that familiar fact, the power of habit, and is nowise
confined to the case of virtuous actions. Many indifferent things, which
men originally did from a motive of some sort, they continue to do from
habit. Sometimes this is done unconsciously, the consciousness coming
only after the action: at other times with conscious volition, but
volition which has become habitual, and is put into operation by the
force of habit, in opposition perhaps to the deliberate preference, as
often happens with those who have contracted habits of vicious or
hurtful indulgence. Third and last comes the case in which the habitual
act of will in the individual instance is not in contradiction to the
general intention prevailing at other times, but in fulfilment of it; as
in the case of the person of confirmed virtue, and of all who pursue
deliberately and consistently any determinate end. The distinction
between will and desire thus understood, is an authentic and highly
important psychological fact; but the fact consists solely in this--that
will, like all other parts of our constitution, is amenable to habit,
and that we may will from habit what we no longer desire for itself, or
desire only because we will it. It is not the less true that will, in
the beginning, is entirely produced by desire; including in that term
the repelling influence of pain as well as the attractive one of
pleasure. Let us take into consideration, no longer the person who has a
confirmed will to do right, but him in whom that virtuous will is still
feeble, conquerable by temptation, and not to be fully relied on; by
what means can it be strengthened? How can the will to be virtuous,
where it does not exist in sufficient force, be implanted or awakened?
Only by making the person _desire_ virtue--by making him think of it in
a pleasurable light, or of its absence in a painful one. It is by
associating the doing right with pleasure, or the doing wrong with pain,
or by eliciting and impressing and bringing home to the person's
experience the pleasure naturally involved in the one or the pain in the
other, that it is possible to call forth that will to be virtuous,
which, when confirmed, acts without any thought of either pleasure or
pain. Will is the child of desire, and passes out of the dominion of its
parent only to come under that of habit. That which is the result of
habit affords no presumption of being intrinsically good; and there
would be no reason for wishing tha