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 mode