In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral Habits' there are some admirable practical re- marks laid down. Two great maxims emerge from the treatment. The first is that in the ac- quisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an 68 TALKS TO TEACHERS old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible. Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall reinforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelope your resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day during which a breakdown is post- poned adds to the chances of its not occurring at all.
I remember long ago reading in an Austrian paper the advertisement of a certain Rudolph Somebody, who promised fifty gulden reward to any one who after that date should find him at the wine-shop of Ambrosius So-and-so. 'This I do,' the advertisement continued, 'in consequence of a promise which I have made my wife.' With such a wife, and such an understanding of the way in which to start new habits, it would be safe to stake one's money on Rudolph's ultimate success.
The second maxim is. Never suffer an exception MAXIMS FOR HABIT-FORMING 69 to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up: a single sHp undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right. As Professor Bain says: — "The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradis- tinguishing them from the intellectual acquisi- tions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many con- quests on the right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing powers that the one may have a series of unin- terrupted successes, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is the theoretically best career of mental progress."
A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emo- tional prompting you may experience in the direc- tion of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in 70 TALKS TO TEACHERS the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain.
No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's senti- ments 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 good intentions, hell proverbially is paved. This is an obvious consequence of the principles I 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 prompt and defi- nite way upon all the principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the brain 'grows' to their use. When a re- solve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evap- orate without bearing practical fruit, it is worse than a chance lost: it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from tak- ing the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human character than MAXIMS FOR HABIT-FORMING 71 that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibil- ity, but never does a concrete manly deed.
This leads to a fom-th maxim. Do7i't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportmiities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do. The strokes of behavior are what give the new set to the charac- ter, and work the good habits into its organic tissue. Preaching and talking too soon become an ineffectual bore.
There is a passage in Darwin's short auto- biography which has been often quoted, and which, for the sake of its bearing on our subject of habit, I must now quote again. Darwin says: "Up to the age of thirty or beyond it, poetry of many kinds gave me great pleasure; and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that pictures formerly gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so 72 TALKS TO TEACHERS intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music...My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts; but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive...If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept alive through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebUng the emotional part of our nature."
We all intend when young to be all that may become a man, before the destroyer cuts us down. We wish and expect to enjoy poetry always, to grow more and more intelligent about pictures and music, to keep in touch with spiritual and rehgious ideas, and even not to let the greater philosophic thoughts of our time develop quite beyond our view. We mean all this in youth, I say; and yet in how many middle-aged men and women is such an honest and sanguine expectation Darwin's case as a warning 73 fulfilled? Surely, in comparatively few; and the laws of habit show us why. Some interest in each of these things arises in everybody at the proper age; but, if not persistently fed with the appropri- ate matter, instead of growing into a powerful and necessary habit, it atrophies and dies, choked by the rival interests to which the daily food is given. We make ourselves into Darwins in this negative respect by persistently ignoring the es- sential practical conditions of our case. We say abstractly: "I mean to enjoy poetry, and to ab- sorb a lot of it, of course. I fully intend to keep up my love of music, to read the books that shall give new turns to the thought of my time, to keep my higher spiritual side alive, etc." But we do not attack these things concretely, and we do not begin io-day. We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone, until those smiling possibilities are dead. Whereas ten minutes a day of poetry, of spiritual reading or meditation, and an hour or two a week at music, pictures, or philosophy, provided we began now and suffered no remission, would infallibly give us in due time the fulness of uU we desire. By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing 74 TALKS TO TEACHERS ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities. This is a point concerning which you teaohers might well give a little timely information to your older and more aspiring pupils.
