HABITS
"Why, will shall break it; will and nothing else."
_Love's Labor's Lost_.
Dreads are brakes on the will, inhibitions which prevent its exercise
and make accomplishment very difficult and sometimes impossible. They
represent mainly a state of mind, yet often they contain physical
elements, and the disposition counts for much. Their counterpart in
the opposite direction is represented by habits which are acquired
facilities of action for good or for ill. Habits not only make
activities easy but they even produce such a definite tendency to the
performance of certain actions as to make it difficult not to do them.
They may become so strong as to be tyrants for ill, though it must not
be forgotten that properly directed they may master what is worst in
us and help us up the hill of life. Acts that are entirely voluntary
and very difficult at first may become by habit so {43} natural that
it is extremely difficult to do otherwise than follow the ingrained
tendency. Nature's activities are imperative. Habitual actions may
become equally so. When some one once remarked to the Duke of
Wellington that habit was second nature, he replied:
"Oh, ever so much more than that! Habit may be ten times as strong as
nature."
The function of the will in health is mainly to prevent the formation
of bad habits or break those that have been formed, but above all, to
bring about the formation of habits that will prevent as far as is
possible the development of tendencies to disease in the body, Man
probably faces no more difficult problem in life than the breaking of
a bad habit. Usually it requires the exercise of all his will power
applied to its fullest extent. If there is a more difficult problem
than the breaking of a bad habit it is the formation of a good one
late in life because of the persistency of advertence and effort that
is required. It is comparatively easy to prevent the formation of bad
habits and also easy to form good habits in the earlier years. The
organism is then plastic and yields itself readily and thus becomes
grooved to the habit or hardened against it by the performance of even
a few acts.
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All the psychologists insist that after the period of the exercise of
instinct as the basis of life passes, habit becomes the great force
for good or for ill. We become quite literally a bundle of habits, and
the success of life largely depends on whether these habits are
favorable or unfavorable to the accomplishment of what is best in us.
More than anything else health depends on habit. We begin by doing
things more or less casually, and after a time a tendency to do them
is created; then almost before we know it, we find that we have a
difficult task before us, if we try not to do them.
To begin with, the activity which becomes the subject of a habit may
be distinctly unpleasant and require considerable effort to
accomplish. Practically every one who has learned to smoke recalls
more or less vividly the physical disturbance caused by the first
attempt and how even succeeding smokes for some time, far from being
pleasant, required distinct effort and no little self-control. After a
time, the desire to smoke becomes so ingrained that a man is literally
made quite miserable by the lack of it and finds himself almost
incapable of doing anything else until he has had his smoke.
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Even more of an effort is required to establish the habit of chewing
tobacco, and it is even more difficult to break when once it has been
formed. Any one who has seen the discomfort and even torments endured
by a man who, after he had chewed tobacco for many years, tried to
stop will appreciate fully what a firm hold the habit has obtained. I
have known a serious business man who almost had to give up business,
who lost his sleep and his appetite and went through a nervous crisis
merely by trying to break the habit of chewing tobacco.
In the Orient they chew betel nut. It is an extremely hot material
which burns the tongue and which a man can stand for only a very short
time when he first tries it. After a while, however, he finds a
pleasant stimulation of sensation in the constant presence of the
biting betel nut in his mouth; he craves it and cannot do his work so
well without it. He will ever advert to its use and will be restless
without it. He continues to use it in spite of the fact that the
intense irritation set up by the biting qualities of the substance
causes cancer of the tongue to occur ten times as frequently among
those who chew betel nut as among the rest of the population. Not all
{46} those who chew it get cancer, for some die from other causes
before there is time for the cancer to develop, and some seem to
possess immunity against the irritation. The betel nut chewer ignores
all this, proceeds to form the habit, urged thereto by the force of
example, and then lets himself drift along, hoping that it will have
no bad effects.
