Chapter 39
Habit and practice; how repeated acts form dispositions and character.
308 passages · 73 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
Habit names the way repeated acts settle into dispositions, so that what was once done with effort comes to be done with ease, and what was once chosen comes to be expected, desired or even compelled. The idea reaches well beyond morals. In these books habit governs the training of the body and the manners of the child, the slavery of the sinner and the self-discipline of the reformer, the inferences of the understanding and the palate of the critic, the stability of states, and the inherited structures and instincts of animals. It is a great idea for the Harvard Classics because so many of their authors, from the Stoics and Augustine through Locke, Franklin and Hume to Burke and Darwin, found in it the hinge between nature and freedom. Habit is something we make, yet once made it acts upon us like nature.
The commonest formula is that custom is a second nature. Hamlet tells his mother that custom may be devil or angel: use gives ease to good actions and can almost change the stamp of nature1. Bacon holds that men’s deeds follow what they have been accustomed to, so that custom governs conduct more than resolution or eloquence2. Burke states the paradox exactly. Constant use dulls the pleasure of a thing, yet deprivation of it causes uneasiness, as with the snuff-taker3. He also notes that men crave novelty while clinging to custom4. Pope gives habit a place in the genealogy of the passions, making nature the ruling passion’s mother and habit its nurse5. Emerson reports Wellington’s saying that habit was ten times nature6. Marcus Aurelius turns the point inward: the soul is dyed by its habitual thoughts7. Plato had already said that the soul which consorts with the body takes on its habits and ways8. Pascal, the most searching of these writers, presses the formula until it becomes doubtful. Perhaps blindness and lust have become man’s second nature9. Perhaps nature itself is only a first custom, since different customs yield different “natural” principles10.
That doubt opens the controversy over natural and acquired differences. Rousseau argues that many supposed natural inequalities are merely the work of habit and different ways of life11. Adam Smith says the same of the philosopher and the street porter, whose difference arises from habit, custom and education rather than from nature12. Mill, following the doctrine of association, holds that character is formed by circumstances13. Freeman observes that habit and early teaching largely fix even a man’s language14. Yet the environmentalist case does not go unchallenged. Pascal elsewhere insists that qualities of mind are not acquired by habit but only perfected, fastidiousness of mind being a gift of nature15. Locke himself, for all his faith in training, denies that memory is improved by exercise and owes it to a happy constitution16. Hume grants that the penetration needed for philosophy comes from nature and is only improved by habit17.
Habit also familiarizes and dulls. Pascal sees that accustomed sight kills wonder and fixes belief18. Habit makes birth seem easy, and want of habit makes resurrection seem impossible19. Macbeth finds that familiarity with slaughterous thoughts has left him unable to be startled20. Byron’s prisoner comes to love his cell and regains his freedom with a sigh21. The same power can be a mercy. Pliny finds himself less sensible of his sufferings through habit22. Dana’s crew sleep through any gale23. Haskell’s veterans doze amid stray bullets24. Darwin marvels at the burdens habit enables the Chilean miners to bear25. Montaigne would use the same mechanism deliberately, making death familiar by meditating on it26, and Locke would cure children’s fears by gradual familiarity27.
How are habits formed? Epictetus gives the classic answer. Every act strengthens its corresponding habit: yield to anger and the next fit flames up faster; refrain, and count the days on which you were not angry28,29. Franklin confirms it from the other side. Modest speech, forced at first, became habitual over fifty years30,31. Smith observes that early reward for labour breeds a relish for industry32. Manzoni notes that a man of settled temperate habits feels even a slight lapse as an injury33. Dryden thinks frequent imitation of admired deeds yields a healthful habit, which is why epic, like a slow medicine, cures chronic ills34,35. Shelley hopes the recurrence of poetic power may leave a habit of order in the mind36.
Nearly all agree that youth is the season of habit. Carlyle compares the young mind to clay that hardens into rock or iron37. Locke warns that early errors leave an incorrigible taint38. Franklin says that in youth we plant our chief habits and prejudices39. Rousseau’s vicar judges vicious habits acquired early to be irresistible40. Augustine finds a custom formed in youth persisting into married life41.
Skill follows the same law. Marcus Aurelius bids us practise even what we despair of, since the practised left hand holds the bridle better than the unpractised right42. Plutarch’s Demosthenes conquers a weak voice by repeated exercise43. Smith traces the dexterity of divided labour to repetition of a single operation44. Johnson holds that skill is partly infused by precept and partly obtained by habit45. Mill credits his speculative work to a habit of returning to puzzles until they were cleared up46. Method matters too. Bacon advises practising by degrees, sometimes with harder exercise than ordinary use, and with intermissions so as not to practise errors47. Descartes would have the mind proceed step by step from easy to difficult, acquiring a facility for discovering truths48. Locke would settle habits one at a time49.
Locke’s treatise on education is the fullest working-out of these principles. His central claim is that rules, however often repeated, achieve nothing until practice turns them into habits50. Habits, once settled, operate without memory or reflection51. The teacher’s business is therefore to settle habits, not to inculcate rules52. He begins with the body. Bodies endure whatever they are accustomed to from the start53. Palates are made gluttonous by usage, not by nature54. Sleep and even the not-quite-voluntary motions of the body can be regulated by practice at fixed seasons55,56. Montaigne had likewise wished boys inured to sweat and cold57. Locke then turns to the mind. The power of self-denial is got by custom and early practice58. The habitual dominion of the mind over itself is worth more than Latin or logic59. Good carriage becomes natural, like a musician’s fingers60. Above all he insists on prevention. Every action of a child should be judged by the habit it forms61. Small dishonesties left alone harden62. Habits work more constantly than reason, which is seldom consulted when it is most needed63. Mill’s father kept him from holidays lest the habit of work be broken64, and Mill later contrasted the old discipline with an easy teaching that breeds men unable to do the disagreeable65.
