EVOLUTION OF INTELLIGENT BEHAVIOUR 163 
Condensation of experience is also effected by the elimina- 
tion, under the guidance of consciousness, of those modes of 
behaviour which are not efficacious—a process to which Pro- 
fessor Mark Baldwin applies the phrase Functional Selection. 
There is a tendency at first to the overproduction of relatively 
useless actions. The multifarious random movements of the 
human infant, though their inexactness renders the child 
terribly helpless, afford a wide store of plastic material which 
intelligence can guide to its appropriate use. And the pro- 
longed period of pupilage in the child is correlated with an 
unsurpassed range of combination and recombination of the 
abundant plastic material. The hereditary legacy, though it 
contains fewer drafts for definite and specific purposes than are 
placed to the credit of an animal rich in instinctive endowment, 
affords a far larger general fund on which intelligence may 
draw for the varied purposes of the freer financial existence 
of a rational being. 
The relatively helpless young of many of the higher 
mammalia exhibit also much overproduction of seemingly 
aimless movements. But from these intelligence selects those 
which are of value for the purposes of life—those which 
experience proves to be effective. These—the relatively few— 
afford the motor impressions which by repetition stand out in 
experience, while the rest lapse from memory and are elimi- 
nated from experience as they are eliminated from practical 
performance. This is a great gain. Motor experience is 
rendered generic; the composite image that is retained is the 
net result of effective behaviour; and all that is valuable in 
the acquisitions of early life is condensed within manageable 
limits. 
This process of rendering generic the particular items of a 
widening experience has a marked effect in the development of 
the conscious situations in the light of which behaviour is 
intelligently guided. It is not the master holding this whip 
or that ball which suggests to the dog a hiding or a scamper ; 
it is a generic situation with interchangeable details. It is not 
this, that, or the other previously unseen cat that at once 
