Full text of "Habit"

HABIT BY 

WILLIAM JAMES 

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HABIT x by WILLIAM JAMES 
NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
1914 
COPYRIGHT. 1890. BY 
HENRY HOLT & CO. 



HABIT 



HABIT 1 

WHEN we look at living creatures 
from an outward point of view, 
one of the first things that strike 
us is that they are bundles of habits. In 
wild animals, the usual round of daily be- 
havior seems a necessity implanted at birth 
in animals domesticated, and especially in 
man, it seems, to a great extent, to be the 
result of education. The habits to which 
there is an innate tendency are called in- 
stincts; some of those due to education would 
by most persons be called acts of reason. It 
thus appears that habit covers a very large 
part of life, and that one engaged in studying 
the objective manifestations of mind is 

1 This chapter has already appeared in the Popular Science 
Monthly for February 1887. 



4 HABIT 

bound at the very outset to define clearly 
just what its limits are. 

The moment one tries to define what habit 
is, one is led to the fundamental properties 
of matter. The laws of Nature are nothing 
but the immutable habits which the different 
elementary sorts of matter follow in their 
actions and reactions upon each other. In 
the organic world, however, the habits are 
more variable than this. Even instincts 
vary from one individual to another of a 
kind; and are modified in the same individual, 
as we shall later see, to suit the exigencies of 
the case. The habits of an elementary par- 
ticle of matter cannot change (on the prin- 
ciples of the atomistic philosophy), because 
the particle is itself an unchangeable thing; 
but those of a compound mass of matter can 
change, because they are in the last instance 
due to the structure of the compound, and 
either outward forces or inward tensions can, 



HABIT 5 

from one hour to another, turn that structure 
into something different from what it was. 
That is, they can do so if the body be plastic 
enough to maintain its integrity, and be not 
disrupted when its structure yields. The 
change of structure here spoken of need not 
involve the outward shape; it may be invisi- 
ble and molecular, as when a bar of iron 
becomes magnetic or crystalline through the 
action of certain outward causes, or India- 
rubber becomes friable, or plaster 'sets.' 
All these changes are rather slow; the mate- 
rial in question opposes a certain resistance to 
the modifying cause, which it takes time to 
overcome, but the gradual yielding whereof 
often saves the material from being disinte- 
grated altogether. When the structure has 
yielded, the same inertia becomes a condition 
of its comparative permanence in the new 
form, and of the new habits the body then 
manifests. Plasticity, then, in the wide 



6 HABIT 

sense of the word, means the possession of a 
structure weak enough to yield to an influ- 
ence, but strong enough not to yield all at 
once. Each relatively stable phase of equili- 
brium in such a structure is marked by what 
we may call a new set of habits. Organic 
matter, especially nervous tissue, seems en- 
dowed with a very extraordinary degree of 
plasticity of this sort; so that we may with- 
out hesitation lay down as our first proposi- 
tion the following, that the phenomena of 
habit in living beings are due to the plasticity 1 
of the organic materials of which their bodies 
are composed. 

But the philosophy of habit is thus, in the 
first instance, a chapter in physics rather 
than in physiology or psychology. That it 
is at bottom a physical principle is admitted 
by all good recent writers on the subject. 

1 In the sense above explained, which applies to inner structure 
as well as to outer form. 



HABIT 7 

They call attention to analogues of acquired 
habits exhibited by dead matter. Thus 
M. Leon Dumont, whose essay on habit is 
perhaps the most philosophical account yet 
published, writes: 

"Every one knows how a garment, after 
having been worn a certain time, clings to 
the shape of the body better than when it 
was new; there has been a change in the 
tissue, and this change is a new habit of co- 
hesion. A lock works better after being 
used some time; at the outset more force was 
required to overcome certain roughnesses in 
the mechanism. The overcoming of their 
resistance is a phenomenon of habituation. 
It costs less trouble to fold a paper when it 
has been folded already. This saving of 
trouble is due to the essential nature of habit, 
which brings it about that, to reproduce the 
effect, a less amount of the outward cause is 



8 HABIT 

required. The sounds of a violin improve by 
use in the hands of an able artist, because the 
fibres of the wood at last contract habits of 
vibration conformed to harmonic relations. 
This is what gives such inestimable value to 
instruments that have belonged to great 
masters. Water, in flowing, hollows out for 
itself a channel, which grows broader and 
deeper; and, after having ceased to flow, it 
resumes, when it flows again, the path 
traced by itself before. Just so, the im- 
pressions of outer objects fashion for them- 
selves in the nervous system more and more 
appropriate paths, and these vital phenomena 
recur under similar excitements from with- 
out, when they have been interrupted a cer- 
tain time." 1 

Not in the nervous system alone. A scar 
anywhere is a locus minoris resistcntia:, more 

1 Revue Philosophique, I, 324. 



HABIT 9 

liable to be abraded, inflamed, to suffer pain 
and cold, than are the neighboring parts. 
A sprained ankle, a dislocated arm, are in 
danger of being sprained or dislocated again; 
joints that have once been attacked by 
rheumatism or gout, mucous membranes 
that have been the seat of catarrh, are with 
each fresh recurrence more prone to a relapse, 
until often the morbid state chronically sub- 
stitutes itself for the sound one. And if we 
ascend to the nervous system, we find how 
many so-called functional diseases seem to 
keep themselves going simply because they 
happen to have once begun; and how the 
forcible cutting short by medicine of a few 
attacks is often sufficient to enable the physi- 
ological forces to get possession of the field 
again, and to bring the organs back to func- 
tions of health. Epilepsies, neuralgias, con- 
vulsive affections of various sorts, insomnias, 
are so many cases in point. And, to take 



10 HABIT 

what are more obviously habits, the success 
with which a * weaning' treatment can often 
be applied to the victims of unhealthy indul- 
gence of passion, or of mere complaining or 
irascible disposition, shows us how much the 
morbid manifestations themselves were due 
to the mere inertia of the nervous organs, 
when once launched on a false career. 

Can we now form a notion of what the 
inward physical changes may be like, in 
organs whose habits have thus struck into 
new paths? In other words, can we say just 
what mechanical facts the expression 'change 
of habit ' covers when it is applied to a nerv- 
ous system? Certainly we cannot in any- 
thing like a minute or definite way. But our 
usual scientific custom of interpreting hidden 
molecular events after the analogy of visible 
massive ones enables us to frame easily an 
abstract and general scheme of processes 



HABIT 11 

which the physical changes in question may 
be like. And when once the possibility of 
some kind of mechanical interpretation is 
established, Mechanical Science, in her pres- 
ent mood, will not hesitate to set her brand 
of ownership upon the matter, feeling sure 
that it is only a question of time when the 
exact mechanical explanation of the case 
shall be found out. 

