HABIT. 125 



No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may pos- 

 sess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one 

 have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to 

 act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the 

 better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially 

 paved. And this is an obvious consequence of the prin- 

 ciples we have laid down. A ' character,' as J. S. Mill says, 

 *is a completely fashioned will ' ; and a will, in the sense in 

 which he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a 

 firm and promjDt and definite way upon all the principal 

 emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes effec- 

 tively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted 

 frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the 

 brain ' grows ' to their use. Every time a resolve or a fine 

 g low of fe eling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is 

 worse than a chance lostj it works so as positively to 

 hincler fulure resolutions and emotions from taking the 

 noFmal path of disckarge. There is no more contem^jtible 

 type of human character than that of the nerveless senti- 

 mentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering 

 sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly 

 concrete deed. Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers of 

 France, by his eloquence, to follow Nature and nurse their 

 babies themselves, while he sends his own children to the 

 foundling hospital, is the classical example of what I mean. 

 But every one of us in his measure, whenever, after glow- 

 ing for an abstractly formulated Good, he practically 

 ignores some actual case, among the squalid * other jDartic- 

 ulars' of which that same Good lurks disguised, treads 

 straight on Rousseau's path. All Goods are disguised by 

 the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day 

 world ; but woe to him who can only recognize them when 

 he thinks them in their pure and abstract form ! The habit 

 of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce 

 true monsters in this line. The weej)ing of a Russian lady 

 over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coach- 

 man is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of 

 thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale. 

 Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those 

 who are neither performers themselves nor musically gifted 



