258 Selective Thinking 



§ 9. WJiat constitutes Fitness in the External World f 



By criteria here is meant not so much objective criteria 

 — marks or characters of this or that experience — as cri- 

 teria of survival, i.e., the tests or qualifications which new 

 items of experience must fulfil if they are to be given a 

 permanent place in the organization of knowledge. This 

 involves the question of objective criteria, to be sure ; but we 

 may be able to find some general qualification under which 

 the special criteria of the different provinces of knowledge 

 may be viewed. Our question may be put in the familiar 

 terms of an analogous biological problem, if we ask : when 

 a particular truth has been shown by selection to be such, 

 why was it found fit to survive ? 



In answer to this question we may say at once, con- 

 cerning knowledge of the external world, that the motor 

 accommodations by which the selective process proceeds 

 are, by the conditions of the environment, of necessity 

 made in this direction or that. The reason a given move- 

 ment is fit is because it actually reports fact. The dictum 

 of the environment is : accommodate to xyz or die in the 

 attempt ! The facts are there ; nature is what it is ; the 

 adjustments are such just because they are fit to report a 

 state of facts. The environment in which the accommo- 

 dations take place, and to which they constitute adjust- 

 ments, is the control factor, and its facts constitute the only 

 reason that the selections are what they are. The crite- 

 rion here, therefore, is simply the adaptive aspect of the 

 movement, as reporting fact. It can be determined in 

 each case only after the event ; that is, after the selection 

 has taken place. 



But even in this lower sphere, where the exigencies of 