If habits are due to the plasticity of mate- 
rials to outward agents, we can immediately 
see to what outward influences, if to any, the 
brain-matter is plastic. Not to mechanical 
pressures, not to thermal changes, not to any 
of the forces to which all the other organs of 
our body are exposed; for nature has care- 
fully shut up our brain and spinal cord in 
bony boxes, where no influences of this sort 
can get at them. She has floated them in 
fluid so that only the severest shocks can 
give them a concussion, and blanketed and 



12 HABIT 

wrapped them about in an altogether excep- 
tional way. The only impressions that can 
be made upon them are through the blood, 
on the one hand, and through the sensory 
nerve-roots, on the other; and it is to the 
infinitely attenuated currents that pour in 
through these latter channels that the hemi- 
spherical cortex shows itself to be so pecu- 
liarly susceptible. The currents, once in, 
must find a way out. In getting out they 
leave their traces in the paths which they 
take. The only thing they can do, in short, 
is to deepen old paths or to make new ones; 
and the whole plasticity of the brain sums 
itself up in two words when we call it an 
organ in which currents pouring in from the 
sense-organs make with extreme facility 
paths which do not easily disappear. For, 
of course, a simple habit, like every other 
nervous event the habit of snuffling, for 
example, or of putting one's hands into one's 



HABIT 13 

pockets, or of biting one's nails is, mechan- 
ically, nothing but a reflex discharge; and 
its anatomical substratum must be a path 
in the system. The most complex habits, 
as we shall presently see more fully, are, from 
the same point of view, nothing but con- 
catenated discharges in the nerve-centres, due 
to the presence there of systems of reflex 
paths, so organized as to wake each other up 
successively the impression produced by 
one muscular contraction serving as a stimu- 
lus to provoke the next, until a final impres- 
sion inhibits the process and closes the chain. 
The only difficult mechanical problem is to 
explain the formation de novo of a simple 
reflex or path in a pre-existing nervous 
system. Here, as in so many other cases, 
it is only the premier pas qui coute. For the 
entire nervous system is nothing but a sys- 
tem of paths between a sensory terminus a 
quo and a muscular, glandular, or other 



14 HABIT 

terminus ad quern. A path once traversed by 
a nerve-current might be expected to follow 
the law of most of the paths we know, and 
to be scooped out and made more permeable 
than before; ' and this ought to be repeated 
with each new passage of the current. 
Whatever obstructions may have kept it at 
first from being a path should then, little by 
little, and more and more, be swept out of 
the way, until at last it might become a 
natural drainage-channel. This is what hap- 
pens where either solids or liquids pass over 
a path; there seems no reason why it should 
not happen where the thing that passes is a 
mere wave of rearrangement in matter that 
does not displace itself, but merely changes 
chemically or turns itself round in place, 
or vibrates across the line. The most 
plausible views of the nerve-current make it 

iSome paths, to be sure, are banked up by bodies moving 
through them under too great pressure, and made impervious. 
These special cases we disregard. 



HABIT 15 

out to be the passage of some such wave of 
rearrangement as this. If only a part of the 
matter of the path were to 'rearrange' itself, 
the neighboring parts remaining inert, it is 
easy to see how their inertness might oppose 
a friction which it would take many waves of 
rearrangement to break down and overcome. 
If we call the path itself the 'organ, ' and the 
wave of rearrangement the 'function, ' then 
it is obviously a case for repeating the cele- 
brated French formula of 'Lajondion fait 
Tor gam J 

So nothing is easier than to imagine how, 
when a current once has traversed a path, 
it should traverse it more readily still a 
second time. But what made it ever tra- 

1 We cannot say the will, for, though many, perhaps most, 
human habits were once voluntary actions, no action, as we 
shall see in a later chapter, can be primarily such. While an 
habitual action may once have been voluntary, the voluntary 
action must before that, at least once, have been impulsive or 
reflex. It is this very first occurrence of all that we consider in 
the text. 



16 HABIT 

verse it the first time? 1 In answering this 
question we can only fall back on our general 
conception of a nervous system as a mass of 
matter whose parts, constantly kept in states 
of different tension, are as constantly tending 
to equalize their states. The equalization 
between any two points occurs through what- 
ever path may at the moment be most per- 
vious. But, as a given point of the system 
may belong, actually or potentially, to many 
different paths, and, as the play of nutrition 
is subject to accidental changes, blocks may 
from time to time occur, and make currents 
shoot through unwonted lines. Such an 
unwonted line would be a new-created path, 
which if traversed repeatedly, would become 
the beginning of a new reflex arc. All this 
is vague to the last degree, and amounts to 
little more than saying that a new path may 
be formed by the sort of chances that in 
nervous material are likely to occur. But, 



HABIT 17 

vague as it is, it is really the last word of our 
wisdom in the matter. 1 

It must be noticed that the growth of 
structural modification in living matter may 
be more rapid than in any lifeless mass 
because the incessant nutritive renovation of 
which the living matter is the seat tends often 
to corroborate and fix the impressed modifica- 
tion, rather than to counteract it by renewing 
the original constitution of the tissue that 
has been impressed. Thus, we notice after 
exercising our muscles or our brain in a new 
way, that we can do so no longer at that time; 



1 Those who desire a more definite formulation may consult 
J. FiskeV Cosmic Philosophy,' vol. II. pp.142 146, and Spencer's 
' Principles of Biology,' sections 302 and 303, and the part entitled 
'Physical Synthesis' of his 'Principles of Psychology.' Mr. 
Spencer there tries, not only to show how new actions may arise 
in nervous systems and form new reflex arcs therein, but even 
how nervous tissue may actually be born by the passage of new 
waves of isometric transformation through an originally indif- 
ferent mass. I cannot help thinking that Mr. Spencer's data, 
under a great show of precision, conceal vagueness and improba- 
bility, and even self-contradiction. 



18 HABIT 

but after a day or two of rest, when we resume 
the discipline, our increase in skill not sel- 
dom surprises us. I have often noticed this 
in learning a tune; and it has led a German 
author to say that we learn to swim during 
the winter and to skate during the summer. 
Dr. Carpenter writes: 1 

"It is a matter of universal experience 
that every kind of training for special apti- 
tudes is both far more effective, and leaves 
a more permanent impress, when exerted on 
the growing organism than when brought to 
bear on the adult. The effect of such train- 
ing is shown in the tendency of the organ to 
'grow to' the mode in which it is habitually 
exercised; as is evidenced by the increased 
size and power of particular sets of muscles, 
and the extraordinary flexibility of joints, 
which are acquired by such as have been 

'Mental Physiology' (1874), pp. 339-345. 



