In final account, then, not only does social life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and vividness of statement and thought. A man really living alone (alone mentally as well as physically) would have little or no occasion to reflect upon his past experience to extract its net meaning. The inequality of achievement between the mature and the immature not only necessitates teaching the young, but the necessity of this teaching gives an immense stimulus to reducing experience to that order and form which will render it most easily communicable and hence most usable.
The word "behavior" is commonly used in an interesting variety of ways. We speak of the behavior of ships at sea, of soldiers in battle, and of little boys in Sunday school.
"The geologist," as Lloyd Morgan remarks, "tells us that a glacier behaves in many respects like a river, and discusses how the crust of the earth behaves under the stresses to which it is subjected. Weatherwise people comment on the behavior of the mercury in the barometer as a storm approaches. When Mary, the nurse maid, returns with the little Miss Smiths from Master Brown's birthday party, she is narrowly questioned as to their behavior."
In short, the word is familiar both to science and to common sense, and is applied with equal propriety to the actions of physical objects and to the manners of men. The abstract sciences, quite as much as the concrete and descriptive, are equally concerned with behavior. "The chemist and the physicist often speak of the behavior of the atoms and the molecules, or of that of gas under changing conditions of temperature and pressure." The fact is that every science is everywhere seeking to describe and explain the movements, changes, and reactions, that is to say the behavior, of some portion of the world about us. Indeed, wherever we consciously set ourselves to observe and reflect upon the changes going on about us, it is always behavior that we are interested in. Science is simply a little more persistent in its curiosity and a little nicer and more exact in its observation than common sense. And this disposition to observe, to take a disinterested view of things, is, by the way, one of the characteristics of human nature which distinguishes it from the nature of all other animals.