248 BIOLOGY AND HUMAN LIFE 



205. Habit as control. The control over our muscles comes 

 from giving attention to what we are doing and then getting 

 connections in the spinal cord to control the actions so that we 

 do not have to think about them at all. In acquiring habits of 

 doing, feeling, and thinking we must recognize that habits of 

 inhibition are just as important as positive habits. We must 

 suppress the impulse to sneer and the feeling that goes with it. 

 We must inhibit the rising temper or the feeling of dismay. In 

 the same way we find thoughts coming into our minds that must 

 be put down. Castles in Spain have their proper place in life, 

 but they must not be a-building at times that require close at- 

 tention to something else. The thought of skating must be in- 

 hibited when the business of the hour calls for thinking about 

 ''dividing by fractions" or "the election of the Senate" or the 

 designing of a dress. 



Schools are established for the purpose of driUing children in 

 the kinds of habits that grown folks believe to be useful. In 

 addition to the habits acquired in school, each one of us gets 

 hundreds of habits that the schools never recognize, some of 

 them very useful, others not so useful, or even injurious. In 

 fact, by the time a child is old enough to think about it he has 

 gotten into so many useless habits that he has a job waiting for 

 him, to get rid of them. Moreover, by the time we are old 

 enough to think about it we realize that there are many things 

 which we should have learned earlier but never did, for one rea- 

 son or another ; and that gives us a second big job. Better still, 

 we can replace undesirable habits with desirable ones, and that 

 is a large part of life, after we get to be old enough to think 

 of such things. 



As we become older our protoplasm loses the power to form 

 new extenstion and new connections readily, but some people 

 retain the power to form new habits much longer than others do. 

 A part of the difference is no doubt due to the fact that some 

 people have the habit of looking forward, of considering new 

 ideas, of trying out new ways of doing things, and this is one of 

 the most valuable habits we can get. 



