EDUCATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION OF NATURE 281 



Recent studies 18 suggesting that the human brain has not increased 

 in average size for 20,000 years or more, also point to improvement in 

 cerebral organization as the distinctive feature of the civilized brain. 

 Further, both Kaes and Vulpius have shown that there are additions 

 to the association fibers in parts of the brain long after thirty-eight 

 years of age. 



Every age brings its change of view. Acts that were once con- 

 sidered the most virtuous are to-day abominable. Why did not the 

 people of past ages see at least some of these things as we do and know 

 that they were wrong? What will future generations say of us in this 

 respect ? Are we never to reach a stage of culture that will enable us 

 to think out these questions experimentally and intellectually, so that 

 we may jump the trying experience of intervening ages? Are we 

 never to eliminate dark ages? The processes of human progress are 

 extremely crude. They are simply naturalistic. Now one of the 

 ultimate functions of education, considered in the large, is to develop 

 a science of progress. The naturalistic way is too expensive. 



We are comparing the animals with their instinctive view of 

 nature in its simplicity — an inherited mode of behavior developed on 

 the basis of narrow experience — with man's mode of action. Man has 

 developed his larger view of nature as complex through a more varied 

 experience, but he acts to-day preponderantly on the instinctive method 

 of the animals. While he has acquired the use of reason this has been 

 only grafted on to the instinctive method of reaction. The cause of 

 man's tardiness in abandoning the instinctive and adopting the intel- 

 ligent method is that science is of modern and comparatively recent 

 growth, and it is science that has entirely changed our conception of 

 things by giving us a new view of life in revealing more of the inner 

 nature of the universe. This has made the simple animal view inade- 

 quate. Wireless telegraphy by which England and America converse 

 with one another through space, the X-ray with which we see through 

 matter, and radio-activity which has established the complexity of 

 the atom, indicate the incredible revolution that is going on in the 

 character and scope of man's universe. But the animal takes the 

 simple, immediate, and direct view of the world. It assumes and 

 accepts without question that it sees the whole thing in its simple per- 

 ceptions, and man has hardly at all emancipated himself from this 

 method of interpreting. 



We have found ability to profit by experiences the test of survival 

 among all animals. With organisms low in the scale this learning 

 is not an individual matter, but belongs to the species and takes the 

 form of adaptation, and the advantage is bought at an enormous cost 

 of life. A little higher, and individuals break away somewhat from 

 inherited modes of behavior and action begins to be influenced by past 



15 Amer. Jour, of Insanity, Vol. 58, p. 1. 



