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Chapter X
Habit
Its Importance for Psychology.There remains a condition of
general neural activity so important as to deserve a chapter by
itselfI 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

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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:
''Everyone 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 roughnesses in the
mechanism. The overcoming of their resistance is a
phenomenon of habituation. It costs less trouble to fold a
paper when it has been folded already; . . . and just so the
impressions of outer objects fashion for themselves in the
nervous system 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 rheu-

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matism 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 p. 18, 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 eventthe habit of snuffling, for
example, or of putting one's hands into one's pockets, or of biting
one's nailsis, mechanically, nothing but a reflex

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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
successivelythe 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:1
"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
1The Physiology of Mind, p. 154.

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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 even of an effort. For while secondary
automatic acts are accomplished with comparatively little
wearinessin this regard approaching the organic movements,
or the original reflex movementsthe conscious efforts of the
will soon produce exhaustion. A spinal cord without . . .
memory would simply be an idiotic spinal cord. . . . It is
impossible for an individual to realise 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

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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 insufficientthe 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:

Fig. 51.

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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,

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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."

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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

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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 circum-

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stances 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, contra-distinguishing
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

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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 straight and narrow path, before one
can begin 'to make one's self over again.' He who every day
makes a fresh resolve is like one who, arriving at the edge of the
ditch he is to leap, forever stops and returns for a fresh run.
Without unbroken advance there is no such thing as
accumulation of the ethical forces possible, and to make this
possible, and to exercise us and habituate us in it, is the
sovereign blessing of regular work."2
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
2J. Bahnsen: Beiträge zur Charakterologie (1867), vol. 1, p.
209.

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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 afterwards in some active way. Let the expression
be the least thing in the worldspeaking genially to one's
grandmother, or giving up one's seat in a horse-car, if nothing
more heroic offersbut let it not fail to take place.
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ular 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

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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.

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