HABIT.
=Its Importance for Psychology.=--There remains a condition of general
neural activity so important as to deserve a chapter by itself--I refer
to the aptitude of the nerve-centres, especially of the hemispheres, for
acquiring habits. _An acquired habit, from the physiological point of
view, is nothing but a new pathway of discharge formed in the brain, by
which certain incoming currents ever after tend to escape._ That is the
thesis of this chapter; and we shall see in the later and more
psychological chapters that such functions as the association of ideas,
perception, memory, reasoning, the education of the will, etc., etc.,
can best be understood as results of the formation _de novo_ of just
such pathways of discharge.
=Habit has a physical basis.= 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. On the principles of the atomistic
philosophy the habits of an elementary particle of matter cannot change,
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, 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 invisible 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 material 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 disintegrated 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 sense of the word, means the
possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but
strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of
equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set
of habits. Organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with
a very extraordinary degree of plasticity of this sort; so that we may
without hesitation lay down as our first proposition the following: that
_the phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of
the organic materials of which their bodies are composed_.
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. They call attention to analogues of acquired habits exhibited
by dead matter. Thus, M. Léon Dumont 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 cohesion.
A lock works better after being used some time; at the outset more
force was required to overcome certain roughness 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; ... and
just so in the nervous system the impressions of outer objects fashion
for themselves more and more appropriate paths, and these vital
phenomena recur under similar excitements from without, when they have
been interrupted a certain time."
Not in the nervous system alone. A scar anywhere is a _locus minoris
resistentiæ_, more 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 substitutes
itself for the sound one. And in the nervous system itself it is well
known 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 physiological forces to get possession of the field again,
and to bring the organs back to functions of health. Epilepsies,
neuralgias, convulsive affections of various sorts, insomnias, are so
many cases in point. And, to take what are more obviously habits, the
success with which a 'weaning' treatment can often be applied to the
victims of unhealthy indulgence 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.
=Habits are due to pathways through the nerve-centres.= If habits are due
to the plasticity of materials 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, as
we saw on pp. 9-10, Nature has so blanketed and wrapped the brain about
that the only impressions that can be made upon it are through the
blood, on the one hand, and the sensory nerve-roots, on the other; and
it is to the infinitely attenuated currents that pour in through these
latter channels that the hemispherical cortex shows itself to be so
peculiarly 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 pockets, or of biting one's nails--is, mechanically, 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 _concatenated_
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 stimulus to
provoke the next, until a final impression inhibits the process and
closes the chain.
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 modification, 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; but after a day or two of rest, when we resume the discipline, our
increase in skill not seldom 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.
=Practical Effects of Habit.=--First, habit simplifies our movements,
makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.
Man is born with a tendency to do more things than he has ready-made
arrangements for in his nerve-centres. Most of the performances of other
animals are automatic. But in him the number of them is so enormous 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 be in a sorry plight. As Dr. Maudsley says:[30]
"If an act became no easier after being done several times, if the
careful direction of consciousness were necessary to its accomplishment
on each occasion, it is evident that the whole activity of a lifetime
might be confined to one or two deeds--that no progress 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
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 conscious effort of the will soon produces exhaustion. A
spinal cord without ... memory 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 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, _A, B, C, D, E, 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. 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 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 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 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 of the first
few movements when performed at a later hour. We all 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. 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 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 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:
[Illustration: FIG. 51.]
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 will usually be in 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 whether or
not the contraction has occurred. When the series, _A, B, C, D, E, F,
G_, is being learned, each of these sensations 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 deliberation 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 the habitual conditions of the chain, the presence, e.g., of the
keyboard near the hand. In the present example, no sooner has this
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
intellectual 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, b, c, d, e, f_, are all supposed to have their seat
below the ideational level.
=Habits depend on sensations not attended to.= We have called _a, b, c, d,
e, f_, by the name of 'sensations.' If sensations, they are sensations
to which 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, 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 is 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 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...." Again: "When a pupil begins to play on the
violin, to keep him from raising 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 feelings, and
feelings of contact connected with the book, provoke 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,
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 combination 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._"
=Ethical and Pedagogical Importance of the Principle of Habit.=--"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
probably can appreciate as well as one who is a veteran soldier himself.
The daily drill and the years of discipline end by fashioning a man
completely over again, as to most of the possibilities of his conduct.
"There is a story," says Prof. Huxley, "which is credible enough, though
it may not be true, of a practical joker who, seeing a discharged
veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out, 'Attention!'
whereupon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton
and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and its effects
had become embodied in the man's nervous structure."
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 domestic beasts seem 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
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 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 invasion
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 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 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 fixing of _personal_ habits,
properly so called, such as vocalization and pronunciation, gesture,
motion, 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-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 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 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 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 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 incompatible 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 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, 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."
The need of securing success at the _outset_ is imperative. Failure at
first is apt to damp the energy of all future attempts, 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 habitually 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_. We must 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 surprising 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 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, 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."[31]
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. 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."
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 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 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 and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed.
Rousseau, 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 formulated 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
excessive indulgence in music, for those who are neither performers
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 emotion 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 _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 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 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 when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff
in the blast.
The physiological study of mental conditions 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 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.