BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1337 



trajectory of the individual life — youth, growth, the play-period, 

 the learning-period, adolescence, and so on; and they are more 

 accustomed than most men to think of the organism as one — Body- 

 MiND and Mind-BoDV at once. Moreover, biology is the central 

 descriptive science, based on chemistry and physics, leading on to 

 psychology and sociology, thus affording a unique vantage-ground 

 from which to envisage education. Thirdly, there is reason to 

 believe — though few yet believe it — that discipline in biology is the 

 least dispensable part of education, at any rate when we are thinking 

 of education as a means of instruction and of preparation for life. 

 For such reasons the biologists' views on education must increasingly 

 claim relevancy, indeed even greater than those of any other 

 scientific teachers and investigators, except the psychologists; and 

 we seek to take them along with us. 



Considered biologically, education is the control of nurture, so as 

 to induce the best possible development of the hereditary nature. 

 Here we mean by "best" that which makes most definitely for the 

 kind of life that is a lasting satisfaction in itself. Or again, education 

 is the endeavour to shorten the individual's recapitulation of racial 

 evolution; and this includes the endeavour to help the individual 

 to utilise — and even in his turn extend — the extra-organismal social 

 heritage. We mean b^^ the social heritage all that is registered in 

 language and literature, in crafts and arts, in the mastery of nature, 

 in the collective memory as stored knowledge, and above aU, in the 

 social life at its best, which we can alone truly call civilisation. 

 This social heritage is for man as supreme as the natural and 

 germinal inheritance is fundamental; yet education fails of its high 

 ambition if the mind remains without freedom, bound by the tram- 

 mels of the past. For the social heritage is not all to the good, any 

 more than is the lien of the past in the individual inheritance. In 

 either case, the legacy has something of burden as well as of 

 wealth, of inhibition or worse, as well as of inspiration and impulse 

 turned towards evolution. 



Many a higher animal, as notably the otter, educates its offspring 

 carefully, quickening their attainment of efftcienc}^ in their every- 

 day business of life, and strengthening towards intelligence their 

 behaviour in their environment, which now also includes man. 

 This animal education is of great survival value; but it is very 

 limited. It obviously differs from man's in being strictly parental, 

 mostly maternal; in there being in most cases only an adumbration 

 of the social heritage ; and in the relative subordination of the inner 

 or mental life. Distinct thoughts apart from feelings can form but 

 a slender rill in the otter, clever and highstrung as it is; but in man, 

 as they get fuller play, they form a broad stream, often insurgent. 



Much needless controversy would be avoided by distinguishing 

 between the utilitarian, the gymnastic, and the nutritive aspects of 