According as a function receives daily exercise or not, the man becomes a different kind of being in later life. We have lately had a number of accomplished Hindoo visitors at Cambridge, who talked freely of life and philosophy. More than one of them has confided to me that the sight of our faces, all contracted as they are with the habit- ual American over-intensity and anxiety of expres- sion, and our ungraceful and distorted attitudes when sitting, made on him a very painful impres- sion. "I do not see," said one, "how it is possible for you to live as you do, without a single minute in your day deliberately given to tranquillity and meditation. It is an invariable part of our Hindoo life to retire for at least half an hour daily into silence, to relax our muscles, govern our breathing, and meditate on eternal things. Every Hindoo child is trained to this from a very early age." The good fruits of such a discipline were obvious in the physical repose and lack of tension, and the wonderful smoothness and calmness of facial THE HABIT OF RELAXATION 75 expression, and imperturbability of manner of these Orientals. I felt that my countrymen were depriving themselves of an essential grace of char- acter. How many American children ever hear it said by parent or teacher, that they should moder- ate their piercing voices, that they should relax their unused muscles, and as far as possible, when sitting, sit quite still? Not one in a thousand, not one in five thousand! Yet, from its reflex influence on the inner mental states, this ceaseless over- tension, over-motion, and over-expression are working on us grievous national harm.
I beg you teachers to think a Httle seriously of this matter. Perhaps you can help our rising gen- eration of Americans toward the beginning of a better set of personal ideals.* To go back now to our general maxims, I may at last, as a fifth and final practical maxim about habits, offer something like this: Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it * See the Address on the Gospel of Relaxation, later in this volume.
76 TALKS TO TEACHERS may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insur- ance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possi- bly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, ener- getic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are win- nowed like chaff in the blast.
I have been accused, when talking of the sub- ject of habit, of making old habits appear so strong that the acquiring of new ones, and partic- ularly anything like a sudden reform or conver- sion, would be made impossible by my doctrine. Of course, this would suffice to condemn the lat- ter; for sudden conversions, however infrequent they may be, unquestionably do occur. But there is no incompatibility between the general laws I have laid down and the most startling sudden alterations in the way of character. New habits can be launched, I have expressly said, on condi- tion of there being new stimuli and new excite- THE SCOPE OF HABIT's EFFECTS 77 ments. Now life abounds in these, and sometimes they are such critical and revolutionary experi- ences that they change a man's whole scale of values and system of ideas. In such cases, the old order of his habits will be ruptured; and, if the new motives are lasting, new habits will be formed, and build up in him a new or regener- ate 'nature.'
All this kind of fact I fully allow. But the general laws of habit are no wise altered thereby, and the physiological study of mental conditions still remains on the whole the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured here- after, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habit- ually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Win- kle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted 78 TALKS TO TEACHERS none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many sepa- rate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faith- fully busy each hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out. Silently, between all the details of his business, the power of judging in all that class of matter will have built itself up within him as a possession that will never pass away. Young people should know this truth in advance. The ignorance of it has probably en- gendered more discouragement and faint-hearted- ness in youths embarking on arduous careers than all other causes put together.
IX.
THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS In my last talk, in treating of Habit, I chiefly had in mind our motor habits, — habits of external conduct. But our thinking and feeling processes are also largely subject to the law of habit, and one result of this is a phenomenon which you all know under the name of 'the association of ideas.' To that phenomenon I ask you now to turn.
You remember that consciousness is an ever- flowing stream of objects, feelings, and impulsive tendencies. We saw already that its phases or pulses are like so many fields or waves, each field or wave having usually its central point of liveliest attention, in the shape of the most promi- nent object in our thought, while all around this lies a margin of other objects more dimly realized, together with the margin of emotional and active tendencies which the whole entails. De- scribing the mind thus in fluid terms, we cling as close as possible to nature. At first sight, it might seem as if, in the fluidity of these successive waves, 80 TALKS TO TEACHERS everything is indeterminate. But inspection shows that each wave has a constitution which can be to some degree explained by the constitu- tion of the waves just passed away. And this relation of the wave to its predecessors is expressed by the two fundamental 'laws of association,' so- called, of which the first is named the Law of Contiguity, the second that of Similarity.
The Law of Contiguity tells us that objects thought of in the coming wave are such as in some previous experience were next to the objects repre- sented in the wave that is passing away. The vanishing objects were once formerly their neigh- bors in the mind. When you recite the alphabet or your prayers, or when the sight of an object reminds you of its name, or the name reminds you of the object, it is through the law of contiguity that the terms are suggested to the mind.
