* The Physiology of Mind, p. 155.



HABIT. 139

to realize how much he owes to its automatic agency until
disease has impaired its functions."

Secondly, habit diminishes the conscious attention with
which our acts are performed.

One may state this abstractly thus: If an act require for
its execution a chain, J, B, C, D, E, F, G, etc., of success-
ive 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 alterna-
tive offering itself, and without any reference to the con-
scious 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.
Whilst we are learning to walk, to ride, to swim, skate,
fence, write, play, or sing, we interrupt ourselves at every
step by unnecessary movements and false notes. When
we are proficients, on the contrary, the results follow not
only with the very minimum of muscular action requisite
to bring them forth, but they follow from a single instan-
taneous * 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 return. A glance at the musical hieroglyphics, and
the pianist's fingers have rippled through a shower 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 ? Persons in going to their bed-
room 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 lial)itiial issue of the first few move-
ments when perforiucfl at a later hour. We all have a



140 P8TCH0L0Q Y.

definite routine manner of performing certain daily offices
connected with the toilet, with the opening and shutting of
familiar cupboards, and the like. But our higher thought-
centres know hardly anything about the 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 the shutters 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 mus-
cular contraction to take place in its appointed order is
not a thought or a perception, but the seiisation occasioned
by the muscular contraction just finished. A strictly vol-
untary act has to be guided by idea, perception, and voli-
tion, throughout its whole course. In 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, D, E, F, G represent an habitual chain of
muscular contractions, and let a, b, c, d, e, f stand for the
several sensations which these contractions excite in us
when they are successively performed. Such sensations



HABIT. 141

will usually be in the parts moved, but they may also be
effects of the movement upon the eye or the ear. Tlirough
them, and tlirough them alone, \vc are made aware whether
or not tlie contraction has occurred. When the series,
A, li, C, D, E, F, G, is being learned, each of these sensa-
tions becomes the object of a separate act of attention by the
mind. We test each movement intellectually, to see if it
have been rightly performed, before advancing to the next.
We hesitate, compare, choose, revoke, reject, etc.; and the
order by which the next movement is discharged is an
express order from the ideational centres after this delib-
eration has been gone through.

In habitual action, on the contrary, the only impulse
which the intellectual centres need send down is that which
carries the command to 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 tiie
habitual conditions of the chain, the presence, e.g., of the
keyboard near the hand. In the present example, no
sooner hits this conscious thought or volition instigated
movement A, than A, through the sensation a of its own
occurrence, awakens B rellexly; B then excites C through
b, and so on till the ciiain is ended, when the intellect
generally takes cognizance of the final result. The intel-
lectual perception at the end is indicated in the diagram
by the sensible effect of the movement G being represented
at G', in the ideational centres above the merely sensational
line. The sensational impressions, a, />, c, d, e,f, are all
su|»|)o>('d tfi liavc their seat below tlie ideational level.

Habits depend on sensations not attended to. AVe have
called (I, l>, '•, li, c, f, by the name of 'sensations,' If
sensations, they are sensations to whicii we are usually
inattentive; but that they are more than unconscious
nerve-currents seems certain, for they catch our attention
if they go wrong. Schneider's account of these sensations
deserves to be quoted. In the act of walking, he says,
even when our attention is entirely absorbed elsewhere.



142 PSTCHOLOOT.

it is doubtful whether we could preserve equilibrium if
no sensation of our body's attitude were there, and doubt-
ful 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 keej^s up
her knitting even while she reads or is engaged in lively
talk. But if we ask her how tliis is possible, she will
hardly reply that the knitting goes on of itself. She will
rather say that slie has a feeling of it, tliat she feels in her
hands that she knits and how she must knit, and that
therefore the movements of knitting are called forth and
regulated by the sensations associated therewitlnil. even
when the attention is called away. . . ." Again: " Wiiena
pupil begins to play on the violin, to keep him from rais-
ing his right elbow in playing a book is placed under his
right armpit, which he is ordered to hold fast by keeping
the upper arm tight against his body. The muscular feel-
ings, and feelings of contact connected with the book, pro-
voke an impulse to press it tight. But often it happens
that the beginner, whose attention gets absorbed in the
production of the notes, lets drop the book. Later, how-
ever, 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 ivith which in tis, alongside of intellectual
processes, processes of inattentive feeling onay still go on."
Ethical and Pedagogical Importance of the Principle of
Habit. — "Habit a second nature! Habit is ten times na-
ture," the Duke of Wellington is said to have exclaimed ;
and the degree to which this is true no one probably can
appreciate as well as one who is a veteran soldier himself.
The daily drill and the years of discipline end by fashion-
ing a man completely over again, as to most of the possi-
bilities of his conducto



HABIT. 143

"There is a story," says Prof. Huxley, "which is credi-
ble enough, though it may not be true, of a practical joker
who. seeing a discharged veteran carrying home his dinner,
suddeidy called out, 'Attention!' whereupon the man in-
stantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton and
potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and
its eflfects had become embodied in the man's nervoua
structure."

