EDUCATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION OF NATURE 269 



MAN'S EDUCATIONAL RECONSTKUCTION OF NATUEE 



By Professor EDGAR JAMES SWIFT 



WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY, 8T. LOUIS 



THE purpose of education among those animals that train their 

 young is adaptation to environment. Man's endeavor is the 

 same, but with the growth of human society and of knowledge his 

 environment has profoundly altered, a fact that education has only 

 partially recognized, and this alteration has made it necessary to 

 reinterpret adaptation. Among the lower animals, nature secures the 

 necessary results mainly through instinct. 



Jennings found 1 that paramecia collect around a mass of bacteria, 

 pushing and crowding one another in apparent effort to reach the food, 

 and Binet, 2 in one of those delightful, imaginative flights in which even 

 the scientific mind at times is wont to recreate, would have us believe 

 that most, if not all of the higher intellectual processes, including 

 choice and volition, form part of the mental life of micro-organisms. 

 But we are clearly drawing inferences beyond our right if we assume 

 that action here has any other cause than the necessity which selection 

 has made the conditions of survival. These organisms must do cer- 

 tain things and do them always, under penalty of extinction, and 

 perhaps this is the reason why these same paramecia begin to gather 

 around innutritious substances quite as surely as around nutritious. 

 The attraction which a dilute solution of carbon dioxide has for them 

 would then, as Jennings has suggested, be due to the fact that this 

 product of organic waste is found wherever paramecia assemble; there- 

 fore, as they gather more often than otherwise around food and natural 

 selection demands that they lose no chance of finding nutriment, carbon 

 dioxide becomes a blind call to food. Instinct is thus organic behavior 

 originating in the necessity of adaptation and directed in its course 

 through the exigencies of the environment by natural selection. Whit- 

 man 3 has observed that our fresh-water salamander, Necturus, reacts to 

 any object quietly introduced into the water, as though it were food. 

 If so small an object as a needle, he says, be brought into contact 

 with the surface of the water, Necturus instantly turns toward it. The 

 reason is that the animal receives exactly the same stimuli from a 

 foreign object that touches or passes through the water as it does from 



1 " Psychology of a Protozoan," Am. Jour, of Psychology, Vol. X., 1899, 

 p. 503. 



2 Binet, "The Psychic Life of Micro-organisms," 1899, p. 61. 



* " Biological Lectures from the Marine Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massa- 

 chusetts," 1898, p. 303. 



