tions as were the ideas of Rip Van Winkle when he awoke. "You will never find your way out," angrily cried the chemist Biot to Pasteur, when he refused to give up his researches on spontaneous generation. That was because Biot's opinions were rigidly classified. They could not form new combinations. When Ericsson asked for an appropriation to build the Monitor, Fox,1 assistant secretary of the navy, and the naval board, condemned the idea. They said that the heavy armor would sink the vessel. Their opinions were organized and filed away. They would not even test them with arithmetic, as Lincoln wished them to do. The department store, the costkeeping systems, loose-leaf books, gathering statistics, charting the demand for commodities, adding-machines, card methods, all these things and many more have been condemned by the classified opinions of business men.

"You see all organization, with its implication of finality, is death," H. G. Wells makes Mr. Britling say. "What you organize you kill. Organized morals or organized religion or organized thought are dead morals and dead religion and dead thought. Yet some organization you must have. Organization is like killing cattle; if you don't kill some the herd is just waste. But you mustn't kill all or you kill the herd. The unkilled cattle are the herd, the continuation; the unorganized side of life is the real life. The reality of life is adventure, not performance. What isn't adventure isn't life. What can be ruled about can be machined, and there is always a tendency to organize and then to automatize."

When the relations between the individual and his environment are definite and maintained, habit dominates. Even when these relations are indefinite and subject to alterations, habit still tends to rule. This is shown in acts that involve volition.

Mr. Fox later saw the value of Ericsson's invention and became one of his most vigorous supporters.

Experiments involving choice between different responses carried out by Barrett' illustrate this. We quote his description of the outcome. "Regularity in the reactions," he says, "was manifested in every phase of the choice-process, in the manner of reading the" [different] cards" [to which the persons reacted], "in the manner of reacting, and of realizing the choice. Automatism entered into every detail of the experiment. Even the experimenter came to perform the various functions in a perfectly automatic way, so much so that the salient note of the whole experiment, toward the end of the series, was its mechanical regularity. . . . We see that the natural tendency is toward automatic choosing. The times grow shorter, the number of phenomena" [admitted within the field of choice by the individual] "grows less, only one alternative is considered; there is economy in every sense, and finally the motivation reaches such a point that it never, or practically never, deviates from a certain curve or motivation track."

In Barrett's earlier experiments those who were being tested made many remarks about motives, feelings, and judgments which influenced action, but toward the end they had little to say. "There was nothing to remark. There were no feelings, hesitations, or motives to describe. The mental act had become direct and simple. . . . The will had gradually ceased to expend useless effort. Volitional force was economized. . . . Automatism held sway, and there was nothing to record." That is a pretty good description of stagnation as far as mental activity is concerned; yet it seems to be the final outcome of being possessed by habit. Evidently, if one is to have living thoughts, if, indeed, one is to think at all, it is necessary to set up a determined resistance to the encroachment of habitual modes of thinking and behaving.

...

Experience gains value to the extent to which inten1 Motive-Force and Motivation Tracks, by E. Boyd Barrett, pp. 140, 149.

tional thoughtful variation characterizes the range of activities. For, as Rousseau long ago said: "He who has lived most is not he who has numbered the most years, but he who has been most truly conscious of what life is. A man may have himself buried at the age of a hundred years, who died from the hour of his birth. He would have gained something by going to his grave in youth, if up to that time he had only lived."

Measuring up to our possibilities is a troublesome matter, not because of lack of desire for the vast majority of people are anxious to do so-but because of the difficulty of realizing on our abilities, of turning them into achievement. Man, like his forebears, was made on the plan of adaptation, and adaptation means fitting into conditions. It does not lead to progress, unless external conditions force such a change. Habit is a preservative. It conserves and fixes those types of behavior which help the individual to fit into his environment. But habit is satisfied with the lowest level of "fitness." It must, therefore, be controlled and directed, else it does not serve us well.

We have found that habit eliminates attention. Only those matters, therefore, which finally require no attention should be intrusted to it. Consequently, selection is necessary. Acts of muscular skill, ethical and social behavior should be reduced to habit; and then no deviation should be tolerated. But even here it must be remembered that there is always a tendency to form habits before a high degree of muscular dexterity or of ethical and social attainment has been reached. This makes the difference between poor workmen and skilful artisans, as well as between mediocre tennis and golf players, and those who can qualify for tournaments; and the same distinction exists in behavior in general.

The elimination of attention from habitual processes reveals the activities from which habit should be barred. It is a distinct advantage to relieve the higher brain cen

tres of the supervision of skilful movements which have been acquired during the preliminary apprenticeship in work or games; and one should not need to wait to decide on acts of courtesy. It is disastrous, however, to free these higher centres from control of matters that require intelligence. For habit is a treacherous ally. It takes us off our guard and registers all our acts. Its subtlety is seen in our ignorance of the fact that it possesses us. Those who condemned the discoveries of the men to whom we have referred did not know that their minds had become inflexible. They believed that they were thinking and that they were doing a social service. Freedom from habituation is relative; thoughts, opinions, and beliefs are largely fixed by social groups, and we adjust ourselves to them involuntarily and unintelligently. Then they become fixed as mental habits of which we are no more aware than we are conscious of our professional and family mannerisms. We believe that we see the reason for them, so gentle and insinuating is their mastery.

CHAPTER IV

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LEARNING

LEARNING in its widest sense is profiting from experience. Education is sometimes said to consist of habit formation, but we have seen that habits mean repetition, and that only those acts should be repeated which can best be performed when automatized. Even these acts should not be reduced to habit until they have been perfected and, as has been said, the tendency always exists to mechanize at a low level of attainment. Ability to continue learning-to improve upon what one has already done, to see more meaning in experience measures intelligence.

The higher animals stand in the evolutional scale the more prominent is the rôle that learning plays in their lives. In man it is the method of development. There are, however, certain general aspects of learning which may be set apart from its narrower applications as manifested in acquiring facility in some act of manual skill, and it may be well, first, to consider some of these larger phases of the subject.

Human activities may be roughly divided into the mental and physical. To be sure, the one never exists without the other, and, consequently, such a classification only indicates somewhat freely the dominating feature. Now, there is a rather wide-spread belief that these two sorts of activities differ essentially in their origin. The physical activities, including as they do the manual arts and trades, are generally admitted to be improved by instruction. Skill in certain mental arts, however, is commonly thought to be an exception to this rule. They are believed to be