ADAPTATION TO ENVIRONMENT 443 



adults possess as a result of the exercise of play tendencies when they 

 normally appeared. On the other hand, when that cruelty instinct, 

 which almost invariably appears at a certain age in every child, is put 

 into a favorable environment, so that it functions and is fastened as a 

 permanent characteristic upon the individual, no matter under how 

 wholesome moral influences he may be thrown in later life, there is 

 there a tendency to cruelty which can hardly be eradicated. It is likely 

 because this instinct is allowed to function in so many children that 

 there are so many cruelties exercised and murders committed in adult 

 life. 



Those instincts and tendencies of the child in its various stages of 

 development are not indications of what the ideal individual ought to 

 be, but are, on the other hand, a portrayal of the history of the race. 

 They appear in the order in which they functioned virtually, and were, 

 therefore, seized upon by natural selection in the order in which their 

 possessors were rendered superior to their fellows as a result of their 

 functioning. 



As a result of conditions which are inevitable in a civilized com- 

 munity, such as prevail where there is sympathy and conscience, the 

 intellectually and morally, as well as physically, fit raise the level of 

 the less fit and unfit, so that they all are enabled to have offspring and 

 to have their descendents maintained, natural selection ceases to func- 

 tion and physical, mental and moral evolution in the race consequently 

 ceases. All the instincts, or at least many of them, continue to appear, 

 just as the physical disharmonies continue to appear; and as surgery 

 must get rid of these disharmonies (such as the appendix) in each 

 individual, so must education rid the individual (and each individual) 

 of these tendencies which throw him out of harmony with the present 

 mental and moral environment. 



Now the third essential qualification of the teacher, that of under- 

 standing the dynamic nature of society and progress, is indispensable. 

 In planning and deciding what sort of a man I want my boy to be, if 

 he is to be completely adjusted to his environment, and consequently 

 to get the most out of life, I must in all respects be able to see into 

 the future and to anticipate the conditions when he is to be an adult. 

 I must, in other words, understand the nature of the change which 

 conditions undergo in the meantime. To illustrate, suppose I am 

 living at a time when typesetting is a good vocation. A typesetter has 

 shorter hours and better remuneration than any other artisan. I plan 

 to make my boy a typesetter. He, as a result of my careful training, 

 develops into an efficient typesetter. He obtains a place and good 

 wages. He marries and by the time he has a good-sized family depend- 

 ing upon him, some one comes along and invents a typesetting machine. 

 He loses his position. He is obliged to serve as an unskilled laborer, 



