Small children can respond to nearly if not quite every sort of stimulus that adults feel. We cannot longer regard even sex as a completely delayed drive, for traces of sex-stimulation are found in infancy, and definite sex interest follows very early. Any social impulse, good or bad, that adults exhibit can be found in early childhood also under appropriate conditions of stimulation. Moreover, in respect to the employment of intelligence there is no necessary break between childhood and maturity, for rational processes mingle with impulse and emotion from infancy. In fact, old-fashioned parental authority met scarcely any obstacle greater than the capacity of children to have a reason and to stick to it. We now know that scientific attitudes and types of observation and inference no more need to be postponed than does good pronunciation, which is taking the place of the old-fashioned “baby-talk.” It is worth noting, by the way, that “baby-talk,” wherever it exists, has been learned largely from adults! This psychical continuity between childhood and maturity vacates the notion that adulthood is a ready-made set of drives or characteristics into which we are ushered by natural laws of growth. We are what we are, not because nature acts after the manner of destiny or fate, but because some selective process has been at work in each individual case. Each of us has the capacity to be very different from what he is. It is true, of course, that there are inborn and ineradicable differences between individuals, differences in degree of energy, in degree of intellectual capacity, in degree of sensitiveness towards a given sort of stimulus, and therefore differences in emotional type. But these are entirely generic; they do not shut up an individual to just this or that occupation, social bond, way of thinking, or policy and habit of weighing values. If we desire to account for the particular qualities of an individual, we must look into his whole experience from infancy onward. This point of view is now no longer a merely general probability. Psychiatrists and experts in child-guidance are daily tracing to particular experiences what seem at first sight to be native and ineradicable personal traits. Moreover, many a bound personality is being released by the interjection of new experiences and the formation of corresponding new habits. This is true of both children and adults, and it is particularly noteworthy that the release of adults often depends upon undoing a knot that was tied in childhood.