Our point of departure is, then, again adjustment, as it 
 will be our goal. Another word of explanation may also be 
 appropriate at this point. With the reaction against ver- 
 balism in education, by which we mean what, from our point 
 of view, we may call spurious adjustment to reality — seeing 
 life, like the Lady of Shalott, in a mirror that reveals only 
 
 267
 
 268 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 shadows — we are entirely at one. Inevitably we can only 
 know most of life, present and past, indirectly through the 
 written record; and knowledge which does not somewhere 
 end in what Professor James called the "sting of reality" 
 hardly deserves the name. But that reaction is a totally 
 different thing from failure to appreciate language as a potent 
 instrument of adjustment and literature, as that which holds 
 the world's best thought in safe keeping and is, consequently, 
 a permanent source of pure delight. Besides, it remains as 
 true as ever, indeed it becomes more obviously true as know- 
 ledge accumulates with the years, that a man who does not 
 know his way about among books and has no anlage for ex- 
 ploration in that field, will remain relatively uneducated. 
 Again, it is essential that education should place him at the 
 growing edges of knowledge and they are accessible for the 
 majority and in most areas only in the records of investiga- 
 tion. Heuristic methods have obvious limits. 
 
 We shall presently consider in some detail the instru- 
 mental value of language and the substantive value of litera- 
 ture for the process of adjustment. A summary survey as a 
 preliminary will provide a schema to attend with, which 
 should become articulate as we go on. With regard to the 
 first world, language is the means by which our exploration 
 of it is fixed, and our conquest of it, such as it may be, com- 
 pleted. That is clearly true of what we casually observe. 
 Only those facts are ours which we can clearly formulate in 
 words, as many a teacher, approaching his task lightly, soon 
 learns to his cost. The test of observation of this casual sort 
 is whether we can, as we say, commit an accurate description 
 of it to writing. And when it is a question of observation 
 aiming at scientific exactness, language is an indispensable 
 tool. A diagram, microscopic slide, or photograph, can 
 only be interpreted by this same flexible instrument, now 
 aiding analysis and now synthesis in the process of guiding 
 attention. As to the second and third worlds, language is 
 their very framework. It mediates the " addition of a trans- 
 parent and responsive world of minds to the dead opaqueness 
 of external things."^ The second and third worlds differ 
 finally from the first. They are practically non-existent for 
 animals other than man. For a dog the "dead opaqueness 
 
 1 See p. 154.
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 269 
 
 of external things " is, at all events, an objective reality ; but 
 it is questionable whether even his domestication has pro- 
 duced anything accurately describable as a social continuum, 
 and it is certain, of course, that to talk of a moral continuum 
 for him would be to talk nonsense. And the main reason no 
 doubt is his lack of language as a vehicle.^ To differentiate 
 between the function of language in respect of the second 
 world and the third is not easy, for they overlap and inter- 
 penetrate to a very considerable extent. We may suggest 
 that, while it is the vehicle and framework of both, and is to 
 that extent objective, its relation to the third is, in addition, 
 one of subjective reinforcement; for, as we shall in the third 
 book see, the objective moral order must be maintained by 
 continuous individual acts of creation, for which subjective 
 process language is a peculiarly essential instrument. We 
 may put it in this way. The social world stands out objec- 
 tively a " transparent and responsive " continuum largely by 
 virtue of language ; while the moral world is recreated and 
 re-inforced subjectively, from hour to hour, just in proportion 
 as moral ideals can be discriminated in the psychoplasm,^ and 
 for this discrimination their formulation in language is in- 
 dispensable. 
 
 We may also note here how, with the progress of 
 cesthetic development, language as a vehicle and the 
 thought which it carries tend to fuse and coalesce. Let us 
 look at three illustrations of poetic genius at its pinnacle of 
 achievement. We take the first from the immortal soliloquy 
 on sleep which Shakespeare makes Henry IV. deliver ; 
 
 " Oh thou dull god . . . 
 Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast 
 Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains 
 In cradle of the rude imperious surge "* 
 
 The second from where Perdita finds in flowers ai\ outlet for 
 her pure and ardent soul : 
 
 " Daffodils, 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty, "^ 
 
 2 Ward, Psychological Principles, p. 286. 
 
 ^ See p. 19. 
 
 * King Henry IV, Part II, Act III, Scene II, lines 15-20. 
 
 ^ The Winter's Tale, II, iv., 1 18-120.
 
 270 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 and the third from the sustained magnificence of Browning's 
 Grammarian's Funeral : 
 
 " Our low life was the level's and the night's; 
 He's for the morning. "^ 
 
 In these passages form and content are with such consummate 
 art commingled, that we cannot say which it is that lifts us up 
 and holds us enthralled. They are fused in a living unity. 
 Language has here ceased to be a vehicle : it is one with the 
 great thoughts which inspire it. That is why literature like 
 this lives on in a way which, perhaps, even the masterpieces 
 of music and painting cannot approach. The union of form 
 and content once, as here, caught and sealed, is eternal. It 
 is not subject to decay or disintegration. It is there, in un- 
 fading lustre, for all time. Schooling which fails to ensure 
 adjustment to beauty like this, has surely failed very 
 grievously. 
 
 §2. But we must hark back and examine briefly what 
 psychology and logic have to teach about language as an aid 
 to actual conscious process and to valid conscious process 
 respectively. For before the instrument and the process it 
 facilitates fuse in the aesthetic unity of literature and, to some 
 extent also, in the unity of logical language, there is a pre- 
 liminary stage, essentially the stage of education when they 
 remain, in intimate association of necessity, but yet not so 
 wedded as they ultimately will be. Language often runs 
 ahead of its full and precise implications, and is apt to lead 
 the speaker or writer into the labyrinth of error or the bog of 
 confusion ; just as coins, in the hands of the improvident, are 
 used without any adequate appreciation of what constitutes 
 real value. So also there is a corresponding negative weak- 
 ness, looking at the matter from the same point of view, that 
 of the instrument. Thought may run ahead of its vehicle 
 and may evaporate before it can add to the sum-total of real 
 acquisition just because the vehicle is not flexible enough to 
 carry its intricacies and ramifications. The logical ideal is 
 the same as the aesthetic one we have just illustrated from 
 literature; that is to say, it is attained when instrument and 
 mental process are adequate to each other and blend in that 
 
 6 11 23, 24.
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 271 
 
 unity and coherence which is characteristic of logical thought, 
 speech and writing; and we may note that the difficulty of 
 attainment is increased by the social nature of language, 
 which, from the point of view we occupy here, is at once its 
 strength and its weakness. We share through language in 
 common thought, in the general mind, but there is some risk 
 in drawing upon this our legitimate inheritance. We may 
 masquerade in borrowed plumes which do not fit, and which 
 may reveal their alien and so far useless character at some 
 critical moment when our individuality, our own unaided 
 power, is at stake. We have, therefore, to be clear about 
 this relation of instrument and mental process, if we are to 
 direct the educative routine which aims at their better adjust- 
 ment. 
 
 Psychological and logical theory are adequate for guid- 
 ance in this respect, for the problem is an old one. We may 
 safely refer the reader to the full and illuminating discussion 
 to be found in Dr. Stout's Analytic Psychology.^ The 
 analytic standpoint is perhaps more useful for a theory of 
 education, although the keen student will do well to become 
 thoroughly familiar with the genetic account of the relation 
 between language and thinking also; and he will find the 
 same author's ManuaP very suggestive for that purpose. 
 The main points for us seem to be these. The first is the 
 conventional nature of language as a system of expressive 
 signs and, what is an immediate consequence of this, the arti- 
 ficial character of the bond between a word and its signific- 
 ance, whether complete and precise as in the ideal world of 
 logical thought, or fragmentary and indefinite as in the actual 
 world of individual conscious process — education being the 
 means whereby the actual is progressively, but never finally, 
 adjusted to the ideal. The conventional character of the sign 
 and the artificial character of the bond are apt to be forgotten. 
 Teachers are prone to pass from the consciousness of the 
 existence of the link between a word and its developed apper- 
 ceptive system in their own minds to the assumption of the 
 existence of the same link, and the same things linked, in the 
 minds of their pupils. They are apt to forget the slow pro- 
 cess of development of apperceptive systems and consequently 
 
 "f Vol. II, Chapter X. 
 8 Book IV, Chapter V.
 
 272 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 of the significance of words. And words are the keys Hber- 
 ating the acquisitive power of these systems. 
 
 On the other hand — and this is the second point — it is 
 most necessary to reaHse the command which the word gives 
 over the idea or the apperceptive system, artificial though 
 the bond may be. Dr. Ward says: " The form and colour 
 of what we call an ' orange ' are perhaps even more intimately 
 combined with the sound and utterance of this word than with 
 the taste and fragrance which we regard as strictly essential 
 to the thing. But, whereas these physical attributes often 
 evade us, we can always command the nominal attribute in so 
 far, that is, as this depends on movements of articulation. "° 
 This ready command is probably due to two general prin- 
 ciples. One is the working of heredity which appears to 
 launch the child with a tendency to utterance, whether we 
 lean to Lamarckism with regard to the transmissability of 
 acquired characteristics or not. The other is the general 
 tendency of an idea to run over into motor activity — in this 
 case the production of the "articulation-sound complex" — 
 which the late Professor James,^" following Bain,^^ has so 
 clearly demonstrated. Moreover, we have to note the great 
 command which the child has over his vocal organs and the 
 derived command over percepts and generic images, and over 
 these again as media of concepts which mental process is 
 constantly developing. In fact we have to take account of 
 the mental economy in this command over the "articulation- 
 sound complex " whereby there is a natural and easy tran- 
 sition, even with the young, from the use of words as expres- 
 sive signs to their use as symbols for thought. On the one 
 hand we are faced with the fact that words rapidly become 
 counters easy to manipulate, and consequently subject to mis- 
 use, as we have noted in the preceding paragraph. On the 
 other we have the fact that, while the halo of ideas may be 
 extremely tenuous, as Burke noted, ^" it is seldom so thin as 
 not to be effective in preventing flagrant misuse of words. 
 This fixating power of words is clearly one which the teacher 
 must make full use of. The more a pupil becomes articulate 
 in expression the more likely is it that his ideas will become 
 
 • Psychological Principles, p. 296. 
 
 10 Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, pp. 522-528. 
 
 11 Stout, Manual of Psychology, pp. 485, 486. 
 
 12 Stout, Analytic Psychology, Vol. I, p. 80.
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 273 
 
 organised as knowledge. And it is safe to say that, while 
 the teacher should be constantly on the alert to sound and 
 plumb the ideas which the words evoke, he should encourage 
 to the fullest extent possible the use of this natural and per- 
 haps hereditary instrument of speech, just because it is con- 
 stantly clarifying and organising the system of ideas which 
 it carries along with it. It is notorious that children coming 
 from homes where they have been encouraged freely to ex- 
 press themselves, and even to reach out to the universe of dis- 
 course appropriate to their parents rather than themselves, 
 are far more acquisitive and develop far more rapidly than 
 others less fortunate in this respect, when they come into the 
 environment of organised schooling. Above all it is neces- 
 sary to remember that the development of concepts and con- 
 ceptual thinking is a gradual process never attaining finality 
 with the most mature ; so that any short-sighted postpone- 
 ment of the use of terms until their full logical implication is 
 understood, or per contra, any attempt at a premature 
 " rounding off " of concepts which might seem to justify the 
 use of the terms which are their vehicle, is likely to defeat 
 itself. Perhaps one of the soundest of all principles of 
 method is that which recognises the constant inter-play of the 
 empirical and the rational within experience. We need not 
 hesitate to let a boy talk freely of gravity although his con- 
 ception of it may be totally inadequate ; provided, of course, 
 we take care that he is constantly progressing towards an 
 adequate idea. We may go further and assert that a 
 pedantically accurate use even of technical language is not 
 by any manner of means an aim of sound pedagogy. The 
 universe of discourse is, after all, a universe full of play and 
 give and take. We enjoy Shakespeare not least when he is 
 not a purist; and Ball's " Story of the Heavens " has been a 
 via media to many a happy hour for the amateur astronomer. 
 The two points of psychological theory we have empha- 
 sised arise out of the nature of the relation between a word 
 and the percept, idea, or apperceptive system to which it is 
 linked. We may summarise them by saying that, while the 
 first brings out the danger of a facile use of words, unless it is 
 constantly checked by reference to the mental content which 
 is, for the individual using them, their meaning, the second 
 brings out the unique value of words in giving command
 
 274 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 over mental content. The third we wish to note is an exten- 
 sion of the second, and is illustrated when words are com- 
 bined into sentences and discourse. This extension has been 
 implied in what has been said above but we must now look 
 at it more closely. We come at this point to language as 
 pre-eminently a tool or instrument of thinking in its double 
 aspect as analysis and synthesis, to the elaborating and per- 
 fecting of which man owes much of his mastery over the 
 world of nature and most of his success in constructing the 
 social and the moral worlds. Although the analytic and syn- 
 thetic functions of language are almost indistinguishable in 
 mature thought, being aspects or moments of what is an 
 indivisible act, we may for convenience of exposition look at 
 them separately. We may take as an illustration the eluci- 
 dation of the features which make a straight line an accurate 
 representation of a force. A force may be said to be com- 
 pletely determined if (a) its point of application, (b) its direc- 
 tion, and (c) its magnitude are know^n. Also we can draw a 
 straight line (a) from any point, (b) in any direction, and 
 (c) of any length. Hence a line may be drawn which will 
 accurately represent a force. And it is evident that the pro- 
 cess of judgment whereby we arrive at the correspondence of 
 force and line in respect of these three determining data, is 
 very materially facilitated by the command which the terms, 
 point of application and starting-point, direction and magni- 
 tude give us over the ideas which they mediate. Our power 
 over the words enables us to hold in abstraction the three 
 elements in each complex. In the same way the terms 
 melody and rhythm enable us to attend separately to these 
 two elements which are combined in the unity of a musical 
 phrase. Dr. Stout examines exhaustively how command of 
 the words makes it easy for a child to analyse such a complex 
 of perception as a flying sparrow and thus obtain command 
 over the subject — predicate relation, the judgment. ^^ We 
 may add as a fourth illustration the value of such a term as 
 psychoplasm" in giving us through its analytic and fixating 
 power a hold over such a difficult and evasive idea as that of 
 consciousness as a continuum. So that along the whole 
 gamut of conscious process, from the simplest percept to the 
 
 13 Analytic Psychology, Vol. II, pp. 198, i99- 
 1* See pp. 19, 277.
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 275 
 
 most abstract idea, we see the fixating and controlling func- 
 tion of the word, the "articulation-sound complex." 
 
 Its synthetic function is no less striking, and it is but 
 another side of the one process. The analytic and synthetic 
 functions are, indeed, hke the concave and convex sides of a 
 curve. They are aspects of a single whole. This will be- 
 come clear if we consider each of the illustrations we have just 
 used. The word magnitude applied to a line or a force, 
 enables us, by analysis, to hold apart this feature of a whole, 
 but it does so just because it calls up the idea or apperceptive 
 system, organised in consciousness through our past experi- 
 ence of magnitudes, and by synthesis appropriates with ease 
 this new instance of it. Through a further elaboration of this 
 same synthetic process, the combination of the terms point 
 of application, direction, and magnitude of a force, in a sen- 
 tence, facilitates the mutual interplay of the corresponding 
 ideas or systems and the conception of a force in its synthetic 
 unity emerges. We need not illustrate the point further. If 
 we consider this analytic-synthetic function in its full bear- 
 ings we shall be justified in describing language as an archi- 
 tectonic instrument in its relation to thought. 
 
 We may conclude this part of our discussion of language 
 with a reference to Bergson.'' His is the philosophic point of 
 view, but it is closely bound up with the psychological and logi. 
 cai aspects of the question. He is considering the ultimate 
 epistemological differentiae of instinct and intelligence and 
 one of them he finds in the fact that " the instinctive sign is 
 adherent, the intelligent sign is mobile,^® and by sign he 
 means language. " If the ants," he says, " have a language, 
 the signs which compose it must be very limited in number, 
 and each of them, once the species is formed, must remain 
 invariably attached to a certain object or a certain operation : 
 the sign is adherent to the thing signified. In human 
 society, on the contrary ... a language is required 
 which makes it possible to be always passing from what is 
 known to what is yet to be known. There must be a 
 language whose signs — which cannot be infinite in number — 
 are extensible to an infinity of things. This tendency of the 
 sign to transfer itself from one object to another is charac- 
 
 15 Creative Evolution, pp. 165-169. 
 1^ Ibid p. 167.
 
 276 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 teristic of human language. "^^ The transference takes place 
 in the exercise of that architectonic function of analysis and 
 synthesis which we have just illustrated. He has a charac- 
 teristically lucid passage where he describes how words, 
 originally applied to things, come to be the vehicle of ideas 
 also, which we must be allowed to quote : " It is only because 
 the word is mobile, because it flies from one thing to another, 
 that the intellect was sure to take it, sooner or later, on the 
 wing, while it was not settled on anything, and apply it to 
 an object which is not a thing and which, concealed till then, 
 awaited the coming of the word to pass from darkness to 
 light. "^» 
 
 There is a body of logical doctrine dealing with the con- 
 notation and denotation of terms, definition and classifica- 
 tion, which is pertinent to the instrumental function of 
 language we are considering, and is extremely important and 
 valuable for a theory of education. It is, however, fully 
 treated in the text-books on logic and the applications of logic 
 to education, so that we need do no more than refer the 
 student to it. 
 
 §3. So far, language as a cognitive instrument has 
 been our point of view. It is also instrumental in relation to 
 emotional and moral life and a note on it in this regard will 
 afford a natural transition to our consideration of literature as 
 substantive in contrast to language as instrumental. The 
 two aspects are, as a matter of fact, almost one at this point. 
 In illustration of the way literature can heighten emotional 
 life we may quote from Swinburne's " Itylus " : 
 
 " Sister, my sister, O fleet sweet swallow, 
 
 Thy way is long to the sun and the south ; 
 But I, fulfilled of my heart's desire, 
 Shedding my song upon height, upon hollow, 
 From tawny body and sweet small mouth 
 Feed the heart of the night with fire." 
 
 Here we have the master liberating through the beauty and 
 the sweep of his aesthetic synthesis, a flood of emotion. A 
 wealth of association which has been accumulating without 
 our knowledge is suddenly revealed. We find that our com- 
 munion with nature has been deeper than we knew. The 
 
 17 Ibid p. 166. 
 i« Ibid 168-169.
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 277 
 
 mind is suffused with emotional warmth ; and the flash of 
 appreciation which sets the tide free is parallel to the sudden 
 illumination which such a term as psychoplasm throws on the 
 obscure region of psychological analysis. It is at once a re- 
 inforcement and a discharge of emotional momentum. The 
 same thing happens in the moral life when we suddenly come 
 across the crystallisation in literature of an ethical principle 
 as in Tennyson's : 
 
 " How dull it is to pause, to make an end, 
 To rust unburnishcd, not to shine in use." 
 
 The moral consciousness expands and glows with the revela- 
 tion of moral truth which had been, perhaps, vaguely felt but 
 now stands out in the vehicle of language. The higher self 
 is re-enforced and another upward step is taken ; and litera- 
 ture points the way. Language has here ceased to be merely 
 an instrument. It has become a stimulus guiding and re- 
 enforcing moral impetus. " We cultivate refined pleasure 
 in noble literary work by stirring up their [our pupils'] minds, 
 as far as we can, those ideas which respond to the magnifi- 
 cent, picturesque, or subtle ideas enshrined in great books. 
 Thoughts not entirely mean, lying somewhere like dull 
 sparks in ourselves, burst into flame in the atmosphere about 
 great writers."^* Such passages help to make stable the 
 orientation of the individual to three worlds : nature, civilisa- 
 tion and morality. 
 
 So far it is just this orientation of the individual and the 
 part language plays in it, that we have had in mind. And it 
 may be thought that there is no other point of view than this 
 individualistic one. Of course it is recognised that language 
 is primarily a means of intercourse and is so far a social 
 phenomenon. But it may be held that, while it is social 
 in origin and in function also so far as it is an instrument of 
 communication, there is a real sense in which, in the form of 
 literature, it is a medium for the play of non-social, i.e., indi- 
 vidualistic feelings. Literature is a source of solitary enjoy- 
 ment : it is often a means of escape from our fellows and of 
 shutting ourselves off from society. It is the haven of indi- 
 vidual leisure. All this is true but partial ; it is not the whole 
 truth. It is true that literature is often a means of escape 
 
 1^ Barnett, Common Sense in Education and Teaching, p. 172.
 
 2/8 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 from the familiar, the dull, and the uncongenial in society, 
 and is, so far, a vehicle for individualism. But it is also a 
 means of entrance into another social world, one of the 
 imagination, where the reader finds a sphere of action or 
 thought which he can share with the writer, a world where 
 adventure replaces routine, and the congenial the dull. It 
 seems, in the mirage of phantasy, to be a more appropriate 
 theatre for the development of the self. But our point is that 
 literature, like the language it originates in, retains its social 
 character even when it appears most to pander to indi- 
 vidualism. It mediates a transfer from one social environ- 
 ment to another. 
 
 §4. We come to the question of language and literature 
 in their most fundamental purpose which is to form a vehicle 
 for that " transparent and responsive world of minds." For 
 that world language is what matter — by contrast " the dead 
 opaqueness of external things " — is for the first the world of 
 nature. It gives to it substantiality, continuity, and above 
 all, objectivity. We have examined the political, national, 
 religious and economic relationships which make up the 
 social fabric. Language and literature are on a different 
 footing. They are co-extensive with all these different rela- 
 tionships and furnish the medium of their permanent exist- 
 ence. No doubt these relationships have the same objective 
 reality as the material world itself ; but being all ultimately 
 of a mental or spiritual texture they require a medium or 
 vehicle which will make them possible of manipulation, and 
 such a medium language and literature provide. So that our 
 treatment of these must change. So far we have regarded 
 them as instrumental and subjective ; as the means by which 
 the individual reaches out towards, captures, and, so far as 
 in him lies, makes permanent his conquest over objective 
 reality, whether material or spiritual. Now we must consider 
 them as substantive and objective, as at once the texture and 
 the depository of spiritual achievement which education 
 should lead him to claim, so far as in him lies, as his 
 inheritance. 
 
 We mav begin by noting the continuity and unity of 
 language and literature. For, on the one hand, the best of 
 literature is not at a uniform level of excellence : the passages 
 which reach heights whence they dominate the ages are few,
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 279 
 
 and thev are linked togelher by others which make the tran- 
 sition in work-a-day garb.-" Otherwise Hght and shade which 
 are necessary, both from the point of view of construction and 
 appreciation, would be lacking. And, on the other hand, we 
 ought to try to lift up and refine language as a vehicle of 
 social intercourse, whether spoken or written. As Mr. 
 Barnett says, "social sympathy and the grace and ease of 
 social intercourse are matters of real and abiding import- 
 ance.""' It is to be remembered that the adjustment we are 
 to seek implies the power to talk easily and naturally, to con- 
 vey our meaning with point and without verbosity, and to 
 write a letter or a description of an event in the same way. 
 That adjustment will not be secured if the literary models we 
 introduce to our pupils remain high and dry, cut off from 
 any relation to our daily intercourse, and operative as 
 standards only in a remote and rare atmosphere. There is no 
 reason why ordinary language should not now and then rise 
 to literary grace and ease just as literature must sometimes 
 make its transitions in ordinary language. "The poet may 
 be made by the joys and sorrows of earthly experience. It is 
 sometimes said, indeed, that every man becomes a poet once 
 at least in his lifetime."" At any rate, we must do what we 
 can to make the literature our pupils read an operative factor 
 in the refinement of the language they habitually use. 
 " Power of appreciation . . . can be so cultivated that 
 the art of expression is easier. The more carefully we read 
 and examine the work of great writers, the easier is it for our- 
 selves, when we speak, to say what we mean. This does not 
 necessarily imply that we make models of great books pro- 
 pounded for our study : it means rather that every effort to 
 discover the secret of the rhetorical power of a fine passage 
 or the ethical influence of a great book quickens the divine 
 spark in ourselves."'^ 
 
 It is worth while pursuing this point, tlie oneness of 
 language and literature, a little further. It would seem best 
 to recognise frankly what life teaches every day, namely, 
 that pleasure and perspective are to be had at all levels, but 
 that change of altitude is good for mental as for physical 
 
 20 Cf. Quiller-Couch, On the Art of \\'iiting, Lecture \V. 
 
 21 Op. cit., pp. 202, 203. 
 
 22 Adams, op. cit., p. 170. 
 
 23 Barnett, op. cit., p. 171. 
 
 19
 
 28o THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 well-being. We ought to climb to the hill-tops of literature 
 as frequently as we can, so as to catch the vistas stretching 
 away, and feel the stir and expansion they bring to our 
 emotional life. But the air is at once too rare and too 
 stimulating to make them a permanent residence for ordinary 
 mortals. On the other hand the low levels — " the unlettered 
 plain, the vulgar thorpe" — on which we are destined to pass 
 most of our days, are not without pleasant bye-ways of their 
 own ; and, as we have suggested, there is no reason why the 
 light from the hill-tops should not penetrate them. The air 
 below may sometimes become heavy and overcharged with 
 the common-place and the sordid, but there is always the 
 possibility, even in most crowded hours, of an excursion to 
 the hills. In plain words we must improve, not despise, the 
 language of the street, the workshop, the market-place and 
 the home. We must refine the currency of social life and 
 with it the newspaper and the periodical — which we cannot 
 do without. The novel and the play to which we may assign, 
 with biographical and descriptive work, the middle levels, 
 will, if there can be a general uplift, catch something of the 
 spirit and atmosphere of the master-pieces. Literature is not 
 something apart but just the perfecting, by the highest art, 
 of the natural and the commonplace. It is the apotheosis of 
 language. The doctrine of Kant with regard to the sublime 
 and the beautiful is pertinent here. Objects— literature 
 among them — are beautiful for us in proportion as we can, 
 through imagination and understanding, combine their 
 elements with ease. They are beautiful for us, that is, if our 
 powers and our personality can find free play in contem- 
 plating them. "The mere form of the object, in the unex- 
 pected and unaccountable sympathy by which, as imagination 
 combines its elements, it almost leaps forward to harmonise 
 with the requirements of understanding, constitutes its 
 beauty."^* And the feeling of the sublime " is due to the 
 revelation that we have a higher vocation and a nobler 
 humanity, which commands the imagination by a vague idea 
 and keeps us tranquil amid the grandeurs of nature.'^* 
 Appreciation of the beautiful and the sublime, in nature or 
 in art, depends on subjective power as well as objective 
 form. To resume our metaphor, the way to the hill-tops of 
 
 2i Wallace's Kant, p. 194.
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 281 
 
 literature is by a path which starts from the plains below. 
 There are few vistas for those who are never sure of their 
 footing. 
 
 To repeat, the way to literature and to literary apprecia- 
 tion is through developing power over language as a medium 
 of ordinary intercourse; just as we have seen, the way to this 
 very development is made easier through the growth of 
 literary appreciation. Language and literature are one, in 
 mutual and organic relation. "Without training in the use 
 of language, literature cannot be fully understood or properly 
 appreciated. Without the study of literature there can be no 
 mastery over language. "^'' It follows that the literature of 
 the home language, the mother tongue, should be the first 
 field explored. W^e need not be too anxious or too careful 
 about the selection, at any rate so far as our anxiety concerns 
 capacity for appreciation. The young are readier to climb 
 high up the hill and roam freely over it than we usuall}^ 
 imagine. We shall be guided by common-sense, of course; 
 starting out along the broad high road of romance : of bold 
 outlines, adventures, stirring deeds, and high hopes. Fiction 
 will gradually be leavened with fact, as represented by the 
 historical novel, for example, and this will lead on to the 
 classical historians. Poetry we must have plenty of, for 
 rhythm and melody are good things of life which the young 
 hunger after once the taste is got. It will be of the ballad 
 and lyrical form at first; then epic; then dramatic. A good 
 anthology of verse is a standing source of delight at every 
 stage from early adolescence onwards. Selections from 
 Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning are good for all; and, 
 as to Shakespeare, I can testify from a recent experience of 
 my own to the intense delight which a class of Dutch boys 
 and girls of an average age of about sixteen years had got 
 from the reading of Julius Ccesar. And if this is true for 
 them, how much more true must it be for those to whom 
 Shakspeare speaks in their native language. As to a general 
 principle of selection there is no better one than that laid 
 down by Mr. Barnett. " Literary interest," he says, " is, at 
 bottom, an interest in man. We are first of all interested in 
 his doings, then in his thoughts. When we are children, it 
 
 -5 Board of Education ("ircular No. 753. par. 2. It is full of sound ihoor} 
 and practical suggestion.
 
 282 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 is action that fascinates us ; as we get older we know that the 
 thought, the thought sometimes expressed in the ' winged 
 word,' is the truer life of man. That is why young people 
 and people who remain young love romances, and why people 
 who know the world and have thought about it find their 
 highest literary pleasure in works that deal with action reflec- 
 tively."^® And pupils of the fourth, fifth and sixth forms, 
 imbued with the boldness and spontaneity of youth, are ready 
 to " deal with action reflectively." ,\Ve may add that pupils 
 of all secondary forms revel in the literature which catches 
 and throws back the beauties of nature. 
 
