olvent of current beliefs about the world and
political institutions. It was a destructive organ of criticism of
hard and fast dogmas. But the work of education is constructive, not
critical. It assumes not old beliefs to be eliminated and revised, but
the need of building up new experience into intellectual habitudes as
correct as possible from the start. Sensationalism is highly unfitted
for this constructive task. Mind, understanding, denotes responsiveness
to meanings (ante, p. 29), not response to direct physical stimuli. And
meaning exists only with reference to a context, which is excluded
by any scheme which identifies knowledge with a combination of
sense-impressions. The theory, so far as educationally applied, led
either to a magnification of mere physical excitations or else to a mere
heaping up of isolated objects and qualities.

(b) While direct impression has the advantage of being first hand, it
also has the disadvantage of being limited in range. Direct acquaintance
with the natural surroundings of the home environment so as to give
reality to ideas about portions of the earth beyond the reach of the
senses, and as a means of arousing intellectual curiosity, is one
thing. As an end-all and be-all of geographical knowledge it is fatally
restricted. In precisely analogous fashion, beans, shoe pegs, and
counters may be helpful aids to a realization of numerical relations,
but when employed except as aids to thought--the apprehension of
meaning--they become an obstacle to the growth of arithmetical
understanding. They arrest growth on a low plane, the plane of specific
physical symbols. Just as the race developed especial symbols as tools
of calculation and mathematical reasonings, because the use of the
fingers as numerical symbols got in the way, so the individual must
progress from concrete to abstract symbols--that is, symbols whose
meaning is realized only through conceptual thinking. And undue
absorption at the outset in the physical object of sense hampers this
growth. (c) A thoroughly false psychology of mental development
underlay sensationalistic empiricism. Experience is in truth a matter
of activities, instinctive and impulsive, in their interactions with
things. What even an infant "experiences" is not a passively received
quality impressed by an object, but the effect which some activity of
handling, throwing, pounding, tearing, etc., has upon an object, and the
consequent effect of the object