ronment must be within the limited number of alternatives
made possible by the original nature with which he
is endowed. As pointed out in connection with our discussion
of "Instinctive Behavior," we do originally what gives
satisfaction to our native impulses, and avoid what irritates
and frustrates them. We may be trained to find satisfactions
in acquired activities, but there is a strong tendency to
acquire habits that "chime in," as it were, with the tendencies
we have to start with.

There is, for example, to certain individuals, intrinsic
satisfaction in form and color; to others in sound. To the
former, pictures and paintings will tend to be the environment
selected; to the latter the hearing and the playing of
music. To those gifted with sensitivity in neither of these
directions, pictures may be through all their lives a bore, and
a piano a positive nuisance.

These facts of original nature, therefore, determine initially,
and consequently in large part, what our environment is
going to be. Once we get into, or select through instinctive
desires, a certain kind of environment, those desires become
strengthened through habit, and that environment becomes
fixed through fulfilling those habitual desires. A man may,
in the first place, choose artists or scholars as companions
because his own gifts and interests are similar. But such an
environment will become the more indispensable for him
when it has the reinforcement of habit to confirm what is
already initially strong in him by birth. "To him who hath
shall be given" is most distinctly true of the opportunities and
environment open to those with native gifts to begin with.

Original nature thus sets the scope and the limits of an
individual's character and achievement. It tells "how
much" and, in the most general way, "what" his capacities
are. Thus a man born with a normal vocal apparatus can
speak; a man born with normal vision can see. But what
language he shall speak, and what sights he shall see, depend
on the social and geographical situation in which he happens
to be placed. Again, if a man is born with a "high general
intelligence," that is, with keen sensory discriminations and
motor responses, precise and accurate powers of analysis of
judgment, a capacity for the quick and effective acquisition
and modification of habits, we can safely predict that he will
excel in some direction. But whether he will stand out as a
lawyer, doctor, philosopher,