 §5. In order to give point and perhaps practical sugges- 
 tion to these general considerations, we propose to submit a 
 scheme of reading in English developed for Transvaal 
 schools, and adopted by such of them as find it helpful. It is 
 only put forward as illustrative. It seems to be beyond all 
 question sound to leave the elaboration of a scheme to the 
 master or mistress"^ in charge of literature. In this subject, 
 indeed in all but especially in this, the teacher should have a 
 free hand. Within the broad limits set by sound theory 
 and experience, the literature scheme should reflect the indi- 
 viduality and even the idiosyncrasy of the school. We say 
 the school deliberately because pupils and form masters or 
 mistresses, as well as the specialist in charge of the subject, 
 should be called in counsel. There are innumerable paths 
 which open out on to the hill-tops and the excursion will be 
 the more delightful in proportion as the choice is free and of 
 common accord. 
 
 The course includes set works to be read in school and 
 other works for home reading. The scheme provides for dis- 
 cussion in class of the books read at home, for the voluntary 
 recitation of a favourite poem or prose extract, and for the 
 acting and declamation of passages or scenes. The 
 "standards" correspond nearly enough to the English 
 scheme of organisation of primary pupils and the fifth form 
 is the matriculation form. 
 
 26 Op. rit., pp. 179, 180. 
 
 27 TliP course for home reading was drawn up by Miss Clephan, English 
 mistrpss in thf Piftoria High School for Girls
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 28:3 
 
 A C 
 
 jurse 
 
 in English Literature 
 
 Standard IV 
 
 
 
 Reading at home 
 
 and 
 
 in school of some of the following : 
 
 Ruskin 
 
 - 
 
 King of the Golden 
 River. 
 
 
 Kingsley 
 
 - 
 
 The Water Babies. 
 
 
 
 
 Robert Bruce. 
 
 " Told to the 
 
 Bunyan 
 
 - 
 
 Pilgrim's Progress. 
 
 y Children " 
 
 Robinson Crusoe. 
 
 
 
 series. 
 
 Uncle Tom's Cabin. 
 
 
 
 
 Tales from the Iliad. 
 
 
 
 
 Tales from the Odyssey. 
 
 
 
 Molesworth 
 
 - 
 
 An Enchanted Garden. 
 
 Molesworth 
 
 - 
 
 The Cuckoo Clock. 
 
 Ewing 
 
 - 
 
 Jan of the Windmill. 
 
 Evving 
 
 - 
 
 Six to Sixteen. 
 
 Hans Anderson's Tales. 
 
 
 (Nelson) 
 
 - 
 
 Tom and Maggie Tulliver. 
 
 Nesbitt 
 
 - 
 
 The Red House. 
 
 Standard V 
 
 
 
 Reading at home 
 
 and 
 
 in school of some of the following : 
 
 Harris 
 
 - 
 
 Uncle Remus. 
 
 Ewing 
 
 - 
 
 Six to Sixteen. 
 
 Kipling 
 
 - 
 
 The First Jungle Book. 
 
 Macgregor 
 
 - 
 
 Stories from the Ballads. 
 
 Marshall 
 
 - 
 
 Stories from Robin Hood. 
 
 (Jack) - - 
 
 - 
 
 Stories from Arabian Nights. 
 
 Lang 
 
 - 
 
 Stories from Shakspeare. 
 
 Lang 
 
 - 
 
 Stories from Don Quixote. 
 
 Lewis Carroll 
 
 - 
 
 Alice in Wonderland. 
 
 Strang and Aston 
 
 - 
 
 Claude the Archer. 
 
 (Bell) 
 
 - 
 
 Mrs. Over the Way's Remembrances 
 
 Yonge 
 
 - 
 
 Book of Golden Deeds. 
 
 Scott 
 
 - 
 
 Ivanhoe. 
 
 Ewing 
 
 - 
 
 The Brownies* 
 
 Lang 
 
 - 
 
 Joan of Arc. 
 
 Strang and Aston 
 
 - 
 
 In the New Forest. 
 
 
 Standard VI or Form I 
 
 (i) Reading of selected poems. Poems of action as well as 
 narrative and descriptive poems are appropriate. 
 
 (ii) Reading at home and in school of some of the following : 
 
 Haggard - - . King Solomon's Mines. 
 
 Stevenson ... Treasure Island. 
 
 Stevenson ... Kidnapped. 
 
 Zimmen - - . Gods and Heroes of the North. 
 
 Hawthorne - - A Wonder Book. 
 
 Kingsley . - . Hereward the Wake.
 
 284 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 Scott 
 
 L. Alcott 
 
 Hoffman 
 
 Hoffman 
 
 Porter 
 
 Dickens 
 
 Alcott 
 
 Hope 
 
 Dickens 
 
 Kipling 
 
 Bovven 
 
 Hughes 
 
 I rvine 
 
 Lytton 
 
 Cooper 
 
 Swift 
 
 F on que 
 
 Ivanhoe. 
 
 Good Wives. 
 
 Story of the Tempest. 
 
 Story of a Midsummer Night's Dream. 
 
 Scottish Chiefs. 
 
 The Christmas Carol. 
 
 Little Men. 
 
 Prisoner of Zenda. 
 
 Little Nell. 
 
 Puck of Pook's Hill. 
 
 Defender of the Faith. 
 
 Tom Brown's School Days. 
 
 Rip van Winkle. 
 
 Harold. 
 
 The Last of the Mohicans. 
 
 Gulliver's Travels. 
 
 Undine. 
 
 Form II 
 
 (i) Reading in class of at least one classical prose work, such 
 as Treasure Island, The Talisman or Westward Ho ! There is no 
 reason why Julius Caesar or The Merchant of Venice should not 
 be read. 
 
 (ii) Ballads, narrative and national poetry, are appropriate. 
 
 (iii) Reading at home and in school of some, say four (one 
 each quarter) of the following : 
 
 Scott 
 
 Chaucer 
 
 Longfellow 
 
 Barrie 
 
 Scott 
 
 Dickens 
 
 Scott 
 
 Malory 
 
 Bowen 
 
 Goldsmith - 
 
 Blackmore - 
 
 Anstey 
 
 Lytton 
 
 Wagner 
 
 George Eliot 
 
 Stevenson - 
 
 The Talisman. 
 
 Stories from. 
 
 Evangeline. 
 
 The Little Minister. 
 
 Quentin Durward. 
 
 David Copperfield. 
 
 Lady of the Lake. 
 
 Selections from. 
 
 Prince and Heretic. 
 
 I^oems and Plays. 
 
 Lorna Doone. 
 
 Vice Versa. 
 
 Last Days of Pompeii. 
 
 Stories from. 
 
 Tales of Clerical Life. 
 
 The Black Arrow. 
 
 Form III 
 
 (i) Reading in class of at least one prose work and a liberal 
 amount of poetry. A historical play of Shakspeare, a historical 
 novel, e.g., *' The Tale of Two Cities," heroic and narrative 
 poetry, e.g. Marmion, romantic poetry, e.g. The Idylls of the 
 King. Any selection from such works as these is appropriate.
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 
 
 285 
 
 (ii) Reading 
 the following : 
 
 Thackeray - 
 
 Scott 
 
 Fothergill - 
 
 Bowen 
 
 C. Bronte - 
 
 Kingsley 
 
 Dickens 
 
 M. x\rnoId 
 
 George Eliot 
 
 (Harrap) 
 
 Tennyson 
 
 Mary Johnston 
 
 Bowen 
 
 Sheridan 
 
 Reade 
 
 Thackeray - 
 
 Wordsworth 
 
 at home of some, say four (one each quarter) of 
 
 Vanity Fair. 
 
 Woodstock. 
 
 The First Violin. 
 
 Prince and Heretic. 
 
 Jane Eyre. 
 
 Westward Ho ! 
 
 Pickwick reapers. 
 
 Selected Poems. 
 
 Mill on the Floss. 
 
 Stories of King Arthur. 
 
 Idylls of the King. 
 
 By Order of the Company. 
 
 I Will Maintain. 
 
 Plays. 
 
 The Cloister and the Hearth. 
 
 Esmond. 
 
 Selected Poems. 
 
 Form IV 
 
 (i) One work, usually a play of Shakspeare, studied in de- 
 tail. Detail is, of course, relative to the age and development o^ 
 pupils and should never encumber appreciation of the whole. 
 Reading over of a passage or a scene, as a whole, is as necessary 
 after as before detailed study. 
 
 (ii) Two other works for general study. 
 
 (iti) Home reading of not less than four works selected from 
 the following : 
 
 Tennyson 
 
 Lamb 
 
 Coleridge 
 
 Kingsley 
 
 Barrie 
 
 Addison and Steele 
 
 Thackeray - 
 
 Browning 
 
 J. L. Allen - 
 
 George Eliot 
 
 Stevens 
 
 (Harrap) 
 
 C. Bronte - 
 
 Gaskell 
 
 Washington Irvine 
 
 Newbolt 
 
 Bowen 
 
 Reade 
 
 Wordsworth 
 
 Enoch Arden. 
 
 Essays of Elia. 
 
 Poems. 
 
 Hypatia. 
 
 The Little White Bird. 
 
 Sir Roger de Coverley Papers. 
 
 The Newcomes. 
 
 Selected Poems. 
 
 The Kentucky Cardinal. 
 
 Silas Marner. 
 
 With Kitchener to Khartoum. 
 
 Stories from Dante. 
 
 Shirley. 
 
 Cranford. 
 
 Columbus. 
 
 Collected Poems. 
 
 I Will ^L^intain. 
 
 The Cloister and the Hearth. 
 
 Selected Poems.
 
 286 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 Fonu V 
 
 (i) One work, usually a play of Shakspeare, to be studied in 
 such detail as has appreciation rather than scholarship for its 
 object. 
 
 (ii) Three other works for general study in class. 
 
 (iii) A selection of works for home reading. Those for 
 Form IV are suitable and indicate the type. 
 
 Any such course should put the pupils who follow it 
 en rapport with the second world, the " transparent and re- 
 sponsive world of minds " in its highest form, the spiritual 
 form which literary genius has created and which shines 
 through it as a political, national, social, economic and 
 religious fabric. This is the effect of literature, although its 
 creation is spontaneous and certainly pervaded by no 
 conscious purpose. And it should be the aim of the study 
 of literature, kept hidden at the back of the head of the 
 teacher, of course, for it is not to be paraded before those w'ho 
 read in the vain hope that it may furnish a stimulus. It will 
 be no more a stimulus to them than it was to the writers them- 
 selves. It is when the fire of individual enthusiasm has been 
 kindled that the after-glow of social sympathy may be ex- 
 pected ; but no exhortation about the after-glow will help to 
 kindle the fire. Mr. Nowell Smith says: "The objects of 
 literary studies as a part of education are (i) the formation of 
 a personality fitted for civilised life, (2) the provision of a 
 permanent source of pure and inalienable pleasure, and (3) 
 the immediate pleasure of the student in the process of edu- 
 cation. None of these objects is exclusive of either of the 
 others. They cannot in fact be separated in the concrete."-® 
 They cannot be separated as aims, and our further point is, 
 they should not be discriminated as aids to treatment. The 
 theory of education is a subtle thing : it is more appropriate 
 to the study, before and after a lesson, than to the evolution 
 of it in the class-room. The adjustment to literature as the 
 flower of civilisation is the cumulative effect of lessons, home- 
 reading, and leisure given to books; it is no "quick return 
 of profit." 
 
 §6. The books we select for our pupils to read will all 
 be tinged with the colour of the time and circumstances of 
 
 '•** Cambridge Essays on Education, p. 105.
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 287 
 
 their origin, and it would be foolish not to make use of the 
 fact. They give life, the stimulating atmosphere of litera- 
 ture, whether prose or poetry, descriptive or dramatic, 
 narrative or reflective, to the dry bones and dust of fact. As 
 Mr. Barnett truly says : " Political history, social history, 
 economic history, even ecclesiastical histor\', are all reflected, 
 illustrated, and interpreted by what we find in the great books 
 of contemporary literature."-" There is a natural, indeed an 
 organic, connection of literature with all other subjects of 
 study, and correlation of it with them is an easy pedagogic 
 deduction. But the very closeness of the relation — almost that 
 of form with content — is a source of danger. We ought not 
 to let literature become ancillary. Complementary it may 
 well be, but subordinate never. The very fact that ** la 
 Utterature est une chose qui louche a toiites choses "^^ should 
 put us on our guard. From its genetic association with 
 definite times and circumstances literature has certain quali- 
 ties : Chaucer breathes the warmth of an intensive and narrow 
 social life, Shakspeare reflects the wide sweep towards 
 humanity, Dryden an artificial age, Tennyson and Words- 
 worth the swing back to romanticism. This is the chrono- 
 logical setting which gives realistic quality. Herein lies a 
 part, but not the greatest part, of its appeal. That is to be 
 found in the directness, intimacy and universality of the 
 thought which transcends time and circumstance and makes 
 the actual the vehicle of the eternal. And this it is which 
 must be the focus of directive educational effort. As lights 
 on life in time, the great works of literature serve a useful, a 
 great purpose ; as lights on life in eternity, they are an end in 
 themselves. " The study of History may often be lit up by 
 apt illustrations from literature. . . . Any attempt, how- 
 ever, to erect it into the principle of selection or to apply it 
 mechanically will only do harm in both subjects. Literature 
 should not be subordinated to History any more than History 
 should be subordinated to Literature."^' 
 
 There is another parallel danger. It arises also out of 
 the temptation to subordinate literature to the level of a 
 
 29 Op. cit., p. 170. 
 
 ■''o Quoted by Mr. Nowell Smitli from Eniile Faguet in Cambridge Essays 
 on Education, p. 104. 
 
 3* Board of Education Circular No. 753, par. 20.
 
 288 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 means; only the danger is greater because in this case the 
 end may be mean and unworthy. We refer to patriotic 
 Hterature. In deaHng with nationaUty as a strand in the 
 social fabric, we laid stress on its essential importance ; but 
 we endeavoured to make it clear that it was but an emotional 
 stepping stone, a necessary vehicle for the universal of 
 humanity/* The same principle is pertinent here. We 
 need to use the glorious utterances of Shakspeare, Milton, 
 Wordsworth and Newbolt, which make home, birth-place, 
 language and race resound in the uttermost depths and 
 heights of our being. But we can very well do without such 
 songs as " Detitschland iiher alles " and " Rule Britannia," 
 which in their hollow blatancy, evoke the resonance of a 
 narrow individualism within the circumference of a few 
 thousand square miles, and provoke an echo of discordance 
 everywhere outside it. It is the music of humanity that 
 echoes from the hill-tops of literature. 
 
 So far we have had the literature of our ow'n language 
 solely in mind. Our point of view brings it first into focus. 
 The first adjustment must be to our own spiritual environ- 
 ment : our own as it exists here and now about us, and our 
 own by inheritance. There is another reason why it should 
 come first in our deliberations. All our pupils in whatever 
 type of school they are enrolled, must be given a footing in 
 this world. It is a common inheritance and all must enter 
 into possession. No differentiation of types of school and 
 no considerations — social, economic, or what not — affecting 
 the length of schooling, should be allowed to close or narrow 
 unduly the avenues of approach to this world. The most 
 cursory glance over continuation and extension courses, 
 organised to meet the wishes of those whose schooling has 
 been cut short by grinding economic necessity, will reveal 
 their hunger for the humanities. They are keen enough on 
 courses designed to improve their directly vocational 
 efficiency ; they are far keener on the courses w hich open up 
 the fields of literary treasure. Their hunger is for the 
 humanities which their beggarly chances at school found no 
 room for. If the social revolution is to escape the fate of 
 the political revolution, it will be by the multiplication of 
 avenues of approach to the world of which literature is the 
 
 32 See pp. 182, 183.
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 289 
 
 vehicle, for there a man can find what is consonant with the 
 best that is in him. The labour of his days can be made 
 lighter by the abiding sense of membership of the society of 
 letters, as the leisure of his evenings can be given over to 
 literary adventures provocative of joyous wrestling. And if 
 (he foreign correspondents are beyond him he will be able to 
 make good shift with the masterpieces of his own tongue. 
 What is clearl}' imperative is that they shall be accessible. 
 
 §7. Whether every pupil should have a chance to ex- 
 plore the social, economic, and literary environment of at 
 least one other people besides his own, by acquiring" some 
 facility in their language, is a question of the time at dis- 
 posal. If such a chance means sacrificing a proper balance 
 of studies, that is, endangering a rational orientation to the 
 vocation, liberally interpreted, which is to be his, then it can- 
 not be given him. If it means, for example, curtailment in 
 respect of native literature, or history, or science, it must go. 
 But if all are to enjoy schooling till the completion of the six- 
 teenth year — and that minimum should be fixed by law — 
 there should be room enough for one modern language, other 
 than the mother tongue, in the curriculum of every type of 
 school. In these days when a League of Nations is the 
 rational machinery of international relations, there is no need 
 to enlarge on its value. Adjustment to the new order of 
 things must be based on mutual understanding, not by social 
 and political leaders only, but by as large a number as pos- 
 sible of the people themselves. Personal intercourse may be 
 limited mainly to the leaders, but it will be a great achieve- 
 ment if, say, French and German newspapers and periodi- 
 cals, and better still standard works of literature, can find a 
 place and a currency in English clubs and libraries. Even 
 if the idiom and the idiosyncracies of a language and a life 
 other than our own evade us, we can at least get a point of 
 view and perhaps some of the magnanimity which a wider 
 vista evokes. On the frontiers of the empire, as here in South 
 Africa, the curriculum of life decides, in this respect, the 
 curriculum of the schools. Only the very narrow and the very 
 short-sighted shirk the effort to adjust themselves to a second 
 environment by learning a second language. Practically 
 every pupil in the Transvaal public schools learns both Eng- 
 lish and Dutch, and since the barrier between primary hnd
 
 290 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 secondary education is rapidly disappearing into the limbo 
 of social stratification whence it emerged, the danger of a dis- 
 turbance of the balance of studies is disappearing with it. 
 The experience of this social and national laboratory may not 
 be without value for the solution of racial and national 
 problems over a wider circumference and involving many 
 more millions. And it can be said with certainty as the out- 
 come of that experience that in proportion as, through 
 language, mutual understanding is widened and deepened, 
 mutual antipathy is diminished and with it racial friction. 
 And on the positive side there is a revelation of the compati- 
 bility, and an impetus to the mutual re-enforcement, of social 
 and ethical ideals which may superficially differ. Fortu- 
 nately we in South Africa cannot shelve the problem because 
 of economic inter-penetration. The English used to be the 
 town dwellers and the Dutch the farmers, but now a rapid 
 process of intermingling in town and country is going on. 
 In Canada there is, one understands, a greater measure of 
 segregation. In our case, at all events, the problem of inter- 
 course is a real and palpable one. And a knowledge of the 
 two official languages is clearly an essential step in adjust- 
 ment and may be the way to a solution of many social 
 problems. 
 
 Here we are brought up against one of the inherent per- 
 plexities of social life. There may be only one language 
 but it has as many meanings as there are individuals using 
 it. Quot homines tot senteniice is true so far as it goes; but 
 it does not go nearly far enough as a plummet of truth. 
 There must be as many opinions as there are men just be- 
 cause each man has his own values for the coins of language; 
 not because he wishes to, but because the gulf between man 
 and man remains unbridgable. There is no common de- 
 nominator for A's thought-values and B's. The way in 
 which words are seized upon and interpreted by each mind 
 for itself is well brought out in an eloquent passage in Pro- 
 fessor Raleigh's monograph on " Style." " The mind of 
 man," he writes, " is peopled, like some silent city, with a 
 sleeping companv of reminiscences, associations, impressions, 
 attitudes, emotions, to be awakened into fierce activity at the 
 touch of words. By one way or another, with a fanfarronade 
 of the marching trumpets, or stealthily, by noiseless passages
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 291 
 
 and dark posterns, the troop of suggestions enters the 
 citadel, to do its work within. The procession of beautiful 
 sounds that is a poem passes in through the main gate, and 
 forthwith the by-ways resound to the hurry of ghostly feet, 
 until the small company of adventurers is well-nigh lost and 
 overwhelmed in that throng of insurgent spirits."" Of 
 course this fact thai each man carries about his own dic- 
 tionary with contents which never correspond with those of 
 any of his fellows, is just what gives zest to life. But it does 
 not make adjustment to common thought by means of a 
 common vehicle of language less difficult. And if there are 
 two languages current instead of one, there is room for a 
 fierce meeting of cross-currents and a fierce struggle of cross- 
 purposes. 
 
 All this points to the imperative need for a study of the 
 language of a people whose homes are alongside ours and 
 with w^hom we share a common sky and a common destiny. 
 It points also to the desirability of a study of the language 
 of those whose relation to ourselves is real though less direct. 
 It should be noted that this is the most fundamental reason 
 for the study of a language other than our own : understand- 
 ing and adjustment. And when it is a living language there 
 is the special advantage of quick returns. Every sentence, 
 indeed, every word, we gain mastery over — save, of course, 
 the dry bones of exceptions which have passed out of real life 
 to prolong a fictitious existence in grammar books — is a real 
 acquisition, a key which may open the door to someone's 
 good fellowship. A greeting, a title page, a word painted 
 on a wall, in a living language is one with its whole life. We 
 need not hesitate to begin a modern language with a pupil 
 who has only one more term at school; assuming, of course, 
 that we do begin with the language and not with its dry 
 bones. But with lengthening school days we may hope for 
 more. We may hope that our pupils will gather a few- 
 literary treasures, at all events, from the new language to put 
 alongside of their own. Not necessarily for comparison, for 
 each literature is unique, but to add to real wealth. And such 
 an accretion is his who has, for example, caught the pathos 
 and the charm of these lines of Alphonse Daudet :
 
 292 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 " Tons deux [les vieuxj me remerciaient d'un sourire ; 
 et dans ces sourires fan^s qui se penchaient vers 
 moi, cherchanl jusqu' au fond de mes yeux I'image 
 de leur Maurice, moi, j'^tais tout emu de \k 
 retrouver cette image, vague, voil^e, presque 
 insaisissable, conime si je voyais mon ami 
 me sourire, tr^s loin, dans un brouillard." 
 
 Or the power and pathos of these lines of Heine : 
 
 " Ein Reiter durch das Bergthal zieht 
 Im traurig stiilen Trab' : 
 «Ach ! zieh' ich jetz wohl in Liebchens Arm, 
 Oder zieli' ich in's dunkle Grab?B 
 Die Bergstimm' Autwort gab: 
 «In's dunkle Grab !» 
 
 " Und weiler reitet dor Reitersmann, 
 
 Und seufzet schwer dazu : 
 «So zieh' ich denn hin in's Grab so friih, — 
 
 Wohlan, im Grab ist Ruh'!)> 
 
 Die Stimme sprach dazu : 
 «Im Grab ist Ruh'!» 
 
 " Dem Reitersmann eine Thrane rollt 
 
 Von der Wange kummervoll : 
 «Und ist nur im Grabe die Ruhe fiir mich, — 
 
 So ist mir im Grabe \vohl.» 
 
 Die Stimm' erwidert hohl : 
 «Im Grabe wohl !» "3* 
 
 §8. The classical languages, Latin and Greek, stand on 
 a difTerent footing. As the sources of inspiration on which 
 most of the great authors in the Teutonic and Roman tongues 
 have directly, or indirectly, drawn, their claim is unchal- 
 lenged. For those whose good fortune it has been to be able 
 to enter into real community of thought with the great 
 masters, it is almost equal to the claim of religion. And 
 there is no question as to the strength of the position of those 
 who take their stand on models which for so many centuries 
 have dominated literary activity, and on the medium which 
 for such a long stretch of time was the depository of the 
 records of civilisation. At the same time it must be recog- 
 nised that they are in the position of men who look backward 
 rather than forward. "We must therefore admit," writes 
 Mr. Barnett, a strong protagonist, " that the claims of Latin 
 and Greek on the grounds of their established position be- 
 come less pressing. For the theories of development by 
 which we are all sensibly or insensibly affected weaken the 
 hold of the past upon us, and direct our view forward rather 
 
 ^'t Die Bergslimme.
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 293 
 
 than backward."'''' As a means of adjustment they must in- 
 evitably become less necessary as the world they mediate be- 
 comes more remote. It is true, of course, as we have already 
 noted, that the masterpieces of literature and, to some extent, 
 even the penetrative achievements of philosophy, can be taken 
 out of their chronological setting and retain all their beauty 
 and truth, in a way which is not possible with the achieve- 
 ments of history or science. They transcend time. Homer 
 and Sophocles, Virgil and Cicero, Thucydides and Livy, 
 Plato and Aristotle, will continue to exercise a formative influ- 
 ence on literary art and philosophic thought, when Roman 
 and Greek history have ceased to have more than antiquarian 
 interest. At the same time native and other modern litera- 
 tures are increasing in content and in richness as the centuries 
 pass and their claim is becoming more and more imperative; 
 and the same thing is true of the progress of philosophy. 
 The mere difficulty of adjustment must bring it about that as 
 modern literature and philosophy loom larger the ancient 
 lights will become sources of illumination and inspiration for 
 a select and enthusiastic few. They w^ill be those for w'hom 
 the humanities offer a specific vocation.^® 
 
 Meanwhile the classicists seem to have themselves to 
 blame for lost ground. There is no doubt that the difficulties 
 of access to classical literature are great, but, carried out of 
 the track by the fetish of formal discipline, those whose busi- 
 ness it is to point the way have lost the literary substance in 
 grasping at the linguistic shadow. They have spent so much 
 time with the dry bones that the body and soul have, for the 
 majority of their pupils, not come to life. Such at any rate 
 is the trend of criticism. Dean Inge writes : " The advo- 
 cates of the old classical education have been gallantly fight- 
 ing a losing battle for over half a century; they are now pre- 
 paring to accept inevitable defeat. But their cause is not 
 lost, if they will face the situation fairly. It is only lost if 
 they persist in identifying classical education with linguistic 
 proficiency."^' Again : " I am well aware of the loss which 
 a great author necessarily suffers by translation ; but I have 
 no hesitation in saying that the average boy would learn far 
 
 '■' op. rit., p. 203. 
 
 ••'6 See pp. 254, 256, 257. 
 
 2" Cambridge Essays on Ediiratioi>, pp. 26, 27.
 
 294 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 more of Greek literature, and would imbibe far more of the 
 Greek spirit, by reading the whole of Hero J ■; ■■, Thucydides 
 the Republic of Plato, and some of the |.' • tn good trans- 
 lations, than he now acquires by going t' ,h the classical 
 mill at a public school. The classics, lik- Imost all other 
 literature, must be read in masses to be appreciated. Boys 
 think them dull mainly because of the absurd wav in which 
 they are made to study them."''** He will find many dis- 
 sentients from his views on translations, but few would in 
 these days disagree about the deadening effect of linguistic 
 discipline. Bateson, writing on the place of science in edu- 
 cation in the same volume, argues warmly in defence of 
 Greek, but languages are to be " treated not as lessons but as 
 vehicles of speech.'"'' " What chance," he exclaims, " has 
 a boy of enjoying an author when he knows him only as a 
 task to be droned through, thirty lines at a time? Small 
 blame to the pupil who never discovers that the great authors 
 were men of like passions with ourselves, that the Homeric 
 songs were made to be shouted at feasts to heroes full of drink 
 and glory, that Herodotus is telling of wonders that his 
 friends, and we too, want to hear, that in the tragedies we 
 hear the voice of Sophocles dictating, choked with emotion 
 and tears; that even Roman historians wrote because they 
 had something to tell, and Caesar, dull proser that he is, com- 
 posed the Commentaries not to provide us with style or gram- 
 matical curiosities, but as a record of extraordinary events."" 
 §9. These are hammer blows, and we are not in a posi- 
 tion to say whether the teaching of classics generally deserves 
 them or not. But it is certain that also in the handling of 
 modern language and literature the danger of separating form 
 from content and focussing attention on it is a real one, and 
 cannot be too strenuously combatted. Neither the writers of 
 text books nor the teachers have as yet shaken themselves 
 free of the linguistic tradition. Shakspeare and Racine are 
 still too frequently degraded to the level of media for gram- 
 matical disquisitions and exercises. There is far less danger 
 in prosody because literature is an aesthetic unity first, its 
 logical coherence coming a long way after. Rhythm and 
 
 3» Ibid p. 28. 
 •■'9 Ibid p. 143. 
 40 Ibid p. 1^4.
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 295 
 
 metre, metaphor and apostrophe — these are flesh and blood, 
 and the feehng for them brings us into immediate sympathy 
 and communion with the working of the mind and soul of 
 the master. But grammatical vivisection kills him. The 
 better way is by composition : in verse — an art pupils 
 attempt with avidity — and prose, by imitation of teacher and 
 literary models, even, with careful going, by paraphrase. 
 The question of treatment is, indeed, vital, and although de- 
 tails of method are outside the scope of this essay, we may, 
 perhaps, profitably bring this chapter to an end with a note 
 on the general principle which should be observed. We 
 have insisted again and again that adjustment to literature as 
 a key to the best thoughts and ideals which great authors 
 have left us, that is, in a word, to civilisation in its highest 
 form, is the aim. But there remains the question how, in 
 general, we ought to think of, and try to bring about that 
 adjustment. That it should be a double-edged process, active 
 as well as passive, an organic interaction bringing about real 
 growth and power, is merely another deduction from the 
 theory of education developed throughout this essay. We 
 find in literature not merely a source of the highest delight — 
 it is that of course — but a stimulus which will evoke clearer 
 thinking, a finer taste, and cleaner and saner moral convic- 
 tions. And it will only do that if our handling of it is intelli- 
 gently guided. In our search for a principle we cannot do 
 better than turn to the great authors themselves ; for what is 
 characteristic of the truest message ought to bring out its 
 counterpart in the reader who is, as best he can, trying to 
 respond to it. Professor Raleigh says that sincerity is the 
 quality universal in the civilising constraint of the noblest 
 appeals of literature. " The most surprising characteristic," 
 he writes, "of the right poetic diction ... is its match- 
 less sincerity."*^ vSincerily is then, what we want in the 
 reader, and we may add, the speaker and writer. And if we 
 keep that principle before us, as the lode-star of treatment, we 
 shall not go far wrong, and detailed injunctions about method 
 will all fall naturally into place. 
 
