Pedagogical Anthropology by Maria Montessori (new books to read .TXT) 📖
- Author: Maria Montessori
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This brings us to two widely diverse facts that demand consideration: first, the subdivision of antagonistic characteristics in the germinal cells that form, so to speak, the atomic and chaotic substratum of characteristics—characteristics that combine according to the mathematical laws of probability; and, secondly, the dominance of characteristics, or else their fusion, which, independently of anything that may happen in the germinal cells, serves to determine and define the individual.
What sort of characteristics are the dominant ones?
According to the latest researches of Mendelism, the dominant characteristics are those acquired latest in the course of evolution, in other words, the youngest, or, if you prefer, the most highly evolved. Accordingly, in hybrids, the most perfected characteristics and forms are the ones that triumph in the end.
This is quite a new principle. Hitherto it was held that the pure species or race was the most perfect; and the hybrid or bastard was under a cloud of contempt. And, as a matter of fact, the first crossings of different races may result in some combinations lacking in harmony, and calculated to sanction the old-time conception of the æsthetic inferiority of the bastard.
But it is necessary to leave time for new generations and further crossings, in order that all of the more highly evolved characteristics may unite and end by triumphing in reciprocal harmony. This the followers of Mendel cannot yet give us, because it would require decades or centuries, according to the species, to produce experimentally such æsthetic forms of hybridism.
But in the human race we have an experiment already accomplished, which actually shows us the æsthetic triumph achieved in the region where the races have for the greatest length of time been crossed and recrossed, through the agency of the most ancient civilisation: the Europeans surpass in physical beauty the people of any other continent; and the Neo-Latin races, the most ancient hybrids of all, seem to be nearing the attainment of the greatest æsthetic perfection. In fact, when I was engaged in compiling an anthropological study of the population of Latium, in accordance with Sergi's principles, and was making a most minute examination of all the different characteristics and their prevalence, as a possible basis for a delineation of the fundamental racial types, I found that complete beauty is never granted to any one race, but distributed among different races: "as a result of my labours, I find perfect artistic proportion as to certain facial features, in a race having inferior hands and feet; and, vice versa, I find facial irregularities in the race having the smallest extremities, and the most artistically proportioned hands. What we now consider as standards of human beauty, and delight in bringing together artificially in a single figure in a work of art, are found in nature scattered and distributed among different races." (See Physical Characteristics of Young Women of Latium, p. 69.)
Upon the combination of all the different points of beauty in a single individual depend Quétélet's biological theories of the medial man (l'homme moyen), lately revived and extensively developed by Viola. The new importance acquired by the reconstruction of the medial man is due precisely to the fact that the new method of reconstructing him is by bringing together all the single characteristics taken separately and worked out mathematically according to the laws of individual variations that behave precisely like those of probability. (See Biometry and the Theory of the Medial Man.)
Viola considers, in its relation to the physiological laws of health, the combination in a single individual of the maximum number of average characteristics, which at the same time are the characteristics numerically prevalent in individuals (dominant characteristics?). The man who accumulates the greater number of average characteristics, escapes diseases and predisposition to disease; he is consequently sounder and more robust and handsomer. De Giovanni, on the contrary, through an ingenious conceit, bestows the name of morphological combination upon the union in a single individual, of parts that are mutually inharmonic and incapable of performing their normal functions together, in consequence of which such an individual's morphological personality is predisposed to special maladies.
Accordingly the meeting and union of germinative potentialities may be either more or less propitious; as for instance the result sometimes produced by the combination of a platyopic (broad) face and an aquiline and extremely leptorrhine (narrow) nose; in other words, combinations that are discordant from the æsthetic standpoint, but harmless as regards health; or again, there may be a lack of harmony between the internal organs, incompatible with a healthy constitution. There may even exist malformations due to the meeting of forms that clash violently; each of which parts may be quite normal, when considered by itself, but cannot adapt itself to the other parts with which it is united.
It is as though the dominant characteristic in respect to an organ had been overpowered by another, which ought on the contrary, in this special case, to have been recessive.
It is precisely on this question of the dominance of characteristics that the researches of the Mendelists are at present being expended. It has been observed in the course of experiments that there exist certain special correlations between potentialities, in consequence of which certain characteristics must always go together; as, for example, when two characteristics, having once been united, must continue to recur together, although they each exist separately. These laws, which are not yet clearly determined, may serve to explain the final harmony of the sum total of individual attributes.
