nature does not work in that way; it is only as the experience of the individual modifies the blind instinctive responses through learning that these results can just as easily come about unless the care of parents provides the right sort of surroundings.  There is nothing in the child’s natural makeup that warns him against eating pins and buttons and poisonous berries, or encourages him to eat milk and eggs and cereal instead of cake and sweets.  He will do one sort of thing just as easily as the other.  All nature provides him with is a blind tendency to put all objects that attract his attention into his mouth.  This response may preserve his life or destroy it, depending on the conditions in which he lives.  The same thing is true of the “social instinct”—­the child may become the most selfish egotist imaginable or the most self-sacrificing of men, according as his surroundings and training influence the original tendencies towards behavior to other people in one way or the other.  Of course it is very evident that no one has ever consistently lived up to the idea indicated by such a treatment of original nature, but certain tendencies in education are traceable to such psychology.  What the child has by nature is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong—­it may become either according to the habits which grow out of these tendencies.  A child’s inborn nature cannot determine the goal of his education.  His nature has remained practically the same from the days of primitive man, while the goals of education have changed.  What nature does provide is an immense number of definite responses to definite situations.  These provide the capital which education and training may use as it will.

It is just because education does need to use these tendencies as capital that the lack of knowledge of just what the responses are is such a serious one.  And yet the difficulties of determining just what original nature gives are so tremendous that the task seems a hopeless one to many investigators.  The fact that in the human being these tendencies are so easily modified means that from the first they are being influenced and changed by the experiences of the child.  Because of the quality of our inheritance the response to a situation is not a one-to-one affair, like a key in a lock, but all sorts of minor causes in the individual are operative in determining his response; and, on the other side, situations are so complex in themselves that they contain that which may call out several different instincts.  For example, a child’s response to an animal will be influenced by his own physical condition, emotional attitude, and recent mental status and by the conditions of size and nearness of the animal, whether it is shaggy or not, moving or still, whether he is alone or with others, on the floor or in his chair, and the like.  It will depend on just how these factors combine as to whether the response is one of fear, of curiosity, of manipulation, or of friendliness.  When to