ransportation, our ready command of heat,
light, and electricity, our ready-made machines and apparatus for every
purpose, do not, by themselves or in their aggregate, constitute a
civilization. But the uses to which they are put are civilization,
and without the things the uses would be impossible. Time otherwise
necessarily devoted to wresting a livelihood from a grudging environment
and securing a precarious protection against its inclemencies is
freed. A body of knowledge is transmitted, the legitimacy of which
is guaranteed by the fact that the physical equipment in which it is
incarnated leads to results that square with the other facts of nature.
Thus these appliances of art supply a protection, perhaps our chief
protection, against a recrudescence of these superstitious beliefs,
those fanciful myths and infertile imaginings about nature in which so
much of the best intellectual power of the past has been spent. If we
add one other factor, namely, that such appliances be not only used,
but used in the interests of a truly shared or associated life, then
the appliances become the positive resources of civilization. If Greece,
with a scant tithe of our material resources, achieved a worthy and
noble intellectual and artistic career, it is because Greece operated
for social ends such resources as it had. But whatever the situation,
whether one of barbarism or civilization, whether one of stinted control
of physical forces, or of partial enslavement to a mechanism not yet
made tributary to a shared experience, things as they enter into action
furnish the educative conditions of daily life and direct the formation
of mental and moral disposition.

Intentional education signifies, as we have already seen, a specially
selected environment, the selection being made on the basis of materials
and method specifically promoting growth in the desired direction. Since
language represents the physical conditions that have been subjected
to the maximum transformation in the interests of social life--physical
things which have lost their original quality in becoming social
tools--it is appropriate that language should play a large part compared
with other appliances. By it we are led to share vicariously in past
human experience, thus widening and enriching the experience of the
present. We are enabled, symbolically and imaginatively, to anticipate
situations. In countless ways, language condenses meanings that record
social outc