The Absorbent Mind. Maria Montessori Montessori
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take the cows. They are powerful animals, strong and well armed. In the geological history of the earth, the course of their evolution can be traced. They make their appearance when the earth is already well covered with vegetation. One might ask oneself why this animal has limited itself to feed only on grass which is the most indigestible food that can be found, so much so that in order to digest it the poor animal has had to develop four stomachs. If, as the old theory said, it was a question of self-preservation of survival, how much easier it would have been to eat something else of which there was an abundance in the surroundings. It would have been very simple and very easy. But today after millions and millions of years, we still see cows, when in natural surroundings, eating only grass. They stand with lowered heads, chewing and chewing. It is very seldom that you can make them raise their heads so that one can look into their beautiful eyes. Immediately after they have given you a look, down goes their head. If you observe the animal, you will see that it crops the grass near the roots, but it never uproots the plant. It seems to know that in order to keep the grass alive, it must be cut near the roots because if the latter are cut, the plant dies, whereas if they are cut like this, they develop under ground. The roots expand and occupy more ground and so the grass travels and spreads instead of dying. Now if one studies the history of evolution, one finds that only very late in the history of the earth grass appears and one also finds the tremendous importance that grass has for other vegetation; because grass ties together the loose grains of sand which otherwise would be carried away by the wind. Not only does it render the ground firm, but it fertilizes it also. No other vegetation could have grown if the grass had not prepared the way first. That is the importance of grass. Two things are necessary for its upkeep, besides cutting: one is manure, the other is rolling i.e., putting a heavy weight upon it. Now, tell me what artificial agricultural machine can be more marvelously fit for these three tasks than the cow herself. So efficient is this machine that besides helping the growth of grass it also produces milk. What a wonderful agriculturist of nature is the cow. Her behavior gives us one more reason to be grateful to her. We thought that she gave us milk and manure and nothing else. At the most we may have thought that the cow is an example of patience. But much more does humanity owe to the cow. It is something which has been ignored by humanity at large, but which has been felt by the subconscious mind in India, where the cow is worshiped. It is the upkeep of the earth, the life of other plants that we owe to the cow. The patience she has is more than the superficial patience that we admire. It is the patience of generations and generations.
A Task in Life
Now if the cow were conscious, she would be conscious merely of the fact that she is hungry, that she likes grass, just as in India the people like chapatis, rice and curry and other people like something else. But certainly the cow will never realize, will never think, will never be conscious of the fact that she is an agriculturist. Yet the behavior of the cow is just such as to help nature in its work of agriculture.
Now, let us take the example of crows and vultures who eat the refuse of nature. Why, with the abundance of food there is in the world, should the vultures eat rotten carcases and the crows excrements and whatever dirt they find in the environment? They have wings. They can and do fly long distances in search of their food. So it would not be difficult for them to find something more appetizing, such as other animals less endowed with strength and the possibility of movement do find. But can you imagine the amount of mortality there would be if this refuse were not removed from the earth? What an amount of illness, of plague and other diseases of all kinds would there be, if there were not some instrument whose only task in life is to keep the environment clean? They have by nature been allotted the task of cleaning the environment. Tell me what is the difference between the mass of workers that in Ahmedabad go back after their work, streaming from the mills towards their homes, and the hundreds of crows we see flying back at dusk towards their roost, after having done their work of cleaning and sweeping? This is their behavior.
These two examples have been given taking them from the choice of food. We might take hundreds and we should find that each species has chosen a particular kind of food. We might conclude that animals have no free choice of food. They do not eat merely to satisfy themselves. They eat to fulfil a mission upon the earth, the mission which is prescribed for them by their behavior. Certain it is that all these animals are benefactors of nature and the benefactors of all other living beings. They work to preserve the harmony of creation. They work out creation, because creation is achieved by the collaboration of all the living and non-living beings. And these two do their part in it by their behavior. Other animals there are which eat in such tremendous quantity that it cannot be explained merely on the ground of the upkeep of life. They do not eat in order to keep themselves alive. They keep alive in order to eat, for instance, the earth-worms. They eat only earth, although there is so much choice of foods. These earthworms eat daily a quantity of food which is 200 times the volume of their body. This is measured by their droppings. This is a species of being that does not eat in order to keep alive, especially when one considers the amount of other better food there is at its disposal. The worm is a worker of the earth. It was Darwin himself who first said that without the worms the earth would be less productive. The worms render the earth fertile. So there are forms of body or details of the body which go beyond the direct advantage of the individual.
Take the bees. They come out in hot weather. They are covered with a sort of fur or a sort of yellow and black velvet. This fur is not necessary in a hot country, but it collects the pollen from flowers which the bee itself does not use. This pollen, however, is useful to other flowers to which it is brought by them and which are thus fertilized. So the work of the bee is not useful to itself alone, it is useful for the propagation of plants so that one might say that this fur has been developed by the bees for the propagation of plants, not for themselves. Don’t you begin to see in this behavior that animals sacrifice themselves for the welfare of other types of life, instead of trying to eat as much as possible merely for their own existence or upkeep? The more one studies the behavior of animals and of plants, the more clearly one sees that they have a task to perform for the welfare of the whole.
There are certain unicellular animals which live in the ocean and drink such an enormous quantity of water that if they were calculated to the proportion of man, they would need to drink a gallon of water per second during their whole life. Certainly one could call this intemperance, for these animals cannot do it to satisfy their thirst. It is not a vice, however, it is rather like a virtue. They must work at high speed because their task is to filter all the water of the ocean, to eliminate from it certain salts which would be a terrible poison for all the other inhabitants of the ocean.
The same is true of corals. Corals are inferior animals and if the theory of evolution were true, it would be incomprehensible that having been among the first animals to appear, they have remained for millions of years always the same. Why have they not changed? Because they have a function to fulfil and they fulfil it in a perfect manner. This is the same function as that of the animals mentioned above: to eliminate from the ocean the poisonous matter which is brought into it by the flow of rivers. Their work is that of coating themselves with those salts. This has been going on for millions and millions of years and so we can imagine the enormous quantity of rock they have accumulated. They accumulate enormous quantities and these animals have been entrusted with the formation of new continents. Look at the innumerable little islands of the Pacific Ocean that today have come into the lime-light on account of the war which has been fought between the Japanese on one side and the Allies on the other. Those islands are constructions made by these animals, the corals. They are the tops of mountains that today are rising out of the water, forming islands. If we study the rocks on dry land, we find that many of them are formed by animals. Even in the Himalayas much of the massif is of coralline origin. We may well say that these corals are the constructors of our continents.
So the more one studies the functions of these animals, the more one finds, that these functions are not for the upkeep of the animal’s body only, but that all give their contribution to the harmony of the whole. Let us say then that these animals are not merely inhabitants of the earth: they are the constructors and workers of this earth, they keep it going. This is the vision given by these new discoveries. Once given this light, by studying the geological epochs of the past, we find testimony of similar work carried out by animals which are now extinct. There has always been this relation