Locke trains others; Franklin trains himself. He found that conviction alone could not prevent slips, because habit and inclination defeated it: contrary habits had to be broken and good ones established66. Hence his scheme of attending to one virtue a week, marking faults in a little book, and weeding one bed of the garden at a time67,68. He confesses that Order resisted him, and in the story of the speckled axe he shows how men give up on breaking bad habits and call their imperfection good enough69. Virtue, he concludes, is secure only when practice has become a habitude free of contrary inclination70. Epictetus had known that old ambitions reassert themselves despite resolutions71 and that principles must be worked out in daily practice, as an athlete lives by rule72,73. The books offer many portraits of such ordered lives. Pliny admires Spurinna, whose routine moves like the heavenly bodies74, and describes his own regulated day75. Thomas à Kempis prescribes fixed daily exercises76. The Buddhist commentary describes the Buddha’s routine after his unprofitable habits were extirpated77.
The darker face of habit is bondage, and here Augustine is the master. He describes custom unresisted becoming necessity, a chain forged link by link that held him against his will78. He calls the law of sin the violence of custom79, and he speaks of a divided will, upheld by truth but borne down by custom80. The inured worse prevails over the unused better, and old pleasures pluck at his garment81. Even after conversion the burden of custom drags him down from rare sweet affections82. Pascal adds that the habit of sin leaves the soul impotent to reach felicity by itself83. Vice grows from small beginnings. Monica’s sips became the draining of cups84, and Aesop’s petty thief becomes a bold criminal85. Browne says bad dispositions harden with age, each repetition adding to the evil86. Smith finds that habitual changing of work breeds sauntering indolence87.
Can such habits be broken? Thomas à Kempis advises resisting at the start88 and opposing old habit with a better one89. Locke likewise counters vice with the contrary habit90. The Gita holds that the wayward heart can be tamed by habit and wont of self-command91. Alypius throws off the Circus by strong self-command92, and Dana’s shipmate holds his resolution against drink for three years93. These cases stand against Augustine’s sense that the chain was loosed by grace rather than by contrary custom alone. Whether the will can break habit unaided remains an unsettled question among these texts.
The moderns extend habit into knowledge. Hume argues that inference from experience rests not on reasoning but on custom, a propensity produced by repeated conjunction94. Custom is the great guide of life, without which action would cease95. Belief itself is a natural instinct arising from customary conjunction96, and the very idea of power is the felt customary transition of the mind97. Pascal had drawn a religious consequence from a similar insight. Custom bends the automaton in us, which persuades the mind without its thinking98,99. Outward practice induces belief100. The habit of seeing kings with guards makes their bare faces awful, and men mistake habit for natural force101. Pascal also observes that Montaigne saw habit to be all-powerful without seeing the reason of its power102. Hume, it might be said, accepts that limit and makes it his philosophy.
Taste shows the same mixture. Burke holds that habit reconciles the palate to alien pleasures without confounding natural and acquired taste103, and that readiness of judgment comes by habit as easy reading follows spelling104. Hume agrees that practice gives dexterity in judging105. Wordsworth finds readers attached to the pleasures they are used to106. Andersen’s court prefers the mechanical bird because it can sing along107. Darwin notes that missionaries come to find a plain face mean-looking108.
In civil life Burke makes habit a principle of political wisdom. Prejudice renders virtue a habit rather than a series of unconnected acts, so that duty becomes part of nature109. Institutions rooted in long habit cannot be torn up without injury110. The habits communicated by civil life form a second nature acting on the first111. Bacon had seen that custom is strongest in society112. Others record the political effects of social habit. Plutarch shows public largesse corrupting a thrifty people113. Smith contrasts the manufacturer’s habits of industry with the soldier’s habits of idleness114. Darwin traces the Chilean miners’ improvidence to their manner of life115. Mill takes up habit as a cause of political failure, tracing weak public spirit to minds habituated to private advantage rather than to human nature116. Mill also warns that the habit of analysis wears away feeling117.
Finally, habit enters biology. Darwin reports Lamarck’s appeal to use and disuse118, and he grants that changed habits produce inherited effects, as in the wings of domestic ducks119. But he judges habit often overmastered by selection120. He compares instinct to habit121 and suggests that some instincts began as acquired habits122. Yet the sterile neuter insects, which leave no offspring, prove that habit is not essential123. In the Beagle he calls habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary in the Fuegian124, and he treats fear of man as an inherited habit125. Taine builds national character from climate, habit and heredity126. Pasteur wonders whether life without air is itself a habit127.
From Epictetus to Darwin, then, the question shifts from how a man may master himself to how far habit constitutes man and species. Unresolved remains whether habit is reason’s servant or its substitute. Emerson’s poet, who breaks up our chain of habits128, suggests that the power that makes us may also need, at times, to be unmade.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
See also: Medicine 2b · Temperance 2b · Education 3c
See also: Education 6b · Custom and Convention 6a · Virtue and Vice 4b
See also: Desire 5a · Virtue and Vice 4b
See also: Will 6a
See also: Evolution 5c · Animal 3b
See also: Education, Temperance, Evolution, Mind, Animal, Will