e result of the former.

Any man possesses at the very start of his life--that is, at the moment
when the ovum and spermatozoon which are to produce him have
united--numerous well-defined tendencies to future behavior. Between the
situations which he will meet and the responses which he will make to
them, pre-formed bonds exist. It is already determined by the
constitution of these two germs that under certain circumstances he will
see and hear and feel and act in certain ways. His intellect and morals,
as well as his bodily organs and movements, are in part the consequence
of the nature of the embryo in the first moment of its life. What a man
is and does throughout life is a result of whatever constitution he has
at the start and of the forces that act upon it before and after birth.
I shall use the term "original nature" for the former and "environment"
for the latter. His original nature is thus a name for the nature of the
combined germ-cells from which he springs, and his environment is a name
for the rest of the universe, so far as it may, directly or indirectly,
influence him.

Three terms, reflexes, instincts, and inborn capacities, divide the work
of naming these unlearned tendencies. When the tendency concerns a very
definite and uniform response to a very simple sensory situation, and
when the connection between the situation and the response is very hard
to modify and is also very strong so that it is almost inevitable, the
connection or response to which it leads is called a reflex. Thus the
knee-jerk is a very definite and uniform response to the simple
sense-stimulus of sudden hard pressure against a certain spot.

When the response is more indefinite, the situation more complex, and
the connection more modifiable, instinct becomes the customary term.
Thus one's misery at being scorned is too indefinite a response to too
complex a situation and is too easily modifiable to be called a reflex.
When the tendency is to an extremely indefinite response or set of
responses to a very complex situation, as when the connection's final
degree of strength is commonly due to very large contributions from
training, it has seemed more appropriate to replace reflex and instinct
by some term like capacity, or tendency, or potentiality. Thus an
original tendency to respond to the circumstances of school education by
achievement in learning the arts and sciences is called the capacity for
scholarship.

There is, of co