 That is why the critical attitude is dangerous. Boys and 
 girls are not put before a masterpiece to criticise it, to attempt 
 
 ^1 Style, p. 8<) 
 
 20
 
 296 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 an evaluation of this or that element of its form and structure. 
 They are there to gather what of its beauty and value they 
 can take in, without any attempt, futile as it must be in the 
 nature of things, to dissect its aesthetic unity. The honours 
 graduate may try his analytic powers on this difficult task, 
 because he should be old enough and wise enough to know 
 that he is only trying for his own soul's sake and that the 
 objective truth of the matter is more likely than not to evade 
 him. "When all has been said there remains a residue 
 capable of no formal explanation.""*^ We shall do well, then, 
 to steer quite clear of this stumbling block of criticism when 
 we are introducing young pupils to an author. They may be 
 encouraged, of course, to say freely and sincerely what they 
 like and to set the seal of their honest appreciation on charac- 
 ters, passages, scenes, and even phrases and words. There 
 is no harm, indeed all good, in that, provided that honesty 
 and sincerity ring out in their choice. But priggish criticism 
 should be met b}^ hammer-blows. 
 
 The real self must come out and reveal itself in broad 
 daylight, frank and unashamed, in the literature and language 
 lessons. Some pupils will dislike Shakspeare — they will be 
 few — and revel in Tennyson. Well, we are not all built 
 alike. But it will be found, on the whole and in the long 
 run, that our pupils will endorse the judgment of posterity. 
 They will hang on, of themselves, to the best and — what is, 
 after all, the educational crux — will make the best of them- 
 selves in doing so. Only we must let their real selves speak. 
 
 »2 Ibid p. ii6.
 
 BOOK III 
 THE WORLD OF MORALITY
 
 BOOK III 
 THE WORLD OF MORALITY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PRELIMINARIES 
 
 §1. We come now to the moral order or continuum and 
 here again it seems necessary to begin by stating precisely 
 what we mean, and, particularly, what justification there is 
 for the use of the latter term. The physical world as 
 polarised to the individual consciousness, has its unity of 
 space and time; the social order existent in the individual 
 consciousness, has the unity conferred by common instincts, 
 customs, language and laws ; and historical continuity 
 as well. The first has the aspects of materiality and ex- 
 tension, and these give it an advantage, for education 
 at any rate, over the substance of the second, which, 
 in its spirituality, seems more attenuated. Both, however, 
 have a given objective coherence. Can we use the same 
 term, with propriety when we come to morality ? One 
 answer might well be that there is no point in distinguishing 
 a third : that the social organism contains the moral order; 
 and that the two represent different aspects of the same piece 
 of reality, looked at as an actual historical fact and as a 
 sphere of values and ideals respectively. This, however, 
 does not seem to be sufficient from the point of view of the 
 theory of education. We can readily imagine an individual 
 in whose consciousness the social order might, so to say, shine 
 out with distinctness and even brilliance, i.e., might be 
 intellectually and even aesthetically appreciated, without the 
 emergence of a correlative and dependent spectrum of moral 
 obligations and ideals. And we may say that the supreme 
 task of education is to raise the intensity of the latter so that 
 it becomes the illumination which floods and pervades the 
 whole of life. 
 
 For educational theory, then, it seems desirable to deal 
 
 299
 
 300 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 with the moral order separately, even if the process is an 
 abstraction from the concrete whole of experience. We 
 have still to show that the term continuum is appropriate. 
 Sufficient ground for it seems to lie in the fact that every act 
 of life is pregnant, if not with moral purpose, at least with 
 moral consequence direct or indirect, immediate or remote. 
 Support for this statement may be found in the following ex- 
 tract from Bergson's Creative Evolution taken together with 
 one from Mackenzie's Manual of Ethics. They represent the 
 combined testimony of philosophy and ethics. Bergson 
 -says: "Our duration is not merely one instant replacing 
 another; if it were, there would never be anything but the 
 present — no prolonging of the past into the actual, no evolu- 
 tion, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous pro- 
 gress of the past which gnaws into the future and which 
 swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceas- 
 ing, so also there is no limit to its preservation. ... In 
 its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that 
 we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is 
 there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, press- 
 ing against the portals of consciousness."^ Here we have 
 the doctrine of psychical continuity, and the necessary corol- 
 lary is the factorial potentiality, so to call it, of all past ex- 
 perience in a new act. Mackenzie says: "It is only in a 
 somewhat strained sense that the judgment can be said to be 
 passed either on the intention or on the motive alone. The 
 truth seems to be rather that the fully developed moral judg- 
 ment is always pronounced, directly or indirectly, on the 
 character of the agent. "^ If these psychological and ethical 
 pronouncements are sound, and they would both be generally 
 accepted, we are justified in saying that every act of life is 
 pregnant with moral consequence. And this being so it is 
 desirable for educational purposes to keep distinct the idea of 
 this third continuum, the moral order. 
 
 We must now attempt to justify the use of the word 
 creation in connection with the moral order, which has been 
 deliberately chosen in contrast with exploration, of the 
 physical and discovery of the social order ; and the call is the 
 more imperative because we have described it as the supreme 
 
 1 Creative Evolution, pp. 4, 5. 
 3 Manual of Ethics, p. 137.
 
 PRELIMINARIES 301 
 
 task of education. And in so describing it we are deliberately 
 leaving" out of account the illumination which it must receive 
 from the light of religious re\'elation, if it is to equal and 
 transcend in constraining power the physical and the social 
 orders. That aspect of it will be touched on later. Here we 
 have to try and show that the weaving of the thoughts, pur- 
 poses, and acts of life, however small or however great, into a 
 moral order, can only be the product of a process of con- 
 tinuous creation by each individual for himself. 
 
 What we mean is just the moral freedom of the indi- 
 vidual looked at from the standpoint of education. We 
 accept the Kantian doctrine that the limitations, the bounds 
 and barriers, set to the pure reason in its exploration of the 
 world of nature (whether or not the}' may be removed by the 
 idealism of post-Kantian philosophy) have no counterpart in 
 the sphere of practical reason, of morality. In this sphere 
 man is free. But his very freedom means just this, that there 
 is no necessary constraint such as is exercised by the physical 
 and the social environment; and that, unless b}' his own 
 creative activity he spins and weaves a moral continuum, it 
 will be non-existent for him. The imperative of duty, the 
 ideal of happiness, of ultimate good, of perfection, will re- 
 main empty forms and categories, unless and until the indi- 
 vidual by his own creative acts, by a continuous process of 
 creation, gives them matter and content. The physical uni- 
 verse and the social universe he cannot escape; but the moral 
 universe, the moral order, will be the product of his own 
 creation. Here individualism is final and unbridgable. No 
 man can save the soul of his brother. Each must spin the 
 moral web anew. Neither heredity nor environment can 
 avail to diminish this obligation. That is, as it seems to us, 
 the inevitable price each must pay for the moral freedom 
 which Kant claimed for him. 
 
 It is to be understood that our point of view is that of 
 education, and that, when we say that individualism is final 
 and unbridgable and that no man can save his brother, we 
 mean that each individual must himself constitute and for 
 ever be renewing the moral continuum or order. It is made 
 real for him just by the nod, fiat, affirmation, or volition — 
 however the act may be described — of the individual self. 
 This does not mean that it may not, from a more fundamental
 
 302 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 point of view, be described as the adoption of the moral order 
 or continuum which the social organism reflects, or rather 
 adumbrates; or as a recognition of that order as existent 
 within himself because he shares with others identity of 
 rationality. That raises a metaphysical rather than an edu- 
 cational question, and it is one which the student must decide 
 for himself. He must think out for himself how much the 
 conception of a social order means. Sometimes it seems to 
 be carried to a point from which the transition to at least an 
 attenuation of individual responsibility is easy. Caird, for 
 example, in the course of a critical examination of the 
 Kantian position that while empirically the conception of a 
 social moral order may be taken as true, rationally morality 
 is individual, asks : " Are we unable to give of our best to 
 others or to receive of their best from them ? Are men shut 
 up in themselves, so that they must each fight his own battle 
 alone, like the separate duels of the amphitheatre; and are 
 there no common charges and retreats, common victories and 
 defeats, as in regular warfare? Does freedom necessarily 
 mean isolation, and can we not receive help from each other 
 in the highest things?"^ 
 
 The answer seems to be, at any rate from the educational 
 point of view, that the Kantian doctrine of moral indi- 
 vidualism, as a corollary of moral freedom, is so far right that 
 an individual is not really a member of a moral social order 
 until he has, so to say, entered it by voluntary enlistment. 
 In this case of the moral continuum its reality for the indi- 
 vidual is its aflirmation, and this is just what distinguishes it 
 from the physical continuum, and the social continuum also, 
 as a psychical fact. Until the fiat has been uttered with the 
 whole weight of the individual behind it, the moral continuum 
 does not exist for him. It does not appear to be the distinc- 
 tion between anoetic and noetic consciousness but the differ- 
 ence between non-existence and existence. We may take the 
 environment at its best, as Plato conceived it in the ideal 
 social organism. He asks : " Ought we not, on the contrary, 
 to seek out artists of another stamp, who by the power of 
 genius can trace out the nature of the fair and graceful, that 
 our young men, dwelling as it were in a healthy region, may 
 drink in good from everv quarter, whence any emanation 
 
 ^ The Critical Philosophy of Kani, Vol. II, p. 397.
 
 PRELIMINARIES 303 
 
 from noble works may strike upon their eye or their ear, like 
 a gale wafting health from salubrious lands, and win them 
 imperceptibly from their earliest childhood into resemblance, 
 love, and harmony with the true beauty of reason?"* Such 
 an environment would assuredly be the best condition for the 
 development of reason, of the rational and ideal self, but that 
 development would depend on the fiat of the individual, re- 
 af^rmed daily and even hourly. The social organism as a 
 moral order is there about us like space and history, but ii 
 seems to differ from them just in this that its existence and 
 reality for each individual depends on free affirmation. Muir- 
 head quotes Dewey as saying " that (i) the fulfilment of the 
 duties of one's station, or as he calls it, ' adjustment to 
 environment,' can be taken as a moral idea, only on con- 
 dition that it means ' willing the maintenance and develop- 
 ment of moral surroundings as one's end ' ; and (2) the func- 
 tion that is thus performed serves at once to define and to 
 unite. It makes a man ' a distinct social member at the same 
 time that it makes him a member. . . . Individuality 
 means, not separation, but defined position in a whole.' "^ 
 This "willing the maintenance and development of moral 
 surroundings as one's own end " seems to be exactly what 
 we are trying to emphasise as the creation of the moral 
 continuum. 
 
 Let us repeat again the fact that it is the educational 
 standpoint we are concerned about. The following quota- 
 tion from Caird we should accept unreservedly as a statement 
 of ethical and philosophical truth : " Moral freedom rests on 
 the consciousness that the law to which we are subjected is no 
 foreign yoke, but our own law — the law that we became 
 conscious of by the same process by which we became con- 
 scious of ourselves as subjects; and, therefore, the fact that 
 it comes to us first as a social law, revealing itself in an ex- 
 ternal order of common life, in no way affects our freedom 
 under it."® Educationally, however, there is something else 
 to note, a further moment in the genesis of a moral order. 
 It may come to us, reveal itself, through the mediation of the 
 social order, but its essence lies in its being caught up and 
 
 ^ The Republic, Davies and N'aughcin's Translation, pp. 96, 97. 
 •' Elements of Ethics, p. 175. 
 8 Op. cit., Vol. II, p. 400.
 
 304 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 affirmed by the individual. Just as the conception of ideo- 
 motor action as an explanation of the genesis of volition 
 seems to lack something/ at any rate from the point of view 
 of education, so does the idea of an external moral order re- 
 vealing itself to the individual. We want something cor- 
 responding to the rite of confirmation admitting to member- 
 ship of a church. The moral law doesn't just come to us or 
 reveal itself in the same way as the idea, say, of a league of 
 nations. It does not exist for the individual until he has 
 affirmed it. The physical order stands over against us, even 
 though, when we reflect, we see that each individual polarises 
 it to himself. We are under its constraint as a fact of exist- 
 ence. We cannot escape it. So it is with the social order, 
 although, as we have urged, its spiritual texture makes the 
 constraint lighter. We cannot escape it also. But the moral 
 order is not polarised to each of us. The words are meaning- 
 less with regard to it. There is nothing static about it; 
 it is not independent of us. It comes into being each 
 time the individual affirms it, and the sequence of impulses 
 and thoughts — mere conscious process — thereby becomes 
 moral process. Moreover it remains in being just so long as 
 affirmation, like the set of a rudder, is maintained. How 
 easily it goes out of being, and our life falls back into mere 
 conscious process, following the current of habit, association, 
 and interest, but not obeying the rudder of morality, every- 
 one knows. The greatest task of education, as it is the most 
 difficult, is to develop in the individual the power and the 
 impulse to weave as much of his life as possible into a moral 
 fabric. The moral continuum must be ceaselessly created. 
 " The moral endeavour of man takes the form, not of isolated 
 fancies about right and wrong, not of attempts to frame a 
 morality for himself, not of efforts to bring into being some 
 praiseworthy ideal never realised ; but the form of sustaining 
 and furthering the moral 'world of which he is a member."^ 
 
 §2. We have now to consider how this process of 
 creation can begin. The student will have learnt from ethics 
 that what moral judgment is passed upon is (a) conduct which 
 
 7 Cf. Stout, Analytic Psychology, Vol. I, pp. 131, 132 (Reference by 
 Bosanquet in The Psychology of the Moral Self, p. 78). 
 
 8 Dewey, Outlines of Ethics. Pt. 11, Quoted by Mackenzie, op. cit., p. 329. 
 The italics are mine-
 
 PRELIMINARIES 305 
 
 mean3 (b) volition, and implies (c) character from which 
 (d) the motive of the individual act issues and to which it is 
 organically related.' And he will do well to consider each of 
 these aspects of the object of the moral judgment separately 
 so that he may fully realise what the psychological implica- 
 tions are. From our immediate point of view synthesis 
 rather than analysis is what is essential. We want to know 
 how the moral continuum can be created, and one essential 
 factor, the fundamental one, will appear if the element of 
 identity in each of the four aspects named is realised. It is 
 the element of end or purpose. Conduct is action, behaviour, 
 directed towards an end ; volition is the nod of affirmation by 
 which consciousness accepts or decides upon an end ; charac- 
 ter is the relative equilibrium of mental powers — cognitive, 
 affective, and conative — which has not been reached until 
 ends can be discriminated, weighed,, and one or other 
 adopted ; and the motive on its cognitive side is an end. 
 
 Now it is just this end, this teleological feature and factor, 
 which makes a moral continuum or fabric possible. We may 
 realise this by contrasting the ways other continua are 
 formed. The contrast has been made incidentally above, 
 but may well be repeated, for it is vital for a theory 
 of education to know how a moral continuum as con- 
 trasted with others, comes into being. The physical 
 continuum is constituted by space, whether of subjective 
 or objective origin. The mental continuum is constituted by 
 time, whether a form or the real duration of Bergson. The 
 social continuum being spiritual, or mental in texture, is also 
 constituted by time, being indeed a stratum of the mental 
 continuum. The moral continuum is constituted neither by 
 space nor by time (though duration is necessary to its 
 genesis, we should hold, as to that of every other mental 
 product) but by its teleological character. It comes into 
 being when, and only when, an end is consciously adopted as 
 having moral worth or value, and an act or a series of acts is 
 voluntarily undertaken as means organically related to the 
 end and thus becomes shot through, so to say, by the light 
 issuing from the end. When that volitional step has been 
 taken we can say the moral continuum has been created. And 
 its maintenance in existence will depend on the maintenance 
 
 3 See Muirhead, op. cit., p. 64.
 
 3o6 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 in consciousness of the idea of an end, operating as a final 
 cause, and weaving into the moral texture or fabric 
 those thoughts, impulses, and acts which further it, and re- 
 jecting those which hinder it. It will disappear from con- 
 sciousness from time to time, as indeed the physical and social 
 continua may do. Its re-emergence on the surface of 
 consciousness will depend on one factor, and one alone, 
 namely, the re-emergence of the end as a constraining force. 
 
 If this is sound theory, one controversial point will have 
 been disposed of, so far as moral education is concerned. We 
 refer to Kant's categorical imperative, or any imperative which 
 rests on an empty edict, that frequently assigned to conscience 
 or intuition, for example. They will be considered more 
 fully later and we shall endeavour to assign their place and 
 value for moral education. But we seem justified in deciding 
 one vital point here and now. If acts, impulses, and 
 thoughts can only be woven into the fabric of a moral con- 
 tinuum by virtue of an end, a teleological factor, a final cause ; 
 and if morality consists, as we are maintaining, in the crea- 
 tion of such a continuum not merely cognised, but felt and 
 lived ; then we shall have settled one vital point of principle 
 and relegated an empty edict, whether of external law, or 
 internal imperative, to its proper place of subordination, of 
 derived and secondary value. Actually and logically, the 
 categories of law and duty are derivative from the categories 
 of end and value. Here educational theory and ethical theory 
 are at one. 
 
 There is a deviation of educational theory from philo- 
 sophical theory, pertinent to the point we are discussing, 
 which may appropriately be referred to here. In an ex- 
 tremely penetrating analysis of the conception of teleology in 
 a philosophical connection, as a factor in the constitution of 
 reality, Bosanquet" reaches the conclusion that if the whole 
 universe, nature and mind, is conceived under the idea of 
 individuality, wholeness or completeness, then there is really 
 no room for the idea of teleology. And particularly that the 
 distinction of ends and means, the teleology of finite con- 
 sciousness — the consciousness, that is, of the individual man 
 which we are considering or the consciousness of the 
 organic, e.g. plant, world, if such there be — can have no 
 
 10 Principle of Individuality and Value, Chapter IV.
 
 PRELIMINARIES 307 
 
 meaning, or at any rate can have no operative agency in the 
 constitution of reality. That may be so, and, indeed, appears 
 to us to be so. The value and worth of the whole must re- 
 place any teleological idea in this ultimate philosophical 
 analysis. It might seem to follow that we are wrong in sup- 
 posing that the creation of the moral continuum in the indi- 
 vidual depends on the volitional adoption of an end as 
 morally valuable. It might be that the moral continuum 
 would be created, not by a final cause, an end consciously 
 adopted by the individual, but would arise because he is part 
 of the concrete universal of reality. Even if that be the ultimate 
 truth, there seems to be this much of truth in the theory of 
 the progressive development of the individual that he must 
 claim or justify his participation in the whole by the continual 
 creation of the moral continuum in the way we have indi- 
 cated. Thus for a theory of education there seems to be no 
 other way than the way of finite teleology. 
 
 §3. We may now try to indicate what this moral order, 
 this third world which each individual must continuously 
 create, consists of. So far we have only indicated the form 
 of it, a continuum of consciousness and life held together 
 teleologically by an end or purpose consciously adopted, 
 that is taken up into the self by volition and thus operating 
 as a final cause. We have not, however, indicated the con- 
 tent or substance of it. It is variously described as the true 
 self, the ideal self, the rational self, and the social self.^^ 
 Each of these terms brings out the point that the end is some- 
 thing relative to the self, a form of self-realisation. It is 
 not something external and detached ; it is something which 
 man has within him, by virtue of his nature, his manhood. 
 It is potentially in all who are normally constituted, some 
 would say as a product of evolution, others as the divine 
 nature and potential destiny of man. Whether it will come 
 to actuality, i.e., to self-realisation, or not, will depend largely 
 on education. One term, the rational self, brings out the 
 point that it is the realisation of one particular potentiality 
 of man, his rational nature; and gives us by inference the 
 further point that the realisation of the rational self will in- 
 volve the subordination of other elements of the self, e.g., the 
 
 11 See Mackpn/ie, op. cit., pp. 248-^58, 273-^90. Also Muirhead, op cit., 
 pp. 163-182.
 
 3o8 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 self of bodily appetites. Another term, the social self, carries 
 us a step further by indicating that it is in the social order 
 that self-realisation must come into being; and inferentially 
 again we may advance to the point that it means self-sacrifice, 
 i.e., the resolution of the opposition of egoism and altruism 
 in the higher unity of self-realisation.^^ " In general a man 
 can only receive his highest development in a congenial state 
 or family, among friends or fellow-workers."^^ 
 
 These various elements of self-realisation are sometimes 
 held together in the single concept of perfection.^* This is, 
 perhaps, not concrete enough for our purpose, which is to 
 find how the moral order or continuum can be continuously 
 created. If we want a single comprehensive conception the 
 best seems to be that of individuality in the sense of a whole, 
 a self-consistent unity, a concrete universal, as Dr. Bosanquet 
 has developed it in the Gifford lectures contained in the 
 volume entitled " The Principle of Individuality and Value." 
 According to that conception the individual will be creating 
 the moral continuum in proportion as he takes up as ends 
 element after element of the moral order immanent in the 
 universe, and realises his unity with nature and man. It is 
 difficult to give any satisfactory summary of this ethical 
 and metaphysical conception. Perhaps the following ex- 
 tract will give a clue to his meaning.^' " The individual, 
 then, does not attain the maximum of individuality in his 
 exclusive self when he feels himself repellent against others. 
 And if personality is taken in the strict sense of the character 
 of being a subject of rights and duties among other similar 
 subjects, then personality itself is only possible in virtue of 
 an individuality which already transcends it. For there can 
 be no system of rights and duties except in virtue of an 
 identity of wills in which rights and duties become a mere 
 machinery of daily life. You cannot coerce the individual 
 and organise his Hfe within a system of "persons" except 
 on the ground of a consciousness on his part which at bottom 
 desires to be coerced and to be organised. So individuality, 
 the principle of reality and the consistent whole, takes us 
 
 12 Cf. Bosanquet, Psychology of the Moral Self, pp. 89-98. 
 
 13 Jowett, Republic of Plato, p. xci. 
 
 1* Cf. Mackenzie, op. cit., Book II, Chap. \'. 
 15 pp. 270, 271.
 
 PRELIMINARIES 309 
 
 on beyond personality in the strict sense, beyond the con- 
 sciousness of self which is mediated by an opposing not-self, 
 into the region where we go out of the self and into it by 
 the same movement, in the quasi-religion of social unity, in 
 knowledge, art, and in religion proper. And in all these ex- 
 periences, as the repellent self-consciousness diminishes, and 
 the sense of unity with the world and with man becomes pre- 
 eminent — in all these individuality is strengthened, and the 
 self, though less in opposition to a not-self, is more itself, and 
 is more at home. And when freedom and spontaneity reach 
 their climax in religion the self no longer insists on its ex- 
 clusive claim, and the whole being goes out together into the 
 service which is perfect freedom." 
 
 We have here, then, the conception of the individual 
 feeling out beyond himself and appropriating moral ends 
 from the universe of man and nature which is more than him- 
 self and which yet as man he shares, and so for ever moving 
 on towards an individuality, which, as a balanced whole in 
 which the parts are, so to say, dovetailed into moral consist- 
 ency, is more than personality. Yet though personality is 
 transcended it is not whittled down. There is "no sugges- 
 tion that selfhood is a trivial or unreal thing. "^^ Indeed on it 
 rests the responsibility of "sustaining and furthering the 
 moral world," to quote Prof. Dewey again; or, as we should 
 put it, of continuously creating it by volition, which is ful- 
 filled in behaviour and conduct. 
 
 It is desirable to carry our inquiry into the adjustment 
 of the individual to the third world, the moral order, a little 
 further. Our point of view is that he must create it and 
 sustain it by continual acts of creation, i.e., by behaviour 
 issuing from volition illumined by moral purpose. There is, 
 however, a sense in which it creates him. In other words 
 the act of continuous creation is reciprocal, a sort of two- 
 edged process which reveals the relation of the individual 
 to the moral order in a new light and one vitally important 
 for a theory of education. It is developed by Dr. Bosanquet 
 in his work " The Value and Destiny of the Individual," the 
 companion volume to the one to which reference has just been 
 made.^^ 
 
 '" Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 289. 
 ^^ See especially Chapters I-IV.
 
 3IO THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 The first idea which Dr. Bosanqiiet is concerned 
 to establish is that the separate existence of individual 
 souls is a fact. It is conditioned by their existence in 
 separate bodies, and their distinctive feeHngs, and is, per- 
 haps, mainly due to the more or less permanent coenaesthesia 
 and the somatic resonance which, whether we go all the way 
 with James or not, is an important factor in giving a dis- 
 tinctive quality to our individual emotions. But this 
 separate existence must not hide the identity which indi- 
 vidual souls exhibit and which, so far as it is found in the 
 moral continuum of ideals and purposes with which we are 
 here concerned, is at once a product and a reflex of the moral 
 environment into which we are born and which may be 
 summed up in the concept of civilisation. 
 
 The moral order sustains them while they sustain it. It 
 is a difficult idea to lay hold of as a living truth, so wedded 
 are we by experience and by common philosophic theory to 
 the opposite idea of individualism. Nevertheless it is a 
 fundamental conception which seems to us to be vital if we 
 are to realise, e.g., the interaction of an individual pupil 
 and a school as a moral order or environment through which 
 moral adjustment advances and develops; and the interaction, 
 both during and after schooldays, of the individual and that 
 continuum of greater circumference which Graham Wallas 
 has called The Great Society ; this being understood not 
 merely as a human fabric, but as a fabric in which, by means 
 of habits, customs, and operative ideals as well as by laws 
 and institutions, a moral order becomes articulate. 
 
 Dr. Bosanquet illustrates what he means by this com- 
 munity in which the limits of the individual soul are 
 transcended, in the following way. " If minds were 
 visible," he says, " as bodies are, the writer has argued else- 
 where, they would not look like similar repeated units, but 
 each would rather appear as a member of a mechanism 
 pointing beyond itself and unintelligible apart from others — 
 one like a wheel, another like a piston, and a third, perhaps, 
 like steam. Here, then . . . we find a thorough-going 
 identity of diverse selves as parts of a single whole; and that 
 in rational beings, with a more or less thinking awareness of 
 the whole to which they contribute."^* The whole includes, 
 
 i** The Value and Destiny of ihe Individual, p. 50.
 
 PRELIMINARIES 311 
 
 of course, the moral order or continuum which we are con- 
 sidering. In Dr. Bosanquet's thought it is more; it is the 
 Absolute with which the religious consciousness is ultimately 
 identified ; but the greater includes the less. Here then we 
 are face to face with what we accept as a vital truth pregnant 
 with educational import. 
 
 Let us, therefore, try to get a firm hold of it. We may 
 approach this idea of our relation to the moral order through 
 that of our relation to the physical order of nature. In the 
 moulding of souls — as Dr. Bosanquet finely describes it, fol- 
 lowing Keats who in one of his letters describes the world 
 as " The vale of Soul-making "*^ — both orders operate. In 
 the cognitive and emotional experience which natural scenery 
 creates there is a felt stress or tension towards a whole, 
 transcending the immediate presentation. Tennyson's 
 "flower in the crannied wall " is the focus of the universe. 
 So Browning — 
 
 " All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one 
 bee : 
 All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one 
 
 gem: 
 In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the 
 sea : "^o 
 
 And again — 
 
 " And God's own profound 
 Was above me, and round me the mountains, 
 
 And under, the sea, 
 And within me my heart to bear witness 
 
 What was and shall be."2t 
 
 Here is clear evidence of that tension which carries the 
 poet beyond the mere natural fact. It is, for him, a fact 
 and more. The tension of imagination or inspiration — 
 whatever we may choose to call it — carries him beyond it. 
 He may remain within the circumference of the world of 
 nature, and, as in the first Browning quotation, or in the 
 Tennyson reference, find the significance of the physical 
 whole revealed in the single fact. The pearl is the focus, the 
 embodiment of the shade and the shine of the sea. Thought, 
 whether we call it imagination or inspiration, transcends its 
 immediate object and the art of transcendence is the bringing 
 
 i« Ibid, p. 64. 
 
 2" Summum Bonum. 
 
