THE LAWS OF HABIT. 441 



would be as difficult to him on each occasion as to the child on its first 

 trial ; and he would, furthermore, be completely exhausted by his ex- 

 ertions. Think of the pains necessary to teach a child to stand, of the 

 many efforts which it must make, and of the ease with which it at 

 last stands, unconscious of any effort. For while secondarily auto- 

 matic acts are accomplished with comparatively little weariness — in 

 this regard approaching the organic movements, or the original reflex 

 movements — the conscious effort of the will soon produces exhaus- 

 tion. A spinal cord without . . . memory would simply be an idiotic 

 spinal cord. ... It is impossible for an individual to realize how 

 much he owes to its automatic agency until disease has impaired its 

 functions." 



The next result is that habit diminishes the conscious attention 

 with which our actions are performed. 



One may state this abstractly thus : If an action require for its 

 execution a chain, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, of successive nervous events ; 

 then in the first performances of the action, the conscious will must 

 choose each of these events from a number of wrong alternatives that 

 present themselves as possible ; but habit soon brings it about that 

 each event calls up its own appropriate successor without any alterna- 

 tive offering itself, and without any reference to the conscious will, 

 until at last the whole chain, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, rattles itself off as 

 soon as A occurs, just as if A and the rest of the chain were fused into 

 a continuous stream. When we are learning to walk, to ride, to swim, 

 skate, fence, write, play, or sing, we interrupt ourselves at every step 

 by unnecessary movements and false notes. When we are proficients, 

 on the contrary, the results not only follow with the very minimum of 

 muscular action requisite to bring them forth, they also follow from a 

 single instantaneous " cue." The marksman sees the bird, and, before 

 he knows it, he has aimed and shot. A gleam in his adversary's eye, 

 a momentary pressure from his rapier, and the fencer finds that he has 

 instantly made the right parry and return. A glance at the musical 

 hieroglyphics, and the pianist's fingers have rippled through a laby- 

 rinth of notes. And not only is it the right thing at the right time 

 that we thus involuntarily do, but the wrong thing also, if it be an 

 habitual thing. Who is there that has never wound up his watch on 

 taking off his waistcoat in the daytime, or taken his latch-key out on 

 arriving at the door-step of a friend ? Very absent-minded persons in 

 going to their bedroom to dress for dinner have been known to take 

 off one garment after another and finally to get into bed, merely be- 

 cause that was the habitual issue of the first few movements when 

 performed at a later hour. The writer well remembers how, on revis- 

 iting Paris after ten years' absence, and, finding himself in the street 

 in which for one winter he had attended school, he lost himself in a 

 brown study, from which he was awakened by finding himself upon 

 the stairs which led to the apartment in a house many streets away in 



