The instinctive desires of children, as we have seen, are vague; education and opportunity can turn them into many different channels. Neither the old belief in original sin, nor Rousseau’s belief in natural virtue, is in accordance with the facts. The raw material of instinct is ethically neutral, and can be shaped either to good or evil by the influence of the environment. There is ground for a sober optimism in the fact that, apart from pathological cases, most people’s instincts are, at first, capable of being developed into good forms; and the pathological cases would be very few, given proper mental and physical hygiene in the early years. A proper education would make it possible to live in accordance with instinct, but it would be a trained and cultivated instinct, not the crude unformed impulse which is all that nature provides. The great cultivator of instinct is skill: skill which provides certain kinds of satisfaction, but not others. Give a man the right kinds of skill, and he will be virtuous; give him the wrong kinds, or none at all, and he will be wicked. These general considerations apply with special force to the will to power. We all like to effect _something_, but so far as the love of power is concerned we do not care what we effect. Broadly speaking, the more difficult the achievement the more it pleases us. Men like fly-fishing, because it is difficult; they will not shoot a bird sitting, because it is easy. I take these illustrations, because in them a man has no ulterior motive beyond the pleasure of the activity. But the same principle applies everywhere. I liked arithmetic until I learnt Euclid, Euclid until I learnt analytical geometry, and so on. A child, at first, delights in walking, then in running, then in jumping and climbing. What we can do easily no longer gives us a sense of power; it is the newly-acquired skill, or the skill about which we are doubtful, that gives us the thrill of success. That is why the will to power is so immeasurably adaptable according to the type of skill which is taught.