348 BRAINS OF RATS AND MEN 



thus established as explanatory rules of human be- 

 havior. This is good; for human life unquestionably 

 has grown out of simpler vital stock of this type, and 

 habit evidently plays an enormous part in our own 

 program of living. Much of education consists in the 

 formation of proper habits. But this is not all of edu- 

 cation or the better part of it. Nor is it all of life or 

 the better part of it. 



The first point which I wish to stress in this con- 

 nection is that mankind has grown up; we have not 

 merely enlarged and complicated the behavior pat- 

 terns of rats and monkeys; we have improved upon 

 them and added new patterns not elsewhere known. 

 The recent attempts of some psychologists to reduce 

 human intelligence to assemblages of habits involve 

 an enlargement of the usual connotation of the term 

 "habit" which has no justification in ordinary usage 

 and which obscures certain very important char- 

 acteristics of human and perhaps some other higher 

 forms of behavior. 



Watson (191 9, p. 273) defines habit as a complex 

 system of reflexes whose pattern has been individually 

 acquired and which functions in a serial order when 

 the individual is confronted by the appropriate stimu- 

 lus. Accepting this definition, it is evident that a 

 firmly established habit is a stabilized behavior pat- 

 tern whose maintenance is dependent upon the per- 

 sistence of some structural modification of the bodily 

 organs. It is the fixation, the enduring nature of the 



