EDUCATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION OF NATURE 273 



lower animals than to man, and the farther down the series we go the 

 less important would it become, until, among micro-organisms, we can 

 not speak of conscious adaptation without greatly overstepping the 

 bounds of scientific accuracy. So far as the evidence goes, learning 

 among the lower animals is strictly a matter of association. The 

 more intelligent of them appreciate the failure of a method quicker 

 than the others, and the discomfort resulting from it exerts a de- 

 pressant effect upon the whole neuro-muscular system which tends 

 to break up the incipient coordinations which were involved in the 

 original action, and even to obliterate their neural effects. All this, 

 of course, reacts against repetition. Success, on the other hand, is 

 attended by a pleasurable feeling, and every one has observed the 

 joyous look of animals capable of expressing their emotions, when 

 they have accomplished what they have been trying to do. These 

 pleasurable feelings increase the muscular tonicity which always tends 

 to motor discharge, and this results in a partial reinervation of the 

 coordinated group of muscles that were involved in the original move- 

 ment. This naturally deepens the existing neural effect and tends 

 to the repetition of the movement that occasioned it. 



So far as our present state of knowledge permits us to draw con- 

 clusions, the intellectual difference between man and the lower animals 

 consists primarily in just this difference between associative reasoning 

 on the one hand, and, on the other, inference in which the connection 

 is obscured, by time or space, or by the complexity of the elements 

 involved. And here, as before, the part that experience plays in deter- 

 mining action is the measure of intellect, only now its influence has 

 been enormously multiplied. Articulate speech has enabled man to 

 organize his experiences and transmit what he has learned, and it 

 is not improbable that the higher psychical processes involved in rea- 

 soning owe to this human acquisition their development if not their 

 crigin. Speech has greatly accelerated adaptation — by no means an 

 unimportant factor in the rapid changes of man's experience, since 

 through it we learn from others that which may benefit or injure, and 

 so avoid what might mean destruction of the species. And then, too, 

 by enlarging the sum of the experiences it has greatly increased the 

 facility in acquisition and assimilation which plays so important a 

 role in human progress. 



Learning in man, whether it be a new adaptation to a changed 

 situation or the acceptance of an intellectual truth or moral principle, 

 depends much upon the content of the individual mind, and this as- 

 sumes infinitely greater importance in man than in the lower animals 

 because of the immense complication of his environment. With 

 animals this content embraces at most relation to the physical world 

 and to other animals, but with man the physical world means and 



vol. Lxxn. — 18. 



