=Habits depend on sensations not attended to.= We have called _a, b, c, d,
e, f_, by the name of 'sensations.' If sensations, they are sensations
to which we are usually inattentive; but that they are more than
unconscious nerve-currents seems certain, for they catch our attention
if they go wrong. Schneider's account of these sensations deserves to be
quoted. In the act of walking, he says, even when our attention is
entirely absorbed elsewhere, it is doubtful whether we could preserve
equilibrium if no sensation of our body's attitude were there, and
doubtful whether we should advance our leg if we had no sensation of its
movement as executed, and not even a minimal feeling of impulse to set
it down. Knitting appears altogether mechanical, and the knitter keeps
up her knitting even while she reads or is engaged in lively talk. But
if we ask her how this is possible, she will hardly reply that the
knitting goes on of itself. She will rather say that she has a feeling
of it, that she feels in her hands that she knits and how she must knit,
and that therefore the movements of knitting are called forth and
regulated by the sensations associated therewithal, even when the
attention is called away...." Again: "When a pupil begins to play on the
violin, to keep him from raising his right elbow in playing a book is
placed under his right armpit, which he is ordered to hold fast by
keeping the upper arm tight against his body. The muscular feelings, and
feelings of contact connected with the book, provoke an impulse to press
it tight. But often it happens that the beginner, whose attention gets
absorbed in the production of the notes, lets drop the book. Later,
however, this never happens; the faintest sensations of contact suffice
to awaken the impulse to keep it in its place, and the attention may be
wholly absorbed by the notes and the fingering with the left hand. _The
simultaneous combination of movements is thus in the first instance
conditioned by the facility with which in us, alongside of intellectual
processes, processes of inattentive feeling may still go on._"
=Ethical and Pedagogical Importance of the Principle of Habit.=--"Habit a
second nature! Habit is ten times nature," the Duke of Wellington is
said to have exclaimed; and the degree to which this is true no one
probably can appreciate as well as one who is a veteran soldier himself.
The daily drill and the years of discipline end by fashioning a man
completely over again, as to most of the possibilities of his conduct.
"There is a story," says Prof. Huxley, "which is credible enough, though
it may not be true, of a practical joker who, seeing a discharged
veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out, 'Attention!'
whereupon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton
and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and its effects
had become embodied in the man's nervous structure."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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