But the fact that by slow increments of change the environment is also altered by the individual is less frequently noted or less frequently held to be of significance. In reality the environment is never, as far as its effect on the individual is concerned, precisely the same after a given reaction or response to external conditions. Thus (d) it is not, dynamically regarded, the mere sum of external conditions which affect the individual, but these conditions plus the effect of the effort for adjustment on the part of the individual.
Let us turn for a moment to an analogous process which occurs on a higher plane of evolution. As said, the life of the human individual is lived in constant reference to the social mean of thought and belief which has established itself, so that even "the doctrines of the greatest moral teacher ... are successful only in proportion as they are congenial to existing sentiments" and "give articulate shape to thoughts already present in the social medium."[1] But the influence which this medium exerts upon the individual is not only direct but indirect. The erratic theory, the religious or political propaganda, ill-mated to the social environment, are cut off by causes beyond the control of the individual or party; but as far as the theory itself, or the effort at reconstruction or readjustment, is influenced by the social mean, it is the product of the individual's conception of that mean. The latter is, structurally, a highly complex system of habits of thought, which is constantly modified by fresh experience and new efforts at adjustment to social conditions. Now with the actual environment of the individual, or the social environment, viewed dynamically as affecting him, must always be reckoned this modification—or the actual environment is never the mere aggregate of external influences, but these plus the individual changing concept, and reorganized with reference to this concept.
Is the case otherwise in principle in the organic world, even in the absence of a group-concept, presupposing only organic plasticity and elemental organic memory? Every reaction leaves the animal with a different situation to confront, while, given a newly acquired habit (say an arboreal habit), its actual environ-
- ↑ Leslie Stephen, op. cit., p. 131.
