period, there is a unique opportunity both for the acquisition by individuals and for the imposition on the part of society of a large number of habits of great social value. The human being born into a world where there are many things to be learnt both of natural law and human relations, is, as it were, fortunately born ignorant. He has instincts which are pliable enough to be modified into habits, and in consequence socially useful habits can be deliberately inculcated in the immature members of a society by their elders. The whole process of education is a utilization of man's prolonged period of infancy, for the deliberate acquisition of habits. This is all the more important since only by such habit formation during the long period of human infancy can the achievements of civilization be handed down from generation to generation. Art, science, industrial methods, social customs, these are not inherited by the individual as are the instincts of sex, pugnacity, etc. They are preserved only because they can be taught as habits to those beings who come into the world with a plastic equipment of instincts which lend themselves for a long time to modification.

Consciousness of Self and Reaction to Ideas

A significant difference between the actions of human beings and those of animals is that human beings are conscious { of themselves as agents. They may be said not only to be the only creatures who know what they are doing, but the only ones who realize their individuality in doing it. Dogs and cats are not, so far as we can draw inferences from extended observation of even their most complex actions, conscious of themselves. It is not very long, however, before the human animal begins to set itself off against the remainder of the universe, to discover that it is something different from the chairs, tables, and surrounding people and faces that at first constitute for it only a 'big blooming buzzing confusion'. A human being performs actions with a feeling of awareness; he is conscious. of himself. This consciousness of self (See Chapters VIII and IX) becomes more acute as the individual grows older. It has consequences of the gravest character in social, political, and

economic life. It is a large factor at once in such different qualities of character as ambition, friendship, humility, and, self-sacrifice, and is responsible in large measure for whatever truth there is in the familiarly spoken of conflict between 'the individual and society'.

Human beings are, furthermore, susceptible to a unique stimulation to action, namely ideas, Animals respond to things only, that is, to things in gross:

It may be questioned whether a dog sees a rainbow any more than he apprehends the political constitution of the country in which he lives. The same principle applies to the kennel in which he sleeps and the meat that he eats. When he is sleepy he goes to the kennel, when he is hungry, he is excited by the smell and color of meat; beyond this in what sense does he see an object? Certainly he does not see a house; i. e., a thing with all the properties and relations of a permanent residence, unless he is capable of making what is present a uniform sign of what is absent-unlesss he is capable of thought "

Human beings can respond to objects as signs of other things, and, what is perhaps more important, can abstract from those gross total objects certain qualities, features, elements, which are universally associated with certain consequences. They can respond to the meaning or bearing of an object; they can respond to ideas.

To respond to ideas means to respond to significant similarities in objects and also to significant differences. It means to note certain qualities that objects have in common, and to classify these common qualities and their consequences in the behavior of objects. To note similarities and differences in the behavior of objects is to enable individuals to act in the light of the future. The printing on this page would be to a dog or to a baby merely a blur. To the reader the black imprints are signs or symbols. To the animal a red lantern is a haze of light; to a locomotive engineer it is a sign to halt. To respond to ideas is thus to act in the light of a future. It makes possible acting in the light of the consequences that can be foreseen when present objects or features of objects are responded to as the signs of future, that is, absent opportunities or dangers. 11 Dewey: How We Think, p. 17.

Every time we read a letter, or act in response to something somebody has told us, we are responding to ideas.

Human Beings Alone Possess Language

The value of the period of infancy in the acquisition of habits and the unique ability of human beings to respond to ideas is inseparably connected with the fact that man alone possesses a language, both oral and written. That is to say, men alone have an instrument whereby to communicate to each other feelings, attitudes, ideas, information. To a very limited degree, of course, animals have vocal and gesture habits; specific cries of hunger, of sex desire, of distress. But physiologically they cannot, with their limited number of vocal arrangements, possibly develop language habits, develop a system of sounds associated with definite actions and capable of controlling actions. Only human beings can develop even the simplest system of written symbols, by which visual stimuli become symbols of actions, objects, emotions, or ideas. Biologists, in particular the experimentalist, Watson, find in the capacity for language, man's most important distinction from the brute.

