664 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



react on action accordingly. Already their Biopsychosis is turning 

 to Psychobiosis. 



But these simple changes are not enough to explain activity 

 proper; they do not reach the higher expressions which characterise 

 mentality fully human, and which are known socially as "Conduct", 

 individually as "Behaviour", or in external resultant as true "Activ- 

 ity" — always in some measure creative, since modifying environ- 

 ment in some significant measure. 



For convenient beginning of this needed inquiry into further 

 developments, note how the child one day reaches the level of 

 "make-believe", and increasingly delights in it, with new and 

 enlarging activity. The httle girl's first extemporised dolly is the 

 standard example of this; for here is the dawn of her coming woman- 

 hood; and in this we see the rudest rag-bundle transformed from 

 senses-object to imagined child. That imagination can and does thus 

 work on sense-material, and subjectively transmutes it, is surely 

 the most undisputed of all psychological interpretations; so the 

 greatest artists and poets, with all their creative genius, are in 

 principle but children of larger growth. 



Again, the development of simple experience to highest and 

 completest ideation is the famihar road of science, as its history and 

 its logic agree. The chemists and physicists started as babies with 

 burning their fingers; and indeed wonderfully keep on doing so. 

 And the child who has first thrilled to any story worth telling has 

 reached beyond the immediate home-circle of folk-feeling, and 

 begun initiation into the great emotional surges of life through 

 history, even to those of the great religions. It is thus no mere crude 

 materialism, but as the normal evolutionary process of humanity, 

 that men have so often risen — and must evTr rise — from very simple 

 and even animal-like babes to the highest summits of achievement, 

 and in all fields of the human spirit, imaginative, intellectual, 

 emotional. And if so, to work out the steps of this evolution is the 

 great problem before our evolutionary psychology; and to apply 

 such science is the corresponding task of education, as it becomes 

 truly educative. 



But now our problem, as biologists, is simpler, yet more obscure 

 also. All these high levels of human achievement are distinctly and 

 intelligibly differentiated from each other, however also complexly 

 and variedly combined in individuals and their achievements. 

 However we may be convinced that the boy is father of the man, 

 child-study is of later date than biographical criticism, and more 

 difficult too. Still more difficulty appears as we descend in the 

 animal scale. For here it is just as with physiology, which is far 

 more easily investigated and understood in the specialised func- 

 tioning of well-developed and clearly differentiated organs than in 

 the ovum, or in the protozoon, elemental and ancestral though it be. 