 21 Xhc Englishman in Ital.v. 
 
 21
 
 312 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 of the whole to bear upon the part. It is a unifying act. 
 And by the same impulse to unification the thought may 
 break through the circumference of the world of nature, and, 
 as is illustrated by the second Browning quotation, link up 
 with it the world of speculation : " what was and shall be." 
 Nor is this tension the privilege and prerogative of the poet. 
 He is differentiated from the man in the street, or the boy 
 in the school chapel, not by the fact of tension, but by the 
 fact of articulateness. The tension is normal in normal 
 human beings. It is, perhaps, the differentia, priceless and 
 immortal, of humanity. The stress beyond the single fact to 
 some sort of whole, whether within its own circumference or 
 beyond it, is common experience. A boy whose interest in 
 the wheels of a locomotive, carries him on to the pistons, the 
 boiler, and the coal in the tender, is an instance of stress 
 within the circumference ; a girl plucking a rose and running 
 with it under the stress of social impulse to her mother, is an 
 instance of breaking through the circumference. And with- 
 in the adolescent or adult consciousness the tension beyond 
 the given fact is constant and imperative. Individuals differ, 
 of course, but if tension beyond the given, the gathering in, 
 from near and far, of rays of illumination, is the differentia 
 of the poetic impulse, then we are all, young and old, poets. 
 
 The other day a young girl — she could not have been 
 more than eight years of age — said to me, quite spon- 
 taneously, that the tramcars must be very glad to be out 
 again. It was the morning after the settlement of a strike 
 of tramwaymen, and her young mind had leapt from the car 
 humming up the rails to the human and agsthetic sphere of 
 delight. And the tension by which a child or an adult is 
 carried into the sphere which we call the moral order is no 
 less real, natural, and normal. Moreover it is reinforced, as 
 Dr. Bosanquet points out, by social suggestion and by 
 language — a social institution — operating sometimes after the 
 manner which we describe as natural selection or as educa- 
 tive, i.e., teleological, purpose. 
 
 What we must grasp, then, is this notion of a natural 
 world and a moral world or order, both calling out, evoking, 
 or eliciting, this natural tension which carries the individual 
 beyond given facts to the whole or order to which they 
 belong, or beyond the order, be it natural or spiritual. And
 
 PRELIMINARIES 313 
 
 since we all experience the tension we so far share this 
 identity or community. Whether we follow to the end the 
 thinkers who, like Dr. Bosanquet, find in this tension evid- 
 ence of real participation by all in the spiritual essence of the 
 universe; or whether we stop short with individualism at the 
 thought that, though we all experience this social and 
 spiritual tension, it does not affect our individual separate- 
 ness and self-containedness — that is a question of meta- 
 physical alternatives between which we must choose for our- 
 selves. That the tension from part to whole, natural or 
 social and moral, exists, there seems to be no question. 
 
 When we look at this tension psychologically, i.e., as a 
 conscious state or phenomenon, we have what James called 
 the fringe or halo which links up a presentation with our 
 whole mental content. In an eloquent passage in which he 
 is concerned to point out the vital significance of this fringe 
 or halo for the conscious life, he says: "Every definite 
 image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that 
 flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, new 
 and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the 
 dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the 
 value of the image, is all in this halo or penumbra that sur- 
 rounds and escorts it — or rather that is fused into one with 
 it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. "^^ 
 The psychology we must accept; the philosophical implica- 
 tion is a matter for reflection and deliberate choice. We 
 may accept the tension felt in the fringe as evidence of a 
 whole or absolute in which we participate, interpreting the 
 whole statically as Bosanquet, for example, following the 
 doctrine traceable through Plato, Hegel, and Green, does; 
 or dynamically as Bergson does ; or we may accept it as 
 evidence of identity or similarity of experience in individuals 
 who nevertheless preserve their separateness and independ- 
 ence as, e.g., in the thought of Leibnitz," Kant,-* and 
 James." 
 
 §4. It will be well to summarise at this point the con- 
 clusions we have reached with regard to this third world, 
 
 "- James, Principles of Psycliology, \'ol. I, p. 255. 
 
 23 See Ucberwpg, History of Philosophy, Vol. II, pp. loq, no; and 
 Schwegler, History of Philosophy, p. 195. 
 
 24 Cf. Caird, Jhe Critical Philosophy of Kant, Vol. Ill, pp. 223-226. 
 
 25 A Pluralistic Universe, passim.
 
 314 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 the moral order. It is a continuum or whole like the first or 
 physical world, and the second or social world. Its con- 
 tinuity and unity are due to the fact that every thought and 
 act of our conscious existence has direct or indirect moral 
 value. The whole of our conscious existence has moral 
 quality and may be judged by an impartial observer to be 
 directly or indirectly a positive or negative contribution to a 
 moral life. Just as we live in a physical world and a social 
 world, so we live in a moral world and every conscious act 
 of ours may be said to be adjusted well or ill to the 
 moral order as well as to the physical and the social 
 environment. The moral continuum differs from the other 
 two, however, in this vital respect : it exists for each indi- 
 vidual so far as he creates it constantly by free volition. 
 Each individual must sustain it, make it, for himself ; other- 
 wise it is not his. It is a world he does not inhabit, and not 
 only does not inhabit but helps to destroy. It is kept alive 
 and existent by being constantly taken up, chosen, as a world 
 to inhabit, a life to live, by all. No normal conscious being 
 can cut himself adrift from it. He sustains and maintains it 
 by free creation of will or he helps to destroy it, also by 
 volitional choice. " The rational being is subjected to a law 
 which is universal but which nevertheless he himself 
 enacts."-^ The way in which he enacts or creates the moral 
 order is by the choice of ends which are consistent with its 
 existence, i.e., are morally valuable in the sense that they 
 sustain and enhance it as a world or life ; just as healthy liv- 
 ing sustains and promotes the physical order and the dis- 
 charge of social duties promotes the welfare of the social 
 order. In so creating and sustaining it he is realising the 
 self, the best self, the rational and social self, the ideal self. 
 In realising this ideal self he is going beyond his finite self 
 and fulfilling his function as a part of the great whole, the 
 universe, the concrete universal. By this realisation of his 
 ideal self, by creative acts which sustain the moral order, he 
 is giving effect to the tension towards the infinite which is the 
 differentia of human consciousness. This tension is what 
 James has distinguished as the marginal function of 
 presentations. 
 
 §5. We have pointed out what the creation of the moral 
 
 28 Caird, op. cit., V'ol. II, p. 224. (Italics mine.)
 
 PRELIMINARIES 
 
 315 
 
 continuum means in general terms. Our point of view, thus 
 far, has been, we may fairly say, that of ethics and phil- 
 osophy combined, though psychological references have 
 here and there seemed appropriate. This seems to be sound 
 procedure for a theory of education. It seems wise first to 
 take a broad synthetic survey of the ground more especially 
 since we assume knowledge of the outlines of philosophy and 
 the rudiments of psychology and ethics as an indispensable 
 condition of any superstructure of educational theory. We 
 have, however, now reached a point at which it is desirable 
 to look at the conclusions we have reached analytically. Our 
 attitude in the remainder of this chapter will thus be that of 
 psychology. We may put our immediate problem in this 
 way. What does the creation of the moral continuum mean 
 in psychological terms ? Of what elements or constituents 
 of conscious process does it consist ? The answer to these 
 questions is involved in the treatment of the subject we have 
 so far followed. Our present purpose is to extricate it 
 psychologically. 
 
 In the first place cognition is involved. If the world or 
 continuum is teleologically constituted, if thoughts and acts 
 become linked together as parts of a moral order through the 
 operative agency of an end or final cause, which may be said 
 at once to throw its light backward and to direct conscious 
 process forward to itself as a focus, then cognition or appre- 
 hension of that end is a factor involved. So far we accept 
 the Socratic dictum that virtue is knowledge and so far we 
 reject, as has been already noted, the Kantian dictum of the 
 categorical imperative of practical reason. The imperative 
 which is operative in the creation of the moral continuum in 
 consciousness is not categorical but conditional, and the con- 
 dition is awareness, cognition, or apprehension of some end 
 of ethical value. Kant himself moved some way onward from 
 his first formulation of the moral law as what Bradley charac- 
 terised as " Duty for Duty's sake,"^^ to the third formulation 
 where he develops the idea of humanity as a kingdom of 
 ends. But while the grandeur of Kant's moral theory re- 
 mains unaffected by destructive criticism, it is generally 
 accepted now that an empty imperative of " Duty for Duty's 
 sake " must be filled out by the conception of an imperative 
 
 ^^ See Note on Kant in Mackenzie's Manual of Ethics, p. 203.
 
 3i6 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 constraint to realise an end of moral value. Cognition of an 
 end is thus, we may say without hesitation, the first element 
 of conscious moral process by which the continuum is 
 created. It follows that morality cannot be said to begin 
 until there is awareness of a ideological character. 
 
 What sort of cognition we may now ask ? We have 
 just used the word awareness and intentionally ; for it seems 
 that as soon as this teleological awareness or apprehension 
 comes into being, we are justified in speaking of the birth of 
 the moral continuum. We may quote a passage from Caird 
 where he is making the point that what we have called the 
 birth of the moral continuum is conditioned by the fact that 
 man is a member of a community, a social order as dis- 
 tinguished from a moral order. He says : " This conscious- 
 ness [our moral continuum], no doubt, is very imperfectly 
 developed at first. In purely savage life, so imperfect are 
 the forms of such union, that it may even be denied to have 
 any actual realisation at all. The consciousness of a unity 
 which is beyond the caprice of individuals, and the conse- 
 quent reverence for a law or will above their own, has not 
 yet separated itself from the submission of terror to a superior 
 force. It shows itself not so much in the achievement [our 
 creation] of a moral order as in the restless discontent which 
 follows caprice and slavery as its shadow, and which makes 
 the savage life so much worse than the life of animals, just 
 because it contains the germ of something better. But still, 
 it is by the secret working of this idea of good which goes 
 along with self-consciousness that gradually out of the chaos 
 of conflicting self-wills there arises some kind of elementary 
 social order, which can furnish the mediation necessary to 
 the development of a distinct moral consciousness. For we 
 must remember always that a moral consciousness does not 
 spring from our minds full blown and complete, without any 
 fertilisation of them by experience."^® 
 
 Three points may be distinguished in this extract. The 
 first is the one we wish to make, namely, that moral con- 
 sciousness may be said to begin to exist when there is 
 cognition of a " unity beyond the caprice of individuals," or 
 perhaps the term recognition would not be out of place, for 
 in the "restless discontent" we should be justified in dis- 
 ss Op. ciL, Vol. II, p. 233.
 
 PRELIMINARIES 317 
 
 tinguishing a cognitive element, though anoetic.^* The 
 second is the fact that the second world, the social order, 
 mediates the cognition or recognition of the third world, the 
 moral order. Bosanquet has suggested" that we might get 
 the germ of moral consciousness without mediation by the 
 social order, but all agree that this order is mainly, if not 
 entirely, instrumental in its genesis. The third is the close 
 relation of the genesis of the moral continuum to the de- 
 velopment of self-consciousness. Our point of view is that 
 that genesis takes place just when the self adopts an end and 
 thus creates a moral continuum by the linking up of a 
 thought or purpose with it. 
 
 The quotation also brings out the nature of the cognition 
 of an end by which the moral continuum comes into being. 
 In the consciousness of the savage it would clearly be of the 
 vaguest kind, something in the nature of the faintest halo or 
 penumbra surrounding an act or purpose. Yet out of this 
 vague consciousness of something better or higher may be 
 developed the whole of the body of morality and subject- 
 matter of ethics by differentiation and development within 
 the continuum. The moral continuum on its cognitive side 
 may thus attain to varying degrees of articulateness between 
 the extremes of mere nebulous awareness of something bigger 
 and better and higher such as Dr. Caird indicates in the ex- 
 perience of the savage, and a clearly differentiated moral 
 order or content within which all the activities of life may 
 find their place and purpose. And the progress from nebu- 
 losity to complete articulateness is dependent on moral edu- 
 cation. It is helpful to think of this progress as comparable 
 with the advance made by that exploration of the physical 
 continuum we have endeavoured to describe in the first part 
 of this essay. There we noted how from the first whole or 
 continuum of physical reality in which the self is not clearly 
 distinguished from its environment, the world of discrete 
 things emerged, to be followed by their re-union in the realm 
 of law, and consummated in the conception of a system or 
 concrete universal in which the functioning of every physical 
 component finds its explanation. There is certainly no such 
 necessary coherence in the scheme of moral progress because 
 
 29 Cf. Stout, Analytic Tsychology, Vol. I, pp. 50, 51. 
 
 30 Psychology of the Moral Self, p. 87.
 
 3i8 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 of the absence of such constraint as is exercised by the 
 physical environment. Progress in the moral order is con- 
 ditioned, as has so often been repeated, by the necessity for 
 individual creation. But it is just this responsibility which 
 is the correlate of human freedom. Potentiality for the same 
 coherence in the moral continuum exists, however, and moral 
 education is just the conversion of this potentiality into 
 actuality. The moments of awareness of a higher end and 
 aim have to be caught up and linked together into a con- 
 tinuum of purpose just as the discrete "things" of the 
 physical world have to be woven together in the texture of 
 law. And as the abstract texture of physical law must ulti- 
 mately be replaced, so to say, in the concrete mosaic of physi- 
 cal system, so the moral continuum of the relations of 
 separate actions and activities to moral ends must culminate 
 in a whole life which sustains the moral order of the world. 
 
 Following the method of analysis and abstraction appro- 
 priate to psychological investigation, we have so far referred 
 to the moral continuum on its cognitive side as something 
 known, realised, apperceived. Like all conscious experience 
 however it has aesthetic quality. We can readily understand 
 that in the fringe of conscious process which mediated aware- 
 ness of something higher and better in the mind of Dr. 
 Caird's savage there was a glow of feeling kindled by the 
 vague consciousness of rational purpose which would trans- 
 form his " restless discontent " into something out of which 
 moral fervour might ultimately emerge. For we know by 
 experience what an uplift accompanies the consciousness of 
 some contribution to the ethos of a society, e.g., a school. Of 
 course there may be awareness of the call of the school with- 
 out the glow which is the life of purpose ; but this is not the 
 normal case and is probably ultimately to be attributed to 
 faulty or short-sighted education. 
 
 We have to add that the creation of the moral con- 
 tinuum involves conation in the restricted sense of an act of 
 will or volition. In a wider sense conation is an aspect of 
 all cognition, being indeed the equivalent of attention.'^ But 
 the creation of the moral continuum involves more than mere 
 
 31 See the exhaustive analysis in Stout's Analytic Psychology, Vol. I, 
 Book I, Chap. VI, and Book II, Chaps. I-IH, and especially pp. 122-132.
 
 PRELIMINARIES 319 
 
 attention to a moral end. Such attention would create it as 
 conscious process and conation would be involved in main- 
 taining it as such within experience. But virtue is not know- 
 ledge though maintained by conation. There must be a fiat 
 of the will by which the end is taken up into organic relation 
 with the self and becomes an object to be striven for. Then 
 the moral continuum is created and gains objectivity, i.e., 
 real existence in the third world of a moral order as real and 
 objective as the physical world itself. We may seem to be 
 labouring this point unduly, but it is vital. The third world 
 of moral ideas can only be sustained by these acts of volitional 
 creation. Cognition is necessary to define it, feeling to give 
 it constraining power, and volition to bring it into real effec- 
 tive being. " In this world of content [our third world] the 
 work of thinking will, we have in an external and factual 
 form the body and substance of thinking will itself. . . . 
 This creation of a world is the fundamental proof and example 
 of the power of will."^^ And the greatest task of education 
 is to concentrate thought, feeling and will on its creation. 
 
 §6. To return now from the abstract to the concrete, 
 from analysis to synthesis, it appears to us that in what we 
 have called the creation of the moral continuum we have the 
 co-operation of the three irreducible factors of mind or con- 
 sciousness cognition, feeling, and volition ; and their blend- 
 ing in the creative act is just what we mean by self-realisa- 
 tion. On to the classic battleground of origins we do not 
 propose to venture. The protagonist of the view that ideas, 
 i.e., cognition, are both logically and temporarily prior to 
 volition, and that out of the opposition of apperceptive 
 masses will emerges in the triumph of one over the other, is 
 Herbart ; while Kant is the champion of the superiority, in 
 respect of freedom at all events, of will in the form of Practi- 
 cal Reason. Ueberweg, summarising the Herbartian view, 
 says " Freedom of the will, in psychology, is the assured 
 supremacy of the strongest masses of ideas over single affec- 
 tions or impressions. Kant's doctrine of ' transcendental 
 freedom ' is false. "^^ The opposition seems irreconcilable. 
 The student with a realistic bent will probably follow Herbart 
 while the idealistic will assuredly be a disciple of Kant. 
 
 •'*- Cosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, p. 113. 
 33 History of Philosophy, Vol. II, p. 279.
 
 320 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 Professor Adams' lucid examination" of the Herbartian 
 position in his great work on " The Evokition of Educational 
 Theory " will be found very helpful for teachers seeking 
 guidance for ideas and practice. He may be cited in sup- 
 port of the view outlined above that the form of self-realisa- 
 tion involved in sustaining the moral order implies the three 
 irreducible factors we have named. We may, indeed, 
 oscillate between the Herbartian and the Kantian position, 
 now laying stress on content, on ideas, as the peg or nucleus 
 about which continuity and unity develop ; now laying it on 
 will which fixes the peg or nucleus and brands it with the 
 personal or individual mark. It does not seem to us that 
 anything is gained, from our point of view, that of the theory 
 of education, by trying to prove the priority of origin or 
 value of either. It is true that the Herbartian view is more 
 helpful as a guide to method in teaching.'' We can get a 
 circle of ideas into the four corners of a syllabus. And it 
 might be said that the central idea of this essay, the idea of 
 the exploration, discovery and creation of the physical, social, 
 and moral worlds respectively, obviously puts the aspect of 
 cognition of ideas and knowledge in the foreground. Un- 
 questionably it does. Absorbing the environment is acquir- 
 ing knowledge.'* But the obvious is rarely the whole. And 
 we shall have failed in our task if we have not established 
 the point that knowledge, the spectator's possession, must 
 be branded with the player's mark, must be a constituent of 
 life and action, or it remains useless and detached. We must 
 be absorbed as well as absorb, give as well as take. 
 
 3'' pp. 322-355. 
 
 35 Cf. Adams, op. rit., p 345. 
 
 36 Ibid, p. 59.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE FACTORS OF ADJUSTMENT 
 
 §1. We come now to another stage of our inquiry. 
 We have to show what agencies we can bring to bear so as 
 to further the development of the moral order in the experi- 
 ence of the individual, and how they act. The first of these 
 agencies and perhaps the most important is the moral order 
 or environment, as this is embodied, for example, in the 
 organisation and traditions of a good school. For we must 
 not lose sight of the fact that such an order or environment is 
 about him in just as real a sense as the physical world. This 
 is not inconsistent with the view that for him its reality will 
 consist in his identification of himself with it by an act of 
 creation. He cannot create his continuum out of nothing: 
 much, indeed most, of the material he must find in just this 
 existent moral order. 
 
 There are, of course, other agencies which will be con- 
 sidered later. The teacher will be thought of at once, but 
 we shall give reasons for regarding him as a constituent, a 
 vitally important one, of the moral order itself, and not as a 
 separate agency. The physical environment is another. 
 The attitude towards it illustrated by Wordsworth's apos- 
 trophe to Duty : 
 
 " Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong 
 And the most ancient heavens through thee 
 are fresh and strong." 
 
 is not merely a flight of poetic fancy, but a sober fact recur- 
 rent within the experience of normal individuals. Then, to 
 these environmental agencies we shall have to add direct 
 instruction, and the indirect moral training which the various 
 school activities afford. It seems well to begin with the moral 
 order itself as an environmental world. Before considering 
 its operation there is one preliminary matter to be cleared up. 
 It is the question of the operation of heredity. The relevancv 
 
 321
 
 322 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 of this point here should appear as we proceed. Anything 
 like a complete survey is, of course, out of the question. It 
 is, perhaps, the central problem of biology, and while the 
 application, in eugenics, of such results as have been reached, 
 to physical well-being, is one of the most vital departments of 
 education, conceived broadly, we are directly concerned with 
 but one aspect of it. That aspect is the vexed and long- 
 disputed question of the transmissibility of acquired charac- 
 teristics or modifications produced in the organic structure, 
 physical or mental, of the individual during its lifetime. 
 Our interest even in this one aspect of the problem of 
 heredity is in a way academic. Whichever way the answer 
 may go, it will not afifect our efforts. Nevertheless, as 
 educators we ought to know what the pronouncement of 
 science is. We ought to know what forces aid us and what 
 handicap us in our efforts. And from another point of view 
 the truth is not merely of academic interest but of practical 
 interest also. At least it will stimulate our efforts, and it 
 may modify them. 
 
 As to the pronouncement of science we may quote 
 Professor J. A. Thomson. He writes : " It may be said that 
 the disputants are now agreed as to the precise point at issue, 
 and perhaps it may also be said that neither the yeas nor the 
 nays ring out so confidently as they did ten years ago."^ He 
 puts the precise point in the form of a question : " Does a 
 structural change in a part of the body, induced by use or 
 disuse, or by change in surroundings and nurture generally, 
 ever influence the germ-plasm in the reproductive organs in 
 such a specific or representative way that the offspring will 
 thereby exhibit the same modification that the parent 
 acquired, or even a tendency towards it?"^ He answers the 
 question cautiously but definitively. "We do not know of 
 any clear case which would at present warrant the assertion 
 that a somatic modification is ever transmitted from parent 
 to offspring."^ We may quote Bergson in support of this 
 conclusion. He says : "If (as seems probable to us) a habit 
 contracted by the individual were transmitted to its 
 descendants only in very exceptional cases, all the Spencerian 
 
 1 Darwinism and Human Lifo, p. 157. 
 
 2 Ibid p. 159.
 
 THE FACTORS OF ADJUSTMENT 323 
 
 psychology would need remaking and a large part of 
 Spencer's philosophy would fall to pieces.'" There is the 
 same scientific caution but decided support for the scepticism, 
 originating in Weismann, which exists with regard to the 
 theory of the transmissibility of acquired characteristics. 
 
 So far as the individual is concerned, then — the limita- 
 tion is a vitally important one, as we shall presently see — we 
 must postulate a fresh start, save in respect of the accumula- 
 tion of germinal variations. ■• Does that justify pessimism ? 
 Let us take counsel of one of ourselves who is concerned with 
 the business of education. Professor Adams throws his 
 weight characteristically into the scale of sane optimism. 
 We must be permitted a somewhat lengthy quotation : "It 
 is hardly fair to regard the demonstration of the fallacy of 
 the transmission of acquired characteristics (if it is demon- 
 strated — as the educator may honestly hope it is) as a 
 calamity for education. The fact works both for and against 
 the educator, but on the whole the balance is in his favour. 
 No doubt it frustrates the hope that by accumulated improve- 
 ments in succeeding generations, the educator may produce 
 an ever-improving set of human beings. The educator's 
 work has therefore been somewhat unreasonably compared to 
 the labour of Sisyphus. He has no sooner disposed of one 
 set of educands than he must start afresh with another, and 
 begin all over again. . . . But it is just here that conso- 
 lation begins. Is it not a gain rather than a loss that a baby 
 must begin at scratch ? ... Is the educator's dismay at 
 losing the paid-up capital of his previous work any greater 
 than his dismay at seeing the sort of material that comes to 
 him from parents who have acquired characteristics that 
 would, if transmitted, make the work of the educator hope- 
 less?"* This is hopeful and inspiring. But there is surer 
 ground for encouragement. In the opening of this 
 paragraph we suggested that the fresh start was limited 
 to the individual. The social organism, especially as a moral 
 order, is just the opposite of the individual organism in this 
 that it can and does store up acquired characteristics. If we 
 have lost transmission of them in one place — which loss as 
 
 ^ Creative Evolution, p. 83. 
 * Thomson, op. cit., p. 159. 
 ^ Evolution of Educational Theory, pp. 55, 56.
 
 324 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 Professor Adams argues may well prove to be an ultimate 
 gain — we can find it in another place. Professor Thompson 
 indicates it plainly. " Of particular importance," he says, 
 " is the fact that man, in contrast to other creatures, has 
 developed around him an external heritage, a social frame- 
 work of customs and traditions, of laws and institutions, of 
 literature and art, by which results almost equivalent to the 
 organic transmission of certain kinds of modifications may be 
 brought about."® This is our second world and we may add 
 our third, the world of a moral order though, as we have all 
 along implied, they overlap. We are certainly on safe 
 ground in this sphere of what has been named social heredity. 
 " The function of social heredity is to pass on from genera- 
 tion to generation the gains that advancing civilisation 
 brings."'' 
 
 The point is vital for a theory of education. Our second 
 and third worlds endure, in Bergson's phrase. Real con- 
 tinuity in time is of their essence. In respect of them it is 
 literally true that " Duration is the continuous progress of 
 the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it 
 advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so also 
 there is no limit to its preservation."* Birth and death in 
 the literal sense are categories which do not apply to these 
 two worlds. The social and moral orders endure and their 
 acquired characteristics are conserved, if we so ivilJ. They 
 are human volitional creations and are free from the 
 positive and negative limitations of physical heredity. 
 " This is the creative path by which the content of will — the 
 second or spiritual world and nature — comes into finite 
 form."' It is, of course, true that decay may exist in the 
 social and moral orders, as it exists in the order of nature. 
 " One good custom may corrupt the world." But because 
 they are orders of our own creation they are within our own 
 power to sustain and carry on in unending progress. In 
 these two spheres we have the factor of transmission within 
 our control. 
 
 6 Op. cit., pp. 173, 174. 
 
 7 Adams, op. cit., p. 59. 
 
 * Creative Evolution, p. 5. 
 
 * Bosanquet, Value and Destiny of the Individual, p. 112. What he calls 
 the second world is our third, but it includes our second, for, as he somewhere 
 says, the super-social includes the social.
 
 THE FACTORS OF ADJUSTMENT 325 
 
 Consider this truth in the concrete instance of a school 
 as a social and moral order or continuum, an order in which 
 social life and social institutions, in miniature, are to be 
 found, and in which moral and religious ideas prevail. 
 These alone give it real and enduring solidarity, and in this 
 respect the school reflects what Graham Wallas has finely 
 called The Great Society. The school is an organism 
 just to the extent that it is a social order, and, as such, 
 or in addition, the incarnation and expression of moral 
 and religious truth. We are clear about the nature of this 
 organism. It is true that, as Wallas says, the term implies, 
 " not merely that the associated human beings influence each 
 other vitally and consciously, but that their association has a 
 conscious life of its own, apart from the many lives of the 
 individuals who constitute it — that a community [e.g. a 
 school] is an ' organism ' or ' body ' in the same sense in 
 which a man is."" We agree with him that " there is in 
 fact no evidence whatever that a self-conscious society in that 
 sense does exist."" But a school and any society which 
 stands for certain purposes, ideals, and traditions, has 
 objectivity, and is a reality, one of the most pervasive of all 
 realities for its loyal members. And perhaps no better proof 
 of its objectivity and reality can be found than the fact we are 
 emphasising now, that it holds and transmits from day to 
 day, from year to year, and from generation to generation 
 those purposes, ideals, and traditions which its members con- 
 tribute. That fact, whatever views we may hold as to the 
 nature of its ultimate being, is one of paramount importance. 
 There is no beginning all over again, no fresh start, in the 
 case of a school, as there probably is, so far as acquired 
 habitudes go, in the case of an individual. Its vitality and 
 value as a social and moral order is, at any moment, the 
 product and expression of all its past history. That is what 
 makes our insistence on the point so important for a theory 
 of education. There is no counterpart in the life of a school 
 to the distinction between somatic and germinal characteris- 
 tics; the somatic and the germinal are one. Every function 
 which it performs, and every act which its members, pupils 
 
 10 The Great Society, p. 250. 
 
 11 Ibid, p. 251. Cf. p. 157 above.
 
 326 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 and staff, perform, leaves it better or worse as an association, 
 an organisation,^^ an environment for evoking and sustaining 
 a moral continuum in the conscious life of its members. 
 
 We may quote McDougall in support of the set-off, by 
 transmission through the environment, against the absence 
 of transmission through the individual of acquired charac- 
 teristics. "Whereas animal species have advanced from 
 lower to higher levels of mental life by the improvement of 
 the innate mental constitution of the species, man, since he 
 became man, has progressed in the main by means of the 
 increase in volume, and improvement in quality of the sum 
 of knowledge, belief, and custom, which constitutes the 
 tradition of any society. And it is to the superioritv of the 
 moral and intellectual tradition of his society that the 
 superiority of civilised man over existing savages and over 
 his savage forefathers is chiefly, if not wholly, due."^^ It is, 
 of course, within the knowledge of every schoolmaster and 
 schoolmistress of experience what a fragile, sensitive growth 
 this is. It is extraordinary how quickly the pale clear fires 
 of purity, truth, and honour will die down, if they are not 
 constantly fed. Every schoolmaster and schoolmistress of 
 experience knows this. And the only fuel is the acts done 
 or left undone, the life lived or rejected by its members, staff 
 and pupils. Mere contribution, service, is not good enough 
 as a conceptual torch. We must have the ideal of trustee- 
 ship, guardianship and championship. R. L. Stevenson's 
 delightful essay on "The Lantern-Bearers" is singularly 
 pertinent. The moral and religious life of the school must 
 be a torch for each boy or girl to light, feed, carry and ulti- 
 mately hand on undimmed. 
 
