upon the direction of activities. (See
ante, p. 140.) Fundamentally (as we shall see in more detail), the
ancient notion of experience as a practical matter is truer to fact that
the modern notion of it as a mode of knowing by means of sensations. The
neglect of the deep-seated active and motor factors of experience is a
fatal defect of the traditional empirical philosophy. Nothing is more
uninteresting and mechanical than a scheme of object lessons which
ignores and as far as may be excludes the natural tendency to learn
about the qualities of objects by the uses to which they are put through
trying to do something with them.

It is obvious, accordingly, that even if the philosophy of experience
represented by modern empiricism had received more general theoretical
assent than has been accorded to it, it could not have furnished
a satisfactory philosophy of the learning process. Its educational
influence was confined to injecting a new factor into the older
curriculum, with incidental modifications of the older studies and
methods. It introduced greater regard for observation of things directly
and through pictures and graphic descriptions, and it reduced the
importance attached to verbal symbolization. But its own scope was
so meager that it required supplementation by information concerning
matters outside of sense-perception and by matters which appealed
more directly to thought. Consequently it left unimpaired the scope of
informational and abstract, or "rationalistic" studies.

3. Experience as Experimentation. It has already been intimated that
sensational empiricism represents neither the idea of experience
justified by modern psychology nor the idea of knowledge suggested by
modern scientific procedure. With respect to the former, it omits the
primary position of active response which puts things to use and which
learns about them through discovering the consequences that result from
use. It would seem as if five minutes' unprejudiced observation of
the way an infant gains knowledge would have sufficed to overthrow the
notion that he is passively engaged in receiving impressions of isolated
ready-made qualities of sound, color, hardness, etc. For it would
be seen that the infant reacts to stimuli by activities of handling,
reaching, etc., in order to see what results follow upon motor response
to a sensory stimulation; it would be seen that what is learned are not
isolated qualities, but the behavior which ma