Proenvironment in the Evolution of Man 645 



and following of a summation, or resultant pathway, that 

 the stimulating facts of cumulated instruction suggest as lead- 

 ing to a higher but satisfying environment. Instruction should 

 focus up all that is known of actions and reactions outside 

 the organism; education should apply these for the future 

 guidance of each individual; instruction is a placing of the 

 facts of the universe on the mental organization; education 

 is a leading out or training of the reflective in relation to the 

 perceptive faculties, so as to enable the organism to respond 

 most perfectly to environal conditions. 



Too often mere instruction is regarded as everything; real 

 education as the day-dream of an idealist. But ethical prin- 

 ciples, morals, and religion represent the cumulated proen- 

 vironal responses of long generations of mankind, in their 

 search for the most satisfying environment. When these 

 are wisely appreciated and applied in daily life, humanit}^ 

 will advance by leaps and bounds. The misfortmie has too 

 often been that they have been largely absorbed by priests, 

 politicians, and unscrupulous place-seekers, who have utilized 

 these principles as a means of professional livelihood, without 

 realizing or acknowledging the cardinal importance of such 

 principles in the evolution of the race. 



Passing therefore to morals and religion, that play and 

 have played so important a part in all human advance, these 

 have been viewed in very different lights by different groups 

 of man. Religion not unfrequently has had ridicule meted 

 out by minds that were incapable of rising to higher energizing 

 levels. Morals and religion are by no means unscientific 

 vagaries of human fancy, for both represent definite, earnest, 

 and hungering proenvironal out-reachings by man, who, sat- 

 isfied only so long as a higher and nobler stimulus is not ])re-' 

 sented, at once starts to combine all of the best results of the 

 past and therefrom fashions a resultant response that becomes 

 a new dissatisfied stimulus guiding him to action that in turn 

 becomes a temporary satisfaction, or a long-continued one, if 

 no new and higher stinudus reaches him. 



Thus, in the sphere of combined morals and religion that 

 will be separately treated in later chapters, as each community. 