 We may sum up this brief preliminary discussion of the 
 question of transmission as it concerns the individual and the 
 environment by once more laying Professor Adams under 
 contribution and borrowing two quotations from his book.** 
 One is from Professor Ra)'' Lancaster and runs : " Educa- 
 bility can be transmitted — it is a congenital character ; but 
 the results of education cannot be transmitted. ... To 
 
 12 Ibid, p. 251. 
 
 I-'' Social Psychology, p. 328. 
 
 i< Op. cit, p. 57.
 
 THE FACTORS OF ADJUSTMENT 327 
 
 the educable animal the less there is of speciaHsed mechanism 
 transmitted by heredity the better. The loss of instinct is 
 what permits and necessitates the education of the receptive 
 brain. "^' The second is from Professor Ritchie: " CiviUsa- 
 tion is the sum of those contrivances [our second and third 
 worlds] which enable human beings to advance independ- 
 ently of (biological) heredity.""^ 
 
 We have so far been dealing with the question of trans- 
 missibility of acquired dispositions as a general question 
 bearing directly upon the theory of education and, in par- 
 ticular, upon the problem immediately before us, viz., the 
 social and moral environment as an agency conditioning the 
 creation of the moral continuum within the experience of the 
 individual. We wanted to know whether progress from 
 generation to generation was possible; and the answer was 
 negative as regards the individual, qua individual, but 
 affirmative as regards the environmental world of morality 
 which was summed up, in the quotation from Professor 
 Ritchie, as civilisation. It follows that the individual boy 
 or girl, of the present day, certainly does not start from 
 scratch, as Professor Adams puts it, in comparison with the 
 individual boy or girl of a generation ago. The volunteers 
 of Kitchener's armies were men, we may well suppose, with 
 much the same congenital endowments as those who made 
 up Wellington's army at Waterloo; but we are certain that 
 the moral order, the civilisation, they went forth to preserve 
 was vastly more imperative in the purity of its call, and their 
 response was, in consequence, more noble and spontaneous, 
 through this cumulative moral effect of a hundred years of 
 history. So the public-school boy starts better than his 
 father, because the social milieu of the school will have accu- 
 mulated the traditions of a generation. " Each generation 
 owes it to itself and to its posterity to protect its culture, to 
 enrich it, and to transmit it."^^ 
 
 §2. There is, of course, a great body of instincts and 
 dispositions which are congenital in the individual and which 
 are vitally important for education. They are, however, the 
 subject-matter of psychological and sociological inquiry, and 
 
 1^ The Kingdom of Man, pp. 123, 124, 
 
 ^^ Darwinism and Politics, p. 132. 
 
 1^ N. M. Butler, " The Meaning of Education," p. 39. 
 
 22
 
 328 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 any attempt to give a summary account of them would be 
 futile. The student who is interested may be referred to 
 James/^ the works of McDougall/® Graham Wallas,^" and 
 a recent historical and critical investigation by Drever^^ with 
 educational references. The three last-named have the social 
 rather than the individual unit in focus, and their investiga- 
 tions are complementary to those of earlier psychologists with 
 an individualistic bias. McDougall brings out the import- 
 ance of these human instincts. "We may say, then, that 
 directly or indirectly the instincts are the prime movers of 
 all human activity ; by the conative or impulsive force of 
 some instinct (or of some habit derived from an instinct), 
 every train of thought, however cold and passionless it may 
 seem, is borne along towards its end, and every bodily 
 activity is initiated and sustained. The instinctive impulses 
 determine the ends of all activities, and supply the driving 
 power by which all mental activities are sustained. . . . 
 Take away these instinctive dispositions with their powerful 
 impulses, and the organism would become incapable of 
 activity of any kind ; it would lie inert and motionless like a 
 wonderful clockwork whose mainspring had been removed, 
 or a steam-engine whose fires had been drawn. "^^ 
 
 Drever, again, opens his work as follows: "Our pur- 
 pose is to attempt to give a psychological account of Instinct 
 in Man, and thereafter to study, still in the main from the 
 psychological point of view, the relation of Instinct to 
 Emotion, with special reference to human emotions, and the 
 part which Instinct plays in that phase of human develop- 
 ment to which we give the name of Education. "^^ Clearly 
 here is a fertile field of inquiry which no teacher who seeks 
 a scientific basis for his work can afford to neglect. Not 
 only does the pupil come to school with an outfit of congeni- 
 tal dispositions, some of a social character since man is such 
 by nature ; but with an outfit of social experience gained as 
 a member of the family. Family life as the natural vestibule 
 to school life has been sympathetically analysed by Dr. 
 
 18 Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, Chapter XXIV. 
 
 i^ Social Psychology. 
 
 -0 Human Nature in Politics and The Great Society. 
 
 21 Instinct in Man. 
 
 22 Op. cit, p. 44. 
 
 "3 Instinct in Man, p. i.
 
 THE FACTORS OF ADJUSTMENT 329 
 
 Welton.^* " The primary educative working of the family 
 is this general moulding of the whole spiritual life — its out- 
 look, its moral standards, its sentiments, its modes of 
 thought, its unexamined opinions and prejudices. It acts 
 continuously through the ideas, aims, and estimates which 
 are taken for granted in all the family intercourse; and inter- 
 mittently in direct instruction, either given positively through 
 exhortation, advice, direction or explanation, or negatively 
 through prohibition, condemnation and punishment. It is 
 the atmosphere in which the child lives and acts."^^ This 
 brings out the way in which family life is — perhaps we had 
 better say should be — the natural thoroughfare to the school 
 as a moral order. Its value lies in the kind of experience it 
 provides. Conduct is, or should be, regulated in early years 
 by love and sympathy rather than by insight. This, how- 
 ever, is just one of the main reasons why school life should 
 follow. The moral continuum needs the more bracing 
 atmosphere of the school if it is to develop strength and co- 
 herence. It is born of the fiat of the individual as we have 
 seen ; and that is more likely to emerge under stress inter 
 pares than in the shelter of the home. " Life at school is 
 based upon the principle of resemblance ; life at home on that 
 of difference. At school a boy associates pre-eminently with 
 his equals, at home with those who are older or younger than 
 himself. . . . It is needful that he should enter by ex- 
 perience as fully as possible into the meaning of both these 
 fundamental types of human relationship."^^ The school 
 needs the family as a seed-bed, and the family needs the 
 school as the open plantation where the boy or girl is 
 hardened by the open air and bluster of life. " The school 
 is, then, an extension of the home circle and a miniature of 
 social life."" 
 
 §3. We have now arrived at a point from which we can 
 look at the way in which the school as a moral order acts 
 upon its members so as to stimulate them to what we have 
 called the creation of that order within their own conscious 
 
 2* What do we mean by Education? pp. 184-192. 
 2* Ibid, p. 190. 
 
 26 H. Bompas Smith, in The International Report on Moral Instruction 
 and Training in Schools, Vol. I, p. 120. The whole article is brimful of 
 suggestion. 
 
 27 Welton, op. cit, p. 216.
 
 330 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 life. The process is really what we mean by the formation 
 of character; for, in the phrase of Emerson, character " is the 
 moral order seen through the medium of an individual 
 nature."^** We want to know what the process of forming 
 character, as thus understood, is. From our point of view 
 it is the subjective aspect of adjustment in the evolutionary 
 sense, as all education is, but we must analyse the idea. 
 Obviously the clue to this analysis is given us in the cogni- 
 tive, affective or aesthetic, and conative or volitional elements 
 out of which the texture of the moral continuum is woven. 
 
 First, then, as regards the element of cognition. How 
 does the moral environment work on the individual so that 
 he comes to know it ? Well, there is a well-established dis- 
 tinction between ways or stages of knowing which is ex- 
 pressed by the contrast between empirical and rational know- 
 ledge. Empirical knowledge means just aw^areness or 
 acquaintance with a fact or a process; while rational know- 
 ledge means, in the widest sense, knowledge of either fact, or 
 process in its relations; or, more simply, knowledge which 
 consists in an intelligent understanding of either. The two 
 shade off into each other and interpenetrate. No knowledge 
 is, perhaps, entirely empirical; it always extends beyond the 
 immediate object; there is always some fringe, some halo of 
 relation, as James would say.^^ I remember a Dutch child of 
 three pointing to the heavens and saying : " Die sterretje 
 daar bo" (the little star up there). She passed beyond the 
 twinkling nucleus of light to its spatial context quite natur- 
 ally. It is certain that the widest conception, the most com- 
 prehensive law, which the human intellect is capable of 
 grasping, is empirical in the sense that it has an unrevealed 
 context or setting. The law^ of gravitation is empirical in 
 this sense. It has not yet been taken up into a wider gener- 
 ality which will explain it. Knowledge is never, probably, 
 purely empirical, without context ; and assuredly never purely 
 rational with a closed context : the boundary will always call 
 for explanation so long as the universe endures. The general 
 criticism of Kant's philosophy is that, in the critique of Pure 
 Reason, he created an artificial gulf between sense and under- 
 standing which he never succeeded in bridging; just as in 
 
 28 Quoted by Butlor, The Meaning of Edncation, p. 08. 
 
 29 See p. 313.
 
 THE FACTORS OF ADJUSTMENT 331 
 
 the critique of Practical Reason he left the categorical im- 
 perative of will without bonds of connection with the mani- 
 fold of desire. 
 
 The distinction is of the utmost value for education. It 
 is within everybody's experience that progress from the 
 relatively empirical to the relatively rational is constantly 
 going on. The transition from one to the other, or the trans- 
 formation of one by the other, may be said to be the general 
 formula of educational progress. Whenever it occurs it is 
 an unfailing source of the purest delight. To-night the moon 
 may be just a lamp ; to-morrow night its comradeship with 
 the earth and its filial ties with the sun may be revealed. Its 
 scientific context breaks through the margin of consciousness 
 and swims into the focus; and to the material light is added 
 the intellectual illumination. A boy has toiled empirically 
 through a series of exercises in decimal fractions and sud- 
 denly he grasps, in a measure, the rational basis of a decimal 
 system. A member of a school board has listened a score 
 of times to discussions about school sites or school hours 
 and, of a sudden, dry details are transfigured by some illu- 
 minating glimpse of a principle of social hygiene. The 
 " flower in the crannied wall " trails a theory of evolution 
 or" childhood a " cloud of glory " about it for the first time. 
 Instances are innumerable just because the three worlds, 
 physical, social, and moral are constantly revealing them- 
 selves to what Dr. Ward so penetratingly called the " greet- 
 ing intelligence.'"" This is what adjustment means. It is 
 what Kant meant by the Transcendental Unity of Appercep- 
 tion. It is mind overcoming the " magnificent opposition " 
 between itself and objective fact. Perhaps it is human mind 
 greeting universal mind as the Idealist philosophers main- 
 tain. 
 
 To come back to the school. The question is how as a 
 moral order it can be brought into that living contact with the 
 consciousness of the boy or girl out of which cognition of it, 
 mere awareness of it at first, will emerge. And the answer is 
 that if the moral order is a living reality it will inevitably 
 bring about that contact. The pupil can no more escape it 
 than he can escape the constraint of t^e physical world. 
 Just, however, as the physical world is not a chaos but a 
 
 30 Naturalism and Agnosticism, Vol. II, p. 254.
 
 232 TflE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 world with articulations and contours within which the indi- 
 vidual can make himself at home and which he can grasp, as 
 we have seen, in the progressive order of things, laws, and 
 system ; so the school, as a reflection of the moral order of 
 the universe, must be an organised world of occupations, 
 serious and gay, flexible routine, rules and customs, traditions 
 and aspirations, shot through and through with moral, 
 aesthetic, and religious purpose. There will be grey lights 
 as well as coloured lights, as there is sunlight and shadow 
 without. But if the moral continuum is there it will find its 
 way through empirical cognition into the greeting conscious- 
 ness of the members of the school. " A boy's moral growth 
 depends upon his assimilation of the social influences of his 
 environment, and . . . this assimilation is effected by 
 his own activity. "^^ 
 
 We are not concerned in this essay with details of 
 method. They are dealt with in the text-books.^^ In our 
 opinion, indeed, there is far too much detailed prescription 
 about method, based largely upon traditional practice, and 
 too seldom upon insight into principle. As Mr. Graham 
 Wallas says: "The problem ... of the adaptation of 
 our nature to our environment cannot be solved by merely 
 enforcing those habits which are most convenient under 
 existing circumstances."^^ Rigidity and fixity of method 
 are radically opposed to the plasticity and variety of adapta- 
 tion. There is perhaps no product of psychological, logical, 
 and philosophical reflection — and the three converge here — 
 more valuable for the theory of education than this distinc- 
 tion between empirical and rational knowledge. But if the 
 educator is alive to it, prescriptions of method based on the 
 idea of fixed boundaries between them, are a handicap rather 
 than a help. There are two deductions from their interpene- 
 tration which we may call methodological principles, that are 
 helpful and directive in a general way. One is that the spark 
 of rationality, the glow on the fringe of a concrete experience, 
 must be spontaneous. Forcing, attempts at premature 
 
 3' H. Bompas Smith, op. cit, Vol. I, p. 113. 
 
 32 Valuable suggestions will be found in Welton and Blandford's Moral 
 Training through School Discipline. 
 
 33 The Great Society, p. 85. The whole chapter (V) on Habit is valuable 
 as showing that too mechanical an interpretation of it may be educationally 
 misleading.
 
 THE FACTORS OF ADJUSTMENT 333 
 
 "eliciting," are worse than useless. Dogmatising is futile, 
 whatever the object of investigation may be, because it is the 
 negation of that self-realisation which is the end of all educa- 
 tion ; and when self-realisation through the creation of a 
 moral continuum is the vital business, then dogmatism, 
 attempted imposition from without, is not even negation, it 
 is a contradiction in terms. The second is that, save for an 
 exceptional personality, one who, in Wordsworth's magnifi. 
 cent conception, 
 
 " By the vision splendid 
 Is on his way attended. "3* 
 
 a mainly empirical acquaintance with the moral order, with 
 occasional glimpses into its rational fabric, is all we can hope 
 for. "The boy's moral standard will normally be deter- 
 mined by a code which represents the common ethical ideals 
 of the school or " house " rather than the dictates of his indi- 
 vidual conscience. This code finds its most characteristic 
 expression in schoolboy honour, and necessarily belongs to 
 the tribal stage of ethical development, intermediate between 
 the instinctive morality of the child and the enlightened fol- 
 lowing of conscience appropriate to the man."" This is 
 true, but there will be flashes of enlightenment from time to 
 time born of the tension towards the rational and the abso- 
 lute, characteristic of the very nature of man. 
 
 §4. When we turn to the affective aspect, the feeling 
 aspect of this process by which the school as a moral order 
 aids in generating, in normal circumstances, its counterpart 
 in the life of the individual, we find a reflection of the con- 
 trast between empirical and rational knowledge. It might 
 have been anticipated, because feeling is but one aspect of 
 conscious process; and its organic relation to cognition is, 
 perhaps, sufficient ground for an a priori inference that any 
 sound distinction of stages of development which is to be 
 found in one will be found in the other also. As a matter of 
 fact the investigation of the affective side of mind — the in- 
 stincts, emotions, and sentiments — is in its infancy. What 
 has been done, however, goes to support that a priori infer- 
 ence. Dr. Drever, for example, places instinct, sentiment, 
 and ideal in an ascending order of development in the life of 
 
 ^** Intimations of Immortality. 
 
 3^ H. Bompas Smith, op. cit, Vol. I, p. 109.
 
 334 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 feeling, which corresponds closely with the stages of cog- 
 nition we have distinguished as being educationally valuable. 
 He savs : " The ideal therefore represents a higher level of 
 psychical integration than the sentiment, just as the senti- 
 ment represents a higher level than the instinct."" And 
 instinct and sentiment together correspond to the empirical 
 stage of cognition, while the ideal is parallel with rationality. 
 Let us bring out the correspondence by a further quotation. 
 " The ideal, though it is generally based upon the sentiment, 
 is more than the sentiment, and involves activity on a yet 
 higher plane, and a yet larger synthesis. . . . Action 
 determined by sentiment may show all kinds of inconsist- 
 encies and incongruities, owing to two facts, the fact that it is 
 emotionally controlled, and the fact that the ideational con- 
 sciousness, at the heart of the sentiment, is not rationalized 
 by reflection upon the meanings of the ideas involved and 
 their relations. Action determined by an ideal is, within the 
 limits of the ideal, consistent and harmonious.'"* This is 
 just what we have tried to indicate as the difference between 
 empirical and rational knowledge. 
 
 It will perhaps be a help if we follow this parallel 
 between the stages or aspects of cognition and feeling into 
 detail for a moment. Suppose it is the first day of a novice 
 in the preparatory school. All sorts of instincts, emotion- 
 tinged, cause the stream of his experience to rise and fall in 
 waves of feeling. His self-feeling will be positive, as 
 McDougall would express it, whenever kindly recognition 
 comes; and negative whenever the new order seems to offer 
 no niche for him. The emotional self will grow first larger 
 then smaller, will expand and contract. Reticence, perhaps 
 a function of the primal instinct of fear, will alternate with 
 response to a friendly glance, perhaps a function of the 
 primal instinct of gregariousness. Curiosity will be active, 
 if the objective bent is a dominant trait. But these throbbing 
 psychophysical dispositions will soon rise and fall about 
 some determinate trend of attraction or repulsion. They 
 will begin to organise themselves. He may go to sleep 
 homesick ; but he will awake in a morning or two a member 
 of the school. This period of the operation of instinctive dis- 
 positions will be followed by one in which they become 
 
 36 Instinct in Man, p. 215.
 
 THE FACTORS OF ADJUSTMENT 335 
 
 organised, that is, are linked together about a nucleus, e.g., 
 a dormitory, a form, or a form-master; even in a vague and 
 occasional way about the school itself. This is the stage 
 when the sentiment is emerging from, or perhaps we had 
 better say, merging with, the instinctive dispositions. Here 
 we have in feeling what exactly corresponds with empirical 
 knowledge reaching out beyond its immediacy and particu- 
 larity to some greater whole. The first chaotic gusts of in- 
 stinctive emotion settle into a steady drift. There is born 
 the sentiment of love (or hate) of the operative world or en- 
 vironmental order : dormitory, form, house, school in 
 lengthening radius and increasing area. And as during later 
 schooldays there is a constant tension in the fringe of empiri- 
 cal thought which is for ever carrying it outwards and beyond 
 itself to its rational context, so the tension of sentiment for 
 the school is for ever carrying the pupil beyond it as a social 
 whole to the ideal, the moral order, for which it stands and 
 which it embodies. It is felt at various times and in various 
 ways. To some it comes when victory in the fields or 
 honours in the lists are suddenly felt to be impersonal school 
 laurels; to others when personality is merged in the singing 
 of a school song or hymn. Some catch it through external 
 agency as when the sun lights up not only the ivy on the 
 western wing of the school but the ideals and traditions for 
 which it stands. Boy, dormitory, form, house, school, ideal 
 world come to be linked together in a concrete moral univer- 
 sal, and the linking up is the progress from instinct and 
 sentiment to ideal, is just the tension from empirical to 
 rational over again in the affective area. There is a swing 
 from one to the other in the intercourse of men. This is 
 illustrated in letters between R. L. Nettleship and Thring. 
 The former writes : " I have got a second. As far as I am 
 concerned it does not matter a straw. But I am very sorry 
 for the school and you."" That is the strong sentiment for 
 the school. The latter replies " You know very little of me 
 yet if you think I care for your second class. ... At all 
 events I care mighty little for any special honour. Humble 
 true work, with heart and eyes open, with or without honour, 
 is sure to do what God means it to do."" That is the ideal 
 or moral order which is more than the school. 
 
 2" G. H. Parkin, Life and Letters of Edward Thring, pp. 295, 296.
 
 336 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 §5. We thought the unity of conscious process a suf- 
 ficient reason for expecting- this paralleHsm between cognition 
 and feeling. We should expect the same unity to give us a 
 similar distinction in the sphere of conation. It does. 
 Habitual action and volitional action present the same con- 
 trast and — what is not so generally recognised — the same 
 interpenetration. Dr. Stout's analysis of what, following 
 Thomas Brown, he calls Relative Suggestion, is pertinent at 
 the point we have reached. ^^ He develops the idea of the 
 constructiveness of mind, its synthetic activity, the tension 
 beyond the immediate and particular, in the sphere of asso- 
 ciation. It is the theory which Mr. Bradley has summed 
 up in the generalisation " association marries only uni- 
 versals." Stout points out that even in action which we re- 
 gard as purely automatic, such as riding a bicycle, "the 
 bicyclist may spin along while he is all the time attending 
 to the scenery or the talk of his companion. It is highly 
 improbable that all the varying adaptations required for this 
 process have been severally and separately provided for in 
 the process of learning, and each so fixed by repetition as to 
 be readily available at need."^^ The point, for us, is that 
 even in automatic action there is a halo about the presentation 
 guiding it which is as it were a potentiality which may at 
 any time become an actuality in guiding new adjustments. 
 It is another proof of Bergson's view that there is no repe- 
 tition in consciousness or life. If this is true of automatic 
 action it is even more true of habitual action such as the 
 routine of a school calls for. The reveille bell, assembly, 
 morning prayers, the routine of lessons, the break away at 
 dismissal, become habitual, but there is always something 
 more than mere habit. Volition merges with, or emerges 
 from, habitual action not in the form in which it preceded 
 it and laid the basis for it, but in the form of recognition, an 
 acceptance, a fiat in respect of the purpose which lies behind 
 these institutions w-hich embody the school as a moral order. 
 The fiat may of course be negative in either of two cases : one 
 when the boy is not good enough for the school, the other 
 when the school is not good enough for the boy. But if the 
 school is a moral order and the boy is normal every day will 
 
 ss Analytic Psychology, Vol. II. Chap. \'I. 
 39 Op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 72, 73.
 
 THE FACTORS OF ADJUSTMENT 337 
 
 see the life of the boy become habitually purposive, habitu- 
 ally volitional; and the process of creating the moral con- 
 tinuum will be an active vital process. He will consciously 
 represent and sustain the school and the school will repro- 
 duce itself in him. What Kant said of perception and con- 
 ception we may apply wholly, mutatis mutandis, to habit and 
 insight. Habit without insight is blind, as insight without 
 habit is empty. " Ideas are directive of energy only when 
 the energy is already there, and to some extent accustomed 
 to flow into a cognate channel. In other words, the begin- 
 nings of habitudes first, then ideas taking them up and using 
 them and so making them more effective, is the true order. 
 And well will it be if by the time a child leaves school — 
 especially the primary school — his moral life have made a 
 good beginning; if he have habitudes illumined by such 
 simple and fruitful ideas as transmute them from blind 
 adherence to the customary into intelligent purpose."*" 
 Fortunately in the concrete process of mental life one is fused 
 with the other. 
 
 We may also quote Mr. Graham Wallas in support of 
 our contention that more than habit is needed. He says : 
 "A habit can neither be formed without risk of failure in the 
 process, nor permanently retained, when formed, unless it is 
 adapted, not only to the facts of the outer world, but also to 
 the whole of our inner nature."*^ And again " The English 
 ' public-school ' system constitutes one of the most tre- 
 mendous instruments of habituation that have ever existed; 
 but at the moment when a lad of eighteen seems on the point 
 of becoming a perfect Etonian, he has been known to 
 turn suddenly and unaccountably into something worse or 
 better."*^ Then he is abnormal and has failed to absorb 
 Eton or Eton him. Mr. Wallas' observations point, how- 
 ever, to the need that habitual action " must be combined 
 with and supported by some organised body of ideas. "*^ 
 One of the strongest arguments against a purely primary 
 education is that, being necessarily largely devoted to merely 
 instrumental subjects, it is inadequate as a means of 
 
 ^0 Welton and Blandford, Moral Instruction through School Discipline, 
 
 *i The Great Society, p. 85. 
 42 Ibid, p. 84. 
 " Ibid, p. 8i,
 
 338 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 developing an organised body of ideas through which its 
 mechanical routine can find outlet and meaning. " The 
 primary-school teacher finally loses sight of the child at the 
 very time when the child has most need of him."*" 
 
 We have not yet asked how the school acts on its mem- 
 bers so as to bring about these cognitive, affective and cona- 
 tive developments; how empirical knowledge, instinctive 
 emotional dispositions, and habitual actions, are first of all 
 stimulated so that the process can begin, and eventually 
 rational insight, organised sentiment, and volitional action 
 respectively, to some degree at all events and varying with 
 the individual, may emerge. When we do so we have an 
 answer on which the authorities are agreed. Stout,*' 
 McDougall," and Drever,*' may be consulted. Wallas'" 
 will also be found helpful while critical as to details. There 
 is general consensus of view that suggestion, sympathy and 
 imitation are operative social forces which stimulate the indi- 
 vidual on the cognitive, affective and conative sides of experi- 
 ence respectively, and that the reactions of thought, feeling 
 and behaviour which they evoke put the individual on the 
 road which must carry him some way at any rate towards 
 the goal of a moral continuum of his own. As James said, 
 from childhood onwards "man is essentially the imitative 
 animal."** These three great social forces are of the utmost 
 importance for education and the student cannot do better 
 than study closely their action as described in the references 
 given below, to which we may add Mr. Keatinge's " Study 
 of Suggestion." They are operative during every moment 
 of school life. And the writers named will be found par- 
 ticularly stimulating because their point of view is not only 
 social, but biological and evolutionary; so that education is 
 seen as a factor in cosmic process. 
 
 §6. Let us now sum up the conclusions of this chapter. 
 We have the pupil, the individual, and the school as a social 
 and moral order. The question is how that moral order can 
 
 ** Burrell in The International Report on Moral Instruction and Training 
 in Schools, Vol. I, p. 298. 
 
 ■15 Manual of Psychology, Book III, Division I, Chapters II and IV, and 
 Book IV, Chapter iX, §5. 
 
 «6 Social Psychology, Chapters W and XV. 
 
 47 Instinct in Man, Chapter X. 
 
 4S The Great Society, Part I, Chapter VIII. 
 
 •*9 Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, p. 408.
 
 THE FACTORS OF ADJUSTMENT 339 
 
 develop its counterpart in the individual. It is to be noted, 
 as a preliminary, that although the individual brings with 
 him a congenital outfit in the form of certain instincts and 
 emotional dispositions, he does not bring with him the 
 accumulated effects of the habits and pursuits of his parents. 
 Save for biological inheritance he is plastic and starts afresh. 
 The school, on the other hand, is the depository of tradition. 
 It is always developing as a moral order for better or worse. 
 While it reproduces itself in its members its life is sustained 
 by them. If now we ask how this comes about in the indi- 
 vidual we can endeavour to answer the question in cognitive, 
 affective, and conative terms, but we must bear in mind that, 
 in doing so, we are but describing three aspects of a single 
 process. We might even say we are describing the same 
 thing, the same process, in three different ways. The 
 creation of the moral continuum in the individual, then, in 
 the first place implies progress from an empirical to a rational 
 knowledge of what the school as a moral order means. It 
 means in the Platonic figure, getting out of the twilight of 
 the cave into the clear sunlight, but to such an extent only 
 that twilight and sunlight are always interfused. In the 
 second place it means that those congenital instincts and 
 emotional dispositions, which at first turn the stream of feel- 
 ing this way and that in ebb and flow and eddy, get in due 
 course a drift in the direction of the welfare of the school, and 
 may become finally a current set strong towards the ideals 
 which the school embodies. And here again it is one stream 
 originating in primitive emotional dispositions but finally 
 taking form and colour from the ideals it sustains. In the 
 third place it is the reinforcement and illumination of habitual 
 action by means of moral purpose definitely willed as an end 
 for the self. Thus each side of the process shows the same 
 phases of development just because it is one process. That 
 development consists in the thing known, or felt, or acted, 
 finding a meaning and a value in something bigger, better, 
 more universal than itself. Finally it is the development by 
 which the self realises what is best in it and which w^e can 
 indicate in three ways as its rationality, its sociality, and its 
 ideality. 
 
 In some such way as this, then, must the action of a 
 school as an environmental agency be conceived. How to
 
 340 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 organise it, how to inspire it, for this high task is a question 
 for investigation on another plane, that of method. The 
 magnitude, the responsibility, and we may add the nobility 
 of the task, will perhaps have in a measure emerged from the 
 brief summary we have attempted. We often have a partial 
 and distorted idea of a school. Sometimes it is a building, 
 sometimes the arena of struggle. Sometimes when we get 
 a good pass-list, a factor in self-gratification, and so on. But 
 if, like the old philosophers, we were searching for its essence 
 or substance, we should have to look for it in its vitality and 
 value as a moral and religious order. We might say of it 
 in a poor year, so far as what one so blindly calls results 
 are concerned, " Well the old plant needs pruning and water- 
 ing, perhaps, but we shall have blossoms again, because it 
 is sound and healthy." If what we call the tone deteriorated 
 we should lie sleepless at nights, because we should know 
 that the very fibre and tissue of the whole was deteriorating. 
 Let us conclude this section with another quotation from Mr. 
 H. Bompas-Smith, " The ethical efficiency of the school is 
 measured by the extent to which all its methods are sub- 
 ordinated to the pursuit of a unified ethical ideal. In my 
 visits to many types of schools nothing impressed me more 
 than the tone prevailing in certain schools, which was the 
 outcome of their devotion to definite forms of ethical ideal. 
 It is by the character of its ideal and the strength of its devo- 
 tion to it that a school must finally be judged. There are 
 schools in which it almost seems as if every member, from 
 the headmaster down to the smallest boy, were inspired by 
 the same spirit of loyalty to some ideal aim. There may not 
 be much talk of moral training, but the thing itself is there. 
 A boy on entering such a school finds himself in an atmos- 
 phere of moral earnestness, which he may resist, but from 
 the influence of which he cannot escape.'"" The moral con- 
 tinuum comes to be as real as the physical continuum. 
 
