It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of
habit, and psychology helps us greatly at this point. We speak, it is
true, of good habits and of bad habits; but, when people use the word
'habit,' in the majority of instances it is a bad habit which they
have in mind. They talk of the smoking-habit and the swearing-habit
and the drinking-habit, but not of the abstention-habit or the
moderation-habit or the courage-habit. But the fact is that our
virtues are habits as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it
has definite form, is but a mass of habits,--practical, emotional, and
intellectual,--systematically organized for our weal or woe, and
bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.
Since pupils can understand this at a comparatively early age, and since
to understand it contributes in no small measure to their feeling of
responsibility, it would be well if the teacher were able himself to
talk to them of the philosophy of habit in some such abstract terms as I
am now about to talk of it to you.
I believe that we are subject to the law of habit in consequence of the
fact that we have bodies. The plasticity of the living matter of our
nervous system, in short, is the reason why we do a thing with
difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and
finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with
hardly any consciousness at all. Our nervous systems have (in Dr.
Carpenter's words) _grown_ to the way in which they have been exercised,
just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to
fall forever afterward into the same identical folds.
Habit is thus a second nature, or rather, as the Duke of Wellington
said, it is 'ten times nature,'--at any rate as regards its importance
in adult life; for the acquired habits of our training have by that time
inhibited or strangled most of the natural impulsive tendencies which
were originally there. Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred
and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and
habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
Our dressing and undressing, our eating and drinking, our greetings and
partings, our hat-raisings and giving way for ladies to precede, nay,
even most of the forms of our common speech, are things of a type so
fixed by repetition as almost to be classed as reflex actions. To each
sort of impression we have an automatic, ready-made response. My very
words to you now are an example of what I mean; for having already
lectured upon habit and printed a chapter about it in a book, and read
the latter when in print, I find my tongue inevitably falling into its
old phrases and repeating almost literally what I said before.
So far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we are stereotyped
creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves. And since this,
under any circumstances, is what we always tend to become, it follows
first of all that the teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into
the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him
throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of
which behavior consists.
To quote my earlier book directly, the great thing in all education is
to _make 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 make automatic and habitual, as
early as possible, as many useful actions as we can_, and as carefully
guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be
disadvantageous. 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 of such a man goes to the deciding or
regretting of matters which ought 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 hearers, 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 the
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 reinforce the right motives; put
yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make
engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case
allows; in short, envelope 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 breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not
occurring at all.
I remember long ago reading in an Austrian paper the advertisement of a
certain Rudolph Somebody, who promised fifty gulden reward to any one
who after that date should find him at the wine-shop of Ambrosius
So-and-so. 'This I do,' the advertisement continued, 'in consequence of
a promise which I have made my wife.' With such a wife, and such an
understanding of the way in which to start new habits, it would be safe
to stake one's money on Rudolph's ultimate success.
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, contradistinguishing 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
repetition 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."
A third maxim may be added to the preceding 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.
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 opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely
unaffected for the better. With good intentions, hell proverbially is
paved. This is an obvious consequence of the principles I 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
tendencies 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 uninterrupted frequency
with which the actions actually occur, and the brain 'grows' to their
use. When a resolve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate
without bearing practical fruit, it is worse than a chance lost: it
works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions 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, but
never does a concrete manly deed.
This leads to a fourth maxim. _Don't preach too much to your pupils or
abound in good talk in the abstract_. Lie in wait rather for the
practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus
at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do. The
strokes of _behavior_ are what give the new set to the character, and
work the good habits into its organic tissue. Preaching and talking too
soon become an ineffectual bore.
* * * * *
There is a passage in Darwin's short autobiography which has been often
quoted, and which, for the sake of its bearing on our subject of habit,
I must now quote again. Darwin says: "Up to the age of thirty or beyond
it, poetry of many kinds gave me great pleasure; and even as a schoolboy
I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical
plays. I have also said that pictures formerly gave me considerable, and
music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read
a line of poetry. I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it
so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my
taste for pictures or music.... My mind seems to have become a kind of
machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts; but
why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone,
on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.... If I had to
live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and
listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of
my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept alive through use. The
loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be
injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by
enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."
