AN EXQUIRY INTO THE FORMATION OP HABIT IN MAN. 155 



not only kept on playing too long, but whenever her fingers 

 rested on the keys she started playing like an automatic 

 musical box, and could not be stopped. Girls who drill holes 

 in buttons in Birmingham are said during their dinner hour as 

 they pass along the streets to be constantly continuing un- 

 consciously the same movements with their fingers. 



Habit is often used to excess with bad results. Hammer- 

 palsy arises from incessantly using the hammer in making 

 knives till the associated group of cells is worn out, and 

 paralysis sets in ; writers' cramp is another illustration. 



Habits that have become unconscious may be put in action 

 by using wrong stimuli. When dressing for dinner one 

 fre(][uently winds up one's watch by mistake, and some in 

 changing their clothes have gone to bed unconsciously. 



A bad habit is a terrible thing Avhen thoroughly fixed. 

 Swearing is a good example of this, and of the tenacity of a 

 habit when firml}'' established. It is a drawback when 

 processes ihat should be intellectual become mechanical by 

 habit, as when prayer is said by rote and not prayed; it is 

 this thai constitutes all forms of " cant." 



Habit blunts the feeling both as to ]-ight and wrong, and 

 as to pleasure and pain, and when purely automatic abolishes 

 it. A man may get such an inveterate habit of lying as to 

 lose all sense of evik So with other sins. 



A person travelling or yachting takes great pleasure in it at 

 first, but if he is ever doing this and gets into the habit of 

 the thing, it loses its charm. 



Games amuse when occasionally played, but when they 

 are incessantly pursued, and an automatic habit is estab- 

 lished, a large amount of the pleasure goes. 



Habit may induce error, as when at the close of the year 

 from long habit the same date is carried on into the next 

 year, until the new habit overcomes the old. 



Such then are some of the pros and cons of this important 

 variety of brain action, and 1 must now leave the matter in 

 your hands for discussion, asking in conclusion your forbear- 

 ance if I have wearied you with details which some here know 

 far better than myself; or if in using more popular language 

 than is perhaps general in this learned atmosphere, 1 may 

 have ffiiled somewhat in preserving the high standard of 

 preceding papers. 



