by the fact
that they are no longer useful and soon disappear.

These non-volitional movements of earliest infancy and of later
childhood (such as licking things, clicking with the tongue,
grinding the teeth, biting the nails, shrugging corrugations,
pulling buttons, or twisting garments, strings, etc., twirling
pencils, etc.) are relics of past forms of utilities now
essentially obsolete. Ancient modes of locomotion, prehension,
balancing, defense, attack, sensuality, etc., are all
rehearsed, some quite fully and some only by the faintest
mimetic suggestion, flitting spasmodic tensions, gestures, or
facial expressions.

Human nature may therefore be regarded on the whole as a superstructure
founded on instincts, dispositions, and tendencies, inherited from a
long line of human and animal ancestors. It consists mainly in a higher
organization of forces, a more subtle distillation of potencies latent
in what Thorndike calls "the original nature of man."

The original nature of man is roughly what is common to all men
minus all adaptations to tools, houses, clothes, furniture,
words, beliefs, religions, laws, science, the arts, and to
whatever in other men's behavior is due to adaptations to them.
From human nature as we find it, take away, first, all that is
in the European but not in the Chinaman, all that is in the
Fiji Islander but not in the Esquimaux, all that is local or
temporary. Then take away also the effects of all products of
human art. What is left of human intellect and character is
largely original--not wholly, for all those elements of
knowledge which we call ideas and judgments must be subtracted
from his responses. Man originally possesses only capacities
which, after a given amount of education, will produce ideas
and judgments.

Such, in general, is the nature of human beings before that nature has
been modified by experience and formed by the education and the
discipline of contact and intercourse with their fellows.

Several writers, among them William James, have attempted to make a
rough inventory of the special instinctive tendencies with which human
beings are equipped at birth. First of all there are the simpler
reflexes such as "crying, sneezing, snoring, coughing, sighing,
sobbing, gagging, vomiting, hiccuping, starting, moving the limb in
response to its being tickl