HABIT 19 

early exercised in gymnastic performances. 
. . . There is no part of the organism of 
man in which the reconstructive activity is so 
great, during the whole period of life, as it 
is in the ganglionic substance of the brain. 
This is indicated by the enormous supply of 
blood which it receives. ... It is, more- 
over, a fact of great significance that the 
nerve-substance is specially distinguished by 
its reparative power. For while injuries of 
other tissues (such as the muscular) which 
are distinguished by the speciality of their 
structure and endowments, are repaired by 
substance of a lower or less specialized type 
those of nerve-substance are repaired by a 
complete reproduction of the normal tissue; 
as is evidenced in the sensibility of the newly 
forming skin which is closing over an open 
wound, or in the recovery of the sensibility 
of a piece of 'transplanted' skin, which has 
for a time been rendered insensible by the 



20 HABIT 

complete interruption of the continuity of 
its nerves. The most remarkable example 
of this reproduction, however, is afforded by 
the results of M. Brown-Se'quard's l experi- 
ments upon the gradual restoration of the 
functional activity of the spinal cord after 
its complete division; which takes place in 
a way that indicates rather a reproduction 
of the whole, or the lower part of the cord 
and of the nerves proceeding from it, than a 
mere reunion of divided surfaces. This 
reproduction is but a special manifestation 
of the reconstructive change which is always 
taking place in the nervous system; it being 
not less obvious to the eye of reason that the 
'waste' occasioned by its functional activity 
must be constantly repaired by the produc- 
tion of new tissue, than it is to the eye of 
sense that such reparation supplies an 

1 [See, later, Masius in Van Benedens' and Van Bambckc's 
'Archives de Biologic' vol I (Li6ge 1880) W. J.J 



HABIT 21 

actual loss of substance by disease or 
injury. 

"Now, in this constant and active recon- 
struction of the nervous system, we recognize 
a most marked conformity to the general 
plan manifested in the nutrition of the organ- 
ism as a whole. For, in the first place, it is 
obvious that there is a tendency to the pro- 
duction of a determinate type of structure; 
which type is often not merely that of the 
species, but some special modification of it 
which characterized one or both of the 
progenitors. But this type is peculiarly 
liable to modification during the early period 
of life; in which the functional activity of the 
nervous system (and particularly of the 
brain) is extraordinarily great, and the recon- 
structive process proportionally active. And 
this modifiability expresses itself in the 
formation of the mechanism by which those 
secondarily automatic modes of movement 



22 HABIT 

come to be established, which, in man, take 
the place of those that are congenital in most 
of the animals beneath him; and those modes 
of sense-perception come to be acquired 
which are elsewhere clearly instinctive. For 
there can be no reasonable doubt that, in 
both cases, a nervous mechanism is developed 
in the course of this self-education, corre- 
sponding with that which the lower animals 
inherit from their parents. The plan of that 
rebuilding process, which is necessary to main- 
tain the integrity of the organism generally, 
and which goes on with peculiar activity in 
this portion of it, is thus being incessantly 
modified; and in this manner all that portion 
of it which ministers to the external life of 
sense and motion that is shared by man with 
the animal kingdom at large, becomes at adult 
age the expression of the habits which the 
individual has acquired during the period of 
growth and development. Of these habits, 



HABIT 23 

some are common to the race generally, while 
others are peculiar to the individual; those 
of the former kind (such as walking erect) 
being universally acquired, save where physi- 
cal inability prevents; while for the latter a 
special training is needed, which is usually 
the more effective the earlier it is begun as 
is remarkably seen in the case of such feats 
of dexterity as require a conjoint education 
of the perceptive and of the motor powers. 
And when thus developed during the period 
of growth, so as to have become a part of 
the constitution of the adult, the acquired 
mechanism is thenceforth maintained in the 
ordinary course of the nutritive operations, 
so as to be ready for use when called upon, 
even after long inaction. 

"What is so clearly true of the nervous 
apparatus of animal life can scarcely be 
otherwise than true of that which ministers 
to the automatic activity of the mind. For, 



24 HABIT 

as already shown, the study of psychology 
has evolved no more certain result than that 
there are uniformities of mental action which 
are so entirely conformable to those of bodily 
action as to indicate their intimate relation 
to a 'mechanism of thought and feeling,' 
acting under the like conditions with that of 
sense and motion. The psychical principles 
of association, indeed, and the physiological 
principles of nutrition, simply express the 
former in terms of mind, the latter in terms 
of brain the universally admitted fact that 
any sequence of mental action which has 
been frequently repeated tends to perpetuate 
itself; so that we find ourselves automatically 
prompted to think, feel, or do what we have 
been before accustomed to think, feel, or do, 
under like circumstances, without any con- 
sciously formed purpose, or anticipation of 
results. For there is no reason to regard the 
cerebrum as an exception to the general 



HABIT 25 

principle that, while each part of the organ- 
ism tends to form itself in accordance with 
the mode in which it is habitually exercised, 
this tendency will be especially strong in the 
nervous apparatus, in virtue of that incessant 
regeneration which is the very condition of its 
functional activity. It scarcely, indeed, ad- 
mits of doubt that every state of ideational 
consciousness which is either Very strong or 
is habitually repeated leaves an organic im- 
pression on the cerebrum; in virtue of which 
that same state may be reproduced at any 
future time, in respondence to a suggestion 
fitted to excite it. . . . The * strength of early 
association' is a fact so universally recognized 
that the expression of it has become prover- 
bial; and this precisely accords with the 
physiological principle that, during the period 
of growth and development, the formative 
activity of the brain will be most amenable 
to directing influences. It is in this way that 



26 HABIT 

what is early 'learned by heart* becomes 
branded in (as it were) upon the cerebrum; 
so that its ' traces * are never lost, even though 
the conscious memory of it may have com- 
pletely faded out. For, when the organic 
modification has been once fixed in the grow- 
ing brain, it becomes a part of the normal 
fabric, and is regularly maintained by nutri- 
tive substitution; so that it may endure to 
the end of life, like the scar of a wound." 

Dr. Carpenter's phrase that our nervous 
system grows to the modes in which it has been 
exercised expresses the philosophy of habit in 
a nutshell. We may now trace some of the 
practical applications of the principle to 
human life. 