The alcohol and drug habits are quite as significant in shortening
life as betel nut and yet men take them up quite confident in the
beginning that _they_ will not fall victims, and then find themselves
enmeshed. It is probable that the direct physical effects of none of
these substances shorten life to a marked degree unless they are
indulged in to very great excess, but the moral hazards which they
produce, accidents, injuries of various kinds, exposure to disease,
all these shorten life. Men know this very well, and yet persist in
the formation of these habits.
Any habit, no matter how strong, can be broken if the individual
really wishes to break it, provided the subject of it is not actually
insane or on the way to the insane asylum. He need only get a motive
strong enough to rouse his will, secure a consciousness of his own
power, and then the habit can be broken. {47} After all, it must never
be forgotten that the only thing necessary in order to break a habit
effectively is to refuse to perform a single act of it, the next time
one is tempted. That breaks the habit and makes refusal easier and one
need only continue the refusal until the temptation ceases.
Men who have not drawn a sober breath for years have sometimes come to
the realization of the fools that they were making of themselves, the
injury they were doing their relatives, or perhaps have been touched
by a child's words or some religious motive, and after that they have
never touched liquor again. Father Theobald Mathew's wonderful work in
this regard among the Irish in the first half of the nineteenth
century has been repeated by many temperance or total abstinence
advocates in more recent generations. I have known a confirmed
drunkard reason himself into a state of mind from which he was able to
overcome his habit very successfully, though his reasoning consisted
of nothing more than the recognition of the fact that suggestion was
the root of his craving for alcohol. His father had been a drunkard
and he had received so many warnings from all his older relatives and
had himself so come to dwell on {48} the possible danger of his own
formation of the habit that he had suggested himself into the frame of
mind in which he took to drink. I have known a physician on whom some
half a dozen different morphine cures had been tried--always followed
by a relapse--cure himself by an act of his own will and stay cured
ever since because of an incident that stirred him deeply enough to
arouse his will properly to activity. One day his little boy of about
four was in his office when father prepared to give himself one of his
usual injections of morphine. The little boy gave very close attention
to all his father's manipulations, and as the doctor was hurrying to
keep an appointment, he did not notice the intent eye witness of the
proceedings. Just as the needle was pushed home and the piston shot
down in the barrel, the little boy rushed over to his father and said,
"Oh, Daddy, do that to me." Apparently this close childish observer
had noted something of the look of satisfaction that came over his
father's face as he felt the fluid sink into his tissues. It is almost
needless to say that the shock the father received was enough to break
his morphine habit for good and all. It simply released his will and
then he found that if he {49} really wanted to, he could accomplish
what the various cures for the morphine habit only lead up to--and in
his case unsuccessfully--the exercise of his own will power.
The word "habit" suggests nearly always, unfortunately, the thought of
bad habits, just as the word "passion" implies, with many people, evil
tendencies. But it must not be forgotten that there are good passions
and good habits that are as helpful for the accomplishment of what is
best in life as bad passions and bad habits are harmful. A repetition
of acts is needed for the formation of good habits just as for the
establishment of customs of evil. Usually, however, and this must not
be forgotten, the beginning of a good habit is easier than the
beginning of a bad habit. Once formed, the good habits are even more
beneficial than the bad habits are harmful. It is almost as hard to
break a good habit as a bad one, provided that it has been continued
for a sufficient length of time to make that groove in the nervous
system which underlies all habit. We cannot avoid forming habits and
the question is, shall we form good or bad habits? Good habits
preserve health, make life easier and happier; bad habits have the
opposite effect, though {50} there is some countervailing personal
element that tempts to their formation and persistence.
Every failure to do what we should has its unfortunate effect upon us.
We get into a state in which it is extremely difficult for us to do
the right things. We have to overcome not only the original inertia of
nature, but also a contrary habit. If we do not follow our good
impulses, the worse ones get the upper hand. As Professor James said,
for we must always recur to him when we want to have the clear
expression of many of these ideas:
"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 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."
It must not be forgotten that we mold not {51} alone what we call
character, but that we manifestly produce effects upon our tissues
that are lasting. Indeed it is these that count the most, for health
at least. It is the physical basis of will and intellect that is
grooved by what we call habit. As Doctor Carpenter says:
"Our nervous systems have 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 afterwards into the same identical
fold."
