That the baby had nothing to do with its equipment will readily be admitted by everyone.  The child is born with a brain of a certain size and fineness.  It is born with a nervous system made up of an infinite number of fine fibers reaching all parts of the body, with fixed stations or receivers like the central stations of a telephone system, and with a grand central exchange in the brain.  If one can imagine all of the telephone wires in the world centered in one station, he may have some sort of a conception of the separate nerves that bring impressions to the brain and send directions out from it, which together make up the nervous system of man.  None of these systems is perfect.  They are of all degrees of imperfection down to the utterly useless or worse than useless system.  These nerves are of all degrees of sensitiveness and accuracy in receiving and transmitting messages.  Some may work well, others imperfectly.  No one is much surprised when an automobile, equipped with a mechanism much simpler than the nervous system, refuses to respond properly.

The child is born without knowledge but with certain tendencies, instincts, capacities and potential strength or weakness.  His nervous system and his brain may be good or bad—­most likely neither very good nor very bad.  All of his actions both as a child and as a man are induced by stimulation from without.  He feels, tastes, sees, hears or smells some object, and his nerves carry the impression to his brain where a more or less correct registration is made.  Its correctness depends largely upon the perfection of the nervous system and the fineness of the material on which the registration is made.  Perfect or imperfect, the child begins to gather knowledge and it is stored in this way.  To the end of his days he receives impressions and stores them in the same manner.  All of these impressions are more or less imperfectly received, imperfectly conveyed and imperfectly registered.  However, he is obliged to use the machine he has.  Not only does the machine register impressions but it sends out directions immediately following these impressions:  directions to the organism as to how to run, to walk, to fight, to hide, to eat, to drink, or to make any other response that the particular situation calls for.

Then, too, stimulated by these impressions, certain secretions are instantly emptied from the ductless glands into the blood which, acting like fuel in an engine, generate more power in the machine, fill it with anger or fear and prepare it to respond to the directions to fight or flee, or to any type of action incident to the machine.  It is only within a few years that biologists have had any idea of the use of these ductless glands or of their importance in the functions of life.  Very often these ductless glands are diseased, and always they are more or less imperfect; but in whatever condition they are, the machine responds to their flow.

The stored-up impressions are more or less awakened under stimulation.  As life goes on, these stored impressions act as inhibitions or stimulations to action, as the case may be.  These form the material for comparisons and judgments as to conduct.  Not only are the impressions imperfect and the record imperfect, but their value and effect depend on the brain which compares and considers the impressions.  From all this mechanism, action is born.