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C. Judson Herrick 
and failure to recognize this elementary principle has wrecked 
many a promising sociological and ethical enterprise. 
An examination of the behavior of many lower animals (birds, 
for example) presents us with many instances of tender care of 
offspring and mates, of the delicate attentions of courtship and 
of heroic self-sacrifice, which cannot be distinguished objectively 
from altruism, parental love and other noble mental qualities of 
mankind. By what right do we admit the derivation of malice 
and avarice from brutes and deny this in the case of love and 
altruism? And love and altruism are as essential adaptive quali- 
ties in the elaboration of the higher social fabric of civilized human 
communities as are parental care and self-sacrifice for the preser- 
vation of a bird community. 
And now, returning to our point of departure, let us inquire 
again what it is which the normal child brings with him into the 
world? First, there is a sound body, whose perfection of form 
and function is the direct product of the survival of the fittest 
and the elimination of weaklings during countless ages of past 
evolutionary history of the ^^ape and tiger method. 
Then, there is a large collection of inborn instincts, the time 
and manner of whose successive appearance is predetermined by 
the hereditary organization of the child’s nervous system. These 
instincts are, like the body, products of the operation of natural 
biological laws. It is a common idea that animal conduct is regu- 
lated by instinct, while man is controlled by reason. Nothing 
could be farther from the truth. How far animals are guided by 
reason, I am not now prepared to say; but it is certain that James 
is correct when he says that no animal possesses so many instincts 
as man himself. These instincts are often masked or supplanted 
early in life by acquired intelligence and so are commonly over- 
looked. 
In the third place, the child is born with the capacity for indi- 
viduality in his further mental development, an ability to profit 
by experience (his own and his elders’), or briefly, docility. All 
three of these are native endowments and, within rather wide 
limits, are common to all members of the race. The general 
bodily form and the pattern of instinctive behavior run quite 
true to type in all members of a given stock; but the capacity 
which I have termed docility is much more variable. And, 
aside from this congenital diversity in intellectual capacity among 
