while training; if you are in the most earnest training for life, you will leave it off altogether.

Drinking, however excusable a consolation for hard-worked men of meager mental and social resources, is inexcusable in young men with such a wealth of physical, intellectual, and social stimulus about them as college life affords. All the fraternities, of their own accord, exclude it from their chapter houses. Any student who injures himself or others by this abuse is liable to be requested to leave college in consequence.

Gambling is so utterly inconsistent with the purpose for which you come here, and, when once started, spreads so insidiously, that we always remove a student from college as soon as we discover that he is addicted to the practice.

Licentiousness involves such a hardening of the heart of the offender, such an anti-social attitude toward its victims, and brings such scandal on the institution, that "notorious and evil livers" in this respect are quietly, but firmly, removed at the end of an early year or term.

In dealing with these offenses, we hold no legal trial; we offer no formal proof of specific acts; we do not always succeed in convincing either students or parents of the justice of our action. In a little community like this, where everybody is intensely interested in everybody else, we know with absolute certainty; and, while we cannot always make public the nature and source of our knowledge, we act upon that knowledge. If this seems arbitrary, if any one of you does not wish to take his chance of summary dismissal without formal proof of specific charges, on any of these grounds, he would do well to withdraw voluntarily at the outset. This is our way of dealing with these matters, and you have fair warning in advance.

Such is college work; college life; college temptations. A million dollars in building and equipment; another million of endowment; the services of a score of trained, devoted teachers; the fellowship of hundreds of alumni, fellow-students, and younger brothers who will follow in the years to come; the name and fame, the traditions and influence of this ancient seat of learning; the rich and varied physical, intellectual, and social life among yourselves all are freely yours on the single condition that you use them for your own good, and to the harm of no one else.

THE PRINCIPLE OF HABIT1

ITS ETHICAL AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPORTANCE

BY WILLIAM JAMES

"HABIT a second nature! Habit is ten times nature," the Duke of Wellington is said to have exclaimed; and the degree to which this is true no one probably can appreciate as well as one who is a veteran soldier himself. The daily drill and the years of discipline end by fashioning a man completely over again, as to most of the possibilities of his conduct.

"There is a story," says Professor Huxley, "which is credible enough, though it may not be true, of a practical joker who, seeing a discharged veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out, 'Attention!' whereupon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and its effects had become embodied in the man's nervous structure."

Riderless cavalry-horses, at many a battle, have been seen to come together and go through their customary evolutions at the sound of the bugle call. Most domestic beasts seem machines almost pure and simple, undoubtingly, unhesitatingly doing from minute to minute the duties they have been taught, and giving no sign that the possibility of an alternative ever suggests itself to their minds. Men

1 Reprinted by permission from Psychology, Briefer Course, copyright, 1892, by Henry Holt and Co., New York.

grown old in prison have asked to be readmitted after being once set free. In a railroad accident a menagerie tiger, whose cage had broken open, is said to have emerged, but presently crept back again, as if too much bewildered by his new responsibilities, so that he was without difficulty secured.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveler, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks. of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the "shop," in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical one in the formation of intellectual and professional habits, the period below twenty is more important still for the fixing of personal habits, properly so called, such as vocalization and pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address. Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty spoken without a foreign accent; hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he ever learn to dress like a gentleman born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest "swell,” but he simply cannot buy the right things. An invisible law, as strong as gravitation, keeps him within his orbit, arrayed this year as he was the last; and how his better clad acquaintances contrive to get the things they wear will be for him a mystery to his dying day.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the