We all intend when young to be all that may become a man, before the
destroyer cuts us down. We wish and expect to enjoy poetry always, to
grow more and more intelligent about pictures and music, to keep in
touch with spiritual and religious ideas, and even not to let the
greater philosophic thoughts of our time develop quite beyond our view.
We mean all this in youth, I say; and yet in how many middle-aged men
and women is such an honest and sanguine expectation fulfilled? Surely,
in comparatively few; and the laws of habit show us why. Some interest
in each of these things arises in everybody at the proper age; but, if
not persistently fed with the appropriate matter, instead of growing
into a powerful and necessary habit, it atrophies and dies, choked by
the rival interests to which the daily food is given. We make ourselves
into Darwins in this negative respect by persistently ignoring the
essential practical conditions of our case. We say abstractly: "I mean
to enjoy poetry, and to absorb a lot of it, of course. I fully intend to
keep up my love of music, to read the books that shall give new turns to
the thought of my time, to keep my higher spiritual side alive, etc."
But we do not attack these things concretely, and we do not begin
_to-day. _We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be
paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone, until
those smiling possibilities are dead. Whereas ten minutes a day of
poetry, of spiritual reading or meditation, and an hour or two a week at
music, pictures, or philosophy, provided we began _now_ and suffered no
remission, would infallibly give us in due time the fulness of all we
desire. By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing
ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of
our higher possibilities. This is a point concerning which you teachers
might well give a little timely information to your older and more
aspiring pupils.
According as a function receives daily exercise or not, the man becomes
a different kind of being in later life. We have lately had a number of
accomplished Hindoo visitors at Cambridge, who talked freely of life and
philosophy. More than one of them has confided to me that the sight of
our faces, all contracted as they are with the habitual American
over-intensity and anxiety of expression, and our ungraceful and
distorted attitudes when sitting, made on him a very painful impression.
"I do not see," said one, "how it is possible for you to live as you do,
without a single minute in your day deliberately given to tranquillity
and meditation. It is an invariable part of our Hindoo life to retire
for at least half an hour daily into silence, to relax our muscles,
govern our breathing, and meditate on eternal things. Every Hindoo child
is trained to this from a very early age." The good fruits of such a
discipline were obvious in the physical repose and lack of tension, and
the wonderful smoothness and calmness of facial expression, and
imperturbability of manner of these Orientals. I felt that my countrymen
were depriving themselves of an essential grace of character. How many
American children ever hear it said by parent or teacher, that they
should moderate their piercing voices, that they should relax their
unused muscles, and as far as possible, when sitting, sit quite still?
Not one in a thousand, not one in five thousand! Yet, from its reflex
influence on the inner mental states, this ceaseless over-tension,
over-motion, and over-expression are working on us grievous national
harm.
I beg you teachers to think a little seriously of this matter. Perhaps
you can help our rising generation of Americans toward the beginning of
a better set of personal ideals.[B]
[B] See the Address on the Gospel of Relaxation, later in
this volume.
* * * * *
To go back now to our general maxims, I may at last, as a fifth and
final practical maxim about habits, offer something like this: _Keep the
faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every
day._ That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do
every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, 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
concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in
unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks
around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the
blast.
* * * * *
I have been accused, when talking of the subject of habit, of making old
habits appear so strong that the acquiring of new ones, and particularly
anything like a sudden reform or conversion, would be made impossible by
my doctrine. Of course, this would suffice to condemn the latter; for
sudden conversions, however infrequent they may be, unquestionably do
occur. But there is no incompatibility between the general laws I have
laid down and the most startling sudden alterations in the way of
character. New habits _can_ be launched, I have expressly said, on
condition of there being new stimuli and new excitements. Now life
abounds in these, and sometimes they are such critical and revolutionary
experiences that they change a man's whole scale of values and system of
ideas. In such cases, the old order of his habits will be ruptured; and,
if the new motives are lasting, new habits will be formed, and build up
in him a new or regenerate 'nature.'
All this kind of fact I fully allow. But the general laws of habit are
no wise altered thereby, and the physiological study of mental
conditions still remains on the whole 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 characters in the wrong way. Could the young
but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits,
they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic 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 authorities and experts in the practical and scientific
spheres, 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 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 business, 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 arduous careers than all other causes put together.