familiar responses to familiar stimuli they cease to be conscious at all. They are performed with almost as little difficulty or attention as normal breathing.

Some Conditions of Habit-Formation

The acquisition of habits is so important in the education. of human beings that the conditions under which they can be acquired and made permanently effective have been closely studied. From experiments certain fundamental conclusions stand out. A habit is acquired by repetition, and the 'curves of learning' show certain recurrent features. In the first few repetitions of an acquired activity, there is progress in the rapidity, effectiveness, and accuracy with which the response is made. There is, up to a certain point, an almost vertical rise in the learning curve. After varying numbers of repetitions, depending somewhat on the particular individual, there occur what are known as 'plateaux', during which no progress in speed or accuracy of response is to be observed. In experiments with the learning of typewriting and telegraphy, for example, it has been found that the beginner makes rapid progress up to the point, say, where he can write fifty words a minute without error; there is a long interval not infrequently before he can raise his efficiency to the point of writing seventy words a minute correctly. Analogous conditions have been observed in the speed with which the sending and receiving of telegraphic messages is learnt. These 'plateaux' of learning are sometimes to be accounted for by muscular fatigue. Frequently there is actual progress in learning during these apparent intervals of marking time. Some of the less observable features of skill in performance which only later become overt in speed and accuracy are being attained during these seemingly profitless and discouraging intervals. Not infrequently in the acquisition of skill in the playing of tennis, piano or in the solution of mathematical problems, a decided gain in skill and speed comes after what seems to be not only lack of progress but decided backsliding.1

See Ladd and Woodworth: Physiological Psychology, pp. 542-592.

It is this which led William James to quote with approval the aphorism that one learns to skate in summer and swim in winter.

Drill versus Attentive Repetition in Learning

The rapidity with which habits may be acquired and the permanency with which they may be retained depend on other factors than simply that of repetition. Mere mechanical drill is effective in the acquisition of simple mechanical habits. The most attentive appreciation of the proper things to be done in playing tennis or the piano will not by itself make one an expert in those activities. The effective responses must actually be performed in order that the appropriate connections within the nervous system may be made, and may become habitual. A habit is physiologically nothing but a certain set or direction given to paths in the nervous system. These paths become fixed, embedded, and ingrained only when nerve currents pass over them time and time again.

Mere repetition, on the other hand, will not suffice in the acquisition of complex habits of action. The learning of these requires a deliberate noting and appreciation of the significant factors in the performance of an activity, and the consciously chosen repetition of these in succeeding instances until the habit is well fixed. One reason why animals cannot be taught so wide a variety of complex habits as can the human being is that they cannot keep their attention fixed on successive repetitions, and that in learning they literally do not know what they are doing. They cannot, as can humans, break up the activity which they are in process of learning into its significant factors, and attend to these in successive repetitions. The superiority of deliberate learning over the brute method of trial-and-error consists precisely in that the deliberate and attentive learner can pick out the important steps of any process, and learn rapidly to eliminate random and useless features of his early performances without waiting to have the right way 'knocked into him' by experience. He will shortcircuit the process of learning by choosing appropriate responses in advance, noting how they may be made more effective and discovering methods for making them so, and for eliminating

useless, random, and ineffective acts. What we call the 'capacity to learn' is evident in marked degree where there is alert attention to the steps of the process in successive repetitions. The truth in the assertion that an intelligent man will shortly outclass the merely automatically skillful in any occupation or profession requiring training lies not in any mysterious faculty, but in the peculiarly valuable habit of attending with discriminating interest to any process, and learning it thereby with vastly more economical rapidity. Genius may be more than what one writer described it, “a painstaking attention to detail;" but a painstaking attention to the meaning and bearing of details it most decidedly is.

Learning Affected by Age, Fatigue and Health

There are certain conditions not altogether within the control of the individual which affect the rapidity with which habits are acquired. One of the most important of these is fatigue. Connections among the fibers that go to make up the nervous system cannot be made with ease and rapidity when the organism is fatigued. At such times there seems to be an unusually high resistance at the synpases or nerve junctions (where there is a lowering of resistance to the passage of a nerve current when habits are easily formed.) After a certain point of fatigue, whether in the acquisition of motor habits, or the memorizing of information, in which the process is much the same, the rate of learning is much slower and the degree of accuracy much less. The length of time through which habits are retained when acquired during a state of fatigue is also much less than under a more healthy and resilient condition of the organism.

The point of fatigue varies among different individuals and in consequence the conditions of habit formation vary. But some conditions remain constant. For instance, in experiments with memory tests (memory being a form of habit in the nervous system), material memorized in the morning seems to be most rapidly acquired and most permanently retained.

The age and health of the individual also are important factors in the capacity to learn, or habit formation. Conditions

during disease are similar to those obtaining during fatigue, only to a more acute degree. The toxins and poisons in the nervous system at such times operate to prevent the formation of new habits and the breaking of old ones. For while the synpases (nerve junctions) may offer high resistance to the passage of a new stimulus, they will lend themselves more and more readily to the passage of stimuli by which they have already been traversed.

That the age of the individual should make a vast difference in the capacity to acquire new habits and to modify old ones is obvious from the physiology of habit already described. When the brain and nervous system are both young, there are few neural connections established, and the organism is plastic to all stimuli. As the individual grows older, connections once made, tend to be repeated and to be, as it were, unconsciously preferred by the nervous system. The capacity to form habits is most pronounced in the young child in whose nervous structure no one action rather than another has yet had a chance to be ingrained. The more connections that are made, the more habits that are acquired, the less, in a sense can be made. For the organism will tend to repeat those actions to which it has previously been stimulated, and the more frequently it repeats them the more frequently it will tend to. So that, as William James pointed out, by twentyfive we are almost literally bundles of habits. When the majority of acts of life have become routine and fixed, it is almost impossible to acquire new ways of acting, since the acquisition of new habits seriously interferes with the old, and old habits physiologically stay put.

Habit as A Time Saver

This fact, that habits can be acquired most easily early in life and that those early acquired become so fixed that they are almost inescapable, is of supreme importance to the individual and society. It is in one sense a great advantage; it is an enormous saver of time. In the famous words of James:

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize

our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, and as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us as we would guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man, goes to the deciding or regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right."

The ideal of efficiency is the ideal of having the effective thing habitually done with as little effort and difficulty as possible. This in the case of human beings is, as James points out, attained when good habits are early acquired and when as large a proportion as possible of purely routine activity is made effortless and below the level of consciousness. To do as many things as possible without thinking is to free thinking for new situations. Our experiences would be very restricted indeed if we could not reduce a large portion of the things we do to the mechanics of habit. Walking, eating, these though partly instinctive, were once problems requiring thought, effort, and attention. If we had to spend all our lives learning to dress and undress, to find our way about our own house or city, to spell and to pronounce correctly, it is clear how little variety and diversity we should ever attain in our lives. By the time we are twenty these fundamental habits are so firmly fixed in us that, for better or for worse, they are ours for life, and we are free to give our attention to other things. Again in the words of James:

We all of us have a definite routine manner of performing certain daily offices connected with the toilet, with the opening and shutting of familiar cupboards and the like. Our lower centers know the order

James: Psychology, Vol. I, p. 122.