278 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



for adaptation to the grade that society may happen to hold at that 

 time, but to create in men the habit of discriminating and of choosing 

 that which leads to something higher. 



The importance of this point of view is not lessened even if it be 

 shown that natural selection is not the only force operative in pro- 

 ducing change. New characteristics may appear suddenly, so-called 

 mutations, but their persistence is after all dependent upon the environ- 

 ment. True, they may persist without being of immediate advantage, 

 but only when conditions are not too unfavorable. Here, again, it 

 should be the purpose of an intelligently endowed society to make 

 conditions that will preserve incipient and less stable individual varia- 

 tions that have appeared, according to the supposition, through no 

 direct environmental influence, but which may tend toward a higher 

 social organization. It is not enough that conditions permit the sur- 

 vival of such varieties under difficulties; they should favor their con- 

 tinuance. While some "mutations" may exist under conditions not 

 altogether favorable, others will require social recognition and society 

 should see to it that the persistence of such sensitive " mutations " is 

 not too hazardous. In this way a tendency to vary, a characteristic 

 which means much for progress, may be fostered. In his work with 

 plants Vilmorin found, according to Darwin, that " when any partic- 

 ular variation is desired, the first step is to get the plant to vary in 

 any manner whatever, and to go on selecting the most variable indi- 

 viduals, even though they vary in the wrong direction, for the fixed 

 character of the species being once broken, the desired variation will 

 sooner or later appear," and Burbank has recently made the same 

 observation. 



Among lower animals variation facilitates new adaptations, but 

 in man it has assumed an added function, that of suggesting new de- 

 partures, new lines of progress, and in doing this it makes important 

 contributions to the growth of experience. Education is always in 

 danger of arrest from compression by immediate or " practical " aims. 

 It should be of a sort that admits of indefinite expansion so that in 

 the end it may become commensurate with life; but this capacity for 

 enlargement requires something more than knowledge. Inability to 

 see this led to the fallacy of the educational system of the middle ages ; 

 nnd we have fallen heir to their infatuation for formal training and 

 learning. Information did fairly well for the simple conditions of 

 early times when the necessary adaptations of life were neither compli- 

 cated nor numerous, but if education is to be adequate to the life of 

 to-day it must take the whole plexus of social forces into account and 

 these social forces are, after all, only biological principles working in 

 human society, to be intelligently interpreted and used for the greater 

 life of society. 



One of the elements in progress, and by no means an unimportant 



