The Interpretation of Experience 65 



finality of environment as a something or a system existing apart 

 from us and operating on a fundamentally different basis. 



There is a tendency on the part of the average human being, 

 owing largely to the manner in which the sense of sight domi- 

 nates his thought, to regard the persons and things he sees as, 

 in a sense, walking into his mind or swimming into his ken in 

 quite a material way and with apparently no volition on his part. 

 The man to whom the colour and form of the world make merely 

 perceptual appeal and who has no thoughtful under-current to 

 his experience, is forgetful of that selective contol which interest 

 and the whole background of his previous experience uncon- 

 sciously exert upon the activity of even the sense at every moment 

 of his life. In order to counteract the dualism implied in this 

 common attitude to environment and the prevalent conception 

 of environment as a unity in itself, there is no surer discipline 

 than that of an earnest and sincere effort to discover what we do 

 when we think. In other words, what we have to do is try to 

 realise just how the sights and sound and things that make up the 

 mobile environment of each day's experience act upon us and 

 we upon them : how, indeed, they are actually part of our think- 

 ing and feeling, and are not so many sights and sounds passing 

 by us, as it were, in a more or less orderly and not always inter- 

 esting procession to which we stand as onlookers. From the 

 point of view of the child who is being educated this attitude of 

 ours to the world of experience has its very significant implica- 

 tion for both theory and practice. These will be considered in 

 greater detail later, but it will be realised even from the outset 

 that from one point of view the child and his environment are 

 to be regarded as two separate entities and that various aspects 

 of a classified environment are to be gotten into his mind by a 

 process of formal instruction — ^that the form is given by the 

 teacher to the material and that the process of education consists 

 in the assimilation of this already organised system of inter- 

 pretation of the world. From the other point of view and the 

 one that is here advocated, the child's activity is made the motive 

 force in education ; the world is regarded as a universe of possi- 

 bilities out of which in the process of human and social develop- 

 ment certain phases have been selected as the most valuable tvpes 

 of activity ; and the process of education is the development of 