If

Language may be said, in fact, to be the most indispensable instrument of civilization. It is the means whereby the whole life of the past has been handed to us in the present. It is the means whereby we in turn record, preserve, and transmit our science, our industrial methods, our laws, our customs. human relations were possible at all without a language, they would have to begin anew, without any cultural inheritance, in each generation. Education, the transmitter of the achievements of the mature generation to the one maturing, is dependent on the unique human capacity to make written marks and heard sounds stand for other things. extent to which civilization may advance is contingent upon the development of adequate language habits. And human beings have perfected a language sufficiently complicated to communicate in precise and permanent form their discoveries of the complex relations between things and between men themselves.

The

Man the Only Maker and User of Tools

One of the most important ways in which man is distinguished from the lower animals is in his manufacture and use of tools. So far as we know the ability to manufacture and understand the use of tools is possessed by man alone. "Monkeys may be taught a few simple operations with tools, such as cracking nuts with a stone, but usually they merely mimic a man." "12 Man's uniqueness as the exclusive maker and user of tools is made possible by two things. The first is his hand, which with its four fingers and a thumb, as contrasted with the monkey's five fingers, enables him to pick up objects. The second is his capacity for reflection, presently to be discussed, which enables him to foresee the consequences of the things he does.

The use of tools of increasing refinement and complexity is the chief method by which man has progressed from the life of the cave man to the complicated industrial civilization of today. Bergson writes in this connection:

As regards human intelligence, it has not been sufficiently noted that mechanical invention has from the first been its essential feature, that even today our social life gravitates around the manufacture and use of artificial instruments, that the inventions which strew the road of progress have also traced its direction. This we hardly realize because it takes us longer to change ourselves than to change our tools Our individual and even social habits survive a good while the circumstances for which they were made, so that the ultimate effects of an invention are not observed until its novelty is already out of sight. A century has elapsed since the invention of the steam engine, and we are only just beginning to feel the depths of the shock it gave us. But the revolution has it effected in industry has nevertheless upset human relations altogether. New ideas are arising, new feelings are on the way to flower. In thousands of years, when seen from the distance, only the broad lines of the present age will still be visible, our wars and our evolutions will count for little, even supposing they are remembered at all; but the steam engine and the process of invention that accompanied it will perhaps be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of prehistoric times; it will serve to define an age. If we could rid ourselves of all pride, if, to define our 12 Mills: The Realities of Modern Science, p. I.

species, we kept strictly to what the historic and the prehistoric periods show us to be the constant characteristic of man and of intelligence, we should not say Homo sapiens, but Homo faber.13

Man's intelligence, it has so often been said, enables him to control Nature, but his intelligence in the control of natural resources is dependent for effectiveness on adequate material instruments. One may subscribe, though with qualification to Bergson's further statement, that "Intelligence considered in what seems to be its original feature is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of infinitely varying the manufacture."

Antropologists distinguish the prehistoric epochs, by such terms as The Stone, Copper or Bronze, and Iron Ages, meaning thereby to indicate what progress man had made in the utilization of the natural resources about him. We date the remote periods of mankind chiefly by the mementoes we have of the kinds of tools they used and the methods they had developed in the control of their environment. The knowledge of how to start and maintain a fire has been set down as the practical beginning of civilization. Certainly next in importance was the invention of the simplest tools. There came in succession, though aeons apart, the use of chipped stone implements; bronze or copper instruments, and instruments made of iron. In the ancient world we find the invention of such simple machines as the pulley, the use of rope, and the inclined plane.

Without tracing the history of invention, it will suffice for our purpose to point out that agriculture and industry, men's /modes of exploiting nature, are dependent intimately on the effectiveness of the tools at their disposal. It is a far cry from the flint hatchet to the McCormick reaper and the modern steel works, but these are two ends of the same process, that process which distinguishes man from all other animals, and makes human civilization possible: that is the use and the manufacture of tools.

13 Bergson: Creative Evolution, pp. 138-139.