s a livery
stable-keep; his mother the daughter of one. Byron's father
was a captain in the Royal Guards; his mother a Scottish heiress.
Newton's father was a tanner; Pasteur's, a tanner; Darwin's, a
doctor of considerable means. Francis Bacon's father was Lord
Keeper of the Great Seal; Newton's was a farmer and the headmaster
of a school; Turner was the son of a barber.]

An individual, again, to a certain extent, makes his own
environment. What kind of an environment he will make
depends on the kinds of capacities and interests he has to
start with. Similarity of original tendencies and interests
brings men together as differences among these keep them
apart. The libraries, the theaters, and the baseball parks
are all equally possible and accessible features of their
environment to individuals of a given economic or social class.
Yet a hundred individuals with the same education and
social opportunities will make themselves by choice a hundred
different environments. They will select, even from
the same physical environment, different aspects. The
Grand Canon is a different environment to the artist and to
the geologist; a crowd of people at an amusement park
constitutes a different environment to the man who has come
out to make psychological observations, and the man who
has come out for a day's fun. A dozen men, teachers and
students, selected at random on a university campus, might
well be expected to note largely different though overlapping
facts, as the most significant features of the life of the
university.

The environment is the less important in the moulding of
character, the less fixed and unavoidable it becomes. If an
individual has the chance to change his environment to suit
his own original demands and interests, these are the less
likely to undergo modification. This is illustrated in the animal
world by the migratory birds, which change their habitations
with the seasons. Similarly human beings, to suit the
original mental traits with which they are endowed, can and
do exchange one environment for another. There are a very
large number of individuals living in New York City, in the
twentieth century, for example, for whom a multiplicity of
environments are possible. The one that becomes habitual
with an individual is a matter of his own free choice. That is,
it is choice, in the sense that it is independent of the
circumstances of the individual's life. But an individual's choice of
his envi