18.7
The concept of human nature
 
  The word "nature" comes from the Latin word nasci and natus, which means literally "to be born"  
  The first writings of the word "nature" appear around 2nd Century AD, with the meaning of " the essential qualities of a thing; the inherent and inseparable combination of properties essentially pertaining to anything and giving it its fundamental character." Around the early 16th Century the word "nature" appeared in Old French and Old English as having the additional meaning of " the inherent and innate disposition or character of a person; and/or the inherent character or disposition of mankind".  
  Interestingly, the more modern interpretation of "nature" also applying to a person corresponds to the same timeframe as the emergence of the more modern definition of "behaviour".  
18.7.1 The modern interpretation of the words "human nature"  
  Again, using our understanding from the previous chapters of this book, we can define the definition of "human nature" to be:  
 

(a) (individual human nature) "the relative features, relationships and fortis of a human being to other human beings" . or

 
 

(b) (group human nature) "the relative features, relationships and fortis of a group of human beings to some other group of human beings".

 
  Now understanding a modern and logic definition of human nature, we can say that Human behaviour Human behaviour occurs from the interaction of human nature(s) and/or certain defined environments.  
18.7.2 The inherent difference to contemporary behavioral scientific research  
  While it makes sense to say that "results" come from interactions of things with particular features in particular relationships according to particular fortis's", contemporary human behavioral science has spent most of its time starting with categorizing human behaviour first.  
  This brings us back to an analogy used earlier in this book when we spoke of sciences approach like trying to count the number of people at a train station, rather than looking down to establish the features causing behaviour ( e.g. trains and train timetables).  
  We have studies by famous scientists such as Freud and Jung, plus hundreds of others that have categorized human behaviour and then human features to great detail. This is the backbone of non-clinical behavioral sciences.  
  In many ways, the findings of these great scientists have been taken as "given's" and therefore influence much of our contemporary understanding of who we "think" we are and "why" we do what we do.  
  But when we look at this approach of observing and categorizing behaviour to understand features and therefore the "why", we see that it is inherently flawed.  
  For example, if we were to look at one theoretical object with say 100 features with 100 different choices interacting with another object with exactly the same number of features with choices, then we are talking about potentially 100,000,000 perfect outcomes.  
  From pure categorization, trying to understand human beings as a whole from the study of a few presents an insurmountable challenge just on categorization before trying to describe behaviour.  
  And that has been the underlying problem with the "behaviour first, features second" approach: it forces scientists to make averages of complex factual results. What this means is that behavioral scientists and clinical behavioral scientists leave out certain observed data because it is not deemed at the time to be important- but it is all important! The net result is that science has created a series of "laws" of human behaviour and then treatments and approaches based on accumulated "averaged" behavioral data, with potentially crucial data omitted.  
  How on Earth then can we ever hope to have perfectly accurate models of human behaviour with this sort of approach of potential misclassification and omissions? The answers is we simply can't.  
     
 
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