 §7. The master of form, subject, or the whole school, 
 is, of course, an element in the environment, perhaps the 
 most important one; and it is advisable to consider by itself 
 his relation to the boy and to the end to be striven for. It 
 is not essentially different, in this vital business of the 
 
 50 Article in The International Rcix)rt on Moral Instruction and Training 
 in Schools, Vol. I, p. 134.
 
 THE FACTORS OF ADJUSTMENT 341 
 
 creation of a moral continuum within the individual, from 
 the relation which obtains, or should obtain, when explora- 
 tion of the physical world or discovery of the social world is 
 in question. 
 
 It is clear, however, that the very occupation of a 
 position of authority, especially if affection and esteem link 
 pupils with occupant, implies a relation favourable to the 
 play of those social forces, suggestion, sympathy, and imita- 
 tion, just referred to. We need not enter into the question 
 whether they operate more freely between pupil and pupil 
 than between pupil and master. Two of the general con- 
 ditions of suggestibility formulated by McDougall justify the 
 conclusion that the relation of master to pupil is favourable 
 to it. They are " (i) deficiency of knowledge or convic- 
 tions relating to the topic in regard to which the suggestion 
 is made, and imperfect organisation of knowledge ; and (2) 
 the impressive character of the source from which the sug- 
 gested proposition is communicated !"^^ It is clear, too, that 
 authority will, at any rate, not diminish the operation of 
 sympathy and imitation. Nor need we consider the negative 
 case of the master who neither commands the respect nor 
 enjoys the sympathy of his boys. He is, indeed, not a 
 master in the sense we are to consider. The fact we are 
 concerned with is that in the normal case of the relation of 
 master to pupils we have a fertile field for the play of the 
 instinctive social forces named. 
 
 We are, indeed, here face to face with the clearest in- 
 stance of what Professor Adams has called the bi-polarity of 
 the relation between master and pupil.*' This relation has 
 already been examined in the introductory chapter. The 
 point is, however, of such importance in respect of moral 
 adjustment that it is desirable to consider it in a little more 
 detail here. There is no question that between the master 
 as an element in the environment and the boy interaction is 
 real and constant. With regard to the social forces we are 
 considering it is a natural fact; that is to say it represents a 
 general instinctive tendency arising through natural selection 
 out of the gregarious nature and habits of man. We have 
 to ask now, however, whether, in the business of evoking a 
 
 *i Social Psychology, p. 98. 
 
 *2 Evolution of Educational Theory p. i8. See also pp. 28-37 above.
 
 342 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 moral continuum, we are to let this natural process go on 
 uncontrolled and unmodified; or whether, starting out from 
 it, as, of course, we must, we should aim at diverting it. To 
 follow nature is a good rule so far as it goes and there is 
 obviously a sense in which it is universal. We cannot dam 
 or reverse the current of natural process, although many 
 schools and families would furnish examples of futile efforts 
 to do so. As an unanalysed criterion, however, following 
 nature may lead to such absurdities as Rousseau put forward. 
 It is at least as essential to direct nature as to follow it. 
 
 Now it seems to us that in the business of education, so 
 far as the master takes a hand in it, we ought to get away as 
 soon as possible from this relation of direct and immediate 
 contact or influence which Professor Adams has called bi- 
 polarity. We want to divert the instinctive tendencies away 
 from the master and on to the fact or truth, whatever it may 
 be ; we want suggestibility, sympathy, and imitation to find a 
 focus in the truth not in the person. We want to get away 
 from the magnetism of personality. The seal and impress 
 of the master should not be found on the boy. The simili- 
 tude of moral truth and power, of divinity, yes; but not the 
 similitude of a finite being. Personality is too precious to 
 be negatived and obliterated by imitation. In fact we must 
 have tri-polarity and not bi-polarity. One pole should be 
 the conscious process, the centre of evolution, of the boy ; 
 the second should be the fact, quality, truth, or act which is 
 the focus of attention ; and the third the reflective guiding 
 activity of the master. The master should look at the focus 
 not at the boy ; the boy should look at the focus not at the 
 master. The influence of the master should gradually be- 
 come mediate not immediate, indirect not direct. The direct 
 impact of mind on mind, inevitable at first, should be, as far 
 as possible, avoided, and the line of approach from the third 
 pole to the first should be through the second. The master 
 should gradually efface himself and turn the boy's attention 
 on the object. There is no difficulty about this transfer. 
 The whole process of evolution, of which the product is what 
 we call civilisation, has been brought about by the transfer, 
 extension, and refinement of primitive instinctive tendencies. 
 In this way, for example, the moral sentiment, is developed 
 from instinctive emotions, such- as love and sympathy. It
 
 THE FACTORS OF ADJUSTMENT 343 
 
 becomes an organised sentiment in proportion as its core is 
 truth. As an emotion it remains attached to a person. The 
 justification for this principle of Iri-polarity is the end of 
 education. That end is self-reahsation. The influence of a 
 master of powerful personality may, if it is not wisely exer- 
 cised, prevent progress towards this end. The arresting 
 effect of dogmatism on self-realisation is obvious, and influ- 
 ence is wider than dogmatism. Influence of personality, 
 even the best and highest, may mean that the moral order 
 remains for the boy at the stage of externality, of law, of 
 authority. It seems likely to have that effect so long as bi- 
 polarity is taken to be a guiding principle as to the relation 
 between master and boy. Tri-polarily should be the aim and 
 attractive power should gradually be transferred from the 
 third pole to the second. This we believe to be the remedy 
 for what Mr. Holmes has described as the Tragedy of Edu- 
 cation. The bi-polar idea which is locked up in the terms 
 teaching and education is highly dangerous; not only in 
 respect of the almost exploded notions of pouring in and 
 drawing out, but in the sense of conveying truth and mould- 
 ing character. Truth can be presented, it cannot be con- 
 veyed ; the teacher's part is presentation, acquisition must 
 come from the boy's side. Character may shape itself but 
 cannot be moulded. What Bergson says of adaptation in a 
 biological sense is very pertinent here. He writes : " If I 
 pour into the same glass, by turns, water and wine, the two 
 liquids will take the same form, and the sameness in form 
 will be due to the sameness in adaptation of content to con- 
 tainer. Adaptation, here, really means mechanical adjust- 
 ment. The reason is that the form to which the matter has 
 adapted itself was there, ready-made, and has forced its own 
 shape on the matter. But, in the adaptation of an organism 
 to the circumstances it has to live in, where is the pre-existing 
 form awaiting its matter? The circumstances are not a 
 mould into which life is inserted and whose form life adopts : 
 this is indeed to be fooled by a metaphor. There is no form 
 yet, and life must create a form for itself, suited to the cir- 
 cumstances whi(-h are made for it. It will have to make the 
 best of these circinnstances, neutralise their inconveniences 
 and utilise their advantages — in short, respond to outer 
 actions by building up a machine which has no resemblance 
 
 23
 
 344 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 to them. Such adapting is not repeating^ but replying — an 
 entirely different thing. "''^ Bergson is writing of life, and 
 with the biologists the verdict as to this account of evolution 
 will rest; but there is no question whatever that, as applied 
 to consciousness and the evolution of character, this descrip- 
 tion has all the fulness of truth. The business of the master 
 is directly with the environment — be it a theorem of 
 geometry, a truth of science, a rule of the school, a glimpse 
 of a moral ideal, or what not — and through the environment 
 only, that is indirectly, with the pupil. His enthusiasm must 
 be for objective truth and value; he must face away from the 
 boy. The boy's enthusiasm must attach itself to the same 
 objective ; he must face away from the master. 
 
 This note runs through the penetrating contribution of 
 Mr. Bompas Smith to the report on Moral Instruction and 
 Training in Schools, from which we have quoted. He says, 
 writing of public schools, " of special value is the healthy 
 and natural character of the typical master's relations with 
 his boys. He views with aversion all attempts at conscious 
 moral influence and aims at getting his boys to do right acts, 
 not at directly improving their moral character."^* This is 
 exactly the tri-polarity we are urging. It is probable that if 
 this view were more prevalent — Mr. Smith seems to be too 
 optimistic in calling it typical — many conscientious men 
 would have less hesitation about joining the ranks of school- 
 masters. The idea of teaching and education as the im- 
 pression of knowledge and character on the boy is as repug- 
 nant to thoughtful men as it is unsound in principle; but it 
 is very prevalent in both theory and practice. The value of 
 Bergson's teaching lies in the place he has found for liberty 
 and creation in the conception of evolution, a value which is 
 assured in its educational application whatever the judgment 
 of posterity may be on its metaphysical validity. 
 
 It will be said, however, that, in one respect at least, bi- 
 polarity, as a factor in the evolution of a moral continuum 
 out of the elements of the conscious experience of the boy, 
 must at all costs be retained. The character and life of the 
 master must be an embodiment and a living example of the 
 
 ■'••' Creath'o Evolution, p. 6i. 
 "^ \'o1. I, p. 117.
 
 ' THE FACTORS OF ADJUSTMENT 345 
 
 moral order impinging with direct and constant formative 
 influence on the character of the boy. Here again prevalent 
 educational theory seems to be somewhat loose and super- 
 ficial. It is the doctrine of direct contact again, in a more 
 subtle form and one likely to command ready acceptance. 
 Nevertheless it seems to be fallacious because analysis is 
 not pushed far enough. It is not the master but the moral 
 order which he tries to live up to which should gradually 
 emerge in the consciousness of the boy. The less there is of 
 the human representative and exponent and the more there is 
 of what he represents and by his life, rather than his teaching, 
 expounds, the more likelihood there is of the boy catching 
 the spirit of it and of its becoming pervasive of his conduct. 
 The distinction is a vital one because identity of moral 
 principle exists, and can only exist, in the midst of diversity 
 of application. It is the concrete universal, this time as a 
 moral order, over again. No two cogs in a machine perform 
 the same function; no two individuals reveal and sustain the 
 moral order in the same way. Each must create it for and 
 in himself and so work out his own salvation. And the too 
 direct impact of a personality, even the best and highest, may 
 arrest moral progress; for one reason because it may repre- 
 sent the moral order on a plane out of reach. A first-class 
 cricketer or golfer is not the best coach for a neophyte ; 
 Joachim represented virtuosity but may have caused the 
 ambition of the budding violinist to ebb rather than to flow. 
 Of course nobility of character is an asset, the greatest 
 asset, in a master, but its effect will be greater and more last- 
 ing if tile boy feels it is not turned broadside on him, so to 
 say. In the master a measure of detachment from the boy 
 and attachment to, or better tension towards, the game of 
 life itself, is a better guarantee of the boy's real progress 
 than the personal nexus. The moral continuum must be 
 continuall}' created and the boy will gain courage for the task 
 if he feels that the master and he are plodding side by side 
 on the same road. There is a world of sound instinct locked 
 up in the revulsion against any symptom of priggishness in 
 a boy, or, we may add, in a master. Isn't the dislike of manv 
 men for the profession of teaching due mainly to that spectre 
 of example which haunts narrow educational theory ? Boys 
 don't want an artificial model, they want a man; and his
 
 346 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 influence will not be less healthy if they know that he, like 
 themselves, can only win his way onward by slow degrees 
 and through constant endeavour. 
 
 " For more is not reserved 
 
 To man, with soul just nerved 
 To act to-morrow wliat he learns to-day ; 
 
 Here, work enough to watch 
 
 The Master v ork, and catch 
 Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play/'^s 
 
 5"' Rabbi Ben Ezra.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE PROrp.SS OF ADJUSTMENT 
 
 1 1. We have now lo consider in. what ways the moral 
 order of the school operates on the individual pupil. This 
 is the question of the embodiment by the school of ethical 
 standards or ideals. We have to ask to what extent these 
 moral standards and ideals which have been reached in the 
 evolution of ethical thought can be embodied in the con- 
 crete life of a school. This part of ethical doctrine is clear 
 and the task of weaving it into educational theory is one 
 which, though vitally important, is fairly straightforward. 
 We may adopt without question the three main forms of the 
 standard which ethics has distinguished, namely law, happi- 
 ness, and perfection. By the last-named is to be understood 
 the realisation of the highest self which, as we have already 
 seen, is at once the rational, social, and ideal self. It is the 
 standard we have already selected as the one which moral 
 progress is to be finally judged by, the ideal towards which 
 real moral progress moves. That is no reason, of course, 
 why any one else should adopt it, if he feels that law or 
 happiness is a better guide. As a matter of fact each of the 
 three has its place in any sound theory of education, as repre- 
 senting an aspect of, and especially a stage in, the moral pro- 
 gress which the life and organisation of a school should 
 reflect. Their inter-relation may conveniently be considered 
 first. 
 
 The question is whether each standard or ideal involves 
 the other two. That we shall consider in a moment. Before 
 doing so, there is another conjecture perhaps worth con- 
 sidering. May we regard law, happiness, and perfection as 
 standing each for the relation of one of the three sides of 
 conscious process to the moral order : law corresponding to 
 will, happiness to feeling, and perfection to cognition? 
 There is some ground for the conjecture. Kant singled out 
 will as the source of the moral order and found ii in a cate- 
 
 347
 
 348 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 gorical imperative ; Bentham found it in the affective stress 
 of the individual towards his own happiness, though he had 
 to face an insuperable difficulty in bridging the psychological 
 gap between the happiness of the individual and that of the 
 greatest number; while Green's perfectionism is directly 
 descended from the Platonic Idea. It is not, perhaps, too 
 much to suppose that law, happiness, and perfection are 
 forms of the ethical ideal which have resulted from an 
 emphatic stress on one or other of the aspects of conscious- 
 ness. At least that seems to be the case as regards the first 
 two. A measure of eclecticism in the formulation of moral 
 educational theory is so far justified. We might say that, 
 seeing that the creation of the moral continuum is, as we 
 have tried to show, a matter for the co-operation of cog- 
 nition, feeHng, and will, there is the fullest justification for 
 finding a place in the school for law, happiness, and perfec- 
 tion as standards to be observed, as ideals to be striven for. 
 In other words, in the unity of conscious process there is 
 room for all three. 
 
 We may now approach the question in the other way 
 suggested above. Is each standard or ideal implied in the 
 other two? Law, or duty as the obligation corresponding to 
 law, does seem to be so implied. This follows from the fact 
 that if we accept happiness or perfection as an end morally 
 valuable, that very acceptance implies an obligation to pursue 
 the end. The end becomes an imperative, a duty, a moral 
 law. " The supreme moral principle, whatever it may be, 
 lays its command upon us absolutely, and admits of no 
 question.'" Secondly, is happiness implied in duty and 
 perfection ? It was essential to the doctrine of Kant, of 
 course, that it was not implied in duty. But the Kantian 
 formalism, "duty for duty's sake," is generally rejected. 
 And even Kant, when he sought for ends which it was a 
 duty to seek, included the happiness of others.- And as to 
 our own happiness " we cannot attain the end of our being 
 without attaining happiness,'" and to attain the end of our 
 being is our duty; so that happiness is bound up with duty, 
 though at the second remove. That it is bound up with 
 
 1 Mackenzie, Manual of Ethics, p. 171. 
 
 2 Caird, oj>. cit. Vol. II, p. 381. 
 ^ Mackenzie, op cit, p. 237.
 
 THE PROCESS OF ADJUSTMENT 349 
 
 perfection is brought out clearly by Mackenzie. " Happi- 
 ness, therefore," he siiys, " in this sense, though Jiot, 
 properly speaking, the end at which we aim, is an insepar- 
 able and essential element in its attainment."* Thirdly, is 
 perfection implied in duty and happiness? Although we put 
 the first on a different plane and find a meaning for the two 
 last in subordination to the first, ^ anyone who preferred to 
 put duty first could well argue that in the fulfilment of duty 
 one would be developing the highest self. Similarly happi- 
 ness, if put first, would be defined as the satisfaction which 
 follows activity in the highest universe, i.e., the universe of 
 the highest self. 
 
 Ethical theory, then, does give us ground for concluding 
 that each of its three great standards has something to offer a 
 theorv of education, because each reflects an aspect of the 
 moral order. As a matter of fact every sane schoolmaster 
 of experience has found a place for law, happiness, and per- 
 fection, in the practical regulation of his school and its teach- 
 ing, whether he is conversant with ethical theory or not. 
 Law obtains in the form of the organisation, rules, and 
 routine which make up the mechanism of the school. But 
 he looks beyond the mechanism to the life which it is meant 
 to subserve; it is a means only and the end is " Self-know- 
 ledge, self-reverence, self-control." Moreover, he knows 
 that he will not arrive at the end unless his mechanism leaves 
 room for the exuberance and joy of youth. It is true that 
 there are some schoolmasters — oftener, perhaps, form-masters 
 or subject-masters — who are not sane. Their unconscious 
 interpretation of the Kantian imperative is "duty for duty's 
 sake " in the form of rigid rule and cast-iron discipline, the 
 "will that wills nothing" beyond itself. They exist and 
 their schools or classes are a moral desert. The haphazard 
 Pestalozzian institution is, of course, a moral Eden by com- 
 parison ; but is ineffective for want of form, i.e., organisation, 
 rule, and routine, just as the other is ineffective, for want of 
 content, i.e., a life which is the progressive realisation of a 
 concrete ethical ideal. On the other hand, an ethical ideal 
 may live in the mind of the master but not in the school — 
 this is often the case with the graduate who has taken a train- 
 ing course but is inexperienced — because he has yet to learn 
 
 * Ibid, p. 253.
 
 350 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 how to put together the scaffolding or skeleton of the struc- 
 ture, how to construct and control the mechanism which is 
 the necessary organ of the moral order just as the body is the 
 necessary organ of mind. A school which is really a moral 
 order will be pervaded by a lofty ethical purpose, imposing a 
 firm but flexible imperative; and happiness will attend its 
 activities. 
 
 §2. We may now briefly consider each of these aspects 
 of the moral order separately. Although the concept of law, 
 duty, obedience, obligation — however it may be expressed — 
 is ultimately derivative, that is, in a logical order, is conse- 
 quent on the concept of an end, the evolution of moral con- 
 duct in the individual and in the social group gives every 
 justification for that almost universal written or unwritten 
 law of the school : " Duty first." As the primitive individual 
 had to obey the tribal law and custom, whether he shared the 
 tribal conscience or not, so the boy must fall in with the life 
 of the school, without quibble or query, before its routine 
 and institutions can have any intelligible meaning for him. 
 Not only is this necessary for the school but it is necessary 
 for the boy. The school should ultimately grant him the 
 inestimable privilege of freedom, but it will be freedom with- 
 in its own traditions, its own ethos. That he will never be 
 permitted to transcend. Loyalty and service within these 
 limits is freedom. And in the wider world of after-school he 
 will find the same moral order which is at once constraint for 
 the worst and freedom for the best of him. There will always 
 be constraint, therefore, even if it is only what he, as a mem- 
 ber of a moral order, must impose upon himself. Hence the 
 school must accustom him from the beginning to bounds 
 w'hich he must not pass. For this is eternally true of the 
 great Kantian idea of the imperative of duty, that when it is 
 linked on to concrete moral purpose, it remains categorical 
 from the beginning to the end of life. " Duty first," then, 
 is a principle which the life of every school should embody, 
 even before the content of duty is appreciated; and "Duty 
 last " will be the call, even more categorically imperative, 
 when the end stands out clear and bright. 
 
 Implied in what we have just said is the principle that 
 moral progress will be real, the moral continuum will be 
 created in the individual, when law and authoritv which are
 
 THE PROCESS OF ADJUSTMENT 351 
 
 at "first external become internal and self-imposed ; when 
 mere obedience is being transformed into volimtary accept- 
 ance of and adherence to rule, routine, and authority. The 
 transformation will be slow and gradual and rarely complete. 
 It will depend upon the emergence of rational from empirical 
 knowledge, upon the development of sentiment from in- 
 stinctive emotional disposition, and upon the inclusion of 
 habitual within volitional action. The relation of these 
 varieties of experience has already been indicated. All that 
 need be added, therefore, is the obvious inference that the 
 organisation of school life, its activities, routine, and duties, 
 should be such as to facilitate this transformation. And the 
 experience of the best schoolmasters proves that the best 
 way of doing so is to associate the boys themselves to the 
 fullest extent possible with the maintenance of the order and 
 dignity of the school. Every boy cannot be a prefect, but 
 every normal boy can be led to realise that, within the limits 
 of his powers and opportunities, he is a custodian of the 
 traditions of the school. Ways and means of doing so would 
 be out of place in an essay such as this. 
 
 §3. Happiness is ethically derivative. At least that 
 may be accepted as the view generally prevalent : hedonism 
 or utilitarianism as an ultimate ethical standard has had its 
 day.^ Psychologically, however, happiness is primary and 
 fundamental. " Every rational finite being must desire to 
 be happy. "^ The educational inference is clear. The school 
 must find a place for happiness, but it should be a conse- 
 quence not a primary aim. It might be objected that happi- 
 ness should be a primary aim in the school circle as in the 
 family circle. The answer would be that in both circles the 
 pursuit of happiness should be subordinate to the discharge 
 of duties and obligations. It might be urged, again, that 
 in the kindergarten and the playing-fields, at all events, 
 serious purposes are subordinate to joyous activities. The 
 answer would be that both the kindergarten and playing- 
 fields are ancillary to the classroom, the workshop, and the 
 laboratory, the former genetically, the latter pari passu. 
 
 Happiness should be the subjective consequence of the 
 
 5 See Mackenzie, Manual of Ethics, Bool< II, Chapter IV', for a seairhing 
 analysis. 
 
 6 Caird, Critical Philosophy of Kanl, \'ol. II, p. 179.
 
 352 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 fulfilment of objective duty and its stimulus should be social 
 approval, the master being the mouthpiece of the society at 
 first. The point is its organic association with duty done. 
 Duty is a somewhat austere goddess and appreciation and 
 approval are essential if devotion is to be steady and sincere. 
 Rewards and their negative, punishments, are more danger- 
 ous in proportion as they are further removed from the 
 approval of the school. School colours, a place in a school 
 team, or on the school honours list, the spontaneous appre- 
 ciation by a form of a bit of really good work, are, one might 
 say, ethically pure. By comparison place-taking, marks, 
 and perhaps, detention are, one might almost say, a confes- 
 sion of the failure of ethical ideals. Dogmatism as to detail 
 is foolish, of course ; for a good master will transform instru- 
 ments which he finds necessary while deploring their neces- 
 sity. It does seem sound, however, to insist on the essential 
 sanity of social or school approval. The need for individual 
 rewards and punishments is not unlike the need for medicine 
 or surgerv. Hygiene is better and prior, and the approval 
 of one's fellows is essentially hygienic. 
 
 A word on the general qtiestion of competition, involv- 
 ing rivalry and pugnacity, is apposite here. It is the fashion 
 to decry it, in the form of games and examinations for 
 example. But is the pendulum not swinging too far? The 
 instinctive basis is pugnacity, and while the individualistic 
 nature of the instinct calls for a measure of inhibition, there 
 is no question that it has done much to strengthen the fibre 
 of social units, from the family up to the nation. McDougall, 
 examining this instinct from the point of view of its evolu- 
 tionary value, is emphatic. Discussing the tribes of Borneo 
 he says: " It might be supposed that the peaceful coastwise 
 people would be found to be superior in moral qualities to 
 their more warlike neighbours; but the contrary is the case. 
 In almost all respects the advantage lies with the warlike 
 tribes. Their houses are better built, larger, and cleaner; 
 their domestic morality is superior, they are physically 
 stronger, are braver, and physically and mentally more 
 active, and in general are more trustworthy. But, above all, 
 their social organisation is firmer and more ef^cient, because 
 their respect for and obedience to their chiefs, and their 
 loyalty to their community, are much greater; each man
 
 THE PROCESS OF ADJUSTMENT 353 
 
 identifies liimself with the whole community and accepts and 
 loyally performs the social duties laid upon him."^ Wallas 
 writes in the same strain/ The strength and stability of any 
 organisation, and consequently the profit and happiness 
 flowing from membership, must rest on the physical, intellec- 
 tual, and moral vigour of its members; and the history of 
 evolution shows that that vigour is maintained bv struggle, 
 rivalry, and competition. This is as true of a school as of 
 any other social organism. On the fields and in the class- 
 rooms healthy and honourable rivalry is to be encouraged in 
 every way. Tennyson's "Ulysses" is as fine a character 
 as can be put before a schoolboy, and there is no need to 
 water down this element : 
 
 " Much have I seen and known . . . 
 
 And drunk delight of battle with my peers," 
 
 for the poet supports the psychologist when he says Ulysses 
 and his men were 
 
 " One equal temper of heroic hearts." 
 
 Uppingham owes its existence to the fighting qualities of 
 Edward Thring, and we ma}' be certain that as the master 
 was, so were, and are, the boys. A school must find play 
 for the instinct of pugnacity in field and form, if it is to be 
 "one equal temper of heroic hearts"; and that way happi- 
 ness lies. 
 
 §4. Perfectionism seems to us to be the supreme ideal 
 which should pervade the life of a school, for it gives an 
 elevating and inspiring content to the conception of duty and 
 attaches happiness to what is permanent and pure. We have 
 quoted Tennyson's concise and noble dictum, "self-rever- 
 ence, self-knowledge, self-control." We must, of course, be 
 careful to interpret self in the manner alread}' indicated. 
 There is a lower self to be controlled, a higher self to be 
 revered, and the whole self to be known. And the highest is 
 the ideal social and rational self which embodies the moral 
 order. It is, moreover, the free self for "freedom and 
 rationality are two names for the same thing."' 
 
 ^ Social Psychology, p. 289. 
 
 * The Great Soriet}', pp. i6q, 170. 
 
 » X. M. Butler, Tlif- Meaninc; of Education, p. 68.
 
 354 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 We must look at this ideal a little more closely ; for 
 although it is the ultimate lite and essence of the moral order, 
 giving duty its content and happiness its surety, it is difficult 
 to lay hands on. Like most of the essential facts or concep- 
 tions of reality it is as evasive as it is pervasive. It shares 
 these qualities, for example, with air, ether, consciousness, 
 truth, time, and life itself. It is the moral ideal which is 
 most difficult to formulate. Law can be got into categories 
 in the form of commands, as in the ten commandments, or 
 exhortations, as in the Sermon on the Mount. Happiness 
 can be defined by means of the duties and virtues which it 
 attends, and it is easy to identify, both in ourselves and in 
 others. The ideal self is lacking in contours or marks of 
 identification, just as is the school ideal which is the atmos- 
 phere in which the ideal self develops and thrives. This is, 
 however, an advantage as well as a difficulty from the point 
 of view of education. Familiarity breeds contempt as we 
 may see in the way the best boys will break bounds. A good 
 custom may become corrupt, as we may see in the danger of 
 the conventionality which dogs school chapel or prayers. 
 An ideal may be fleeting and intermittent, but its vitality may 
 be greater than a whole world of limits and contours. 
 Thompson's "Hound of Heaven" and Tennyson's "Voyage" 
 are immortal embodiments of its constraining power. 
 
 In conscience we have the surety that ever}' normal boy 
 in some measure experiences this constraint towards an ideal 
 self. The synthetic and integrating aspect of conscience 
 which Muirhead examines is, perhaps, more suggestive for a 
 theory of education than an account of its genesis. He com- 
 pares and contrasts consciousness and conscience as active 
 unifying forces. As consciousness constructs physical 
 reality out of given data, so conscience constructs a moral 
 order out of natural impulses. " As the principle of inter- 
 pretation in the former case is the ideal which the conscious 
 self cherishes of a unified world of experience, representing 
 its own complete realisation as a principle of knowledge, so 
 the principle which conscience brings to the interpretation of 
 external circumstances is the ideal of a system of moral rela- 
 tions, representing its own realisation as a principle of con- 
 duct."^" This is Kant's view^ of the relation of Pure Reason 
 
 1° Elements of Ethics, p. 239
 
 THE PROCESS OF ADJUSTMENT 355 
 
 to Practical Reason. According to him tlie unity of nature 
 is ultimately the unity of the subject. But his criticism of 
 pure reason leaves the duality of subject and nature unre- 
 solved. It is overcome by the practical reason, i.e., by self- 
 consciousness as will. In self-consciousness as will we have 
 the polarisation of the system, order, or continuum of 
 morality. Muirhead, in the passage quoted, seems to find 
 the germ of this polarisation in conscience. We have, 
 therefore, in conscience the germ of the rational self which is 
 perhaps the ultimate differentia of man and which means that 
 within every individual there exists the potentiality of a moral 
 order. There is no stronger argument for limiting a class 
 and a school to the number which, as Thring insisted, ^^ makes 
 individual care possible. This most precious thing, the 
 germ in conscience of the rational and ideal self, should have 
 light and air. 
 
