of
declamation, into the errour opposite to that which he ridicules. "The
only habit," cries he, "that I wish my Emilius to have, is the habit
of having no habits." Emilius would have been a strange being, had he
literally accomplished his preceptor's wish. To go up stairs, would
have been a most operose, and to go down stairs, a most tremendous,
affair to Emilius, for he was to have no habits: between every step of
the stairs, new deliberations must take place, and fresh decisions of
the judgment and will ensue. In his moral judgments, Emilius would
have had as much useless labour. Habit surely is necessary, even to
those who make reason the ultimate judge of their affairs. Reason is
not to be appealed to upon every trivial occasion, to rejudge the same
cause a million of times. Must a man, every time he draws a straight
line, repeat to himself, "a right line is that which lieth evenly
between its points?" Must he rehearse the propositions of Euclid,
instead of availing himself of their practical use?

"Christian, can'st thou raise a perpendicular upon a straight line?"
is the apostrophe with which the cross-legged emperor of Barbary,
seated on his throne of rough deal boards, accosts every _learned_
stranger who frequents his court. In the course of his reign,
probably, his Barbaric majesty may have reiterated the demonstration
of this favourite proposition, which he learned from a French surgeon
about five hundred times; but his majesty's understanding is not
materially improved by these recitals; his geometrical learning is
confined, we are told, to this single proposition.

It would have been scarcely worth while to have singled out for combat
this paradox of Rousseau's, concerning habit, if it had not presented
itself in the formidable form of an antithesis. A false maxim,
conveyed in an antithesis, is dangerous, because it is easily
remembered and repeated, and it quickly passes current in
conversation.

But to return to our subject, of which we have _imprudently_ lost
sight. Imprudence does not always arise from our neglect of our past
experience, or from our forgetting to take the future into our
calculations, but from false associations, or from passion. Objects
often appear different to one man, from what they do to the rest of
the world: this man may reason well upon what the majority of
reasonable people agree to call false appearances; he may follow
strictly the conviction of his own understanding, an