Nature has provided plants, animals, and man with many ways of
adjusting themselves to their environment, but only animals
and man organize their experiences so as to make them of use
to them in future situations. Some kinds of mice can learn
to go to a little house with a blue-colored front because it
suggests food to them as they have always found it there, and
not in a similar one with a red front. Another kind of mouse
(the Japanese dancing mouse) does not learn this difference,
either because it is color-blind or, much more likely, because
it has not sufficient intelligence to organize its experiences
of blueness by making it suggest food to him. It has been said
bees can distinguish colors and associate them with sweetened
water. These animals, and, in fact, animals in general, have the
ability, as we say, naturally to do thousands of appropriate
things whenever the appropriate stimulus presents itself.
Given the newly hatched chicken and the attractive piece of
corn within easy range, and with a quick dive of the head
the corn has been snapt up by a series of muscular movements
quite complicated in their totality but all coordinated or
organized from the first. The chicken does not have to learn
this accomplishment. A young child also can perform many kinds
of action without learning, as, for example, movements of head,
limbs, and other parts of the body.
Compare the difficulty a year-old child able to walk has in
picking up something with his hands. He makes many motions,
sometimes overreaching, sometimes falling short, in the end
probably falls flat. The child has to learn both to walk and to
pick things up, but he learns both without realizing that he is
learning them. It is done spontaneously.
There are, then, some things that man and animals can do without
learning, and some things they have to learn, but that they
learn automatically. Beside these easier tasks there are many
others that man may learn, but only through definite thinking or
direction with a distinct aim in view, rather than automatically
without any consciousness of his learning. The child may
recognize his father’s authority instinctively even without
learning. He may by imitation think of some things as right or
wrong without being taught. There are others he must be taught
and learn with a definite purpose and effort or he will not
make the distinction.--STUART H. ROWE, “Proceedings of
Religious Education Association,” 1907.
(173)
=Auxiliary Strength=--See REENFORCEMENT FROM WITHOUT.
=Auxiliary Workers=--See SUPPLIES, BRINGING UP.