However, if the man of science holds fast to the results reached by James and others regarding habit and at the same time avoids James’s romantic fallacies he might perceive the possibility of extending the idea of habit beyond the naturalistic level; and the way would then be open for an important coöperation between him and the humanist. Humanists themselves, it must be admitted, even critical humanists, have diverged somewhat in their attitude towards habit, and that from the time of Socrates and Aristotle. I have been dwelling thus far on the indispensableness of a keen Socratic dialectic and of the right knowledge it brings for those who aspire to be critical humanists. But does right knowing in itself suffice to ensure right doing? Socrates and Plato with their famous identification of knowledge and virtue would seem to reply in the affirmative. Aristotle has the immediate testimony of consciousness on his side when he remarks simply regarding this identification: The facts are otherwise.[314] No experience is sadder or more universal than that of the failure of right knowledge to secure right performance: so much so that the austere Christian has been able to maintain with some plausibility that all the knowledge in the world is of no avail without a special divine succor. Now the Aristotelian agrees with the Christian that mere knowledge is insufficient: conversion is also necessary. He does not incline, however, like the austere Christian to look for conversion to “thunderclaps and visible upsets of grace.” Without denying necessarily these pistol-shot transformations of human nature he conceives of man’s turning away from his ordinary self--and here he is much nearer in temper to the man of science--as a gradual process. This gradual conversion the Aristotelian hopes to achieve by work according to the human law. Now right knowledge though it supplies the norm, is not in itself this working, which consists in the actual pulling back of impulse. But an act of this kind to be effective must be repeated. A habit is thus formed until at last the new direction given to the natural man becomes automatic and unconscious. The humanistic worker may thus acquire at last the spontaneity in right doing that the beautiful soul professes to have received as a free gift from “nature.” Confucius narrates the various stages of knowledge and moral effort through which he had passed from the age of fifteen and concludes: “At seventy I could follow what my heart desired without transgressing the law of measure.”[315]