The Law of Similarity says that, when contigu- ity fails to describe what happens, the coming objects will prove to resemble the going objects, even though the two were never experienced together before. In our 'flights of fancy,' this is frequently the case.
If, arresting ourselves in the flow of reverie, we ask the question, "How came we to be think- THE TWO LAWS OF ASSOCIATION 81 ing of just this object now?" we can almost al- ways trace its presence to some previous object which has introduced it to the mind, according to one or the other of these laws. The entire rou- tine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Con- tiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others. In dry and prosaic minds, almost all the mental se- quences flow along these lines of habitual rou- tine repetition and suggestion.
In witty, imaginative minds, on the other hand, the routine is broken through with ease at any moment; and one field of mental objects will sug- gest another with which perhaps in the whole his- tory of human thinking it had never once before been coupled. The link here is usually some anal- ogy between the objects successively thought of, — an analogy often so subtle that, although we feel it, we can with difficulty analyze its ground; as where, for example, we find something masculine in the color red and something feminine in the 82 TALKS TO TEACHERS color pale blue, or where, of three human beings' characters, one will remind us of a cat, another of a dog, the third perhaps of a cow.
Psychologists have of course gone very deeply into the question of what the causes of association may be; and some of them have tried to show that contiguity and similarity are not two radically diverse laws, but that either presupposes the pres- ence of the other. I myself am disposed to think that the phenomena of association depend on our cerebral constitution, and are not immediate con- sequences of our being rational beings. In other words, when we shall have become disembodied spirits, it may be that our trains of consciousness will follow different laws. These questions are discussed in the books on psychology, and I hope that some of you will be interested in following them there. But I will, on the present occasion, ignore them entirely; for, as teachers, it is the fact of association that practically concerns you, let its grounds be spiritual or cerebral, or what they may, and let its laws be reducible, or non-reduci- ble, to one. Your pupils, whatever else they are, are at any rate little pieces of associating machin- ery. Their education consists in the organizing THEIR GREAT SCOPE 83 within them of determinate tendencies to associate one thing with another, — impressions with conse- quences, these with reactions, those with results, and so on indefinitely. The more copious the associative systems, the completer the individual's adaptations to the world.
The teacher can formulate his function to him- self therefore in terms of 'association' as well as Jn terms of 'native and acquired reaction.' It is mainly that of building up useful systems of asso- ciation in the pupil's mind. This description sounds wider than the one I began by giving. But, when one thinks that our trains of associa- tion, whatever they may be, normally issue in ac- quired reactions or behavior, one sees that in a general way the same mass of facts is covered by both formulas.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association. The great problem which association undertakes to solve is. Why does just this particular field of consciousness, constituted in this particular way, now appear before my mind? It may be a field of objects imagined; it may be of objects remembered or of objects perceived; it may include an action resolved on. In either case, 84 TALKS TO TEACHERS when the field is analyzed into its parts, those parts can be shown to have proceeded from parts of fields previously before consciousness, in con- sequence of one or other of the laws of association just laid down. Those laws run the mind: inter- est, shifting hither and thither, deflects it; and attention, as we shall later see, steers it and keeps it from too zigzag a course.
To grasp these factors clearl}^ gives one a solid and simple understanding of the psychological machinery. The 'nature,' the 'character,' of an individual means really nothing but the habitual form of his associations. To break up bad associa- tions or wrong ones, to build others in, to guide the associative tendencies into the most fruitful chaimels, is the educator's principal task. But here, as with all other simple principles, the dif- ficulty lies in the application. Psychology can state the laws: concrete tact and talent alone can work them to useful results.
