154 What Is Meant by Habit 



This action, which there was no resisting, illustrates 

 genuine intelligence. When another ape was given a 

 difficult hammer with one end of the head very 

 rounded, he felt the two ends carefully and then 

 proceeded to use the flatter one for driving in the 

 nails. This, again, was genuine intelligence. 



When a spider constructs a beautiful web, true to 

 the type of its species, the very first time it tries, that 

 is one of its "habits" in the loose sense ; but it is an 

 expression of an inborn hereditary or instinctive 

 capacity. The spider's deftness may increase with 

 practice, but it is clear that this spinner and weaver 

 does not learn its trade any more than we learn to 

 sneeze. Both kinds of activity depend physiologi- 

 cally on preestablished linkages of certain nerve-cells 

 and certain muscle-cells, but the pre-arrangements 

 (badly called mechanisms) involved in the spider's 

 web-making are more complicated than those in- 

 volved in our sneezing or coughing or any other re- 

 flex action. And besides the physiological pre- 

 arrangements, there is, in the more complicated 

 cases, a psychological side — a certain degree of 

 awareness and a bent bow of endeavor or desire. But 

 instincts are not habits. 



We usually mean by a habit a chain of actions 

 which follow one another in an easy sequence as the 

 result of much individual repetition. A habit is the 

 outcome of habituation ! And we mean by habituation 

 the engrained facility which comes from frequent 

 individual repetition. The facility with which we 

 wrote down the word "repetition" without even look- 



