Pedagogical Anthropology

by Maria Montessori

Furthermore, the new branches are always higher up than the old ones; that which comes last is the highest of all.

Thus, the species which are the latest in acquiring a stable form are the highest up in the biological scale, because the privilege of carrying forward the process of evolution belongs to those species which have not yet become fixed. An apparent weakness, instability, an active capacity for adaptation, are consequently so many signs of superiority, as regards a potential power of evolution—just as the nudity and sensibility of animal cells, for example, are signs of superiority, as compared with vegetable cells—and of man, as compared with the lower animals.

In order to show that the inferiority of a species is in proportion to its precocity in attaining fixed characteristics, Rosa conceived the following striking comparison. Two animals are fleeing, along the same road, before an advancing flood. One of the two climbs to the top of a neighboring tree, the other continues in its flight toward a mountain. As the level of the water rises, it threatens to isolate and engulf the animal now stalled upon the tree; the other animal, still fleeing toward the heights, reaches, on the contrary, a higher and more secure position.

The animal on the tree stands for an inferior species that has earlier attained a fixed form; the other represents a higher species that has continued to evolve; but the animal upon the mountain never was on the tree at all, because, if he had mounted it and become caught there, he would have lost his chance of continuing on his way. In other words, the higher species never was the lower species, since the characteristics of the latter are already fixed.

Some eloquent comparisons might be drawn from the social life of to-day. We are all of us spurred on to choose as early as possible some form of employment that will place us in a secure and definite place at the great banquet of existence. The idea of continuing to follow an indefinite and uncertain path, leading upward toward the heights is far less attractive than the safe and comfortable shelter of the shady tree that rises by the wayside. The same law of inertia applies to every form of life. Biological evolution bears witness to it, in the forms of the different species; social evolution, in the forms of the professions and trades; the evolution of thought, in the forms of the different faiths. And whoever first halts in any path of life, the path of study, for instance, occupies a lower place than he who continues on his road.

The salaried clerk, armed only with his high-school certificate, has an assured income and the pleasures of family life, at a time when the physician, with an independent profession, is still struggling to establish a practice. But the obscure clerk will eventually hold a social position below that of the physician; his income will always be limited, while the physician may acquire a fortune. Now, the clerk, by adapting himself to his bureaucratic environment, has acquired certain well-defined characteristics; we might even say that he has become a representative type of the species, clerk. And the same will be true of the physician in his independent and brilliant life as high priest of humanity, scientist and man of wealth. Both men were high-school students, and now they are two widely different social types; but the physician never represented the type of clerk; or, in other words, he did not have to be a clerk before he could be a physician; on the contrary, if he had been a clerk, he never could have become a physician. It is somewhat after this fashion that we must conceive of the sequence of species in evolution. It follows that man never was an anthropoid ape, nor any other animal now living around us. Nor was the man of the white race ever at any time a negroid or a mongolian. Consequently, the theory is untenable which tries to explain certain morphological or psychic malformations of man, on the principle of atavism—because no one can inherit if he is not a descendant.

So, for example, reverting to our previous comparisons, if the animal on the mountain should climb a tree, or if the physician should become pedantic, this would not prove that the animal from the mountain was once upon a time the animal in the tree, nor that the physician recalled, by his eventual pedantry, certain bygone days when he was a clerk.

The theories of evolution seemed for a time to illumine and definitely indicate the origin of man. But this illusion has so far resulted only in relegating to still deeper darkness the truth that the biologists are seeking. We do not know of whom man is the son.

Even the earlier conceptions regarding the mechanics of evolution are essentially altered. The mystery of the origin of species, like that of the mutability of forms, has withdrawn from the forms that are already developed, and taken refuge in the germinal cells; these cells in which no differentiation is revealed, yet in which the future organism, in all its details, exists in a potential state; in which, we may even say, life exists independent of matter, are the real laboratorium vitæ. The individual, in developing, does nothing more than obey, by fulfilling the potentiality of the germs.

The direction of research has shifted from the individual to its germs. And just as the early Darwinian theories evolved a social ethics, seemingly based upon the facts of life, to serve as a guide in the struggle for existence, so in the same way, to-day, there has arisen from the modern theories a new sexual ethics, founded upon a biologic basis.