Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/445

 Rh in which he is called upon to live (civilization) must be accomplished through artificial means. Physical adaptation, as was shown, must be by means of surgery and inoculation, and mental adaptation by means of education. It is the purpose of this article to consider the processes and significance of this mental adaptation of the individual to his civilized environment.

Civilization implies that each generation is working at a higher environing intellectual, moral and spiritual level, and with better tools, which their predecessors from generation to generation have devised and handed down to the subsequent one with usury. The essential thing in progress is that evolution has been transferred from the organism to the environment and that it is the accumulated social structure which persists. Civilization, therefore, is better characterized as a product than as the continual rise of average intellectual capacity. This product is the mold in which mediocrity is cast, and implies, merely, that the level of acquisition is becoming higher rather than the level of intelligence. The mediocre, and even the mentally poor, as well as the apt, are by means of education adapted to their environment and are thus enabled to survive and to bring up a family. Here, too, natural selection is barred from functioning, and for this reason man's mental evolution tends to a limit. One feature, inevitable in education, and which distinguishes social evolution from merely organic evolution, is the predominant part played by the fittest in raising the level of the less fit.

It is not, however, the motive here to discourage education, nor even to lament the fact that natural selection is thereby barred from further developing human intellectual capacity, but to consider progress as superorganic development of the environment, and education as the means of adjusting man to it. It is the method which most efficiently brings man into vital relationship with his intellectual inheritance, and which enables him thereby most effectively to realize himself, that is the interest here.

In order that the child may be enabled to come into the full and most effective relationship with his cumulative intellectual environment, three things must be fully understood, appreciated and taken cognizance of by the teacher in the training of that child. First, he must consider the material out of which the child is constituted, the clay, so to speak, out of which he expects to mold and build the adult. Secondly, he must know the order of appearance and unfolding of the child's various tendencies and powers, when instincts, interests and capacities appear, and how these can be made to function, if desirable, and become a permanent characteristic of the adult. Or, if undesirable, he must know how to keep those tendencies from functioning, in order to eliminate them and leave the individual as an adult free from their