of capacity for growth or development. What the child inherits, his
original nature, is the capital with which education must work; beyond
the limits which are determined by inheritance education cannot go.

All original nature is in terms of a nervous system. What a child
inherits is not ideas, or feelings, or habits, as such, but a nervous
system whose correlate is human intelligence and emotion. Just what
relationship exists between the action of the nervous system and
consciousness or intellect or emotion is still an open question and need
not be discussed here. One thing seems fairly certain, that the original
of any individual is bound up in some way with the kind of nervous
system he has inherited. What we have in common, as a human race, of
imagination, or reason, or tact, or skill is correlated in some fashion
to the inheritance of a human nervous system. What we have as individual
abilities, which distinguish us from our fellows, depends primarily upon
our family inheritance. Certain traits such as interest in people, and
accuracy in perception of details, seem to be dependent upon the sex
inheritance. All traits, whether racial, or family, or sex, are
inherited in terms of a plastic nervous system.

The racial inheritance, the capital which all normal children bring into
the world, is usually discussed under several heads: reflexes,
physiological actions, impulsive actions, instincts, capacities, etc.,
the particular heads chosen varying with the author. They all depend for
their existence upon the fact that certain bonds of connection are
performed in the nervous system. Just what this connection is which is
found between the nerve cells is still open to question. It may be
chemical or it may be electrical. We know it is not a growing together
of the neurones,[1] but further than that nothing is definitely known.
That there are very definite pathways of discharge developed by the laws