Man early acquires automatic tendencies and abilities quite beyond the compass of his natural equipment. Man is gifted natively with a brief and fleeting form of attention, but by exercise and wise guidance its effectiveness may be greatly increased both as to direction and span. Imagination and memory may be natively vigorous in a desultory and disorganized sort of a way and yet be comparatively helpless when confronted with a situation requiring the organization of details into a system or unit. For example, children may get a great deal of pleasure out of fairy stories long before they understand much from the various disconnected and often incorrect interpretations they make of the words they have heard. This tendency is shown also in childish explanations of things. One young man notices that leaves, sticks, and stones left standing some time on the pond where he skated gradually sink into the ice. He notices, also, that slight scratches and flakes of snow gradually disappear. Such data led him to explain to himself the phenomenon as due to the fact that the water worked through the pores of the ice and froze on the top. It is evident that he had not heard of radiation from dark as compared with light surfaces, but it illustrated an automatic tendency to explain things fairly well developed which was quite beyond the power of man naturally.—Stuart H. Rowe, "Proceedings of the Religious Education Association," 1907.
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AUTOMATIC LEARNING
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.
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Auxiliary Strength—See Reenforcement from Without.
Auxiliary Workers—See Supplies,
Bringing Up.
AVARICE
When you can put out a fire by throwing
oil on it, then, and not till then, can you extinguish
avarice by feeding it with millions.—N.
D. Hillis.
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See Greed; Money, Greed for.
AVERAGE LIFE
Many an enthusiastic tourist has sacrificed
morning sleep to witness a sunrise from
some summit, and suffered disappointment.
The splendor extended over too wide an
area; it lacked concentration—accentuation.
The sunrise of the short horizon, seen from
the average altitude, appears brighter as well
