the necessity of labour as a safeguard of
happiness."

Active habits are such as action gives: passive habits are such as our
condition qualifies us to receive. In emotion, however violent, we may be
passive, the forgiving and the vindictive man are for a time equally
passive in their emotions. It is when the vindictive man proceeds to
retaliation upon an adversary that he becomes a voluntary agent. It is
often difficult to analyse the ingredients of our thought, and to
determine how far they are involuntary and how far they are spontaneous.
Nor is this an enquiry the solution of which can ever affect the majority
of mankind: it is not with such subtleties that the practice of the
moralist is concerned. It is a psychological fact, which never can be
repeated too often, that habit deadens impression and fortifies activity.
It gives energy to that power which depends on the sanction of the
will--it renders the sensations which are nearly passive every day more
languid and insignificant.

"Mon sachet de fleurs," says Montaigne, "sert d'abord a mon nez; mais,
apres que je m'en suis servi huit jours, il ne sert plus qu'au nez des
assistants." So the taste becomes accustomed to the most irritating
stimulants, and is finally palsied by their continued application, yet
the necessity of having recourse to these provocatives becomes daily more
imperious.

"Crescit indulgens sibi dirus hydrops
Nec sitim pellit."

The tanner who lives among his hides till he is insensible to their
exhalations--the surgeon who has conquered the disgust with which the
objects around him must fill an ordinary individual--the sensualist, on
whose jaded appetite all the resources of art and all the loveliness of
nature are employed in vain--may serve as common instances of the first
part of the proposition; and the astonishing facility acquired by
particular men in the business with which they are conversant, are proofs
no less irrefragable of the second. Can any argument be conceived which is
more decisive in favour of the moral economy to which even this lower
world is subject, than the undeniable fact, that virtue is fortified by
exercise, and pain conquered by endurance; while vice, like the bearer of
the sibyl's books, extorts every hour a greater sacrifice for less
enjoyment? The passage in Mammon's speech is no less philosophically
accurate than it is poetically beautiful--

"Out torments also may in length of time