Riderless cavalry-horses, at many a battle, have been seen
to come together and go through their customary evolu-
tions at the sound of the bugle-call. Most domestic beasts
seem machines almost pure and simple, undoubtingly, un-
hesitatingly 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 be-
ing once set free. In a railroad accident a menagerie-tiger,
whose cage had broken open, is said to have emerged, 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
fortune 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
keei)s the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the
winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails tiie
countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through
all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the
natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all
to fight out the battle of life upn.i the lines of our nurture
or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that
disagrees, because there is no other for wliich 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



144 PSYCHOLOG r.

see the professional mannerism settling down on the young
commercial 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 character has set like plaster, and will never soften
again.

If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical
one in the formation of intellectual and professional habits,
the period below twenty is more important still for the fix-
ing of personal habits, properly so called, such as vocaliza-
tion and pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address.
Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty spoken
without a foreign accent; hardly ever can a youth trans-
ferred 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. Tlie 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-clad
acquaintances contrive to get the things they wear will be
for him a mystery till his dying day.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our
nervons 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 make automatic and
Jiahitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as ive
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



MABJT. 145

jan hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the
more our liiglier powers of mind will be set free for their
own proper work. There is no more miserable hunum be-
ing than one in whom nothing is habitual but iiulecision,
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 ex-
press volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a
man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which
ouglit to be so ingrained 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 leaving 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 assiduously in conditions that
encourage the new way; make engagements inconipatil)lo
with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in
short, envelop your resolution with 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 break-
down is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring
at all.

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

"The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguish-



146 PSYCHOLOGY.

ing them from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence
of two hostile 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, therefore, is so to regulate
the two opposing powers that the one may have a series of
uninterrupted successes, until reiDetition has fortified 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 damp the energy of all future at-
tempts, whereas past experiences of success nerve one to
future vigor. Goethe says to a man who consulted him
about an enterprise but mistrusted his own powers : "Ach !
you need only blow on your hands ! " And the remark
illustrates the effect on Goethe's spirits of his own habitu-
ally successful career.

The question of " tapering-off," in abandoning such habits
as drink and opium-indulgence comes in here, and is a
question about which experts differ within certain limits,
and in regard to what may be best for an individual case.
In the main, however, all expert opinion would agree that
abrupt acquisition of the new habit is the best way, if there
be a real possibility of carrying it out. AVe must be care-
ful not to give the will so stiff a task as to insure its defeat
at the very outset; hut, 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 surprising how soon a desire will die of manition if it be
never fed.

*' One must first learn, unmoved, looking neither to the
right nor loft, to walk firmly on the strait 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,



HABIT. 147

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 in it, is the sovereign blessing of regular
work." *

A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair;
Seize the eery first jmssible opportunity to acton every reso-
lution you make, and on every emotional prompting you
may experience in the direction of the hahils 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 strength,
and raise itself aloft. He who has no solid ground to
press against will never get beyond the stage of empty
gesture-making."

Xo matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may pos-
sess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if
one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportu-
nity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected
for the better. With mere good intentions, hell i.-> pro-
ver})ially paved. And tliis is an obvious consequence of
the princij)les we have laid down. A " cliaracter,' as J. S.
Mill says, * is a compk'toly fashioned will'; and a will, in
tlie sense in which lie means it, is an aggregate of tenden-
cies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all
the principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only
becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the
nnintorrujited frequency with which the actions actually
occur, and the brain 'grows' to their use. When a resolve
or u fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate without

•J. I'.aljn.sen ; ' Hoitrlge zu CLuraktcrolnj^io ' (1807), vol. I. p. 200



148 PSYCHO LOOT.

bearing practical fruit it is worse than a chance lost; it
works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emo-
tions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is
no more contemptible 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. Eousseau, inflaming
all the mothers of France, by his eloquence, 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 formu-
lated Good, he practically ignores some actual 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 the 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 exces-
sive indulgence in music, for those who are neither per-
formers themselves nor musically gifted enough to take it
in a purely intellectual way, has probably a relaxing effect
upon the character. One becomes filled with emotions
which habitually pass without 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 emo-
tion at a concert, without expressing it afterward in some
active way. Let the expression be the least thing in the
world — speaking genially to one's grandmother, 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



UABl'l. 149

particular lines of discharge, but also general forms of
discharge, that seem to be grooved out by liabit iu tlie
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 makiiig an eifort, before we
know it the etfort-making capacity will be gone; and that,
if wo sutTer 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 faciilti/ of effort alive
in you by a little gratuitous exercise every clay. 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 insurance 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 concen-
trated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in un-
necessary things, lie will stand like a tower when every-
thing rucks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals
are winnowed like chaff in the bhist.

The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the
most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to bo
endured hereafter, of whieji theology tells, is no worse than
the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually
fjtfhioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the
young but realize how soon they will booomo mere walking



150 PSYGHOLOOY.

bundle!* of habits, they would give more heed to their con-
duct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own
fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every small-
est 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
Decome saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in
the practical and scientific sjjheres, by so many separate
acts and 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 work-
ing 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 business, the i)oioer
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 discourage-
ment and faint-heartedness in youths embarking on ardu-
ous careers than all other causes put together.



CHAPTER XI.

THE STREA^I OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

The order of our study must be analytic. "We are no.v
prepared to bej^i.i tlie introspective study of tlie adult con
sciousness itself. Most books adopt tlie so-called synthetic
method. Starting with 'simple ideas of sensation/ and re-