Education Its Data And First Principles

eeds elucidation. No creature is independent of its world in the sense that it could exist apart from it; prevented from assimilating matter from the environment in the form of food, it would soon cease to live. We may go farther, and admit that the intimacy of the relations between a living organism and its environment is, as Dr. J. S. Haldane has pointed out, one of the main differences between it and a mere machine. Matter from the environment is constantly flowing into and out of the organism, being, in Dr. Haldane's vigorous phrase, only for a while " caught up in the whirl " of its bodily structure. And the same is true of an organism's psychical activities, which could neither develop nor be sustained unless it were in constant intercourse with the world about it. For instance, a great part of a man's psychical activity is evidently dependent upon intercourse with his fellows and would perish if he were isolated. Thus it may be said that the texture of man's mind, like that of his body, consists in what is from time to time " caught up in the whirl " of its structure in perception, in thought, in all the acts involved in the common social life. Nevertheless, every animal, so long as it is alive, continues to affirm or assert itself over against the world of which, fromanother point of view, it is merely a part. Even the least " assertive " of us must recognize that this attitude belongs to every moment of our conscious lives. In every act we say to our worl...