The first result of it is that habit simplifies 
the movements required to achieve a given result, 
makes them more accurate and diminishes 
fatigue. 



HABIT 27 

"The beginner at the piano not only moves 
his finger up and down in order to depress the 
key, he moves the whole hand, the forearm 
and even the entire body, especially moving 
its least rigid part, the head, as if he would 
press down the key with that organ too. 
Often a contraction of the abdominal muscles 
occurs as well. Principally, however, the 
impulse is determined to the motion of the 
hand and of the single finger. This is, in the 
first place, because the movement of the 
finger is the movement thougkt o/, and, in 
the second place, because its movement and 
that of the key are the movements we try 
to perceive, along with the results of the latter 
on the ear. The more often the process 
is repeated, the more easily the movement 
follows, on account of the increase in perme- 
ability of the nerves engaged. 

"But the more easily the movement occurs, 
the slighter is the stimulus required to set it 



28 HABIT 

up; and the slighter the stimulus is, the more 
its effect is confined to the fingers alone. 

"Thus, an impulse which originally spread 
its effects over the whole body, or at least 
over many of its movable parts, is gradually 
determined to a single definite organ, in 
which it effects the contraction of a few 
limited muscles. In this change the thoughts 
and perceptions which start the impulse 
acquire more and more intimate causal rela- 
tions with a particular group of motor nerves. 

"To recur to a simile, at least partially 
apt, imagine the nervous system to represent 
a drainage-system, inclining, on the whole, 
toward certain muscles, but with the escape 
thither somewhat clogged. Then streams of 
water will, on the whole, tend most to fill the 
drains that go toward these muscles and to 
wash out the escape. In case of a sudden 
'flushing/ however, the whole system of 
channels will fill itself, and the water over- 



HABIT 29 

flow everywhere before it escapes. But a 
moderate quantity of water invading the sys- 
tem will flow through the proper escape alone. 
"Just so with the piano-player. As soon 
as his impulse, which has gradually learned 
to confine itself to single muscles, grows ex- 
treme, it overflows into larger muscular 
regions. He usually plays with his fingers, 
his body being at rest. But no sooner does 
he get excited than his whole body becomes 
1 animated, ' and he moves his head and trunk, 
in particular, as if these also were organs with 
which he meant to belabor the keys." 1 

Man is born with a tendency to do more 
things than he has ready-made arrangements 
for in his nerve-centres. Most of the per- 
formances of other animals are automatic. 
But in him the number of them is so enor- 

1 G. H. Schneider: 'Der menschliche Wille' (1882), pp. 417- 
419 (freely translated). For the drain-simile, see also Spencer's 
'Psychology,' part V, chap. VIII. 



30 HABIT 

mous, that most of them must be the fruit 
of painful study. If practice did not make 
perfect, nor habit economize the expense of 
nervous and muscular energy, he would there- 
fore be in a sorry plight. As Dr. Maudsley 
says: 1 

"If an act became no easier after being 
done several times, if the careful direction 
of consciousness were necessary to its accom- 
plishment on each occasion, it is evident that 
the whole activity of a lifetime might be 
confined to one or two deeds that no prog- 
ress could take place in development. A 
man might be occupied all day in dressing 
and undressing himself; the attitude of his 
body would absorb all his attention and 
energy; the washing of his hands or the 
fastening of a button would be as difficult 
to him on each occasion as to the child on 

1 'Physiology of Mind,' p. 155. 



HABIT 31 

its first trial; and he would, furthermore, be 
completely exhausted by his exertions. Think 
of the pains necessary to teach a child to 
stand, of the many efforts which it must 
make, and of the ease with which it at last 
stands, unconscious of any effort. For while 
secondarily automatic acts are accomplished 
with comparatively little weariness in this 
regard approaching the organic movements, 
or the original reflex movements the con- 
scious effort of the will soon produces ex- 
haustion. A spinal cord without . . . mem- 
ory would simply be an idiotic spinal cord. 
. . . It is impossible for an individual to 
realize how much he owes to its automatic 
agency until disease has impaired its func- 
tions. " 

The next result is that habit diminishes 
the conscious attention with which our acts 
are performed. 



32 HABIT 

One may state this abstractly thus: If 
an act require for its execution a chain, 
A, B, C, D, E y F, G, etc., of successive 
nervous events, then in the first performances 
of the action the conscious will must choose; 
each of these events from a number of wrong 
alternatives that tend to present themselves; 
but habit soon brings it about that each 
event calls up its own appropriate successor 
without any alternative offering itself, and 
without any reference to the conscious will, 
until at last the whole chain, A, B, C, D, E, 
F, G, rattles itself off as soon as A occurs, 
just as if A and the rest of the chain were 
fused into a continuous stream. When we 
are learning to walk, to ride, to swim, skate, 
fence, write, play, or sing, we interrupt our- 
selves at every step by unnecessary move- 
ments and false notes. When we are pro- 
ficients, on the contrary, the results not only 
follow with the very minimum of muscular 



HABIT 33 

action requisite to bring them forth, they also 
follow from a single instantaneous 'cue.' 
The marksman sees the bird, and, before he 
knows it, he has aimed and shot. A gleam 
in his adversary's eye, a momentary pressure 
from his rapier, and the fencer finds that he 
has instantly made the right parry and re- 
turn. A glance at the musical hieroglyphics, 
and the pianist's fingers have ripped through 
a cataract of notes. And not only is it the 
right thing at the right time that we thus 
involuntarily do, but the wrong thing also, 
if it be an habitual thing. Who is there that 
has never wound up his watch on taking off 
his waistcoat in the daytime, or taken his 
latch-key out on arriving at the door-step of 
a friend? Very absent-minded persons in 
going to their bedroom to dress for dinner 
have been known to take off one garment 
after another and finally to get into bed, 
merely because that was the habitual issue 



34 HABIT 

of the first few movements when performed 
at a later hour. The writer well remembers 
how, on revisiting Paris after ten years' 
absence, and, finding himself in the street in 
which for one winter he had attended school, 
he lost himself in a brown study, from which 
he was awakened by finding himself upon the 
stairs which led to the apartment in a house 
many streets away in which he had lived 
during that earlier time, and to which his 
steps from the school had then habitually 
led. We all of us have a definite routine 
manner of performing certain daily offices 
connected with the toilet, with the opening 
and shutting of familiar cupboards, and the 
like. Our lower centres know the order of 
these movements, and show their knowledge 
by their 'surprise' if the objects are altered 
so as to oblige the movement to be made in 
a different way. But our higher thought- 
centres know hardly anything about the 



HABIT 35 

matter. Few men can tell off-hand which 
sock, shoe, or trousers-leg they put on first. 
They must first mentally rehearse the act; 
and even that is often insufficient the act 
must be performed. So of the questions, 
Which valve of my double door opens first? 
Which way does my door swing? etc. I 
cannot tell the answer; yet my hand never 
makes a mistake. No one can describe the 
order in which he brushes his hair or teeth; 
yet it is likely that the order is a pretty fixed 
one in all of us. 

