HABIT 251 



the feeling of dismay. In the same way we find thoughts coming into 

 our consciousness that must be put down. Castles in Spain have their 

 proper place in one's life, but they must not come into our minds at 

 times that require close attention to something else. The thought of 

 skating must be inhibited when the business of the hour calls for 

 thinking about Washington crossing the Delaware. For the action 

 to be unlearned there must be no indulgence and no compromise. 



Society establishes schools for the purpose of drilling children in 

 the kinds of habits that are supposed to be useful to them immedi- 

 ately or at some time in the future. But in addition to what the schools 

 can do, each one of us has opportunities to establish thousands of 

 useful habits that the schools never recognize ; and each one of us 

 no doubt has a number of useless habits — or habits that are worse 

 than useless — which it would be worth while to get out of our nerv- 

 ous system. By resolving to inhibit the undesirable habits — whether 

 of thinking, feeling, or acting — we may in time suppress them ; or 

 we may replace them with useful habits, as when we replace a slouch- 

 ing gait with erect carriage. But there are two things to remember 

 in the matter of habit-making and habit-breaking: first, " It 's dogged 

 as does it," and, second, " You can't teach an old dog new tricks," 

 which, translated into English, mean. Persistence wms and Vok have 

 to catch 'em young. 



304. Value of habits. One need not go far from his own immedi- 

 ate experience to find out how valuable habits are when they are 

 of the right kind, and how miserable they may make us when they 

 are of the other kind. The amount of work or play that one can 

 accomplish depends very largely upon the kinds of habits one has 

 acquired. In the simple matter of dressing ourselves, how many 

 movements are necessary, and how much thought and effort they 

 take at first ! But to-day you probably dressed yourself without think- 

 ing about the buttons and sleeves at all. You ought to be able to do 

 all of your dressing and a hundred other things that have to be done 

 daily — or at least very often — without giving the actions the slight- 

 est attention. This means not only a great saving of time in the doing 

 of the necessary work, it means also a saving of thought for 

 matters that are much more interesting. The control over our mus- 

 cles comes by first giving our attention to what we are doing, and 

 then getting the spinal-cord connections to control the actions so that 

 we do not have to think about them at all. 



