ous
cultivation on the part of the individual of the habit of
open-minded inquiry, of the habit of learning, and the
encouragement of this tendency by the group are the only antidotes
that can be provided against this marked physiological
tendency to fossilization and the frequent social tendencies in
the same direction.

Whether habits shall master us, or whether we shall be
their masters, depends also on the method by which they
were acquired. If they were learned merely through mechanical
drill, they will be fixed and rigid. If they were learned
deliberately to meet new situations, they will not be retained
when the conditions they were acquired to meet are utterly
changed.

THE SPECIFICITY OF HABITS. One important consideration,
finally, that must be brought to consideration is that habits
are, like instincts, specific. They are not general "open sesames"
which, learned in one situation, will apply with indiscriminate
miraculousness to a variety of others. Just as an
instinct is a definite response to a definite stimulus, so is a
habit. The chief and almost only observable difference is
that the former is unlearned, while the latter is learned or
acquired.

But while habits are specific, they are within limits transferable.
Such is the case when a situation which calls out a
certain habitual response is paralleled in significant points by
another. Thus the situation,
one's-room-at-home-cluttered-up-with-a-miscellany-of-books-papers-tennis-apparatus-and-clothing,
has sufficiently similar significant points to the situation,
one's-office-littered-with-documents-old-letters-manuscripts-blueprints-and-proofs,
to call forth, if the habit has
been established in one case, the identical response of "tidying
up" in the other. But unless there are marked points of
similarity between two different sets of circumstances, specific
habits remain specific and non-transferable. There is in the
laws of habit no guarantee that an industrious application to
the batting averages of the major league on the part of an
alert twelve-year-old will provoke the same assiduous assimilation
of the facts of the American Revolution; that a boy
who works hard at his chemistry will work equally hard at his
English, or that one who is careful about his manners and
pronunciation in school will display the slightest heed to them
among his companions on the ball-field. One of the most
cogent arguments against the stereotyped teaching of Latin