ter. But it is the human baby
who, though it cannot find food for itself at the start, can
eventually be taught to distinguish between the nutritive
values of food, secure food from remote sources, and make
palatable food from materials which when raw are inedible.
An inventory and classification of man's original tendencies
is made more difficult precisely because these are so easily
modifiable and are, even in earliest childhood, seldom seen in
their original and simple form.
At any given time a human being is being acted upon by a
wide variety of competing and contemporaneous stimuli. In
walking down a street with a friend, for example, one may be
attracted by the array of bright colors, of flowers, jewelry and
clothing in the shop windows, blink one's eyes in the glare of
the sun, feel a satisfaction in the presence of other people and
a loneliness for a particular friend, dodge before a passing
automobile, be envious of its occupant, and smile benevolently
at a passing child. It would be difficult in so complex
and so characteristically familiar a situation to pick out
completely and precisely the original human tendencies at work,
and trace out all the modifications to which they have been
subjected in the course of individual experience. For even
single responses in the adult are not the same in quality or
scope as they were to start with. Even the simplest stimuli
of taste and of sound are different to the adult from what
they are to the child. What for the adult is a printed page
full of significance is for the baby a blur, or at most chaotic
black marks on white paper.
But while it is difficult to disentangle out of even a simple,
everyday occurrence the original unlearned human impulses
at work, experimentation on both humans and animals seems
clearly to establish that "in the same organism the same
situation will always produce the same response." It also seems
clear that in man these native unlearned responses to given
stimuli are unusually numerous and unusually controllable.
Upon the possibility of the ready modification of these original
elements in man's behavior his whole education and social
life depend.
LEARNING IN ANIMALS AND MEN. Men and animals are alike
not only in that they have in common a large number of tendencies
to respond in definite ways to definite stimuli, but that
these responses may be modified, some strengthened through
use, and others weakened or altogether discarded th
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