ake the rule. Bad behavior,
from the point of view of the teacher's art, is as good a starting-point
as good behavior. In fact, paradoxical as it may sound to say so, it is
often a better starting-point than good behavior would be.

The acquired reactions must be made habitual whenever they are
appropriate. Therefore Habit is the next subject to which your attention
is invited.

VIII. THE LAWS OF HABIT

It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of
habit, and psychology helps us greatly at this point. We speak, it is
true, of good habits and of bad habits; but, when people use the word
'habit,' in the majority of instances it is a bad habit which they
have in mind. They talk of the smoking-habit and the swearing-habit
and the drinking-habit, but not of the abstention-habit or the
moderation-habit or the courage-habit. But the fact is that our
virtues are habits as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it
has definite form, is but a mass of habits,--practical, emotional, and
intellectual,--systematically organized for our weal or woe, and
bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.

Since pupils can understand this at a comparatively early age, and since
to understand it contributes in no small measure to their feeling of
responsibility, it would be well if the teacher were able himself to
talk to them of the philosophy of habit in some such abstract terms as I
am now about to talk of it to you.

I believe that we are subject to the law of habit in consequence of the
fact that we have bodies. The plasticity of the living matter of our
nervous system, in short, is the reason why we do a thing with
difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and
finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with
hardly any consciousness at all. Our nervous systems have (in Dr.
Carpenter's words) _grown_ to the way in which they have been exercised,
just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to
fall forever afterward into the same identical folds.

Habit is thus a second nature, or rather, as the Duke of Wellington
said, it is 'ten times nature,'--at any rate as regards its importance
in adult life; for the acquired habits of our training have by that time
inhibited or strangled most of the natural impulsive tendencies which
were originally there. Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred
and ninety-nine