s 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.

3. The Educational Bearings of the Conception of Development. We have
had so far but little to say in this chapter about education. We have
been occupied with the conditions and implications of growth. If our
conclusions are justified, they carry with them, however, definite
educational consequences. When it is said that education is development,
everyth