 The ideal self suggests an individualistic point of view, 
 but the social reference, insisted upon throughout this essay, 
 must be re-emphasised here ; and from two points of view. 
 First the fact that the moral order is outside as well as inside 
 him. "The svstem of social institutions [in our particular 
 and immediate case, the school] among which the individual 
 finds himself, is only the other or objective side of the organic 
 svstem of impulses and desires that constitute his inward 
 nature."^" Secondly, the fact that in that social order the 
 individual must realise his ideal self. It follows that the 
 schoolmaster has also a correlative task. We noted the need 
 for room and opportunity for individual care. We must 
 repeat what has been said above about the need for care of 
 the environment or tone. The schoolmaster's eye and 
 thought can never leave it. 
 
 The progressive nature of the ideal makes it just what a 
 school needs as a source of inspiration. On the one hand it 
 is not too high or rather, as it would be better and truer to 
 say, there is nothing — no act or impulse — so small as to fall 
 outside the sphere of the ideal. Nothing is unimportant 
 because everything thought or done means victory of the 
 ideal rational self, or victory of the lower animal self. In 
 other words, the ideal can be made real every hour and every 
 
 i' See Parker's Life and Letters of Edward Thrlnt;. pp. 71-74. 
 12 Muirhead, op. tit, p. 240.
 
 356 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 day. Perfectionism does not present morality as an advance 
 towards some " far-off divine event." It is a realisation of 
 victory here and now. Perhaps the word victory suggests 
 asceticism too strongly. That is not meant. There is plenty 
 of room for the animal in the sphere of perfectionism, only it 
 must keep its place. The unity of man with, on the one 
 hand, animal and organic life below him and, on the other, 
 an order — a moral order — above him, is a point Dr. Bosan- 
 quet constantly insists upon. " They (i.e., human beings) rest 
 on arrangements below them ; they indicate in every feature 
 fuller forms of totality above them.'"'' Human conscious- 
 ness is at once " the climax and sum and substance of evolu- 
 tion '"* and "an individual spiritual body, a special utter- 
 ance and revelation of the universe in its highest finite 
 form."^"* Bergson says the same thing in other words : " A 
 philosophy of intuition will be a negation of science, will be 
 sooner or later swept away by science, if it does not resolve 
 to see the life of the body just where it really is, on the road 
 that leads to the life of the spirit. . . . Thus souls are 
 continually being created, which, nevertheless, in a certain 
 sense pre-existed. They are nothing else than the little rills 
 into which the great river of life divides itself, flowing 
 through the body of humanity. . . . Finally conscious- 
 ness is essentially free; it is freedom itself.'"^ The point of 
 these quotations for us is that, actually, and genetically, the 
 ideal self is one with animal nature below and the infinite and 
 divine above, and that perfection consists in maintaining an 
 equilibrium based on the emergence of the infinite and the 
 subsidence of the animal, to the extent that the boy's moral 
 strength and development permit of. It is what Muirhead 
 calls a " moving equilibrium " maintained by progress along 
 the stepping stones of our dead selves. 
 
 Thus the ideal self can catch up and inspire the boy of 
 ten and the youth of eighteen. Each can reach out towards 
 the infinite he shares but which stretches beyond him, and 
 can thus lift up and transfigure the animality he shares but 
 which stretches away below him. While that is just what 
 
 13 The Principle of Indixidunlity ;incl \'akii-, p. 221. 
 
 14 Ibid, p. 158. 
 
 15 Creative evoliilion, pp. 283-2JS5. The whole passage in which he sums 
 up the meaning of evolution is a brilliant example of Bergson 's thought and 
 style.
 
 THE PROCESS OF ADJUSTMENT 357 
 
 gives the ideal tlie power to pervade the hfe of a school from 
 end to end, it is also the source of the diflficulty of transform- 
 ing the power, the potentiality, into actuality. There is 
 nothing static or final about it as in disciplinary rules for 
 example. Its dynamic character is its life and the only fuel 
 is constant and unswerving adherence. And that is true of 
 it in both its subjective and objective forms, in the boy and 
 in the ethos of the school. In both stagnation is death. The 
 moral continuum, which is the moral ideal woven into the 
 texture of life, must be constantly re-created, re-asserted, in 
 both the individual and the school. And it is never the same 
 process over again. In this sense there appears to be a real 
 progrcssus ad infinitum. 
 
 The question how it is to be done recurs, and the answer 
 again is that so far as any concrete situation is concerned the 
 master must be left to himself, if only because every such 
 situation is necessarily unique. What does seem futile is 
 dogmatic argument about method. The problem to be solved 
 is to put the boy in the way of transcending his lower self. 
 It is not a question whether precept or practice, exhortation 
 or environment, is best. Any way that helps the boy to 
 transcend the limits of his lower self and live up to his mem- 
 bership in the school and in the infinite, is sound. We shall 
 deal briefly with this question of instrument in a moment, 
 but it is the question of the master rather than the instru- 
 ment, so long as he is faithful to the principle of tri-polaritv 
 and does not preach, save in chapel. It is a question of a 
 clean pure wind-swept atmosphere rather than of time-table 
 and curriculum. It is hygiene rather than treatment. Here 
 is what Dr. Bosanquet sa}'s : " The educator should not seek 
 to be expert physician to every one, but none the less is he 
 necessary as director of moral hygiene."^® And again : " It 
 is for the most part desirable in moral influence that the 
 stimulative should take the lead of the corrective function."^® 
 
 §5. We must come down to detail : not the detail of 
 method, but a summary review and estimate of the oppor- 
 tunities which a school presents of stimulating the creative 
 evolution of the continuum wherein and whereby the 
 thoughts and acts of the individual member become sufTused 
 
 '" Intfrnational Rcpoii on Moral Insiructiun and Teaching" in School 
 Vol. I, p. 48.
 
 3S8 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 and pervaded by moral quality, the quality of contributing 
 to the realisation of the ideal self. The terms here used to 
 define this continuum may be considered inappropriate to 
 boyhood and youth. It may be said thai obedience to law 
 with an occasional glow of reverence for the ideal w'hich law 
 faintly adumbrates, is all that can reasonably be expected ; 
 that in moments of moral and religious stress the tension 
 may carry a boy towards a better and a nobler self ; but that 
 a continuum of thoughts and acts deriving its unity from a 
 moral beacon always burning brightly, is more than can be 
 looked for in the evolution of character at the school stage. 
 We have already said that the light will be intermittent and 
 that conscious experience will only intermittently be shot 
 through by its illumination. But it is well to aim high. 
 And adolescence is, passively, a period of singular plasticity, 
 while active tension is of its essence. The normal boy will 
 gladly turn to the light ; but if he fails to find it, he will 
 assuredly explore the penumbra and may find himself in the 
 umbra before he or any one else is aware of the eclipse. 
 
 In theory, though not in practice, there is a difficulty 
 about the genesis of the moral continuum ; that is to say, 
 there is, if we take it to be a third order, related, indeed, to 
 the first and second, the physical and social worlds, having 
 no separate existence apart from them, and yet being as dis- 
 tinct from them as, sa}^ life is from the organs which are 
 its vehicle. There is no difficulty if it has no valid claim to 
 this distinctness of being. If the question is merely the rela- 
 tion of the individual to the two orders out of which come, 
 say, beauty from the play of the first, and, say, love and 
 sympathy from the play of the second ; if, that is to say, we 
 are content to remain at the stage of history and experience, 
 moral development is simply a chapter in individual and 
 social psychology. If, however, a mora! ideal is of another 
 order and nature, something valuable in itself which is more 
 than duty, though it defines duty, and more than happiness, 
 though it ensures happiness, then its adoption by the indi- 
 vidual is, from the point of view of theory, a difficulty. It 
 is like the difficulty of finding teleology in mechanism. The 
 categories which fit natural development do not seem to 
 carry one on to the development of the ideal. Dr. Eucken 
 seems to think they cannot. He says: "Those to whom
 
 THE PROCESS OF ADJUSTMENT 359 
 
 morality has this meaning trace back the power which makes 
 for good Uving to sources in the secret places of the indi- 
 vidual soul."^' Perhaps it is intuition in the Bergsonian 
 sense of the term. With him, at all events, it implies free- 
 dom, and it seems to be just freedom which is wanted to 
 carry the individual from the historical to the moral world. 
 
 As has been said, there is no practical difificulty. The 
 normal boy is carried over sooner or later, whether we regard 
 the third world as just an extension of the first and second, 
 or whether we regard it as a new order and dimension. We 
 need not dwell on the theoretical difficulty, were it not that 
 we desire to get light from theory shed over practice. We 
 have experience enough to guide us along the broad highway 
 of training, although the light comes from behind and we 
 stumble over obstacles hidden by our own shadow. There 
 are certain empirical conclusions which, as it seems, no theory 
 will ever disturb. There is the one that cleanliness is next 
 to godliness, which is one aspect of the truth contained in 
 Plato's famous pronouncement on the relation of beauty of 
 environment to beauty of soul, which we have already 
 quoted.'^ We shall not make a mistake if we insist, first and 
 last, that a school shall be a clean and a vigorous community. 
 It may be that cleanliness is not necessarily the high road to 
 purity. It may be that, in Bergsonian phrase, " between 
 the most diverse orders of things pass, like invisible threads, 
 the mysterious laws of analogy, "^^ and yet a boy's mind may 
 not work through the machinery of analogy. We can be 
 content to follow experience. Town-planning, civic hygiene, 
 is the road to which experience points as the readiest approach 
 to a higher standard of city life. It is the same in a school. 
 Speaking of the special moral difficulties of the boarding- 
 school, Thring wrote : " Neglect and faulty structure breed 
 impurity as in a hotbed. Alter the conditions, or be silent. 
 . . . The good wall, within a certain range, is omnipo- 
 tent,"^° The relation of physical to mental and moral train- 
 ing conceived and elaborated by Plato in the Republic is in 
 the same sense. 
 
 '" International Rfiwrt on Moral Instruction and Training, Vol. I, op 
 
 3. 4- 
 
 IS See p. 302, 303. 
 
 1® Henri Bcrgson, An Account of his i.ife and Philosophy, Ruhe and 
 Paul, p. 27. 
 
 20 Parkin, Life and Letters of Edward Thring, p. 277. 
 
 24
 
 36o THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 §6. We have thus plenty of empirical support for the 
 theory that a clean and vigorous physical life is the safest 
 foundation for a moral life, though we may not succeed in 
 satisfying ourselves why the latter should grow out of 
 the former. We can, however, discern the dim outlines of a 
 bridge. Continuous almost with physical vigour, to which 
 such things as air, food, baths, games, and physical exer- 
 cises are the avenues, is ^esthetic alertness. That seems to 
 touch physical sanity at one end and moral sanity, normally, 
 at the other. Here we have Thring's "almighty wall" in 
 another context. In the dormitory it is the guardian of 
 virtue, in the classroom and corridor it should be the sentinel 
 of symmetry and beauty. There is this also about aesthetic 
 feeling. It promotes the development of the social self 
 which, as we have seen, is the ideal self. It is of the essence 
 of aesthetic glow that it spreads, if it can. A child plucks a 
 flower and then brings it to you. You must share the 
 fragrance. In the presence of beauty the tendency is to be 
 communicative. On a high hill, in a cathedral, or in a 
 garden, when you feel the esthetic glow, you turn instinc- 
 tively to find someone to share it. The same truth is tied up 
 in the saying that Art is disinterested. That is what 
 Browning felt when he wrote : — 
 
 " I want to know a butcher paints, 
 A baker rhjmes for his pursuit, 
 Candlestick-maker much acquaints 
 His soul with song, or, haply mute, 
 Blows out his brains upon the flute !"2i 
 
 This sharing of the aesthetic sentiment is perhaps the purest 
 form of solidarity, purest, that is, in the sense of freest from 
 selfish or material impulse. This is true, of course, of 
 greater social units than the school. The Great Society is 
 at its best at a concert, an organ recital, or a play; and it is 
 nearest an organism when individual tension breaks and 
 swells the common flood of chorus or applause. 
 
 Now it is clear that a school should make use of such an 
 impulse to solidarity and disinterestedness, and hence, per- 
 haps, to morality, as this. The extraordinary thing is how 
 far it reaches. The same element is present, or better, the 
 same glow is felt, over a range so wide that at one end you 
 
 21 Shop.
 
 THE PROCESS OF ADJUSTMENT 361 
 
 may have a sunset, King Lear, or the Moonlight Sonata, 
 and at the other, a sketch of a bit of apparatus, a few lines of 
 prose composition, or the page of an exercise book. The 
 presence of it or the absence of it is felt in every corner of the 
 school grounds, and it would seem that the master is solely 
 at fault where it is lacking, for childhood and youth will con- 
 tribute to beauty if encouragement is given. Beauty is ulti- 
 mately order, symmetry, and rhythm, and there is nothing so 
 small or insignificant as not to be contributory to or destruc- 
 tive of these qualities, in some schools, possibly in other 
 ways alive, there is no sign of them ; in others there is 
 nothing without the sign. And beauty may not remain with 
 itself; it may pass over into morality. Browning thought 
 so : 
 
 " O World, as God has made it ! all is beauty 
 And knowing this, is love, and love is duty. "-2 
 
 We may claim the great authority of Kant in support of 
 the contention that, while aesthetic delight in the beautiful is 
 not to be confused with moral fervour, the former may be a 
 bridge to the latter. In both cases there is activity which 
 fuses the lower self in the higher ideal self. But in 
 aesthetic activity the effort is to maintain the satisfaction 
 which beauty brings, while in moral activity we must do 
 more, we must will an end, i.e., create the moral continuum. 
 Thus the aesthetic sentiment, "that tone of feeling which is 
 self-maintaining and subjectively universal in its validity, is 
 subordinated to that way of thinking which can be main- 
 tained only by painful resolve, "^^ i.e., the moral sentiment. 
 In other words the two are not to be confused. Nevertheless 
 the interest in the beautiful " is akin to our interest in that 
 which is morally good.'"" Again, " The Beautiful is the 
 symbol of the morally good."^"* And once more, "Taste 
 makes possible a transition, without any violent leap, from 
 the allurements of sense to a habitual interest in what is 
 morally good."" If Kant does not go the length of Brown- 
 ing in finding identity between appreciation of beauty, love, 
 and dutv, he indicates so close a relation between the first and 
 
 22 The Guardian Angel. 
 
 23 Caird, The Critical Philosophy of Kant, Vol. II, p. 429. 
 
 24 Caird, op. cit, \'ol. II, p. 441. 
 
 25 Ibid, p. 450.
 
 362 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 last as to justify the educational principle that symmetry, 
 order and beauty, if embodied in the physical and spiritual 
 environment of a school, will do much to ensure the creative 
 evolution of the moral continuum. Thring's almighty wall 
 has rational as well as empirical foundations. 
 
 We have grounds, then, both of experience and principle 
 for believing that if physical and aesthetic sanity are charac- 
 teristic of a school as a social organism, moral sanity is likely 
 to develop. They contribute to bodily health and vigour 
 and refinement of taste out of which the moral continuum 
 may emerge. They are at once environment and activity, or 
 adjustment and training, and on this inter-play moral pro- 
 gress will mainly depend. It is moulding of the individual 
 and by the individual. It is that double-edged process which 
 the concept of creative evolution sums up. Professor Adams 
 says : " The educational process as a whole may be described 
 as the absorbing and being absorbed by the environment."-® 
 Both sides of the process are essential, the active side, per- 
 haps, m.ore so. " Education is now coming to be regarded 
 as the process by which the educand is helped to make him- 
 self at home in his surroundings. Education as adjustment 
 is getting to be recognised as an important educational cate- 
 gory. It must not, however, be interpreted to mean that the 
 function of the educator is to help the educand merely to fit 
 himself into his surroundings. No one ever wants to fit 
 himself into his environment. It is the instrument — to be 
 understood of course — but the educand is the end. Educa- 
 tionally, the truer aim is to enable the educand to modify his 
 environment. The thing that best fits itself into its environ- 
 ment is something that has lost its power, say a rotting tree. 
 The living tree resists, manipulates, and in certain directions 
 thoroughly converts the environment."" That is most cer- 
 tainly true of moral progress which is the side of education 
 we are considering. The moral order of the school is just 
 what the moral order operative in the conscious life of its 
 members makes it. The process of creative evolution goes 
 on within the life of conscious purpose which its members 
 live. 
 
 §7. We come now to the subjects of instruction as fac- 
 
 26 Evolution of Educational Theorv, p. 59. 
 
 27 Ibid, p. 187.
 
 THE PROCESS OF ADJUSTMENT 363 
 
 tors in this process of evolution. Ultimately, in an ultimate 
 analysis, there is no justification for separating subjects of 
 instruction from other factors and agencies. A demonstra- 
 tion on the blackboard is on the same educational plane as a 
 picture on the wall ; activity in laboratory or classroom or 
 workshop is not different in nature from activity in the 
 playing-fields or in the school chapel. Creative evolution, 
 double-edged adjustment, is a category which includes all 
 alike. And there is some danger in their artificial separa- 
 tion. That a priori inference seems to be justified as one 
 reads the voluminous evidence available in the Report of an 
 International Enquiry on Moral Instruction and Training in 
 Schools. Some witnesses express justifiable doubt about the 
 wisdom of circumscribing moral instruction and training 
 within certain subjects and periods. Some prefer this or that 
 instrument or agency. Some champion direct moral instruc- 
 tion, others plump for incidental and more or less indirect 
 suggestion. It seems necessary to insist on the Bergsonian 
 conception of duration, living time, in whose steady onward 
 march no moment is negligible for moral as for any other 
 aspect of creative evolution. " Nowhere is the substantial 
 reality of change so manifest as in our own interior life. 
 Here there is indeed no fixed substratum, nor are there dis- 
 tinct states, defiling in procession like actors on the stage. 
 There is only the indivisible melody of our inner life, un- 
 broken from the beginning of our consciousness. Our per- 
 sonality is just this.^^ This has a metaphysical ring but 
 educational theory will, if it is sound, be consonant with it. 
 So at least it seems to us. 
 
 Is not the divergence of view and practice of the pro- 
 tagonists and antagonists of direct moral instruction, as it is 
 called, due to the fact that analysis has not been carried far 
 enough, that no real attempt at the reconciliation of prejudice 
 on the plane of principle has been made? One is driven 
 towards that conclusion when one reads the evidence in the 
 report just alluded to. The opponents seem, on close examin- 
 ation, to have so much in common. The grounds of hesita- 
 tion and fear about direct constructive effort to assist the 
 pupil to create the moral continuum, seem to be mainly these. 
 First, there is the sound, almost instinctive, revolt of the 
 
 28 Ruhc and Paul, Henri Bergson, p. 83.
 
 364 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 sensitive and conscientious against interference with indi- 
 vidual autonomy. Moral freedom is sacred. It is self- 
 realisation, a movement of volitional creation. The master 
 feels it in his own life and shrinks from imposing heteronomy 
 as he would resent his own unwilling subjection to it. 
 Secondly, he will often feel that the ground is not firm 
 enough under his own feet. He knows how often the light 
 of the ethical ideal becomes dim ; how often, indeed, it goes 
 out in the storm and stress of circumstance. He shrinks from 
 pointing to a path along which he himself finds it so difficult 
 to march steadfastly. It is not that he lacks conviction, but 
 he knows the pitfalls along the road. Thirdly, he hates cant, 
 priggishness, apish conventionality, because he knows what 
 the veneer can hide. Again, he himself doubts, like Pro- 
 fessor Findlay for example,'' whether the method of direct 
 instruction may not be mischievous, because it seeks to evoke 
 moral insight before psychological observation gives any 
 warrant for supposing that anything but an artificial and 
 spurious product will emerge. And he can point to what 
 looks like the comparative failure of the effort at direct moral 
 instruction in France.^" 
 
 Let us call the two first difficulties of principle, and the 
 two last difficulties of procedure. They are mutually impli- 
 cated, of course, but may be considered separately. As re- 
 gards principle, is it not clear that the shrinking from step- 
 ping on sacred ground and the fear that he is not good 
 enough to tread on it, is just the attitude which we want in a 
 master? Does not the w^hole difficulty arise because bi- 
 polarity is so constantly urged or implied when the relation 
 of master to boy is under discussion ? Does not the concep- 
 tion of master and boy sharing humanity and all its weak- 
 ness, but facing side by side the third pole, which in this case 
 is the evasive moral ideal, and honestly trying to weave it 
 into the texture of their life, give us just the condition we 
 want for mutual moral progress? Dr. Bryant's whole 
 article" points fearlessly and confidently to a via media. She 
 writes : " Growth — especially spiritual growth — is a secret 
 thing. The educator should not seek either to know or to 
 
 29 International Report, \'ol. 1, Chapter III. 
 
 30 Ibid, Vol. II, Chapters I-IV. 
 
 31 International Report, Vol. I, Chapter VI.
 
 THE PROCESS OF ADJUSTMENT 365 
 
 regulate it altogether. Each )3erson grows of himself to- 
 wards his moral height, as the climber seeks to scale the cliff, 
 by planting his own spiritual limbs in his own way on such 
 holds as the rock of circumstances offers him. Even his 
 defects may be the means by which he reaches towards the 
 summit."^- vSurely the wider experience of the master is the 
 only justilication he needs for roping himself to his pupils so 
 that together they may hazard the ascent. It is not exhorta- 
 tion, bi-polarity, which is needed, but plain evidence of a life 
 of conscious effort towards a goal which high light illu- 
 minates. That is where the value of example and personality 
 lies. It is one of the greatest factors in the creative evolu- 
 tion of morality, but its effective force lies rather in reticence 
 than in articulate precept, in avowed shortcoming rather than 
 in overt achievement. No master need think that " the 
 struggle nought availeth" : 
 
 " If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; 
 It ina\' be, in yon smoke concealed, 
 Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers 
 And, but for you, possess the field. 
 
 " For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, 
 Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
 Far back, through creeks and inlets making 
 Comes silent, flooding in, the main "33 
 
 The difficulty about procedure seems to arise, partly at 
 all events, out of lack of precision in the use of terms, and 
 this looseness may be a consequence of an attempt to apply a 
 rigid framework of method to living content which it cannot 
 fit. It is like the attempt to apply all the machinery and 
 categories of mechanism to the phenomena of life and con- 
 sciousness. If it is supposed that through the examination 
 of examples, actual, historical, or imaginary, a moral truth 
 or ideal can be abstracted, formulated, and applied, much in 
 the same way as a theorem of mathematics, or a physical 
 generalisation, then the opponents of direct moral instruction 
 are unquestionably in the right in their antagonism. The 
 establishment of that sort of objectivity as a result of what 
 might be called a futile caricature of ethical dialectic, has 
 nothing to do with morality or moral progress. The objec- 
 ts Ibid, p. 48. 
 33 Clougii, " Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth."
 
 366 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 tivity we want is the transcendence of the natural self by 
 which it is taken up into the ideal self, making it a participant 
 in the moral order which the social order embodies, and in so 
 doing transforming and transfiguring it. Moral progress 
 means a better impulse to volition, something organic in con- 
 sciousness, not verbal formulation of abstract principles, out 
 of the range of possible appreciation by the young. Even if 
 there is some faint appreciation of such a formula as "Be 
 kind to animals" or " Be thrifty," it is extremely doubtful 
 whether it implies any progress in the creative evolution of 
 a moral continuum of thought and deed. Moral progress is 
 not like scientific progress, the accumulation of formulas of 
 truth. It is the progressive realisation of a higher and more 
 universal self. And direct moral instruction must be inter- 
 preted in the light of that ideal if it is to have any value. 
 Even such a magnificent school motto as " Strenue "^* is 
 better regarded as a post-hoc dedication of its whole essence 
 and purpose than as an ethical formula for which hourly 
 applications are to be sought. They are likely to be artificial 
 and spurious. 
 
 This does seem to be the theoretical objection to direct 
 moral instruction. It is regarded as on all fours with, say, 
 direct scientific instruction. The generalisation is taken to 
 be a moral truth or axiom, and to be applied by exhortation. 
 To that theoretical conception of it there is unquestionably a 
 fundamental objection. Moral truth is not like scientific 
 truth, an objective and detached reality which, so to say, may 
 be taken or left by the individual without any attenuation of 
 its reality. It only begins to exist, for the individual, when 
 he has harnessed himself on to it, and by so doing has taken 
 a step forward in the process of realising his higher self. If 
 he has taken this step, exhortation is superfluous; if he has 
 not, it is unavailing. The centre of creative evolution must 
 be within the pupil's own personality. The lesson may seem 
 to have failed but, on the other hand, the seed may have 
 found a resting-place where it will germinate in its own good 
 time. And no teacher who has felt the sympathetic grip with 
 which pupils seize the moral elements in the struggles of 
 Ulysses, Sir Richard Grenville, King Harry, as adumbrated 
 
 •'* The motto of King Edward VII School, Johannesburg.
 
 THE PROCESS OF ADJUSTMENT 367 
 
 in the immortal choruses of Henry the Fifth, the King and 
 Sir Bedevere, in The Passing of Arthur, will be in any doubt 
 about the germination. The characters named are good for 
 youth, but childhood and youth interpenetrate; and it is 
 better that imagination should be on the stretch. Our error 
 in respect of material is, as a rule, that we offer too little. 
 Sympathy has a long radius ; its antennae reach out far. By 
 a sort of paradox the remote is often more real than the near. 
 The gladiators and the Knights of the Round Table may 
 have more of the sting of reality than Robinson Crusoe. 
 And the real thrill of sympathy is the embryo of moral life, 
 not an unnatural and therefore artificial generalisation. We 
 might say almost that abstract moral truth is always arti- 
 ficial in a school, were it not that it is dangerous to generalise 
 about the energy of moral tension. Dr. Bryant thinks that 
 her post-matriculation girls have profited from ethical 
 discussion. ^^ 
 
 In this connection there is another interesting point of 
 theory. Most of us must have noticed the reaction which 
 follows spiritual tension : the stampede after a service in the 
 school chapel, the delight of the cricket-nets after a confirma- 
 tion class, the relief of stretching one's limbs after the door 
 closes on a visitor who obviously lives in a more rarified 
 moral atmosphere than we can breathe with comfort. The 
 same thing appears in the wonder, often tinged with admira- 
 tion, which disregard for convention and even some canons 
 of morality excites. Does it mean that the lower self is 
 natural and the higher artificial? It does mean that the pro- 
 cess of moral evolution in the race has to be reflected, and 
 to some extent repeated, in the life of the individual. The 
 higher self has its basis in nature, in the form of such in- 
 stincts as love, sympathy, and the need for approval, just as 
 certainly as the lower self. But all the facts point to the 
 need for constant nurture and development of the higher self. 
 The phenomena of " baulked dispositions " on which Wallas 
 rightly lays such stress,^^ is what the evolution of civilisation 
 has left lurking about the road which, as Bergson would put 
 it," the vital impulse in consciousness must carve out for it- 
 
 ss International Report, Vol. I, pp. 55, 63-65. 
 
 36 The Great Society, Chapter IV. 
 
 37 Cf. Creative Evolution, pp. 57, 59 and passim. He uses the metaphor 
 constantly. 
 
 24*
 
 368 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 self. Does not this point to the imperative need for constant 
 supervision and constant guidance, whether we call it direct 
 or indirect, in moral progress? Does it not also point to the 
 caution necessary in rooting out instinctive impulses, e.g., 
 pugnacity, from the school ? McDougall emphasises the evo- 
 lutionary value of anger^* and says : " In the nursery and the 
 school righteous anger will always have a great and proper 
 part to play in the training of the individual for his life in 
 society "^^ — a part, we may add, appropriate to pupil as well 
 as to master. 
 
 It is probable that few of the protagonists of direct moral 
 instruction, at any rate few of them who are teachers of ex- 
 perience, ever interpret it in a rigid way. The focus to which 
 they " direct " themselves and their pupils is the incident or 
 example, historical or imaginary, in its concrete setting. 
 They trust to instinct for the creation of the spark of sym- 
 pathy or emulation. They let the moral " soak in as it 
 may."^" In this sense all moral instruction is indirect. It 
 is like the seed in the parable of the sower. It may germinate 
 or not, but that will depend on the fertility of instinctive and 
 emotional reaction, and not on dry, abstract formulation of 
 truth. That, however, is not to discredit instruction. The 
 seed is as necessary as the fertile soil for germination. The 
 Herbartian doctrine of the efficacy of ideas and the Socratic 
 dictum that knowledge is virtue, contain a solid kernel of 
 truth. 
 
 The following passage from the section in the Inter- 
 national Report on "Ethical Sunday Schools" contains the 
 essence of sound method and procedure. "The teaching in 
 the Ethical Sunday Schools strives to be pre-eminently true 
 to the great truths of pedagogy, such as concrete before 
 abstract, from the simple to the complex, the doctrine of 
 interest and the encouragement of self-activity, the enlarge- 
 ment and enriching of the " circle of thought." Accordingly 
 the facts of the moral life are conveyed by stories, fairy tales, 
 fables, sagas, legends, mythology, Bible and history stories 
 and biographies, according to the ages of the children. They 
 must be dramatically told, with due detail of scene, so as to 
 
 38 Social Psychology, p. 61. 
 
 39 Ibid, p. 293. 
 
 4" International Report, Vol. I, p. 399.
 
