The environment cannot be separated from the organism in the case of a whole event in the course of living experience. A particular item of activity cannot belong to the one at one time and to the other at another.
Every bit of behavior is whole because it does not have a part which is without and separate from another part which is within the organism. There is a tendency in our life situation to remake and reorganize itself.
This tendency becomes a part of our personality with increasing realization of powers of adjustment, and reorganization. Thus, it appears to be fundamentally impossible to separate the environment from the organism. Needless to say that the Gestalt theory confirms this truth by its very nature
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The psychology of ‘stimulus response’ holds that the organism and the environment are separately acting upon each other in a behaviour course. It would be really very fitting if this were the case.
But the Gestalt theory proves the invalidity of the above notion by advancing ‘insight’ into the nature of behaviour. The S-R view may be of some use to us, but our educational scheme must rise above this, demanding the fullness of the passing event
The study of original nature was inspired by the S-R psychology. But now there is no enthusiasm to draft our educational scheme on the discovery of original nature. The, studies of original nature has helped us to know what not to attribute to original nature.
But its positive contributions are not encouraging, because the investigation has been wrongly begun. We have to study the whole situation in order to understand the original nature, and the behaviour is a product of the whole.
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Hence it should not be studied in terms of needy abstracted aspects made over into substitutes for the whole. Here it is difficult to agree with Dewey who says in his ‘Human Nature and Conduct’ that, “the content of any trait in human conduct is always an affair of environmental influence, a picture of interaction in some specific environment.”
We cannot sort out original traits because it is difficult to divide a situation in actual life. The Gestalt theory points out to an educator that he should reject the fruitless belief that one can shift out an original nature to guide the full events of human life into ever richer content.