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Human Nature and Conduct

Part 1: The Place of Habit in Conduct:
II. Habits and Will

It is a significant fact
that in order to appreciate the peculiar place of habit in activity we have to
betake ourselves to had habits, foolish idling, gambling, addiction to liquor
and drugs. When we think of such habits, the union of habit with desire and with
propulsive power is forced upon us. When we think of habits in terms of walking,
playing a musical instrument, typewriting, we are much given to thinking of
habits as technical abilities existing apart from our likings and as lacking in
urgent impulsion. We think of them as passive tools waiting to be called into
action from without. A bad habit suggests an inherent tendency to action and
also a hold, command over us It makes us do things we are ashamed of, things
which we tell ourselves we prefer rot to do. It overrides our formal
resolutions, our conscious decisions. When we are honest with ourselves we
acknowledge that a habit has this power because it is so intimately a part of
ourselves. It has a hold upon us because we are the habit.

Our self-love, our
refusal to face facts, combined perhaps with a sense of et possible better
although unrealized self, leads us to eject the habit from the thought of
ourselves and conceive it as an evil power which has somehow overcome us. We
feed our conceit by recalling that the habit was no'' deliberately formed; we
never intended to become idlers or gamblers or roučs.

(25) And how cam anything
be deeply ourselves which developed accidentally, without set intention?
These traits of a bad habit are precisely the things which are most instructive
about all habits and about ourselves. They teach us that all habits are
affections, that all have projectile power, and that a predisposition formed by
a number of specific acts is an immensely more intimate and fundamental part of
ourselves than are vague, general, conscious choices. All habits are demands for
certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self. In any intelligible
sense of the word will, they are will. They form our effective desires and they
furnish us with our working capacities. They rule our thoughts, determining
which shall appear and be strong and which shall pass from light into obscurity.

We may think of habits as
means, waiting, like tools in a box, to be used by conscious resolve. But they
are something more than that. They are active means, means that project
themselves, energetic and dominating ways of acting. We need to distinguish
between materials, tools and means proper. Nails and boards are not strictly
speaking means of a box. They are only materials for making it. Even the saw and
hammer are means only when they are employed in some actual making. Otherwise
they are tools, or potential means. They are actual means only when brought ins
conjunction with eye, arm and hand in some specific operation. And eye, arm and
hand are, correspondingly, means proper only when they are in active
opera-

(26) -tion. And whenever
they are in action they are cooperating with external materials and energies.
Without support from beyond themselves the eye stares blankly and the hand moves
fumblingly. They are means only when they enter into organization with things
which independently accomplish definite results. These organizations are habits.

This fact cuts two ways.
Except in a contingent sense, with an " if," neither external materials nor
bodily and mental organs are in themselves means. They have to be employed in
coordinated conjunction with one another to be actual means, or habits. This
statement may seem like the formulation in technical language of a common-place.
But belief in magic has played a large part in human history. And the essence of
all hocus-pocus is the supposition that results can be accomplished without the
joint adaptation to each other of human powers and physical conditions. A desire
for rain may induce men to wave willow branches and to sprinkle water. The
reaction is natural and innocent. But men then go on to believe that their act
has immediate power to bring rain without the cooperation of intermediate
conditions of nature. This is magic; while it may be natural or spontaneous, it
is not innocent. It obstructs intelligent study of operative conditions and
wastes human desire and effort in futilities.

Belief in magic did not
cease when the coarser forms of superstitious practice ceased. The principle of
magic is found whenever it is hoped to get results

(27) without intelligent
control of means; and also when it is supposed that means can exist and yet
remain inert and inoperative. In morals and politics such expectations still
prevail, and in so far the most important phases of human action are still
affected by magic. We think that by feeling strongly enough about something, by
wishing hard enough, we can get a desirable result, such as virtuous execution
of a good resolve, or peace among nations, or good will in industry. We slur
over the necessity of the cooperative action of objective conditions, and the
fact that this cooperation is assured only by persistent and close study. Or, on
the other hand, we fancy we can get these results by external machinery, by
tools or potential means, without a corresponding functioning of human desires
and capacities. Often times these two false and contradictory beliefs are
combined in the same person. The man who feels that his virtues are his own
personal accomplishments is likely to be also the one who thinks that by passing
laws he can throw the fear of God into others and make them virtuous by edict
and prohibitory mandate.