These results may be expressed as 
follows: 

In action grown habitual, what instigates 
each new muscular contraction to take place 
in its appointed order is not a thought or a 
perception, but the sensation occasioned by 
the muscular contraction just finished. A 
strictly voluntary act has to be guided by 
idea, perception, and volition, throughout 



36 HABIT 

its whole course. In an habitual action, 
mere sensation is a sufficient guide, and the 
upper regions of brain and mind are set 
comparatively free. A diagram will make 
the matter clear: 




Let A, B,C, Z), , F, G represent an habit- 
ual chain of muscular contractions, and let 
a, b, c, d, e, f stand for the respective sensa- 
tions which these contractions excite in us 
when they are successfully performed. Such 
sensations will usually be of the muscles, 
skin, or joints of the parts moved, but they 
may also be effects of the movement upon 
the eye or the ear. Through them, and 
through them alone, we are made aware 



HABIT 37 

whether the contraction has or has not 
occurred. When the series, A, B,C, D, E y F, 
G, is being learned, each of these sensations 
becomes the object of a separate perception 
by the mind. By it we test each movement, 
to see if it be right before advancing to the 
next. We hesitate, compare, choose, revoke, 
reject, etc., by intellectual means; and the 
order by which the next movement is dis- 
charged is an express order from the idea- 
tional centres after this deliberation has 
been gone through. 

In habitual action, on the contrary, the only 
impulse which the centres of idea or percep- 
tion need send down is the initial impulse, 
the'commandto start. This is represented in 
the diagram by V; it may be a thought of the 
first movement or of the last result, or a mere 
perception of some of the habitual conditions 
of the chain, the presence, e.g., of the key- 
board near the hand. In the present case, 



38 HABIT 

no sooner has the conscious thought or 
volition instigated movement A, than A, 
through the sensation a of its own occurrence, 
awakens B reflexly ; B then excites C through 
b, and so on till the chain is ended, when the 
intellect generally takes cognizance of the 
final result. The process, in fact, resembles 
the passage of a wave of ' peristaltic ' motion 
down the bowels. The intellectual percep- 
tion at the end is indicated in the diagram by 
the effect of G being represented, at G 1 , in 
the ideational centres above the merely 
sensational line. The sensational impres- 
sions, a, J, c, d, c, /, are all supposed to have 
their seat below the ideational lines. That 
our ideational centres, if involved at all by 
a, I, c, d, e,f, are involved in a minimal degree, 
is shown by the fact that the attention may 
be wholly absorbed elsewhere. We may say 
our prayers, or repeat the alphabet, with our 
attention far away. 



HABIT 39 

"A musical performer will play a piece 
which has become familiar by repetition 
while carrying on an animated conversation 
or while continuously engrossed by some train 
of deeply interesting thought; the accus- 
tomed sequence of movements being directly 
prompted by the sight of the notes, or by the 
remembered succession of the sounds (if 
the piece is played from memory), aided in 
both cases by the guiding sensations derived 
from the muscles themselves. But, further, 
a higher degree of the same 'training' (acting 
on an organism specially fitted to profit by 
it) enables an accomplished pianist to play 
a difficult piece of music at sight; the move- 
ments of the hands and fingers following so 
immediately upon the sight of the notes that 
it seems impossible to believe that any but 
the very shortest and most direct track 
can be the channel of the nervous communi- 
cation through which they are called forth. 



40 HABIT 

The following curious example of the same 
class of acquired aptitudes, which differ from 
instincts only in being prompted to action 
by the will, is furnished by Robert Houdin: 
"'With a view of cultivating the rapidity 
of visual and tactile perception, and the 
precision of respondent movements, which 
are necessary for success in every kind of 
prestidigitation, Houdin early practised the 
art of juggling with balls in the air; and hav- 
ing, after a month's practice, become thor- 
ough master of the art of keeping up four 
balls at once, he placed a book before him, 
and, while the balls were in the air, accus- 
tomed himself to read without hesitation. 
'This,' he says, 'will probably seem to my 
readers very extraordinary; but I shall sur- 
prise them still more when I say that I have 
just amused myself with repeating this curi- 
ous experiment. Though thirty years have 
elapsed since the time I was writing, and 



HABIT 41 

though I have scarcely once touched the 
balls during that period, I can still manage 
to read with ease while keeping three balls 
up." (Autobiography, p. 26.) * 

We have called a, b, c, d, e, /, the antece- 
dents of the successive muscular attractions, 
by the name of sensations. Some authors 
seem to deny that they are even this. If not 
even this, they can only be centripetal nerve- 
currents, not sufficient to arouse feeling, 
but sufficient to arouse motor response. 2 It 
may be at once admitted that they are not 
distinct Volitions. The will, if any will be 
present, limits itself to a permission that 
they exert their motor effects. Dr. Car- 
penter writes: 

"There may still be metaphysicians who 

Carpenter's 'Mental Physiology' (1874), pp. 217, 218. 

2 Von Hartmann devotes a chapter of his 'Philosophy of the 
Unconscious' (English translation, vol. I. p. 72) to proving that 
they must be both ideas and unconscious. 



42 HABIT 

maintain that actions which were originally 
prompted by the will with a distinct inten- 
tion, and which are still entirely under its 
control, can never cease to be volitional; 
and that either an infinitesimally small 
amount of will is required to sustain them 
when they have been once set going, or that 
the will is in a sort of pendulum-like oscilla- 
tion between the two actions the mainte- 
nance of the train of thought, and the mainte- 
nance of the train of movement. But if only 
an infinitesimally small amount of will is 
necessary to sustain them, is not this tanta- 
mount to saying that they go on by a force 
of their own? And does not the experience 
of the perfect continuity of our train of thought 
during the performance of movements that 
have become habitual, entirely negative the 
hypothesis of oscillation? Besides, if such 
an oscillation existed, there must be intervals 
in which each action goes on of itself; so that 



HABIT 43 

its essentially automatic character is vir- 
tually admitted. The physiological explana- 
tion, that the mechanism of locomotion, as 
of habitual movements, grows to the mode 
in which it is early exercised, and that it then 
works automatically under the general con- 
trol and direction of the will, can scarcely 
be put down by any assumption of an hypo- 
thetical necessity, which rests only on the 
basis of ignorance of one side of our composite 
nature. " l 

But if not distinct acts of will, these im- 
mediate antecedents of each movement of 
the chain are at any rate accompanied by con- 
sciousness of some kind. They are sensa- 
tions to which we are usually inattentive, but 
which immediately call our attention if they 
go wrong. Schneider's account of these 
sensations deserves to be quoted. In the 

1 'Mental Physiology,' p. 20. 



