sant substances; to gag
and to curl the lip, and so on in almost indefinite number. But these
tendencies (a) instead of being a small number sharply marked off from
one another, are of an indefinite variety, interweaving with one another
in all kinds of subtle ways. (b) Instead of being latent intellectual
powers, requiring only exercise for their perfecting, they are
tendencies to respond in certain ways to changes in the environment
so as to bring about other changes. Something in the throat makes one
cough; the tendency is to eject the obnoxious particle and thus
modify the subsequent stimulus. The hand touches a hot thing; it is
impulsively, wholly unintellectually, snatched away. But the withdrawal
alters the stimuli operating, and tends to make them more consonant with
the needs of the organism. It is by such specific changes of organic
activities in response to specific changes in the medium that that
control of the environment of which we have spoken (see ante, p. 24) is
effected. Now all of our first seeings and hearings and touchings and
smellings and tastings are of this kind. In any legitimate sense of the
words mental or intellectual or cognitive, they are lacking in these
qualities, and no amount of repetitious exercise could bestow any
intellectual properties of observation, judgment, or intentional action
(volition) upon them.

(2) Consequently the training of our original impulsive activities is
not a refinement and perfecting achieved by "exercise" as one might
strengthen a muscle by practice. It consists rather (a) in selecting
from the diffused responses which are evoked at a given time those which
are especially adapted to the utilization of the stimulus. That is to
say, among the reactions of the body in general occur upon stimulation
of the eye by light, all except those which are specifically adapted to
reaching, grasping, and manipulating the object effectively are
gradually eliminated--or else no training occurs. As we have already
noted, the primary reactions, with a very few exceptions are too
diffused and general to be practically of much use in the case of the
human infant. Hence the identity of training with selective response.
(Compare p. 25.) (b) Equally important is the specific coordination of
different factors of response which takes place. There is not merely a
selection of the hand reactions which effect grasping, but of the
particular visual stimuli which call out just these reacti