and Greek has been the serious doubt psychologists have held
as to whether four years' training in Latin syntax will develop
in the student general mental habits which will be applicable
or useful outside the Latin classroom.

The older "faculty" psychologists presumed that different
subjects trained various so-called "faculties" of "memory,"
"imagination," and "intellect." It has now become clear on
experimental evidence that in education we are training no
isolated faculties, but are training the individual to certain
specific habits. The more widely applicable the habits are,
obviously the more valuable or dangerous will they be in the
conduct of life. But when habits do become general, such as
a habit of promptness, honesty, and regularity, not in one
situation but "in general," it is because they are something
more than habits in the strict physiological sense. They are
intellectual as well as merely motor in character; they are
deliberate and conscious methods rather than mechanical
rules of thumb. Habits that have been drilled into an
individual will appear only when the situation very closely
approximates the one in which the drill has been performed.
The cat that has learned to get out of a certain type of cage
by pressing a button will be utterly at a loss if the familiar
features of the cage are changed. The intelligent human
will detect and take pains to detect among the minor
differences of the situation some significant fact which he has met
in another setting, and he will apply a habit useful in this new
situation despite the slightly changed accompanying circumstances.
The man who can drive an automobile with reflective
appreciation of the processes involved, who knows, as
we say, what he is doing, will not long be baffled by a car
with a slightly different arrangement of levers and steering-gear,
nor be completely frustrated when the car for some
reason fails to move. As happened in many notable instances
during the World War, trained executives were not long at a
loss when they shifted from the management of a steel plant
to a shipyard, or from large-scale mining operations in Montana
to large-scale relief work in Belgium.

THE CONSCIOUS TRANSFERENCE OF HABITS. When habits are
consciously acquired, they may be consciously transferred
with modifications to situations slightly different from those
in which they were first learned. Merely mechanical habits
are a hindrance in any save the most mech