44 HABIT 

act of walking, he says, even when our atten- 
tion is entirely off, 

"we are continuously aware of certain mus- 
cular feelings; and we have, moreover, a 
feeling of certain impulses to keep our 
equilibrium and to set down one leg after 
another. It is doubtful whether we could 
preserve equilibrium if no sensation of our 
body's attitude were there, and doubtful 
whether we should advance our leg if we had 
no sensation of its movement as executed, 
and not even a minimal feeling of impulse 
to set it down. Knitting appears altogether 
mechanical, and the knitter keeps up her 
knitting even while she reads or is engaged in 
lively talk. But if we ask her how this be 
possible, she will hardly reply that the 
knitting goes on of itself. She will rather 
say that she has a feeling of it, that she 
feels in her hands that she knits and 



HABIT 45 

how she must knit, and that therefore 
the movements of knitting are called forth 
and regulated by the sensations associated 
therewithal even when the attention is 
called away. 

"So of every one who practises, apparently 
automatically, a long-familiar handicraft. 
The smith turning his tongs as he smites the 
iron, the carpenter wielding his plane, the 
lace-maker with her bobbin, the weaver at 
his loom, all will answer the same question 
in the same way by saying that they have a 
feeling of the proper management of the 
implement in their hands. 

" In these cases, the feelings which are con- 
ditions of the appropriate acts are very faint. 
But none the less are they necessary. 
Imagine your hands not feeling; your move- 
ments could then only be provoked by ideas, 
and if your ideas were then diverted away, 
the movements ought to come to a standstill, 



46 HABIT 

which is a consequence that seldom 
occurs." 1 

Again: 

"An idea makes you take, for example, a 
violin into your left hand. But it is not 
necessary that your idea remain fixed on the 
contraction of the muscles of the left hand 
and fingers in order that the violin may con- 
tinue to be held fast and not let fall. The 
sensations themselves which the holding of 
the instrument awakens in the hand, since 
they are associated with the motor impulse 
of grasping, are sufficient to cause this im- 
pulse, which then lasts as long as the feeling 
itself lasts, or until the impulse is inhibited 
by the idea of some antagonistic motion." 
And the same may be said of the man- 
ner in which the right hand holds the 
bow: 

1# Der mcnschliche Wille,' pp. 447, 448. 



HABIT, 47 

"It sometimes happens, in beginning these 
simultaneous combinations, that one move- 
ment or impulse will cease if the conscious- 
ness turn particularly toward another, be- 
cause at the outset the guiding sensations 
must all be strongly felt. The bow will per- 
haps slip from the fingers, because some of 
the muscles have relaxed. But the slipping 
is a cause of new sensations starting up in 
the hand, so that the attention is in a moment 
brought back to the grasping of the bow. 

"The following experiment shows this 
well : When one begins to play on the violin, 
to keep him from raising his right elbow in 
playing a book is placed under his right arm- 
pit, which he is ordered to hold fast by keep- 
ing the upper arm tight against his body. 
The muscular feelings, and feelings of con- 
tact connected with the book, provoke an im- 
pulse to press it tight. But often it happens 
that the beginner, whose attention gets 



48 HABIT 

absorbed in the production of the notes, lets 
drop the book. Later, however, this never 
happens; the faintest sensations of contact 
suffice to awaken the impulse to keep it in 
its place, and the attention may be wholly 
absorbed by the notes and the fingering with 
the left hand. The simultaneous combina- 
tion of movements is thus in the first instance 
conditioned by the facility with which in us, 
alongside of intellectual processes, processes of 
inattentive feeling may still go on." 1 

This brings us by a very natural transition 
to the ethical implications of the law of habit. 
They are numerous and momentous. Dr. 
Carpenter, from whose 'Mental Physiology' 
we have quoted, has so prominently enforced 
the principle that our organs grow to the way 
in which they have been exercised, and dwelt 

1 'Der menschliche Wille,' p. 439. The last sentence is rather, 
freely translated the sense is unaltered. 



HABIT 49 

upon its consequences, that his book almost 
deserves to be called a work of edification, on 
this account alone. We need make no 
apology, then, for tracing a few of these 
consequences ourselves: 

"Habit a second nature! Habit is ten 
times nature," the Duke of Wellington is 
said to have exclaimed; and the degree to 
which this is true no one can probably appre- 
ciate as well as one who is a veteran soldier 
himself. The daily drill and the years of 
discipline end by fashioning a man complete- 
ly over again, as to most of the possibilities 
of his conduct. 

"There is a story, which is credible enough 
though it may not be true, of a practical 
joker, who, seeing a discharged veteran carry- 
ing home his dinner, suddenly called out, 
'Attention!' whereupon the man instantly 
brought his hands down, and lost his mutton 



50 HABIT 

and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had 
been thorough, and its effects had become 
embodied in the man's nervous structure." l 

Riderless cavalry-horses, at many a battle, 
have been seen to come together and go 
through their customary evolutions at the 
sound of the bugle-call. Most trained domes- 
tic animals, dogs and oxen, and omnibus- and 
car-horses, seem to be machines almost pure 
and simple, undoubtingly, unhesitatingly 
doing from minute to minute the duties 
they have been taught, and giving no sign 
that the possibility of an alternative ever 
suggests itself to their mind. Men grown 
old in prison have asked to be readmitted 
after being once set free. In a railroad acci- 
dent to a travelling menagerie in the United 
States some time in 1 884, a tiger, whose cage 
had broken open, is said to have emerged, 

Huxley's 'Elementary Lessons in Physiology,' lesson XII. 



HABIT 51 

but presently crept back again, as if too 
much bewildered by his new responsibilities, 
so that he was without difficulty secured. 

