dining-room. That
is the crucial test which determines the strength of your resolve. Many
repetitions will be required before a pathway is worn deep enough to be
settled. Seize the very earliest opportunity to begin grooving it out,
and seize every other opportunity for deepening it.

After this view of the place in your life occupied by habit, you
readily see its far-reaching possibilities for welfare of body and
mind. Its most obvious, because most annoying, effects are on the side
of its disadvantages. Bad habits secure a grip upon us that we are
sometimes powerless to shake off. True, this ineradicableness need have
no terrors if we have formed good habits. Indeed, as will be pointed
out in the next paragraph, habit may be a great asset. Nevertheless, it
may work positive harm, or at best, may lead to stagnation. The
fixedness of habit tends to make us move in ruts unless we exert
continuous effort to learn new things. If we permit ourselves to move
in old grooves we cease to progress and become "old fogy."

But the advantages of habit far outweigh its disadvantages. Habit helps
the individual to be consistent and helps people to know what to expect
from one. It helps society to be stable, to incorporate within itself
modes of action conducive to the common good. For example, the respect
which we all have for the property of others is a habit, and is so
firmly intrenched that we should find ourselves unable to steal if we
wished to. Habit is thus a very desirable asset and is truly called the
"enormous fly-wheel of society."

A second advantage of habit is that it makes for accuracy. Acts that
have become habitualized are performed more accurately than those not
habitualized. Movements such as those made in typewriting and
piano-playing, when measured in the psychological laboratory, are found
to copy each other with extreme fidelity. The human body is a machine
which may be adjusted to a high degree of nicety, and habit is the
mechanism by which this adjustment is made.

A third advantage is that a stock of habits makes life easier. "There
is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual
but indecision, for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of
every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day and the
beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional
deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding or
regretting of matters which ought