Recently a friend
remarked to me that there was one superstition current among even cultivated
persons. They suppose that if one is told what to do, if the right end
is pointed to them, all that is required :a order to bring about the right
act is will or wish on the part of the one who is to act. He used as an
illustration the matter of physical posture; the assumption is that if a man is
told to stand up straight, all that

(28) is further needed is
wish and effort on his part, and the deed is done. He pointed out that this
belief is on a par with primitive magic in its neglect of attention to the means
which are involved in reaching an end. And he went on to say that the prevalence
of this belief, starting with false notions about the control of the body and
extending to control of mind and character, is the greatest bar to intelligent
social progress. It bars the way because it makes us neglect intelligent inquiry
to discover the means which will produce a desired result, and intelligent
invention to procure the means. In short, it leaves out the importance of
intelligently controlled habit.

We may cite his
illustration of the real nature of a physical aim or order and its execution in
its contrast with the current false notion.[1]
A man who has a bad habitual posture tells himself, or is told, to stand up
straight. If he is interested and responds, he braces himself, goes through
certain movements, and it is assumed that the desired result is substantially
attained; and that the position is retained at least as long as the man keeps
the idea or order in his mind. Consider the assumptions which are here made. It
is implied that the means or effective conditions of the realization of a
purpose exist independently of established habit and even that they may be set
in motion in opposition to habit. It is assumed that means are there, so that
the failure to stand erect is wholly a matter of failure of purpose and desire.
It needs paralysis or

(29) a broken leg or some
other equally gross phenomenon to make us appreciate the importance of objective
conditions.

Now in fact a man who can
stand properly does so, and only a man who can, does. In the former case, fiats
of will are unnecessary, and in the latter useless. A man who does not stand
properly forms a habit of standing improperly, a positive, forceful habit. The
common implication that his mistake is merely negative, that he is simply
failing to do the right thing, and that the failure can be made good by an order
of will is absurd. One might as well suppose that the man who is a slave of
whiskey-drinking is merely one who fails to drink water. Conditions have been
formed for producing a bad result, and the bad result will occur as long as
those conditions exist. They can no more be dismissed by a direct effort of will
than the conditions which create drought can be dispelled by whistling for wind.
It is as reasonable to expect a fire to go out when it is ordered to stop
burning as to suppose that a man can stand straight in consequence of a direct
action of thought and desire. The fire can be put out only by changing objective
conditions; it is the same with rectification of bad posture.

Of course something
happens when a man acts upon his idea of standing straight. For a little while,
he stands differently, but only a different kind of badly. He then takes the
unaccustomed feeling which accompanies his unusual stand as evidence that he is
now standing right. But there are many ways of standing

(30) badly, and he has
simply shifted his usual way to a compensatory bad way at some opposite extreme.
When we realize this fact, we are likely to suppose that it exists because
control of the
body is physical and hence is external to mind and will. Transfer the
command inside character and mind, and it is fancied that an idea of an end and
the desire to realize it will take immediate effect. After we get to the point
of recognizing that habits must intervene between wish and execution in the case
of bodily acts, we still cherish the illusion that they can be dispensed with in
the case of mental and moral acts. Thus the net result is to snake us sharpen
the distinction between non-moral and moral activities, and to lead us to
confine the latter strictly within a private, immaterial realm. But in fact,
formation of ideas as well as their execution depends upon habit. If we could
form a correct idea without a correct habit, then possibly we could carry it out
irrespective of habit. But a wish gets definite form only in connection with an
idea, and an idea gets shape and consistency only when it has a habit back of
it. Only when a man can already perform an act of standing straight does he know
what it is like to have a right posture and only then can he summon. the idea
required for proper execution. The act must come before the thought, and a habit
before an ability to evoke the thought at will. Ordinary psychology reverses the
actual state of affairs.

Ideas., thoughts of ends,
are not spontaneously generated, _ There is no immaculate conception of mean-

(31) -ings or purposes.
Reason pure of all influence from prior habit is a fiction. But pure sensations
out of which ideas can be framed apart from habit are equally fictitious. The
sensations and ideas which are the "stuff " of thought and purpose are alike
affected by habits manifested in the acts which give rise to sensations and
meanings. The dependence of thought, or the more intellectual factor in our
conceptions, upon prior experience is usually admitted. But those who attack the
notion of thought pure from the influence of experience, usually identify
experience with sensations impressed upon an empty mind. They therefore replace
the theory of unmixed thoughts with that of pure unmixed sensations as the stuff
of all conceptions, purposes and beliefs. But distinct and independent sensory
qualities, far from being original elements, are the products of a highly
skilled analysis which disposes of immense technical scientific resources. To be
able to single out a definitive sensory element in any field is evidence of a
high degree of previous training, that is. of well-formed habits. A moderate
amount of observation of a child will suffice to reveal that even such gross
discriminations as black, white, red, green, are the result of some years of
active dealings with things in the course of which habits have been set up. It
is not such a, simple matter to have a clear-cut sensation.. The latter is a
sign of training, skill, habit.