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of 
society, its most precious conservative agent. 
It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds 
of ordinance, and saves the children of for- 
tune from the envious uprisings of the poor. 
It alone prevents the hardest and most 
repulsive walks of life from being deserted 
by those brought up to tread therein. It 
keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at 
sea through the winter; it holds the miner 
in his darkness, and nails the countryman to 
his log cabin and his lonely farm through all 
the months of snow; it protects us from in- 
vasion by the natives of the desert and the 
frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the 
battle of life upon the lines of our nurture 
or our early choice, and to make the best 
of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is 



52 HABIT 

no other for which we are fitted, and it is 
too late to begin again. It keeps different 
social strata from mixing. Already at the 
age of twenty-five you see the professional 
mannerism settling down on the young com- 
mercial traveller, on the young doctor, on 
the young minister, on the young counsellor- 
at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage 
running through the character, the tricks of 
thought, the prejudices, the ways of the 
'shop,' in a word, from which the man can 
by-and-by no more escape than his coat- 
sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of 
folds. On the whole, it is best he should 
not escape. It is well for the world that 
in most of us, by the age of thirty, the char- 
acter has set like plaster, and will never soften 
again. 

If the period between twenty and thirty 
is the critical one in the formation of intellec- 
tual and professional habits, the period below 



HABIT 53 

twenty is more important still for the fixing 
of personal habits, properly so called, such as 
vocalization and pronunciation, gesture, mo- 
tion, and address. Hardly ever is a language 
learned after twenty spoken without a foreign 
accent; hardly ever can a youth transferred 
to the society of his betters unlearn the 
nasality and other vices of speech bred in 
him by the associations of his growing years. 
Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much 
money there be in his pocket, can he even 
learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The 
merchants offer their wares as eagerly to 
him as to the veriest * swell,' but he simply 
cannot buy the right things. An invisible 
law, as strong as gravitation, keeps him 
within his orbit, arrayed this year as he was 
the last; and how his better-bred acquaint- 
ances contrive to get the things they wear 
will be for him a mystery till his dying 
day. 



54 HABIT 

The great thing, then, in all education, is 
to ma\e our nervous system our ally instead 
of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize 
our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the 
interest of the fund. For this we must mafe 
automatic and habitual, as early as possible, 
as many useful actions as we can, and guard 
against the growing into ways that are likely 
to be disadvantageous to us, as we should 
guard against the plague. The more of the 
details of our daily life we can hand over to 
the effortless custody of automatism, the 
more our higher powers of mind will be set 
free for their own proper work. There is 
no more miserable human being than one in 
whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and 
for whom the lighting of every cigar, the 
drinking of every cup, the time of rising and 
going to bed every day, and the beginning 
of every bit of work, are subjects of express 
volitional deliberation. Full half the time 



HABIT 55 

of such a man goes to the deciding, or regret- 
ting, of matters which ought to be so in- 
grained in him as practically not to exist for 
his consciousness at all. If there be such 
daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of 
my readers, let him begin this very hour to 
set the matter right. 

In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral 
Habits' there are some admirable practical 
remarks laid down. Two great maxims 
emerge from his treatment. The first is that 
in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leav- 
ing off of an old one, we must take care to 
launch ourselves with as strong and decided 
an initiative as possible. Accumulate all 
the possible circumstances which shall re- 
enforce the right motives ; put yourself assidu- 
ously in conditions that encourage the new 
way; make engagements incompatible with 
the old; take a public pledge, if the case 
allows; in short, envelop your resolution with 



56 HABIT 

every aid you know. This will give your 
new beginning such a momentum that the 
temptation to break down will not occur as 
soon as it otherwise might; and every day 
during which a breakdown is postponed 
adds to the chances of its not occurring 
at all. 

The second maxim is: Never suffer an 
exception to occur till the new habit is securely 
rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the 
letting fall of a ball of string which one is 
carefully winding up; a single slip undoes 
more than a great many turns will wind 
again. Continuity of training is the great 
means of making the nervous system 
act infallibly right. As Professor Bain 
says: 

"The peculiarity of the moral habits, con- 
tradistinguishing them from the intellectual 
acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile 



HABIT 57 

powers, one to be gradually raised into the 
ascendant over the other. It is necessary, 
above all things, in such a situation, never 
to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong 
side undoes the effect of many conquests on 
the right. The essential precaution, there- 
fore, is so to regulate the two opposing powers 
that the one may have a series of uninter- 
rupted successes, until repetition has forti- 
fied it to such a degree as to enable it to cope 
with the opposition, under any circumstances. 
This is the theoretically best career of mental 
progress." 

The need of securing success at the outset 
is imperative. Failure at first is apt to 
dampen the energy of all future attempts, 
whereas past experience of success nerves 
one to future vigor. Goethe says to a man 
who consulted him about an enterprise but 
mistrusted his own powers: "Ach! you 



58 HABIT 

need only blow on your hands!" And the 
remark illustrates the effect on Goethe's 
spirits of his own habitually successful career. 
Prof. Baumann, from whom I borrow the 
anecdote, 1 says that the collapse of barbarian 
nations when Europeans come among them 
is due to their despair of ever succeeding as 
the new-comers do in the larger tasks of life. 
Old ways are broken and new ones not 
formed. 

The question of ' tapering-off , ' in abandon- 
ing such habits as drink and opium-indul- 
gence, comes in here, and is a question about 
which experts differ within certain limits, and 
in regard to what may be best for an individ- 
ual case. In the main, however, all expert 
opinion would agree that abrupt acquisition 
of the new habit is the best way, // there be a 
real possibility of carrying it out. We must 

1 See the admirable passage about success at the outset, in 
his 'Handbuch der Moral* (1378), pp. 38-43. 



HABIT 59 

be careful not to give the will so stiff a task 
as to insure its defeat at the very outset; 
but, provided one can stand it, a sharp period 
of suffering, and then a free time, is the best 
thing to aim at, whether in giving up a habit 
like that of opium, or in simply changing 
one's hours of rising or of work. It is sur- 
prising how soon a desire will die of inanition 
if it be never fed. 

