2. Habits as Expressions of Growth.
—We have already noted that plasticity is the capacity to retain
and carry over from prior experience factors which modify subsequent
activities. This signifies the capacity to acquire habits, or develop
definite dispositions. We have now to consider the salient features of
habits. In the first place, a habit is a form of executive skill, of
efficiency in doing. A habit means an ability to use natural conditions
as means to ends. It is an active control of the environment through
control of the organs of action. We are perhaps apt to emphasize the
control of the body at the expense of control of the environment. We
think of walking, talking, playing the piano, the specialized skills
characteristic of the etcher, the surgeon, the bridge-builder, as if
they were simply ease, deftness, and accuracy on the part of the
organism. They are that, of course; but the measure of the value of
these qualities lies in the economical and effective control of the
environment which they secure. To be able to walk is to have certain
properties of nature at our disposal—and so with all other habits.
Education is not infrequently defined as consisting in the acquisition
of those habits that effect an adjustment of an individual and his
environment. The definition expresses an essential phase of growth.
But it is essential that adjustment be understood in its active sense of
control of means for achieving ends. If we think of a habit simply
as a change wrought in the organism, ignoring the fact that this change
consists in ability to effect subsequent changes in the environment, we
shall be led to think of "adjustment" as a conformity to environment as
wax conforms to the seal which impresses it. The environment is thought
of as something fixed, providing in its fixity the end and standard of
changes taking place in the organism; adjustment is just fitting
ourselves to this fixity of external conditions.
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Habit as habituation is indeed something relatively passive;
we get used to our surroundings—to our clothing, our shoes, and gloves;
to the atmosphere as long as it is fairly equable; to our daily associates,
etc. Conformity to the environment, a change wrought in the organism
without reference to ability to modify surroundings, is a marked trait
of such habituations. Aside from the fact that we are not entitled to
carry over the traits of such adjustments (which might well be called
accommodations, to mark them off from active adjustments) into habits
of active use of our surroundings, two features of habituations are worth
notice. In the first place, we get used to things by first using them.
Consider getting used to a strange city. At first, there is excessive
stimulation and excessive and ill-adapted response. Gradually certain
stimuli are selected because of their relevancy, and others are
degraded. We can say either that we do not respond to them any longer,
or more truly that we have effected a persistent response to
them—an equilibrium of adjustment. This means, in the second
place, that this enduring adjustment supplies the background upon which
are made specific adjustments, as occasion arises. We are never
interested in changing the whole environment; there is much that we take
for granted and accept just as it already is. Upon this background our
activities focus at certain points in an endeavor to introduce needed
changes. Habituation is thus our adjustment to an environment which at
the time we are not concerned with modifying, and which supplies a
leverage to our active habits.
Adaptation, in fine, is quite as much adaptation of the environment to
our own activities as of our activities to the environment. A savage
tribe manages to live on a desert plain. It adapts itself. But its
adaptation involves a maximum of accepting, tolerating, putting up with
things as they are, a maximum of passive acquiescence, and a minimum of
active control, of subjection to use. A civilized people enters upon
the scene. It also adapts itself. It introduces irrigation; it
searches the world for plants and animals that will flourish under such
conditions; it improves, by careful selection, those which are growing
there. As a consequence, the wilderness blossoms as a rose. The savage
is merely habituated; the civilized man has habits which transform the
environment.
The significance of habit is not exhausted, however, in its executive
and motor phase. It means formation of intellectual and emotional
disposition as well as an increase in ease, economy, and efficiency of
action. Any habit marks an inclination—an active preference
and choice for the conditions involved in its exercise. A habit does not
wait, Micawber-like, for a stimulus to turn up so that it may get busy;
it actively seeks for occasions to pass into full operation. If its
expression is unduly blocked, inclination shows itself in uneasiness and
intense craving. A habit also marks an intellectual disposition. Where
there is a habit, there is acquaintance with the materials and equipment
to which action is applied. There is a definite way of understanding
the situations in which the habit operates. Modes of thought, of
observation and reflection, enter as forms of skill and of desire into
the habits that make a man an engineer, an architect, a physician, or a
merchant. In unskilled forms of labor, the intellectual factors are at
minimum precisely because the habits involved are not of a high grade.
But there are habits of judging and reasoning as truly as of handling a
tool, painting a picture, or conducting an experiment.
Such statements are, however, understatements. The habits of mind
involved in habits of the eye and hand supply the latter with their
significance.
Above all, the intellectual element in a habit fixes the relation of
the habit to varied and elastic use, and hence to continued growth. We
speak of fixed habits. Well, the phrase may mean powers so well
established that their possessor always has them as resources when
needed. But the phrase is also used to mean ruts, routine ways, with
loss of freshness, open-mindedness, and originality. Fixity of habit
may mean that something has a fixed hold upon us, instead of our having
a free hold upon things. This fact explains two points in a common
notion about habits: their identification with mechanical and external
modes of action to the neglect of mental and moral attitudes, and the
tendency to give them a bad meaning, an identification with "bad
habits." Many a person would feel surprised to have his aptitude in his
chosen profession called a habit, and would naturally think of his use
of tobacco, liquor, or profane language as typical of the meaning of
habit. A habit is to him something which has a hold on him, something
not easily thrown off even though judgment condemn it.
Habits reduce themselves to routine ways of acting, or degenerate into
ways of action to which we are enslaved just in the degree in which
intelligence is disconnected from them. Routine habits are unthinking
habits: "bad" habits are habits so severed from reason that they are
opposed to the conclusions of conscious deliberation and decision. As
we have seen, the acquiring of habits is due to an original plasticity
of our natures: to our ability to vary responses till we find an
appropriate and efficient way of acting. Routine habits, and habits
that possess us instead of our possessing them, are habits which put an
end to plasticity. They mark the close of power to vary. There can be
no doubt of the tendency of organic plasticity, of the physiological
basis, to lessen with growing years. The instinctively mobile and
eagerly varying action of childhood, the love of new stimuli and new
developments, too easily passes into a "settling down," which means
aversion to change and a resting on past achievements. Only an
environment which secures the full use of intelligence in the process of
forming habits can counteract this tendency. Of course, the same
hardening of the organic conditions affects the physiological structures
which are involved in thinking. But this fact only indicates the need
of persistent care to see to it that the function of intelligence is
invoked to its maximum possibility. The short-sighted method which
falls back on mechanical routine and repetition to secure external
efficiency of habit, motor skill without accompanying thought, marks a
deliberate closing in of surroundings upon growth.