Admission that the idea
of, say, standing erect is dependent upon sensory materials is, therefore
equivalent to recognition that it is dependent upon the

(32) habitual attitudes
which govern concrete sensory materials. The medium of habit filters all the
material that reaches our perception and thought. The filter is not, however,
chemically pure. It is a reagent which adds new qualities and rearranges what is
received. Our ideas truly depend upon experience, but so do our sensations. And
the experience upon which they both depend is the operation of habits—
originally of instincts. Thus our purposes and commands regarding action
(whether physical or moral) come to us through the refracting medium of bodily
and moral habits. Inability to think aright is sufficiently striking to have
caught the attention of moralists. But a false psychology has led them to
interpret it as due to a necessary conflict of flesh and spirit, not as an
indication that our ideas are as dependent, to say the least, upon our habits as
are our acts upon our conscious thoughts and purposes.

Only the man who can
maintain a correct posture has the stuff out of which to form that idea of
standing erect which can be the starting point of a right act. Only the man
whose habits are already good can know what the good is. Immediate, seemingly
instinctive, feeling of the direction and end of various lines of behavior is in
reality the feeling of habits working below direct consciousness. The psychology
of illusions of perception is full of illustrations of the distortion introduced
by habit into observation of objects. The same fact accounts for the intuitive
element in judgment of action, an element which is valuable or the

(33) reverse in accord with
the quality of dominant habits. For, as Aristotle remarked, the untutored moral
perceptions of a good man are usually trustworthy, those of a bad character,
not. (But he should have added that the influence of social custom as well as
personal habit has to be taken into account in estimating who is the good man
and the good judge.)

What is true of the
dependence of execution of an idea upon habit is true, then, of the formation
and quality of the idea. Suppose that by a happy chance a, right concrete idea
or purpose— concrete, not simply correct in words— has been hit upon: What
happens when one with an incorrect habit tries to act in accord with it P
Clearly the idea can be carried into execution only with a mechanism already
there. If this is defective or perverted, the best intention in the world will
yield bad results. In the case of no other engine does one suppose that a
defective machine will turn out good goods simply because it is invited to.
Everywhere else we recognize that the design and structure of the agency
employed tell directly upon the work done. Given a bad habit and the " will " or
mental direction to get a. good result, and the actual happening is a reverse or
looking-glass manifestation of the usual fault— a compensatory twist in the
opposite, direction. Refusal to recognize this fact only leads to a separation
of mind from body, and to supposing that mental or " psychical " mechanisms are
different in kind from those of bodily operations and independent of them. So
deep seated is this notion that even so " scientific " a theory

(34) as modern
psycho-analysis thinks that mental habits can be straightened out by some kind
of purely psychical manipulation without reference to the distortions of
sensation and perception which are due to bad bodily sets. The other side of the
error is found in the notion of " scientific " nerve physiologists that it is
only necessary to locate a particular diseased cell or local lesion, independent
of the whole complex of organic habits, in order to rectify conduct.

Means are means; they are
intermediates, middle terms. To grasp this fact is to have done with the
ordinary dualism of means and ends. The " end " is merely a series of acts
viewed at a remote stage; and a means is merely the series viewed at an earlier
one, The distinction of means and end arises in surveying the course of a
proposed line of action, a connected series in time. The "end" is the
last act thought of; the means are the acts to be performed prior to it in time.
To reach an end we must take our mind off from it and attend to the act
which is next to be performed. We must make that the end. The only exception to
this statement is in cases where customary habit determines the course of the
series. Then all that is wanted is a cue to set it off. But when the proposed
end involves any deviation from usual action, or any rectification of it— as in
the cage of standing straight — then the main thing is to find some act
which is different from the usual one. The discovery and performance of this
unaccustomed act is the " end " to which we must devote all attention. Otherwise
we shall