Meanwhile it is a matter of the commonest expe- rience that our minds m.ay pass from one object to another by various intermediary fields of conscious- ness. The indeterminateness of our paths of asso- ciation in concreto is thus almost as striking a feat- ure of them as the uniformity of their abstract INDETERMINATENESS OF ASSOCIATIONS 85 form. Start from any idea whatever, and the entire range of your ideas is potentially at your disposal. If we take as the associative starting- point, or cue, some simple word which I pronounce before you, there is no limit to the possible diver- sity of suggestions which it may set up in your minds. Suppose I say 'blue,' for example: some of you may think of the blue sky and hot weather from which we now are suffering, then go off on thoughts of summer clothing, or possibly of meteo- rology at large; others may think of the spectrum and the physiology of color-vision, and glide into X-rays and recent physical speculations; others may think of blue ribbons, or of the blue flowers on a friend's hat, and proceed on lines of personal reminiscence. To others, again, et^Tnology and linguistic thoughts may be suggested; or blue may be ' apperceived ' as a synonjTn for melan- choly, and a train of associates connected with morbid psychology may proceed to unroll them- selves.
In the same person, the same word heard at different times will provoke, in consequence of the varying marginal preoccupations, either one of a number of diverse possible associative sequences. Professor Miinsterberg performed this experiment 86 TALKS TO TEACHERS methodically, using the same words four times over, at three-month intervals, as 'cues' for four different persons who were the subjects of obser- vation. He found almost no constancy in their associations taken at these different times. In short, the entire potential content of one's con- sciousness is accessible from any one of its points. This is why we can never work the laws of asso- ciation forward: starting from the present field as a cue, we can never cipher out in advance just what the person will be thinking of five minutes later. The elements which may become prepo- tent in the process, the parts of each successive field round which the associations shall chiefly turn, the possible bifurcations of suggestion, are so numerous and ambiguous as to be indetermina- ble before the fact. But, although we cannot work the laws of association forward, we can always work them backwards. We cannot say now what we shall find ourselves thinking of five minutes hence; but, whatever it may be, we shall then be able to trace it through intermediary links of contiguity or similarity to what we are thinking now. What so baffies our prevision is the shifting part played by the margin and focus — in fact, by each element by itself of the margin or focus — in calling up the next ideas.
SOME CUES ARE PREPOTENT 87 For example, I am reciting 'Locksley Hall,' in order to divert my mind from a state of suspense that I am ia concerning the will of a relative that is dead. The will still remains in the mental background as an extremely marginal or ultra- marginal portion of my field of consciousness; but the poem fairly keeps my attention from it, until I come to the line, "I, the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time." The words 'I, the heir,' immediately make an electric connection with the marginal thought of the will; that, in turn, makes my heart beat with anticipation of my possible legacy, so that I throw down the book and pace the floor excitedly with visions of my future fortune pouring through my mind. Any portion of the field of consciousness that has more potentialities of emotional excitement than an- other may thus be roused to predominant activ- ity; and the shifting play of interest now in one portion, now in another, deflects the currents in all sorts of zigzag ways, the mental activity run- ning hither and thither as the sparks run in burnt-up paper.
One more point, and I shall have said as much to you as seems necessar^^ about the process of association.
8S TALKS TO TEACHERS You just saw how a single exciting word may call up its own associates prepotently, and deflect our whole train of thinking from the previous track. The fact is that every portion of the field tends to call up its own associates; but, if these associates be severally different, there is rivalry, and as soon as one or a few begin to be effective the others seem to get siphoned out, as it were, and left behind. Seldom, however, as in our ex- ample, does the process seem to turn round a single item in the mental field, or even round the entire field that is immediately in the act of pass- ing. It is a matter of constellation, into which portions of fields that are already past especially seem to enter and have their say. Thus, to go back to 'Locksley Hall,' each word as I recite it in its due order is suggested not solely by the previous word now expiring on my lips, but it is rather the effect of all the previous words, taken together, of the verse. "Ages," for example, calls up "in the foremost files of time," when preceded by "I, the heir of all the" —; but, when preceded by "for I doubt not through the," — it calls up "one increasing purpose runs." Similarly, if I write on the blackboard the letters A B C D E F,...they probably suggest to you G H I...