By William James
HABIT, by William James, in his The Principles of Psychology,1890. Reprinted in Rudolph W.Chamberlain's Progressive Readings in Prose, New York, Doubleday, Page and Company, 1923, pp. 22-26.
“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 can probably 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, 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 trained domestic animals, dogs and oxen, and omnibus- and car-horses, seem to be 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 to a traveling menagerie in the United States some time in 1884, a 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 thu s the enormous flywheel 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 fixing of personal habits, properly so called, such as vocalization and pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address. Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty spoken without a foreign accent; hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he even learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest “swell,” but he simply cannot buy the right things. An invisible law, as strong as gravitation, keeps him within his orbit, arrayed this year as he was the last; and how his better-bred acquaintances contrive to get the things they wear will be for him a mystery till his dying day.
The great thing, 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 li ghting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right.
In Professor Bain's chapter on “The Moral Habits” there are some admirable practical remarks laid down. Two great maxims emerge from his treatment. The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible. Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall reënforce 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 fortifie d 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 dampen the energy of all future attempts, whereas past experience of success nerves 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. Professor Baumann, from whom I borrow the anecdote, says that the collapse of barbarian nations when Europeans came among them is due to their despair of ever succeeding as the newcomers do in the larger tasks of life. Old ways are broken and new ones not formed.
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 inpidual 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 straight and narrow path, before one can begin ‘to make oneself 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.”
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 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. Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit 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 theater going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of a 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 oneself 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 aunt or giving up one's seat in a horse car, if nothing more heroic offers—but let it not fail to take place.
These latter cases make us aware that it is not simply particular lines of discharge, but also general forms of discharge, that seem to be grooved out by habit in the brain. Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into a way of evaporating; so there is reason to suppose that if we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it the effort-making capacity will be gone; and that, if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time. Attention and effort are, as we shall see later, but two names for the same psychic fact. To what brain processes they correspond we do not know. The strongest reason for believing that they do depend on brain processes at all, and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just this fact, that they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit, which is a material law. As a final practical maxim, relative to these habits of the will, we may, then, offer something like this:Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, “I won't count this time!” Well! he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve cells and fibers 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 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.
Notes
second nature. Nature is one's natural endowment or essential character, as, natural impulse or action, instinct or native constitution, intrinsic or inborn nature. Hence, second nature means one's real nature, something that has become so much a part of the inpidual that he cannot escape from it.
Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley （1769-1852）, British general responsible for the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.
“There is a story . . . , ”from Huxley's Elementary Lessons in Physiology, Lesson XII.
practical joker. A practical joke is a joke put into practice, the fun consisting in what is done rather than in what is said, especially a trick played on a person. He who practices such witticisms is called a practical joker.
gutter, a small channel at the side of a road or elsewhere to lead off surface water.
cavalry-horses, horses belonging to the cavalry or that branch of the army which serves on horseback.
customary evolutions, the evolutions that they have been accustomed to go through.
bugle call, a summons on a bugle, as to call soldiers to duty. The bugle is a brass or copper wind instrument curved and somewhat high-pitched.
omnibus- and car-horses, horses employed to draw such vehicles. The omnibus is a heavy four-wheeled public vehicle designed to carry a comparatively large number of people; a car is a vehicle adapted to the rails of a railroad.
menagerie, a collection of wild or foreign animals in cages or inclosures kept especially for exhibition, as with a circus.
flywheel, a heavy wheel for opposing and moderating by its inertia any fluctuation of speed in the machinery with which it involves.
ordinance, order.
walks, occupations.
deck hand, a common sailor.
nurture, bringing up; fostering care.
strata. A stratum is a body of sedimentary rock or earth of one kind formed by natural causes and consisting usually of a series of layers lying between beds of other kinds. Here, social strata refer to the different groups that make up a society.
mannerism, a recurrent trick of style or behavior.
cleavage, pision, way in which a thing tends to split.
“shop, ” one's occupation or business as a topic of conversation, especially when introduced unseasonably.
set like plaster, grown hard, become fixed like plaster.
fixing, making or becoming rigid.
vocalization, act of vocalizing or forming into voice; giving intonation or resonance to.
nasality, in speaking, having the twang described as speaking through the nose.
veriest,the superlative of very;most very;most actual, veritable, real.
“swell, ” a slang expression to mean a stylish or ultrafashionable person.
orbit, social group within which he moves. An orbit is the path described by a heavenly body in its revolution around another body. Here, a man's social group within which he moves.
contrive, manage.
ally, one joined to another by alliance, treaty, or league.
automatic, acting of itself; having an inherent power of action or motion.
the effortless custody of automatism, habit.
nothing is habitual but indecision, having no habit except the habit of not being able to make up his mind on any decision.
express volitional deliberation, in which he must every time make up his mind definitely before he carries out the act.
ingrained, deeply rooted.