 I 
 
 THE PROCESS OF ADJUSTMENT 369 
 
 let the children feel that morality lives and moves in the con- 
 crete world. . . . The instincts of hero-worship and 
 imitation give a moral direction to his will and he feels his 
 oneness with the moral order of the universe."*' This is not 
 dry formalism but that weaving of moral truth into the fabric 
 of the individual moral life which we have called the creation 
 of the moral continuum. It is the realising that " the truth 
 shall make you free." It is difficult to see what sound objec- 
 tion there can be to direct moral instruction as so interpreted, 
 or how it can develop cant and priggishness. It should be 
 a part of the life of every school, Sunday or week-day. 
 
 §8. It is hardly necessary to comment on the thread- 
 bare and artificial distinction between instruction and train- 
 ing. Every thoughtful teacher realises that they are like ihe 
 convex and concave sides of a curve, two aspects of the same 
 thing. Nor need the relation of truth to activity be empha- 
 sised after what has been said of the relation of volition and 
 feeling to cognition in moral progress. The Boy Scout 
 movement and the contribution of schools to social service — 
 their contribution to national service during the war — point 
 plainly to the way boys and girls are ready to play their part 
 in sustaining the social, national and moral fabric. 
 
 Nor need we discuss at any length the moral import of 
 the great formative and cultural school subjects, science and 
 mathematics, literature and history. Through the agency of 
 the first pair we explore our first world, the physical universe. 
 They reveal law and system which are, as we have seen, 
 stages in the revelation of the moral as of the physical sys- 
 tem. They reveal the sublime in nature and Kant's asso- 
 ciation of the starry heavens and the moral law as the objects 
 of the deepest reverence is well-known. Moreover we have 
 it on his high authority that " when we find a man imme- 
 diately interested in the beauty of nature, we have cause to 
 believe that there is in him at least a basis for a good moral 
 character."*^ Through the agency of the second pair, the 
 humanistic studies, our second world, the social continuum, 
 is discovered. There we have revealed the evolution of 
 civilisation. Within and yet transcending both the moral 
 
 ''1 Ibid, Vol. I, p. 396. See also the contribution of Mr. F. J. Gould (Vol. 
 I, Chapter V) and that of Chancellor Bernard (Vol. 1, Chapter VIII). 
 *2 Caird, op. cit, Vol. II, pp. 441, 442.
 
 370 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 order is adumbrated. And if teaching is sound revelation 
 will involve participation. Each world will be, not an objec- 
 tive detached panorama, but a living continuum within ex- 
 perience. The opposition between formal and cultural train- 
 ing will appear as what it really is, an artificial abstraction 
 from the concrete process in which truth, whether of science, 
 civilisation, or morality becomes the very stuff and substance 
 of life, of action as well of contemplation. 
 
 Of art in the "direct" form of choral music, with its 
 ennobling and refining effect on the emotions, or of drawing 
 and painting, it is unnecessary to point out the immediate 
 moral implications. In the " indirect " form of neatness, 
 order, and symmetry in all the routine of school activities, 
 we need only say that its moral value cannot be too highly 
 appraised. In such details the higher self can find hourly 
 expression. Of games also we need only remark that they 
 mean individuality for solidarity, or they mean little, if any- 
 thing. The moral value of manual work is also generally 
 recognised. The late William James, in reply to the ques- 
 tion : " How could the ethical efficiency of education be 
 increased?" said : " I should increase enormously the amount 
 of manual or ' motor ' training relatively to the book-work, 
 and not let the latter predominate till the age of fifteen or six- 
 teen."*^ The moral effect of practical work in the case of the 
 defective and the degenerate is established beyond question. 
 Its place in the curriculum of normal childhood and youth is 
 also assured. Its indirect value for moral training seems to 
 lie in the scope it gives for definite and progressive achieve- 
 ment. The growing power to adapt material to a specific 
 purpose is a faithful reflection of what we have described 
 as the creation of the moral continuum. There is no room in 
 the workshop for the moral inertia which halts behind insight 
 and even conviction. The translation of a plan into a reality 
 must be attempted. James' practical advice is an immediate 
 corollary of his splendid abstract dictum " Keep the faculty 
 of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every 
 day,"^* The workshop provides a field where volition must 
 emerge ii> effort. In the upper school it is also a fine correc- 
 
 *3 International Report, Vol. I, p. 94. See also Mr. Legge's contribution 
 in Vol. I, Chapter XXVI. 
 
 ** Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, p. 126.
 
 THE PROCESS OF ADJUSTMENT 371 
 
 live for flitting and fugitive higher impulses which attend 
 the revelation of literary or scientific beauty. The higher 
 self can find readier embodiment, a complementary bracing 
 and binding, in the effort at practical achievement. In the 
 school dairy, orchard, or experimental field-plot, the way can 
 be prepared for the reahsation of the ideal self in social 
 service. 
 
 §9. As to religious instruction there is this to be said, 
 in the first place, that it cannot be isolated in theory, and 
 ought not to be in practice. We shall have failed altogether 
 in our purpose if it is not now clear that adjustment must be 
 to " the whole of reality which is God."''^ We have had to 
 consider separately adjustment to three orders because they 
 emerge in turn in the unity of experience and only reflect one 
 aspect at a time of the unity " which is God." We have 
 tried to show, however, that each aspect carries as a penumbra 
 or halo the significance of divinity. In the first book we 
 found that significance in the greeting of spirit by spirit 
 implied inevitably, as we think, in adjustment to the natural 
 order. In the second book we tried to show how the religious 
 sentiment has been the most powerful factor in shaping the 
 spiritual contours of the social fabric. In this book our con- 
 tention has been that the creation of the moral order is the 
 essence of adjustment, but that for that constructive task the 
 materials are ready to hand just because the work of the 
 Divine Architect is visible in the fabric of experience which 
 the individual inherits. So that all adjustment is religious, 
 and the setting aside of three-quarters of an hour for the 
 divinity lesson must not cloak that fundamental truth. Least 
 of all is there any room for a hierarchy of values when we 
 reflect that adjustment is to " the whole of reality which is 
 God." 
 
 But, in the second place, we must remember the needs of 
 childhood and adolescence. The divine significance of 
 nature, our fellows, and morality, is but a faintly-glimmering 
 halo for the young. It will gain in intensity of illumination 
 if we direct adjustment aright, but it needs the fuel of divinity 
 in personal garb. Prayers in hall, the chapel service, the 
 voice of exhortation, the divinity lessons, must be part of the 
 routine of school life just because they give personal signific- 
 
 *' Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 371.
 
 yjz THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT 
 
 ance to " the reality which is God." It would be the height 
 of presumjDtion to dogmatise about detail. It would be the 
 depth of folly to ignore the stress, in the young at all events, 
 towards the human in the divine. Unless the schoolmaster 
 feels it he should leave the school. Unless he feels that it is 
 to God in the full panoply of human life and sympathy that 
 adjustment is to be consummated, his vocation is not with 
 the young.
 
 INDEX 
 
 B 
 
 Acquired characteristics, transmissi- 
 bility of in individuals, 322, 323 ; in 
 social fabric, 323-327. 
 
 Adams, mental tests, 26 ; bi-polar view 
 of education, 28-30, 341, 342 ; 
 general and specific education, 237, 
 238 ; poetry, 279 ; Herbartian view 
 of priority of ideas, 320 ; transmisst- 
 bility of acquired characteristics, 
 323, 324, 326, 327 ; individual and 
 environment, 361. 
 
 Adamson, J. W., 126. 
 
 Adjustment, process of, 8, 9, 15, 16; 
 to Nature, lo, 11, 46-54; to Nature 
 and to science compared, 54-59 ; to 
 social fabric, 11, 12, 219-236; to 
 moral order, 12-14, 35-37. 300-313; 
 diagrammatic representation of, 31, 
 32 ; illustration of, ^2, 34. 
 
 Aesthetic factor in moral adjustment, 
 318, 359-362. 
 
 Agricultural development, 206. 
 
 Aitken, 130. 
 
 Amos, social contract, 170 ; basis of 
 constitution, 171 ; political stability 
 of England, 179, 180;; the church 
 and the organisation of society, 186. 
 
 Apprentices, 202, 203. 
 
 Aristotle, 173. 
 
 Arithmetic, in preparatory course, 73, 
 
 74, 83. 
 
 Armstrong, 108. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 4, 5. 
 
 Ashley, evolution of villein, 196 ; 
 economic England in 14th century, 
 196 ; class of villein, 197 ; life on 
 manor, 198 ; differentiation of econ- 
 omic function, 200 ; value in ex- 
 change, 201 ; gild system, 203, 204 ; 
 woollen industry, 208 ; economic in- 
 dependence, 2og. 
 
 Authority, see government. 
 
 Badley, 119. 
 
 Bagley, 261. 
 
 Bain, 272. 
 
 Baldwin, 20. 
 
 Ball, 273. 
 
 Barnett, P. A., method in geography, 
 80 ; unity of history, 227 ; the 
 classics and humanistic vocations, 
 256 ; effect of literature, 277 ; 
 language and literature, 279 ; selec- 
 tion of literature, 281, 282 ; history 
 and literature, 287 ; the classics, 292, 
 
 293- 
 
 Bateson, on Bergson, 21 ; congenital 
 diversity, 44 ; aim of education, 45 ; 
 science and utility, 65 ; purpose of 
 science, 112, 115, 117; method in 
 teaching science, 113; literature and 
 science, 119, 120; biological approach 
 to science, 126; Greek literature, 
 294. 
 
 Bentham, 340. 
 
 Bergson, creative evolution, 21, 30, 46, 
 47, 102, 103, 104, 161, 168, 220, 228, 
 356, 367 ; mechanical and vital 
 phenomena, 136, 137 ; change, 147, 
 148 ; language, 275, 276 ; activity of 
 subject, 9 ; Kant's view of space, 52 ; 
 abstractions of science, 57 ; past as 
 shaping present experience, 300 ; 
 transmissibility of acquired charac- 
 teristics, 322, 2^5 ; duration, 324 ; 
 repetition, 336 ; adaptation, 343, 344 ; 
 reality and God, 371. 
 
 Bernard, 369. 
 
 Bosanquet, principle of individuality, 
 147, 148, 308-313 ; social self, 157, 
 158 ; law and social spirit, 172 ; 
 Greek political philosophy, 173 ; evo- 
 lution and sacrifice, 217; teleology, 
 306, 307 ; egoism and altruism, 308 ; 
 germ of moral consciousness, 317; 
 373
 
 374 
 
 INDEX 
 
 creation of moral continuum, 319, 
 324 ; unity of animal life and moral 
 order, 356 ; moral hygiene, 357. 
 
 Bradley, 21, 315, 336. 
 
 Brooke, Stopford, 3. 
 
 D 
 
 Daudet, a., 58, 291, 292. 
 Democracy, 170-173. 
 Descartes, 23, 139. 
 
 Browning, 3, 14, 37, 46, 244, 270, 281, Dewey, science and humanities, 3 ; 
 
 287, 311, 312, 346, 360, 361. 
 Bryant, 364, 365, 367. 
 Burke, 272. 
 Burrell, 338. 
 
 meaning of environment, 7 ; utility, 
 65, 66 ; science and experience, 60 ; 
 verbalism in science teaching, 67 ; 
 preparatory or primary course, 74 ; 
 geography and history, 78 ; Nature 
 and civilisation, 103 ; individual and 
 social environment, 104 ; laboratory 
 work, 109, 112; education as life, 
 222 ; vocational ideals, 240 ; educa- 
 tion and unity of experience, 247, 
 248 ; sustaining moral order, 304. 
 
 Cairo, E., interaction of subject and 
 
 object, 105 ; freedom and isolation, 
 
 302 ; freedom under moral law, 303, Discipline, ideal of, 10. 
 
 314; birth of moral consciousness, 
 
 316, 317; duty and happiness, 348; 
 
 happiness, 351 ; aesthetic and moral 
 
 adjustment, 361 ; Nature and moral 
 
 law, 369. 
 Cause, concept of, 143-146. 
 Chaucer, 287. 
 
 Chesterton, 187, 189, 200, 206. 
 Chisholm, 91 
 
 Economic evolution and sacrifice, 216, 
 
 217. 
 Economic freedom and individualism, 
 
 214-216. 
 Education, a liberal, defined, 38. 
 
 Civics and Politics in Schools, 230-232. Educational theory, independence of. 
 Classical languages, 292-294. 16-18, 113, 114. 
 
 Clephan, 282. Ego, see Self. 
 
 Clough, 365. Ellwood, 155. 
 
 Cognitive factor in moral adjustment, Emerson, 147. 
 
 315-318. 
 
 Commercial revolution, 209-212. 
 Commercial Schools, 263, 264. 
 Committee of Seven, History in 
 
 Schools, 219, 222. 
 Competition, moral value of, 352, 353. 
 Conative factor in moral adjustment, 
 
 318, 319- 
 Conscience, 354, 355. 
 Continuum of Nature, 10, 11, 39, 40; 
 
 Environment, threefold nature of, 2, 3 ; 
 
 continuity with individual, 7, 41, 42 ; 
 
 is term applicable to social fabric? 
 
 156-160; to moral order? 299-304. 
 Ethical standards, mutually involved, 
 
 347-349 ; as embodied in school life, 
 
 349. 350- 
 
 Eucken, 358. 
 
 Evidence, weighing of, as aim in his- 
 tory, 235, 236. 
 
 of social fabric, 156-160; of moral Experience, uniqueness of, 7, 8; as 
 
 subject-matter of psychology, 20, 21 ; 
 as unity of individual and environ- 
 ment, 39-41 ; change in, 21, 46-48. 
 
 order, 299-304. 
 Corn Laws, 225, 226. 
 Craftsmen, free, evolution of, 199-204. 
 Craft guilds, 201-204. 
 Crafts schools, 258-263. 
 Cunningham, secular and spiritual, 
 
 195; teaching of history, 196; com- 
 mercial and colonial rivalry, 210; 
 
 England's success in, 210, 211. 
 Cunningham and McArthur, the Findlay, 16, 364. 
 
 manor, 196, 197; the villeins, 197, Food supply, 213, 214. 
 
 198 ; effects of black death, 199 ; Formal training, 239. 
 
 craft guilds, 202; Edward Ill's Freedom, political, and diversity of 
 
 economic policy, 205 ; food supply, race, 182, 183. 
 
 214. Freud, 26. 
 
 Fa.mily and School, 328, 329.
 
 INDEX 
 
 375 
 
 Galileo, 109. 
 
 Geography, relation to Nature-study 
 and history, 76, 77 ; to history, 78, 
 79 ; first steps in, 79, 80 ; near and 
 far, 80, 81 ; maps, 81-83 ; compara- 
 tive political, 83, 84 ; regional, 84- 
 87; logic of (1) latitude, 83, 87; 
 
 (2) atmospheric currents, 87, 88 ; 
 
 (3) precipitation, 8g ; (4) geological 
 features, 8g, 90 ; economic geography, 
 90-92 ; summary, 92, 93. 
 
 George, 85. 
 
 Girls, science for, 128-130; a course 
 in hygiene, 130-134 ; vocational ad- 
 justment of, 265, 266. 
 
 GoUancz and Somervell, 159, 160. 
 
 Government, basis of, 170; nature of, 
 170, 171 ; democratic form of, 170- 
 173 ; sphere of, 173-174. 
 
 Gould, 369. 
 
 Green, 313, 348. 
 
 H 
 
 Individuality of Nature, as focus of 
 school science, 117-119; conception 
 of, 147-150. 
 
 Industrial development and wool, 207, 
 208. 
 
 Inge, Dean, 21, 120, 293, 294. 
 
 Innes, 171. 
 
 Instincts, 327, 328. 
 
 International Report on Moral Instruc- 
 tion and Training in Schools, 329, 
 333' 33«. 340, 344' 357. 359. 3^3. 
 364. 367. 368, 369, 370. 
 
 James, empirical self, 6; uniqueness of 
 experience, 7, 8 ; subjective activity, 
 20, 21 ; psychic fringes, 22, 58, 144, 
 313, 314 ; extensity of sensations, 
 52 ; pluralism, 160, 313 ; " sting of 
 reality," 268; moral adjustment, 
 370- 
 
 J 
 
 Journeymen, 202, 203. 
 Jowett, 308. 
 Jung, 26. 
 
 Hall, Stanley, 50. 
 
 Happiness in school life, 351, 352. 
 
 Hayes, Church of Rome and organ- 
 isation of society, 185, i86 ; religion 
 and the Peasants' Revolt, 189; 
 religious intolerance and emigration, 
 190 ; Jesuits as teachers, 193. 
 
 Hegel, 313. 
 
 Heine, 292. 
 
 Herbart, 50, 67-69, 319, 320. 
 
 Herbertson, 86, 90, 91. 
 
 Heuristic reform, 108-111; excessive 
 use of method, 110-113; adjustment 
 as a criterion of, 115, 116. 
 
 History, aim of, 223, 224. 
 
 History courses, range and selection 
 of topics, 226-229. 
 
 Hobbes, 171. 
 
 Holmes, 343. 
 
 Home, W. J., 261-263. 
 
 Huyghens, 109. 
 
 I 
 
 K 
 
 Kant, forms and categories, 5, 53 ; 
 synthetic function of subject, 20, 27, 
 50, 239, 331 ; perception and concep- 
 tion, 23, 58, 75, 337; space and 
 time, 51, 52, 102 ; intellect and 
 Nature, 146 ; sublime and beautiful, 
 280 ; freedom of will, 301 ; categori- 
 cal imperative, 306, 315 ; indi- 
 vidualism, 313 ; will as source of 
 moral action, 319 ; duty and happi- 
 ness, 348 ; pure and practical 
 reason, 354 ; aesthetic and moral 
 adjustment, 361 ; starry heavens and 
 moral law, 369. 
 
 Keatinge, 338. 
 
 Keats, 31. 
 
 Kerschensteiner, 233, 234, 241, 263. 
 
 Kidd, 192, 209. 
 
 Kirchoff, 145. 
 
 Imitation, see Suggestion. 
 
 Individual, the, 3-8. L 
 
 Individuality, uniqueness of, 42, 43 ; 
 
 formal identity in, 43, 44; Bateson Laboratory and methods of, 110-113. 
 
 on, 44, 45. Lancaster, E. Ray, 258, 326, 327.
 
 376 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Language, continuity of with litera- 
 tui't-, 278-282 ; relation to each world 
 or order, 268, 269 ; relation to social 
 order, 164, 165 ; ahead of or behind 
 thought, 270, 271 ; word and mean- 
 ing, 271-273 ; as instrument of 
 ana]3'sis, 274 ; of synthesis, 275 ; 
 Bergson on, 275, 276 ; logical doc- 
 trine concerning, 276 ; and nation- 
 ality, 180-183. 
 
 Latta, 126. 
 
 Law, concept of, 145-147. 
 
 Law or Duty in school life, 391. 
 
 Legge, 370. 
 
 Leibnitz, 20, 139, 313. 
 
 Literature, fusion of content and form 
 in, 269, 270 ; continuity with 
 language, 278-282 ; relation of to 
 aesthetic and moral feeling, 276, 
 277 ; school course in, 282-286 ; rela- 
 tion to history, 286, 287 ; patriotic 
 
 poetry, 287, : 
 296 ; Board 
 on, 281, 287. 
 
 Locke, 46. 
 
 Lyde, 87, : 
 
 Luca 
 
 of 
 
 ; treatment 
 Education 
 
 of, 294- 
 circular 
 
 89, 90. 
 
 s, 192, 197. 
 
 M 
 
 Mach, 145. 
 
 Mackenzie, social organism, 157 ; 
 object of moral judgment, 300 ; con- 
 tent of moral order, 307 ; perfection, 
 308 ; categorical imperative of Kant, 
 315 ; ethical standards as impera- 
 tives, 348; happiness, 351. 
 
 Mackinder, 78, 81, 90. 
 
 Manor, life on, 196-198. 
 
 Manual training and adjustment to 
 Nature, 72, 73 
 
 Mathematics in school course, 139-141. 
 
 Maxwell, 139. 
 
 Mazzini, 169. 
 
 McDougall, natural development of 
 sentiments, 5, 12 ; sympathy, i8 ; 
 voluntaristic and social psychology, 
 24, 25 ; moral adjustment, 36, 37 ; 
 curiosity and wonder, 41 ; positive 
 self-feeling, 104 ; spcial heredity, 
 326 ; instinct, 328 ; imitation, 338 ; 
 conditions of suggestibility, 341 ; 
 pugnacity, 352, 353 ; anger, 368 ; 
 and Preface. 
 
 McMurry, 64. 
 
 Meiklejohn, 59. 
 
 Mercantile Marine, 213. 
 
 Merchant Guilds, 200, 201. 
 
 Ministry of Reconstruction Report, 
 
 260, 261. 
 Modern Languages, 289-292. 
 Moral discipline of school subjects, 
 
 369-371- 
 
 Moral hygiene, 357. 
 
 Moral instruction, 362-369. 
 
 Moral order, nature of, 12-14, 299, 
 300 ; creation of, 300-304, 358-362 ; 
 teleological element in, 304-307 ; and 
 self-realisation, 307, 308 ; Bosan- 
 quet's conception of individuality, 
 308-313. 
 
 Muirhead, 303, 305, 307, 353. 
 
 75. 209. 
 to democracy, 
 and, 176-180 ; 
 
 N 
 
 Napoleon', 169, 171, 
 
 Nationality, relation 
 174-176; freedom 
 strength of sentiment, 177, 178; 
 physical features and, 178, 179 ; his- 
 torical continuity and, 179-180; 
 Language and, 180-183. 
 
 Natural world or order, nature of, 
 10, II ; unity of ego and world in 
 experience, 39-41. 
 
 Nature-study, place in preparatory 
 curriculum, 62, 63 ; principles 
 governing selection of material, 63- 
 71 ; relation to science, 71, 72 ; aims 
 
 of, 75. 76- 
 Navigation Acts, 213. 
 Ncttleship, 335. 
 Newbolt, 288. 
 
 Newton, 109, 117, 139, 143, 145. 
 Nunn, 126, and Preface. 
 
 o 
 
 0'.SnE\, z6, 77. 
 
 Parkin, 335, 355, 359. 
 Pearson, Karl, 52, 145. 
 Peasantry, free, evolution of, 195-199- 
 Perfectionism in school life, 353-357- 
 Physical side of school life, relation of 
 to moral adjustment, 357.
 
 INDEX 
 
 377 
 
 Physiography, 93-96- 
 
 Pilgrim Fathers, 226. 
 
 Plato, Greek political philosophy, 173 ; 
 Theory of Education, 238-239 ; indi- 
 vidual" and environment, 302, 303, 
 359 ; relation to modern philosophers, 
 
 313- 
 
 Poincar^, 139. 
 
 Preparatory Course, continuous with 
 Secondary, 16 ; aim and content of, 
 249, 250 ; length and transition to 
 Secondary Course, 251, 252. 
 
 Presentations, currency value of, 47, 
 
 Primary Course, See Preparatory 
 
 Course. 
 Psychic fringes, 22-24, 313, 314, 330- 
 Psychology, relation to education, 16- 
 19 ; principles and developments 
 specially valuable for education, 19- 
 26 ; dynamic conception of mind, 
 19-22 ; social psychology, 24, 25 ; ex- 
 perimental, 24 ; child-siudy, 24 ; 
 currency value of presentations, 47. 
 
 R 
 
 Rayleigh, W., 290, 296. 
 
 Religion, strength of sentiment, 183, 
 184 ; relation to nationality and 
 humanity, 184, 185, 188 ; Church of 
 Rome and the organisation of 
 society, 185-188 ; relation to economic 
 facts, 189, 190 ; to emigration and 
 national expansion, 191, 192 ; to 
 education, 192-194. 
 
 Religious instruction, 371, 372. 
 
 Reynolds, 87. 
 
 Rights of man, 168-169. 
 
 Ritchie, 327. 
 
 Rose, Holland, rights of man, 169 ; 
 nationality and language, 181 ; politi- 
 cal freedom and diversity of race, 
 182, 183 ; protection and war, 216. 
 
 Ross, 24. 
 
 Rousseau, 239. 
 
 Ruhe, and Paul, on Bergson, 359, 
 
 363- 
 Rusk, 22, 26. 
 
 .Sadler, 62, 107, 108. 
 
 School and ethical standards, 347-35" 
 
 School as factor in moral adjustment : 
 (i) cognitive, 3^9-333; <2) affective, 
 333-33S; ^3) conative, 336-338; as 
 medium for creation of moral con- 
 tinuum, 357-36^- 
 School-farm, 264, 2(>5. 
 Science, stage of adjustment, 97-ioS, 
 141-147 ; activity of subject in, 97- 
 103, 141-147; and civilisation, 103- 
 108 ; selection of subjects for a 
 course in, 117-119; science and the 
 humanities, 119, 120; method in 
 teaching of, 120, 121; science sylla- 
 buses : Transvaal courses in (1) 
 Nature-study, geography, and physi- 
 cal science^ 122-128; (2) hygiene, 
 130-134 ; biology in schools, 134-139 '> 
 for girls, 128-130. 
 
 Science, Natural, Committee's Report, 
 Nature-study, 61, 62, 126; real 
 value of science, 69 ; physiography, 
 94, 95; biology in schools, 134-139; 
 mathematics and physics, 140; 
 science and unity of Nature, 141, 
 147 ; laboratory work and heuristic 
 method, no," in; selection of 
 topics, 120, 121, 126; aim of 
 science, 128. 
 
 Secondary schools, three general types, 
 254, 255 ; common subjects, 255, 
 256 ; humanistic type, 256, 257 ; 
 nature type, 257, 258 ; crafts and 
 commerce type, 258-264. 
 
 Self, pure and empirical, 6. 
 
 Shakspeare, 269, 270, 273, 281, 287, 
 288, 295. 
 
 Shand, 24. 
 
 Smith, H. Bompas, 329, 332, 333. 340, 
 
 344- 
 
 Smith, Nowell, 286, 287. 
 
 Social Fabric or Order, Nature of, 11, 
 12, 153-164; existent only in indi- 
 vidual minds, 156, 157; is term con- 
 tinuum or environment applicable? 
 158-160; 'capitalisation' in, 160, 
 161 ; plasticity of, 162 ; polarisation 
 to and constraint of individual, 162- 
 164 ; language in relation to, 164, 
 
 165. 
 Social heredity, 323-327. 
 Social service in schools, 232-235. 
 South Africa ; nationality and language 
 
 180-183. 
 Spencer, 208, 323. 
 Stephen, L., 157. 
 Stephenson, 89. 
 I. Stevenson, 326.
 
 378 INDEX 
 
 Stout, subjective activity, 20, 21 ; 
 psychic fringes, 22-24 ! extensity of 
 sensations, 52 ; interest, 246 ; 
 language, 271, 272, ;;74 ; relative 
 suggestion, 336 ; imitation, 338. 
 
 Stubbs, the Church and the organisa- 
 tion of Society, 186, 187. 
 
 Suggestion, Sympathy and Imitation, 
 working of, 338, 341. 
 
 Swinburne, 276. 
 
 Sympathy, see Suggestions. 
 
 Teacher, place and function of, 26-37 ; 
 
 in moral adjustment, 340-346. 
 Teleological character of moral order, 
 
 304-307. 
 Tennyson, 3, 46, 277, 28 1, 287, 295, 
 
 311. 353. 354- 
 
 Thomas, 126. 
 
 Thompson, 354. 
 
 Thomson, J. A., 322, 323, 324. 
 
 Thought and Language, 270-275. 
 
 Thring, 335, 353, 355, 359, 360. 
 
 Three R's, subsidiary and instru- 
 mental, 61, 62, 72-75. 
 
 Trades Schools, 258-263. 
 
 Transferability of power, theory of, 
 253. 254. 
 
 u 
 
 Ueberweg, 319. 
 
 Unity of Nature, See Individuality of 
 
 Nature. 
 Unity of three worlds, 149, 150; and 
 
 unity of school subjects, 109. 
 
 V 
 
 Venn, 79. 
 Vives, 255. 
 
 Von Wyss on Nature-study, 53, 64, 66, 
 69, 126. 
 
 w 
 
 Wall.\ce, 280. 
 
 Wallas, Graham, dynamic view of 
 mind, 24 ; interaction of individual 
 and moral order, 24 ; social heredity, 
 325 ; habit, 332, 337 ; suggestion, 
 sympathy, and imitation, 353 ; 
 baulked dispositions, 367. 
 
 Ward, uniqueness of experience, 7 ; 
 individualistic standpoint, 25 ; sub- 
 jective activity, 20, 21, 50, 51 ; ex- 
 tensity of sensations, 52 ; withdrawal 
 of attention, 59 ; reality, 94 ; sub- 
 ject and reality, 143 ; intelligibility 
 of Nature, loi, 331 ; mental con- 
 tinuum, 102 ; capitalisation in social 
 order, 139, 160, 161 ; plasticity of 
 social order, 162 ; constraint of social 
 order, 164; cause, 144; law, 146; 
 Nature teleological, 150; words, 
 272 ; " transparent world of minds," 
 
 3. '54- 
 Watson, F., 255. 
 Webb, 90. 
 Weissman, 323. 
 Welton, 32, 329. 
 
 Welton and Blandford, 332, 337. 
 Withers, 227. 
 Wolff, 20. 
 
 Woollen industry, 207, 208. 
 Wordsworth, 149, 156, 281, 287, 288, 
 
 321. 333- 
 Work and leisure, 242. 
 
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