But in general the dominance of characteristics is not absolute, but subject to many causes of variation, associated with environment. Thus, for example, just as a change in nutrition of a young plant will result in a different height, it is also possible in the mechanics of reproduction that the original relations of germs may be altered by external causes, and the dominant characteristics be made recessive.[6] Many deviations are attributable to the influences that act upon the germinative cells of hybrids, after the latter have already been determined in their potentiality; thus for example when certain germinal cells are less resistant during maturation; or again when combinations between potentialities are difficult to achieve. That is to say, there may exist certain phenomena associated with environment, thanks to which Mendel's natural laws concerning the dominance of characteristics may become inverted.
Another fact of great significance is this: that, in the course of extensive experimental plantings, for the purpose of verifying the laws of Mendel, a widespread sickliness and mortality occurred among cryptograms, at the expense of the plants of recessive character; which would go to prove that a lower power of resistance accompanies the appearance of recessive characteristics. The dominant characteristics accordingly are not only the most highly evolved, but they also possess a greater power of resistance. So that, to-day, the dominance of the strong tends through the workings of the phenomena of Mendelism, to do away, little by little, in the course of generations, with characteristics that are weak or antiquated. This has an important bearing upon human pathology, because it opens the way to hope for a possible regeneration in families branded with hereditary disease.
The germinal potentialities that contain beauty and strength seem predestined to that predominance which will achieve the triumph of life in the individual. To learn the laws of the union, in one individual and definitive unity, of the infinite dominant and recessive potentialities that must encounter one another in the mysterious labyrinth in which life is prepared—therein lies the greatest problem of the present day.
It is that which should constitute our guiding purpose.
Form and Types of StatureThe Form.—Fundamental Cannons regarding the Form.—Types of Stature, Macroscelia and Brachyscelia; their physiological Significance.—Types of Stature in relation to Race, Sex, and Age.
A few years ago, when anthropology first began to be studied, the skull was taken as the point of departure; because in the analytical study of the human body it represents the principal part. Indeed, the same thing was done by Lombroso, when he applied anthropology to the practice of psychiatry and later to the study of criminals. It is a matter of fact that degenerative stigmata of the gravest significance are to be found associated with the skull; and this he could not fail to take into account, because of its bearings upon criminal anthropology.
But to-day anthropology is reaching out into vaster fields of science and striving to develop in diverse directions, such as those of physiology and pathology; and revolting from the collection of degenerative details, it undertakes to study normal man in regard to his external form as related to his functional capacity, or else the man of abnormal constitution, who in his outward form reveals certain predispositions to illness; and starting on these lines, it proposes to investigate principally the metamorphoses of growth, through the successive periods of life.
From this new point of view, it is not any single malformation, but the individual as a whole in the exercise of his functions, who assumes first importance. The study of the cranium (formerly so important as to be the basis of a special science, craniology), becomes only one detail of the whole. As a matter of fact, the brain, which is what gives the cranium its importance, is not only the immediate organ of intelligence, but it is also the psychomotor organ; and as such exercises control over all the striped muscles, and is morphologically associated with the development and the functional powers of the whole body.
It follows that, the larger the body, the bigger brain it needs to control it, independently of the question of intelligence. Therefore the first point of departure should be eminently synthetic, and should include the morphological personality considered as a whole.
One of the properties of living bodies is that of attaining a determinate development, whose limits, both in regard to the quantity of its mass and the harmony of its form, are defined by that biological final cause which is implanted in the race and transmitted by heredity. Consequently every living creature has determinate limits: and these constitute a fundamental biological property.
The causality of such limits has not yet been determined by scientific research; nevertheless it is a phenomenon over which we must pause to meditate. If the philosopher pauses to contemplate the immensity of the ocean from the sea shore, marvelling that the interminable and impetuous movement of the waves should have such exact and definite limits that it cannot overpass by so much as a metre the extreme high-water line upon the beach, we may similarly pause to meditate upon the material limits that life assumes in its infinitely varied manifestations.
From the microbe to the mammal, from the lichen to the palm, all living creatures have inherited these limits, which permit the zoologist and the botanist to assign to each a measure as one of its descriptive attributes.
This is the first attribute which we must take into consideration in the study of anthropology: namely, the mass of the body, and together with the mass, its morphological entirety. The Italian vocabulary lacks any one word which quite expresses this idea, [and in this respect English is scarcely more fortunate[7]]. The stature which represents to us the most synthetic measure of the body in its entirety (a measure determined by the vertical linear distance between the level on which the individual's feet are placed, up to the top of his head as he stands erect), does not represent the entire body in the sense above indicated. It may rather be considered as a linear index of
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