The Ethical and Pedagogical
Importance of the Principle of Habit
by William James
"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 traveler, on the young doctor, on the young minister,
on the young counselor-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 fixings of personal
habits, properly so called, such as a 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 anyone 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. [J. Bahnsen]
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
everyone 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 theater-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. Ascetism 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.
1890