Laws and Hypotheses for Behavior 243 
iIf the movements are really the result of the action of the en- 
vironment on the animal’s nature, they are never random. 
A baby twiddles his thumbs or waves his legs for exactly the 
same sort of reason that a chick pecks at a worm or preens 
its wing. | 
The other doctrine which witnesses to neglect of the 
axiom that behavior is the creation of the environment, act- 
ing on the animal’s nature, is the doctrine that! the need” 
for a certain behavior helps to create it, that being in a 
difficulty tends in and of ‘a to make an animal respond so 
as to end the difficulty a 
|The truth is that to a difficulty the animal responds by 
whatever its inherited and acquired nature has connected 
difficulty is sélected and connected more enily -with that 
difficulty’s next appearance. The difficulty acts only as a 
stimulus fo the animal’s nature and its relief acts only as a 
premium to the connection whereby it was relieved. | The 
law of original behavior, or the law of instinct, is then“that 
to any situation an animal will, apart from learning, respond 
by virtue of the inherited nature of its reception-, -connection- 
and action-systems. | 
The inquiry into the laws of learning to be made in this 
essay is limited to those aspects of behavior which the term 
has come historically to signify, that is, to intellect, skill, 
morals and the like. 
For the purposes of this essay it is not necessary to decide 
just what features of an animal’s behavior to include under 
intellect, skill, morals and the like. The statements to be 
made will fit any reasonable dividing line between behavior 
on the one side and mere circulation, digestion, excretion 
and the like on the other. There should in fact be no clear 
