THE UNIQUENESS OF THE INDIVIDUAL 



pellingly true, or half true, that one wonders how anyone could 

 ever have held a contrary opinion. But it is true only oi learned 

 activity. No matter what the activity may be — learning the 

 multiplication table, or how to drive a car, to speak intelligibly, 

 or to sew — learning is a process of thinking and deliberation 

 and trial and decision, but the state of having learned is the 

 state in which one need think no longer. Paradoxically enough, 

 learning is learning not to think about operations that once 

 needed to be thought about; we do in a sense strive to make 

 learning ""instinctive"*, i.e. to give learned behaviour the readi- 

 ness and aptness and accomplishment which are characteristic 

 of instinctive behaviour. But that is only half the story. The 

 other half of the half truth is that civilization also advances by 

 a process which is the very converse of that which Whitehead 

 described: by learning to think about, adjust, subdue and 

 redirect activities which are thoughtless to begin with because 

 they are instinctive. Civilization also advances by bringing 

 instinctive activities within the domain of rational thought, 

 by making them reasonable, proper and co-operative. Learn- 

 ing, therefore, is a twofold process: we learn to make the 

 processes of deliberate thought 'instinctive"* and automatic, 

 and we learn to make automatic and instinctive processes 

 the subject of discriminating thought. 



II 



I now want to try to answer the second question I put before 

 you: in what fundamental biological way do human beings 

 differ from other animals? One possible answer, which I shall 

 try to justify, is this: man is unique among animals because of 

 the tremendous weight that tradition has come to have in 

 providing for the continuity, from generation to generation, of 

 the properties to which he owes his biological fitness. 



It is the merest truism that man is a tool- or instrument- 



138 



