90 BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF HUMAN PROBLEMS 



help, since the unstable nervous system we are con- 

 sidering has shown itself incapable of gaining this 

 balance by wholly spontaneous reactions. Almost 

 any person who recognizes that his conduct has been 

 characterized by habitual lack of inhibition in one 

 direction or another will realize also that the de- 

 sired balance might have been attained had he been 

 so fortunate as to be subjected to insistent corrective 

 human influences from outside. Such a belief is 

 justified by the facts of experience. In other words, 

 there exist powerful educational corrective forces 

 which may be utilized for the benefit of the very 

 many nervous systems which need such outside help 

 to aid them in establishing that balance between 

 lower and higher centers which is necessary to 

 minimize the great losses of human energy and 

 efficiency which are the expression of the failure to 

 attain such a balance. Perhaps the greatest need 

 of the human race is an enormous increase in the 

 forces of education which may be applied by superior 

 and balanced nervous systems to those in which 

 there exists a want of proportion between the reflexes 

 subserving fundamental appetites and those inhibit- 

 ing centers which are their physiological guardians. 

 The individual who has come to realize the automatic 

 character of his own acts and the fatalism which 

 surrounds them will learn not to waste time and 

 regrets for his mistakes, but will bend his energies 

 to the avoidance of mistakes of the same sort, and 

 he will do this because the stimuli of experience set 