Professor Bain's chapter on “The Moral Habits.” Alexander Bain （1818-1903）, Scottish psychologist and educator. The quotation is from his The Study of Character,1861.
maxims, general truth drawn from science or experience; principle;rule of conduct.
his treatment, his book, his way of dealing with the subject.
launch ourselves, set ourselves going; start out.
initiative, first step, origination.
incompatible, inconsistent with; opposed in character to; discordant to.
a public pledge, make a promise in public, before others; swear not to do a thing in front of many others.
momentum, the force of motion acquired by a moving body as a result of the continuance of its motion by virtue of inertia; impetus.
breakdown, stoppage; collapse; failure of a thing.
undoes, annuls; unties or unfastens or loosens.
wind, coil around.
contradistinguishing, distinguishing by a contrast.
ascendant, higher position.
outset, start, beginning.
imperative, urgent, obligatory, necessary.
dampen, discourage; depress; chill.
nerves, gives strength, vigor, courage to; supplies one with physical or moral force.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von （1749-1832）, German author.
mistrusted, had no faith in his own powers.
Ach, ah, an exclamation, expressive of surprise, pity, complaint, entreaty, contempt, threatening, delight, triumph, etc., according to the manner of utterance. Here, it is used to express the ease with which the enterprise can be carried out.
anecdote, a particular or detached incident or fact of an interesting nature; a biographical incident or fragment.
“tapering-off, ” stopping gradually; ceasing little by little.
a sharp period, an abrupt, intense, period of suffering.
inanition, want of fullness; emptiness; exhaustion from lack of food;fasting.
“One must first learn . . . , ”from J. Bahnsen Beitrage zu Characterologie, Vol. I, p.209.
the straight and narrow path, the path which conforms to justice and rectitude, with special reference to some peril or misfortune.
“to make oneself over again, ” to reform, to change for the better.
resolve, resolution, determination.
for a fresh run. He must make the preliminary run again because he was timid and stopped before making the leap and therefore wasted the previous run.
habituate, make habitual, make into a habit.
motor effects, physical movements; consciousness of action.
fulcrum, the support, as a wedge-shaped piece or a hinge, about which a lever turns.
to press against, to stand on.
With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved. Possession of a determination to act in a certain way or to do a certain thing, yet never acting upon it, is but to prepare the way for misery, anguish, turmoil, or wickedness.
J. S. Mill, John Stuart （1806-1873）, English philosopher and political economist.
“grows, ” develops, becomes larger and fuller.
evaporates, disappears, does not come to fruit.
discharge, relief of load; unloading.
nerveless, destitute of strength or courage; without nerves; lacking vigor; powerless; weak; inert.
weltering sea of sensibility and emotion. A weltering sea is one which rises and falls tumultuously; rocks and tosses; hence, restless, boundless space or extent of one's feeling or consciousness.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques （1712-1778）, French philosopher and author. He advocated going back to nature; he proposed that parents should nurture their own children.
foundling hospital, an institution for infants found after their parents have deserted or exposed them.
“other particulars, ” other details, perhaps not so inviting.
concomitants, associates, companions.
inertly, sluggishly, slowly, weakly.
flinch, draw back; wince.
psychic, pertaining to the mind, mental as contrasted to the physical.
gratuitous, offered free; extra; not called for by the circumstances.
ascetic, rigid in self-denial and devotions.
winnowed, separated and driven off; blowing the chaff away from the seed.
chaff, the glumes or husks of grain and grasses separated from the seed by threshing and winnowing.
hortatory ethics, moral conduct or teaching which counsels, advises, or incites or encourages.
theology, the science of God or of religion.
Rip Van Winkle. Joseph Jefferson （1829-1905）, American actor, seeking an original play for himself, made a dramatization of Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle. He first played this role in London in 1865. This drama delighted American playgoers for two generations.
dereliction, failure in duty; a neglect or omission as if by wilful abandonment.
Questions
1. How is habit a conservative agent?
2. What period is most important for the fixing of personal habits?
3. How can we make our nervous system our ally?
4. What are the two great maxims quoted from Professor Bain?
5. What is the third maxim suggested?
6. Why is action necessary?
7. What final practical maxim is given?
8. What encouragement may youth find in a physiological study of mental conditions?
参考译文
【作品简介】
《习惯》一文选自威廉·詹姆斯1890年出版的作品《心理原则》。后收入鲁道夫·W．钱伯伦编写的《散文进阶读本》，纽约道布尔戴·佩奇出版公司1923年出版，22—26页。