The words "environment," "medium" denote something more than surroundings which encompass an individual. They denote the specific continuity of the surroundings with his own active tendencies.

A tribe, let us say, is warlike. The successes for which it strives, the achievements upon which it sets store, are connected with fighting and victory.

Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. Ifwe are to continue talking about "data" in any other sense than as reflective distinctions, the original datum is always such a qualitative whole.

Experience, in short, is not a combination of mind and world, subject and object, method and subject matter, but is a single continuous interaction of a great diversity (literally countless in number) of energies.

Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites.

Man is merely a frequent effect, a monstrosity is a rare one, but both are equally natural, equally inevitable, equally part of the universal and general order. And what is strange about that? All creatures are involved in the life of all others, consequently every species... all nature is in a perpetual state of flux. Every animal is more or less a human being, every mineral more or less a plant, every plant more or less an animal... There is nothing clearly defined in nature.

How many students ... were rendered callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in which learning was experienced by them?