ADAPTATION TO ENVIRONMENT 441 



ment in which he is called upon to live (civilization) must be accom- 

 plished 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 indi- 

 vidual 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 organ- 

 ism 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 environ- 

 ment 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 or- 

 ganic 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 environ- 

 ment, 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 

 cla}', 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 



