244 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



as first received becomes an immutable reaction-basis for the 

 future. With a school child, however, the case is quite different. 

 It does, indeed, receive "an historical basis of reaction," when 

 the teacher illustrates the process of multiplication by means 

 of an example on the blackboard. But it does not receive this 

 information passively and render it back in the original stereo- 

 typed form. On the contrary, it analyzes the information re- 

 ceived, and is able thereafter to reapply the analyzed informa- 

 tion to new problems differing in specificity from the problem 

 that the teacher originally worked out on the blackboard. The 

 human pupil does not, like the monkey or the phonograph, ren- 

 der back what it has received in unaltered specificity. His 

 reaction differs from its original passive basis. To borrow 

 the words of Driesch, he "uses this basis, but he is not bound 

 to it as it is. He dissolves the combined specificities that have 

 created the basis." ("The Problem of Individuality," pp. 27, 

 28.) The brute, therefore, cannot "learn," or "be taught" in 

 the sense of intellectual comprehension and enlightenment. 

 "We see," says John Burroughs somewhere, "that the caged 

 bird or beast does not reason because no strength of bar or 

 wall can convince it that it cannot escape. It cannot be con- 

 vinced because it has no faculties that are convinced by 

 evidence. It continues to dash itself against the bars not until 

 it is convinced, but until it is exhausted. Then slowly a new 

 habit is formed, the cage habit. When we train an animal to 

 do stunts, we do not teach it or enlighten it in any proper 

 sense, but we compel it to form new habits." 



Human beings, however, can be taught and enlightened 

 under the most adverse circumstances. Even those unfortu- 

 nates are susceptible to it, who, like Laura Bridgman, Helen 

 Keller, Martha Obrecht, Marie Heurtin, and others, have been 

 blind and deaf and dumb from infancy or birth. With nearly 

 all the light of sensibility extinguished, there was, nevertheless, 

 latent within them something of which a perfectly normal 

 ape, for all the integrity of its senses, is essentially destitute, 

 namely, the superorganic power of reason. Reason, however, 



