ABSTRACT
Since the original nature of man, and of other animals, provides certain more or less definite modes of response to a variety of situations, these must afford a starting-point for any revision or change in the animal’s behavior. It thus appears that an inventory of the human instincts should furnish a very useful means of outlining the method of early education, and, indeed, the direction of all education. Unfortunately, our studies of the earliest forms of behavior in children, and even the behavior of those animals which might be useful in comparison, are still too incomplete to supply this information. It has been customary to classify instincts by reference to organic needs, such as food-getting, homebuilding, procreation, attack and defense, migration, etc.; but this method is apt to lead one into two errors. The first is to write down as necessary conditions all the requirements of life that one can think of, and thus to overlook many possibilities of response which do not obviously belong to such a ready-made, theoretical preconception. The second error is closely allied to the first, and is, indeed, this theoretical preconception itself.