Permitting exceptions to occur when we are forming a habit is almost
necessarily disturbing. The classical figure is that it is like
letting fall a ball of string which we have been winding. It undoes in
a moment all that we have accomplished in a long while. As Professor
Bain has said it so much better than I could, I prefer to quote him:
"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 {52} 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 means training the will by a series of difficult acts,
accomplished in spite of the effort they require, but which gradually
become easier from repeated performance until habit replaces nature
and dominates the situation.
Serious thinkers who faced humanity's problems squarely and devoted
themselves to finding solutions for them had worked out this formula
of the need of will training long ago, and it was indeed a principal
characteristic of medieval education. The old monastic schools were
founded on the idea that training of the will and the formation of
good habits was ever so much more important than the accumulation of
information. They frankly called the human will the highest faculty of
mankind and felt that to neglect it would be a serious defect in
education. The will can only be trained by the accomplishment of
difficult things day after day until its energies are aroused and the
man becomes conscious of his own powers and the {53} ability to use
them whenever he really wishes. There was a time not so long since,
and there are still voices raised to that purport, when it was the
custom to scoff at the will training of the older time and above all
the old-fashioned suggestion that mortifications of various
kinds--that is, the doing of unpleasant things just for the sake of
doing them--should be practiced because of the added will power thus
acquired. The failure of our modern education which neglected this
special attention to the will is now so patent as to make everyone
feel that there must be a recurrence to old time ideas once more.
The formation of proper habits should, then, be the main occupation of
the early years. This will assure health as well as happiness, barring
the accidents that may come to any human being. Good habits make
proper living easy and after a time even pleasant, though there may
have been considerable difficulty in the performance of the acts
associated with them at the beginning. Indeed, the organism becomes so
accustomed to their performance after a time that it becomes actually
something of a trial to omit them, and they are missed.
Education consists much more in such {54} training of the will than in
storing the intellect with knowledge, though the latter idea has been
unfortunately the almost exclusive policy in our education in recent
generations. We are waking up to the fact that diminution of power has
been brought about by striving for information instead of for the
increase of will energy.
Professor Conklin of Princeton, in his volume on "Heredity and
Environment", emphasized the fact that "Will is indeed the supreme
human faculty, the whole mind in action, the internal stimulus which
may call forth all the capacities and powers." He had said just before
this: "It is one of the most serious indictments against modern
systems of education that they devote so much attention to the
training of the memory and intellect and so little attention to the
training of the will, upon the proper development of which so much
depends."
Nor must it be thought that the idea behind this training of the will
is in any sense medievally ascetic and old-fashioned and that it does
not apply to our modern conditions and modes of thinking. Professor
Huxley would surely be the one man above all whom any one in our times
would be least likely to think of {55} as mystical in his ways or
medieval in his tendencies. In his address on "A Liberal Education and
Where to Find It", delivered before the South London Workingmen's
College some forty years ago, in emphasizing what he thought was the
real purpose of education, he dwelt particularly on the training of
the will. He defined a liberal education not as so many people might
think of it in terms of the intellect, but rather in terms of the
will. He said that a liberal education was one "which has not only
prepared a man to escape the great evils of disobedience to natural
laws, but has trained him to appreciate and to seize upon the rewards
which nature scatters with as free a hand as her penalties." And then
he added:
"That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so
trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and
does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is
capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all
its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order, ready,
like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the
gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is
stored with a knowledge of the great {56} and fundamental truths of
nature and of the laws of her operations; one who is no stunted
ascetic but who is full of life and fire, but whose passions are
trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender
conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or
of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.
"Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education;
for he is, completely as a man can be, in harmony with nature."
This is the liberal education in habits of order and power that every
one must strive for, so that all possible energies may be available
for the rewards of good health. Details of the habits that mean much
for health must be reserved for subsequent chapters, but it must be
appreciated in any consideration of the relation of the will to health
that good habits formed as early as possible in life and maintained
conservatively as the years advance are the mainstay of health and the
power to do work.
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