st mechanical,
automatical, foreign, as I may say, to our personality. As we advance
in life a considerable portion of our activity escapes our notice,
removes from the sphere of liberty to enter that of habit, and becomes
as it were fated; the remainder, relieved in that respect, and so far
absolved from attention and effort, finds itself, by a process of
compensation, more free to act elsewhere.

This is useful, but it is also dangerous. The fatal part increases
within us, without our interference, and grows in the darkness of our
inward nature. What formerly struck our attention, now passes
unperceived. What was at first difficult, in time grows easy, too
easy: at last we can no longer say even that it is easy, for it takes
place of its own accord, independently of our will; we suffer, if we do
not do it. These acts being those, of all others, that cost the least
trouble, are incessantly renewed. We must, at last, confess that a
second nature is the result, which, formed at the expense of the
former, becomes, in a great measure, its substitute. We forget the
difficulties of our early beginnings, and fancy we have always been so.
This favours at least our idleness, and excuses us from making any
efforts to stop ourselves on the brink. Besides, the very traces of
the change are at length effaced, the road has disappeared; even though
we desire to go back, we could not. It is as though a bridge were
broken down behind us; we have passed over it--but for the last time.

We then resign ourselves to our lot, and say, with a faint attempt to
smile, "_For me it is a second nature_," or, better still, "_It is my
nature_." So much have we forgotten! But between this nature and our
real primitive nature, which we received at our birth, there is a great
difference; which is, that the latter, derived from the bosom of the
mother, was like the real mother herself, an attentive guardian of
life, that warned us of whatever may compromise it, that sought and
found in its benevolence a remedy for our ills. Whereas this second
nature, habit, under this perfidious name is often nothing else than
the high road that leads to death.

"It is my second nature," says the opium drinker in a sad tone, when he
sees dying by his side one who had taken to the deadly beverage only a
few months before himself: "I have still so many months to live." "It
is my second nature," says a miserable child, a devoted victim of idle
and bad hab