is present environment upon the young is simply
to abdicate the educational function. A biologist has said: "The history
of development in different animals. . . offers to us. . . a series of
ingenious, determined, varied but more or less unsuccessful efforts to
escape from the necessity of recapitulating, and to substitute for the
ancestral method a more direct method." Surely it would be foolish if
education did not deliberately attempt to facilitate similar efforts in
conscious experience so that they become increasingly successful.

The two factors of truth in the conception may easily be disentangled
from association with the false context which perverts them. On the
biological side we have simply the fact that any infant starts with
precisely the assortment of impulsive activities with which he does
start, they being blind, and many of them conflicting with one another,
casual, sporadic, and unadapted to their immediate environment. The
other point is that it is a part of wisdom to utilize the products
of past history so far as they are of help for the future. Since they
represent the results of prior experience, their value for future
experience may, of course, be indefinitely great. Literatures produced
in the past are, so far as men are now in possession and use of them, a
part of the present environment of individuals; but there is an enormous
difference between availing ourselves of them as present resources and
taking them as standards and patterns in their retrospective character.

(1) The distortion of the first point usually comes about through misuse
of the idea of heredity. It is assumed that heredity means that past
life has somehow predetermined the main traits of an individual, and
that they are so fixed that little serious change can be introduced into
them. Thus taken, the influence of heredity is opposed to that of
the environment, and the efficacy of the latter belittled. But for
educational purposes heredity means neither more nor less than the
original endowment of an individual. Education must take the being as he
is; that a particular individual has just such and such an equipment of
native activities is a basic fact. That they were produced in such
and such a way, or that they are derived from one's ancestry, is not
especially important for the educator, however it may be with the
biologist, as compared with the fact that they now exist. Suppose one
had to advise or direct a person regarding