(35) simply do the old thing
over again, no matter what is our conscious command. The only way of
accomplishing this discovery is through a flank movement. We must stop even
thinking of standing up straight. To think of it is fatal, for it commits us to
the operation of an established habit of standing wrong. We must find an act
within our power which is disconnected from any thought about standing. We must
start to do another thing which on one side inhibits our falling into the
customary bad position and on the other side is the beginning of a series of
acts which may lead into the correct posture.[2]
The hard-drinker who keeps thinking of not drinking is doing what he can to
initiate the acts which lead to drinking. He is starting with than stimulus to
his habit. To succeed he must find some positive interest or line of action
which will inhibit the drinking series and which by instituting another course
of action will bring him to his desired end. In short, the man's true aim is to
discover some course of action, having nothing to do with the habit of drink or
standing erect, which will take him where he wants to go. The discovery of this
other series is at once his means and his end. Until one takes intermediate acts
seriously enough to treat them as ends, one wastes one's time in any effort at
change of habits. Of the intermediate acts, the most important is the next
one. The first or earliest means is the most important end to discover.

(36)

Means and ends are two
names for the same reality. The terms denote not a division in reality but a
distinction in judgment. Without understanding this fact we cannot understand
the nature of habits nor can we pass beyond the usual separation of the moral
and non-moral in conduct. " End " is a name for a series of acts taken
collectively— like the term army. " Means " is a name for the same series taken
distributively— like this soldier, that officer. To think of the end signifies
to extend and enlarge our view of the act to be performed. It means to look at
the next act in perspective, not permitting it to occupy the entire field of
vision. To bear the end in mind signifies that we should not stop thinking about
our next act until we form some reasonably clear idea of the course
of action to which it commits us. To attain a remote end means an the other hand
to treat the end as a series of means. To say that an end is remote or distant,
to say in fact that it is an end at all, is equivalent to saying that obstacles
intervene between us and it. If, however, it remains a distant end, it becomes a
Mere end, that is a dream. As soon as we have projected it, we must. begin
to work backward in thought. We must change what is to be done into a
how, the means whereby. The end thus re-appears as a series of " what
nexts," and the what next of chief importance is the one nearest the present
state of the one acting. Only as the end is converted into means is it
definitely conceived, or intellectually defined, to say nothing of being
executable, Just as end, it is vague, cloudy, impressionistic. We

(37) do not know
what we are really after until a course of action is mentally worked out.
Aladdin with his lamp could dispense with translating ends into means, but no
one else can do so.

Now the thing which is
closest to us, the means within our power, is a habit. Some habit impeded by
circumstances is the source of the projection of the end. It is also the primary
means in its realization. The habit is propulsive and moves anyway toward some
end, or result, whether it is projected as an end-in-view or not. The man who
can walk does walk; the man who can talk does converse if only with himself. How
is this statement to be reconciled with the fact that we are not always walking
and talking; that our habits seem so often to be latent, inoperative? Such
inactivity holds only of overt, visibly obvious operation. In actuality
each habit operates all the time of waking life; though like a member of a crew
taking his turn at the wheel, its operation becomes the dominantly
characteristic trait of an act only occasionally or rarely.

The habit of walking is
expressed in what a man sees when he keeps still, even in dreams. The
recognition of distances and directions of things from his place at rest is the
obvious proof of this statement. The habit of locomotion is latent in the sense
that it is covered up, counteracted, by a habit of seeing which is definitely at
the fore. But counteraction is not suppression. Locomotion is a potential
energy, not in any metaphysical sense, but in the physical sense in

(38) which potential energy
as well as kinetic has to be taken account of in any scientific description.
Everything that a man who has the habit of locomotion does and thinks he does
and thinks differently on that account. This fact is recognized in current
psychology, but is falsified into an association of sensations. Were it not for
the continued operation of all habits in every act, no such thing as character
could exist. There would be simply a bundle, an untied bundle at that, of
isolated acts. Character is the interpenetration of habits. If each habit
existed in an insulated compartment and operated without affecting or being
affected by others, character would not exist. That is, conduct would lack unity
being only a juxtaposition of disconnected reactions to separated situations.
But since environments overlap, since situations are continuous and those remote
from one another contain like elements, a continuous modification of habits by
one another is constantly going on. A man may give himself away in a look or a
gesture. Character can be read through the medium of individual acts.