"One must first learn, unmoved, looking 
neither to the right nor left, to walk firmly 
on the straight and narrow path, before one 
can begin 'to make one's self over again.' 
He who every day makes a fresh resolve 
is like one who, arriving at the edge of the 
ditch he is to leap, forever stops and returns 
for a fresh run. Without unbroken advance 
there is no such thing as accumulation of the 
ethical forces possible, and to make this 
possible, and to exercise us and habituate us 



60 HABIT 

in it, is the sovereign blessing of regular 
work/ 1 l 

A third maxim may be added to the pre- 
ceding pair: Seize the Very first possible 
opportunity to act on every resolution you make, 
and on every emotional prompting you may 
experience in the direction of the habits you 
aspire to gain. It is not in the moment of 
their forming, but in the moment of their 
producing motor effects, that resolves and 
aspirations communicate the new 'set' to 
the brain. As the author last quoted 
remarks: 

"The actual presence of the practical 
opportunity alone furnishes the fulcrum 
upon which the lever can rest, by means of 
which the moral will may multiply its 

1 J. Bahnsen: 'Beitrage zu Charakterologie' (1867), vol. 
I. p. 209. 



HABIT 61 

strength, and raise itself aloft. He who has 
no solid ground to press against will never 
get beyond the stage of empty gesture- 
making.' ' 

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims 
one may possess, and no matter how good 
one's sentiments may be, if one have not 
taken advantage of every concrete oppor- 
tunity to ad, one's character may remain 
entirely unaffected for the better. With 
mere good intentions, hell is proverbially 
paved. And this is an obvious consequence 
of the principles we have laid down. A 
'character, ' as J. S. Mill says, 'is a completely 
fashioned will'; and a will, in the sense in 
which he means it, is an aggregate of ten- 
dencies to act in a firm and prompt and defi- 
nite way upon all the principal emergencies 
of life. A tendency to act only becomes effec- 
tively ingrained in us in proportion to the 



62 HABIT 

uninterrupted frequency with which the 
actions actually occur, and the brain 'grows' 
to their use. Every time a resolve or a fine 
glow of feeling evaporates without bearing 
practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; 
it works so as positively to hinder future reso- 
lutions and emotions from taking the normal 
path of discharge. There is no more con- 
temptible type of human character than that 
of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, 
who spends his life in a weltering sea of 
sensibility and emotion, but who never does 
a manly concrete deed. Rousseau, inflam- 
ing all the mothers of France, by his elo- 
quence, to follow Nature and nurse their 
babies themselves, while he sends his own 
children to the foundling hospital, is the 
classical example of what I mean. But 
every one of us in his measure, whenever, 
after glowing for an abstractly formulated 
Good, he practically ignores some actual 



HABIT 63 

case, among the squalid 'other particulars' 
of which that same Good lurks disguised, 
treads straight on Rousseau's path. All 
Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their 
concomitants, in this work-a-day world; but 
woe to him who can only recognize them 
when he thinks them in their pure and 
abstract form ! The habit of excessive novel- 
reading and theatre-going will produce true 
monsters in this line. The weeping of a 
Russian lady over the fictitious personages 
in the play, while her coachman is freezing 
to death on his seat outside, is the sort of 
thing that everywhere happens on a less 
glaring scale. Even the habit of excessive 
indulgence in music, for those who are 
neither performers themselves nor musically 
gifted enough to take it in a purely intellec- 
tual way, has probably a relaxing effect upon 
the character. One becomes filled with 
emotions which habitually pass without 



64 HABIT 

prompting to any deed, and so the inertly 
sentimental condition is kept up. The 
remedy would be, never to suffer one's self 
to have an emotion at a concert, without 
expressing it afterward in some active way. 1 
Let the expression be the least thing in the 
world speaking genially to one's aunt, or 
giving up one's seat in a horse-car, if nothing 
more heroic offers but let it not fail to take 
place. 

These latter cases make us aware that it 
is not simply particular lines of discharge, but 
also general forms of discharge, that seem to 
be grooved out by habit in the brain. Just 
as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get 
into a way of evaporating; so there is reason 
to suppose that if we often flinch from making 
an effort, before we know it the effort-making 
capacity will be gone; and that, if we suffer 

1 See for remarks on this subject a readable article by Miss V. 
Scudder on 'Musical Devotees and Morals,' in the Andover 
Review for January, 1887. 



HABIT 65 

the wandering of our attention, presently it 
will wander all the time. Attention and 
effort are, as we shall see later, but two names 
for the same psychic fact. To what brain- 
processes they correspond we do not know. 
The strongest reason for believing that they 
do depend on brain-processes at all, and are 
not pure acts of the spirit, is just this fact, 
that they seem in some degree subject to the 
law of habit, which is a material law. As a 
final practical maxim, relative to these habits 
of the will, we may, then, offer something 
like this: Keep the faculty of effort alive in 
you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. 
That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic 
in little unnecessary points, do every day or 
two something for no other reason than that 
you would rather not do it, so that when the 
hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you 
not unnerved and untrained to stand the 
test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insur- 



66 HABIT 

ance which a man pays on his house and 
goods. The tax does him no good at the 
time, and possibly may never bring him a 
return. But if the fire does come, his having 
paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So 
with the man who has daily inured himself 
to habits of concentrated attention, ener- 
getic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary 
things. He will stand like a tower when 
everything rocks around him, and when his 
softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff 
in the blast. 

The physiological study of mental con- 
ditions is thus the most powerful ally of 
hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured 
hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse 
than the hell we make for ourselves in this 
world by habitually fashioning our charac- 
ters in the wrong way. Could the young 
but realize how soon they will become mere 
walking bundles of habits, they would give 



HABIT 67 

more heed to their conduct while in the plas- 
tic state. We are spinning our own fates, 
good or evil, and never to be undone. Every 
smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its 
never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van 
Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself 
for every fresh dereliction by saying, *I 
won't count this time!' Well! he may not 
count it, and a kind Heaven may not count 
it; but it is being counted none the less. 
Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the 
molecules are counting it, registering and 
storing it up to be used against him when the 
next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do 
is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. 
Of course, this has its good side as well as 
its bad one. As we become permanent 
drunkards by so many separate drinks, so 
we become saints in the moral, and author- 
ities and experts in the practical and scien- 
tific spheres, by so many separate acts and 



68 HABIT 

hours of work. Let no youth have any 
anxiety about the upshot of his education, 
whatever the line of it may be. If he keep 
faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, 
he may safely leave the final result to itself. 
He can with perfect certainty count on 
waking up some fine morning, to find himself 
one of the competent ones of his generation, 
in whatever pursuit he may have singled out. 
Silently, between all the details of his busi- 
ness, the power of judging in all that class of 
matter will have built itself up within him as 
a possession that will never pass away. 
Young people should know this truth in 
advance. The ignorance of it has probably 
engendered more discouragement and faint- 
heartedness in youths embarking on ardu- 
ous careers than all other causes put together. 






mf 

Source: 

http://archive.org/stream/habitjam00jameuoft/habitjam00jameuoft_djvu.tx