on every
emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits
you aspire to gain._ It is not in the moment of their forming, but in
the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and
aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain.

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter
how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of
every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely
unaffected for the better. With good intentions, hell proverbially is
paved. This is an obvious consequence of the principles I have laid
down. A 'character,' as J.S. Mill says, 'is a completely fashioned
will'; and a will, in the sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of
tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all the
principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes
effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency
with which the actions actually occur, and the brain 'grows' to their
use. When a resolve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate
without bearing practical fruit, it is worse than a chance lost: it
works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from
taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type
of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and
dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility, but
never does a concrete manly deed.

This leads to a fourth maxim. _Don't preach too much to your pupils or
abound in good talk in the abstract_. Lie in wait rather for the
practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus
at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do. The
strokes of _behavior_ are what give the new set to the character, and
work the good habits into its organic tissue. Preaching and talking too
soon become an ineffectual bore.

* * * * *

There is a passage in Darwin's short autobiography which has been often
quoted, and which, for the sake of its bearing on our subject of habit,
I must now quote again. Darwin says: "Up to the age of thirty or beyond
it, poetry of many kinds gave me great pleasure; and even as a schoolboy
I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical
plays. I have also said that pictures formerly gave me considerable, and
music very great delight. But now for many years I c