810 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



diice a harmonious molecular vibration of the cognitic and 

 cogitic sense-structures, tend also toward the general advance 

 and proenvironal activity of each organism; while actions or 

 stimuli that tend to disintegrate or to set up an unharmonious 

 molecular vibration give rise to decay and to imperfect re- 

 sponse of the organism to its environment. 



So, alike in child education and in the environment of the 

 adult, those cognitic or sensuous and those cogitic or mental 

 actions or stimuli that give rise to resultant effects which serve 

 to upbuild the whole organism and to start steady proenvironal 

 responses along advancing lines are alone beneficial to the 

 whole organism. The converse is equally true. Therefore it 

 is that, with the advancing socialization of mankind, child 

 education and adult environment have undergone a progressive 

 e\olution in the past half century that has been profound. 

 Schools and their classrooms have been enlarged and beautified, 

 textbooks have been illustrated and carefully selected, teachers 

 have been much more highly educated, experiments and dia- 

 grams that appeal to the sense directly have been increased 

 and perfected, while the health of the scholar — once a fortu- 

 itous and negligible quanity — is now regarded as of prime 

 importance. 



We arrive last, in study of child dcA^elopment, at the higher 

 cogitic or mento-moral and the spiritic stages. The first awak- 

 ening of the moral or ethical perceptions in the child appear, 

 according to Preyer (5i), Romanes (52), and others, in the 

 third year. Up till then the child is an unmoral and unreligious 

 organism. Furthermore, not a few cases of child history show 

 us that, if the environal educational stimuli be absent, children 

 descended from moral and religious parents remain dull and 

 apathetic to such questions. The material substance or basis 

 may be present, definite inclinations or tendencies of appropri- 

 ate molecules to place themselves in relation to possible future 

 tubes of energy may exist, but, unless appropriate and ever- 

 augmented stimuli from without of a moral and religious kind 

 be also present, the organism fails to respond, and the highest 

 nerve centers of the organism remain rudimentary. 



