tions to the environment are like those of any other adaptations of the organism to the environment (3). This relationship involves the processes of assimilation and accommodation, as the intelligence proceeds to "structure the universe just as the organism structures its immediate environment" (4).
Piaget briefly outlines the nature of the hereditary factors, the structures and functions, that affect intellectual development and the development of intelligence. In intellectual development the inherited structures are those connected with the operations of the nervous system and the sense organs. Their purpose is the physical perception of the environment and they are, by nature, limiting in that there are boundaries to physical perception. But these structures also serve as the foundation for the construction of fundamental concepts that are formed by the inherited function involved in intellectual development, i.e., "the deductive and organizing activity of the mind" (2). The function clearly is unlimited. The mind is capable of formulating generalizations that go far beyond the sense perceptions produced by the inherited structures. Yet the transintuitive concepts are, just as clearly, conditioned by the terms established by the structural factors.
It is with the inherited factors relevant to intelligence that Piaget comes to the functional invariants that play a recurring role in development. The distinction between the structural and the functional inheritance in this area consists of the specifically human inheritance of a certain level of intelligence and the "general" hereditary factor -- the activity of reason -- which is, Piaget says, similar to the general heredity of the organism itself. If the organism were not organized in a certain fashion it would not know how to adapt to variations in its environment. In the same fashion, "without certain functions of coherence, and functions making relationships," the...