Page:John Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education (1913).djvu/86

 was not known that the sense-organs are simply the pathways of stimuli to motor-responses, and that it is only through these motor-responses, and especially through consideration of the adapting of sense-stimulus and motor-response to each other that growth of knowledge occurs. The sense-qualities of color, sound, contact, etc., are important not in their mere reception and storage, but in their connection with the various forms of behavior that secure intelligent control. The baby would not arrive even at the knowledge of individual things,—hat, chair, orange, stone, tree,—were it not for the active responses through which various qualities are made mutually significant of one another, and thereby knit into coherent wholes. Even in the ordinary hard-and-fast school, where it is thought to be a main duty to suppress all forms of motor-activity, the physical activities that are still allowed under the circumstances, such as moving the eyes, lips, etc., in reading to one's self; the physical adjustments of reading aloud, figuring, writing, reciting, are much more important than is generally recognized in holding attention. The outlet in