Of course
interpenetration is never total. It is most marked in what we call strong
characters. Integration is an achievement rather than a datum. A weak, unstable,
vacillating character is one in which different habits alternate with one
another rather than embody one another. The strength, solidity of a habit is not
its own possession but is due to reinforcement by the force of other habits
which it absorbs into itself. Routine specialization always works against
interpene-

(39) -tration. Men with "
pigeon-hole " minds are not infrequent. Their diverse standards and methods of
judgment for scientific, religious, political matters testify to isolated
compartmental habits of action. Character that is unable to undergo successfully
the strain of thought and effort required to bring competing tendencies into a
unity, builds up barriers between different systems of likes and dislikes. The
emotional stress incident to conflict is avoided not by readjustment but by
effort at confinement. Yet the exception proves the rule. Such persons are
successful in keeping different ways of reacting apart from one another in
consciousness rather than in action. Their character is marked by stigmata
resulting from this division.

The mutual modification
of habits by one another enables us to define the nature of the moral situation.
It is not necessary nor advisable to be always considering the interaction of
habits with one another, that is to say the effect of a particular habit upon
character— which is a name for the total interaction. Such consideration
distracts attention from the problem of building up an effective habit. A man
who is learning French, or chess-playing or engineering has his hands full with
his particular occupation. He would be confused and hampered by constant inquiry
into its effect upon character. He would resemble the centipede who by trying to
think of the movement of each leg in relation to all the others was rendered
unable to travel. At any given time, certain habits must be taken for granted as
a matter of course. Their operation is not

(40) a matter of moral
judgment. They are treated as technical, recreational, professional, hygienic or
economic or esthetic rather than moral. T o lug in morals, or ulterior effect on
character at every point, is to cultivate moral valetudinarianism or priggish
posing. Nevertheless any act, even that one which passes ordinarily as trivial,
may entail such consequences for habit and character as upon occasion to require
judgment from the standpoint of the whole body of conduct. It then comes under
moral scrutiny. To know when to leave acts without distinctive moral judgment
and when to subject them to it is itself a large factor in morality. The serious
matter is that this relative pragmatic, or intellectual, distinction between the
moral and non-moral, has been solidified into a fixed and absolute distinction,
so that some acts are popularly regarded as forever within and others forever
without the moral domain. From this fatal error recognition of the relations of
one habit to others preserves us. For it makes us see that character is the name
given to the working interaction of habits, and that the cumulative effect of
insensible modifications worked by a particular habit in the body of preferences
may at any moment require attention.

The word habit may seem
twisted somewhat from its customary use when employed as we have been using it.
But we need a word to express that kind of human activity which is influenced by
prior activity and in that sense acquired; which contains within itself a
certain ordering or systematization of minor elements of

(41) action; which is
projective, dynamic in quality, ready for overt manifestation ; and which is
operative in some subdued subordinate form even when not obviously dominating
activity. Habit even in its ordinary usage comes nearer to denoting these facts
than any other word,. If the facts are recognized we may also use the words
attitude and disposition. But unless we have first made clear to ourselves the
facts which have been set forth under the name of habit, these words are more
likely to be misleading than is the word habit. For the latter conveys
explicitly the sense of operativeness, actuality. Attitude and, as ordinarily
used, disposition suggest something latent, potential, something which. requires
a positive stimulus outside themselves to become active. If we perceive that
they denote positive forms of action which are released merely through removal
of some counteracting " inhibitory " tendency, and then become overt, we may
employ them instead of the word habit to denote subdued, non-patent forms of the
latter.

In this case, we must
bear in mind that the word disposition means predisposition, readiness to act
overtly in a specific fashion whenever opportunity is presented, this
opportunity consisting in removal of the pressure dire to the dominance of some
overt habit; and that attitude means some: special case of a predisposition, the
disposition waiting as it were to spring through an opened door. While it is
admitted that the word habit has been used in a somewhat broader sense than is
usual, we must protest against the tendency in

(42) psychological
literature to limit its meaning to repetition. This usage is much less in accord
with popular usage than is the wider way in which we have used the word. It
assumes from the start the identity of habit with routine. Repetition is in no
sense the essence of habit. Tendency to repeat acts is an incident of many
habits but not of all. A man with the habit of giving way to anger may show his
habit by a murderous attack upon some one who has offended. His act is
nonetheless due to habit because it occurs only once in his life. The essence of
habit is an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response, not to
particular acts except as, under special conditions, these express a way of
behaving. Habit means special sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes
of stimuli, standing predilections and aversions, rather than bare recurrence of
specific acts. It means will.

Notes

I refer to Alexander,
"Man's Supreme Inheritance"

The technique of this
process is stated in the hook of Mr. Alexander already referred to. and the
theoretical statement given is borrowed from Mr. Alexander's analysis.

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