The so-called reflexes and their temporary, purposefully adaptive, but hereditarily stereotyped combinations, which respond always more or less in the same manner to the same stimuli, constitute the paradigm of automatic activities. These have the deceptive appearance of a “machine” owing to the regularity of their operations. But a machine which maintains, constructs, and reproduces itself is not a machine. In order to build such a machine we should have to possess the key of life, i. e., the understanding of the supposed, but by no means demonstrated, mechanics of living protoplasm. Everything points to the conclusion that the instinctive automatisms have been gradually acquired and hereditarily fixed by natural selection and other factors of inheritance. But there are also secondary automatisms or habits which arise through the frequent repetition of plastic activities and are therefore especially characteristic of man’s enormous brain-development. In all the psychic provinces of intellect, feeling, and will, habits follow the constant law of perfection through repetition. Through practice every repeated plastic brain-activity gradually becomes automatic, becomes “second nature,” i. e., similar to instinct. Nevertheless instinct is not inherited habit, but phylogenetically inherited intelligence which has gradually become adapted and crystalised by natural selection or by some other means. Plastic activity manifests itself, in general, in the ability of the nervous system to conform or adapt itself to new and unexpected conditions and also through its faculty of bringing about internally new combinations of neurocyme. Bethe calls this the power of modification. But since, notwithstanding his pretended issue with anthropomorphism, he himself continually proceeds in an anthropomorphic spirit and demands human ratiocination of animals, if they are to be credited with plasticity (power of modification),--he naturally overlooks the fact that the beginnings of plasticity are primordial, that they are in fact already present in the Amœba, which adapts itself to its environment. Nor is this fact to be conjured out of the world by Loeb’s word “tropisms.”