Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 233, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 October 1914 — HABIT—THE SERVANT, THE MASTER. [ARTICLE]

HABIT—THE SERVANT, THE MASTER.

ON every hand we hear the discussion of eugenics, but early training in habit forming io just as important as to be well born. “When shall I begin to train my child?” asked a young mother of a prominent physician. “How old is the child?” inquired the doctor. "Two years, sir.” “Then you have lost just two years," replied he, gravely. “You must begin with the grandmother," said Oliver Wendell Holmes, when asked a similar question. “We sow an act, we reap a habit; wo sow a habit, we reap a character." While correct habits depend largely on self-discipline, and often on selfdenial, bad habits, likd weeds, spring up, unaided and untrained, to choke the plans of virtue, and, as with Canada thistles, allowed to go to seed In a fair meadow, we may have “one day’s seeding, ten years’ weeding.” Wo seldom see much change in peo-

pie after they get to be twenty-five or thirty years of age, except in going farther in the way they have started; but it is a great comfort to think that, when one is young, it is almost as easy to acquire a good habit as a bad one, and that it is possible to be hardened in goodness as well as in evil. Take good care of the first twenty years of your life, and you may hope that the last twenty will take good care of you. How unfortunate that the science of habit-forming is not more generally known by parents, and taught in our schools, colleges and universities.. It is a science, compared with which other departments of education sink into insignificance. Man’s life work is a masterpiece or a botch, according as each little habit has been perfectly or carelessly formed. It is said that if you invite one of the devil’s children to your home the whole family will follow. So one bad habit seems to have a relationship with all the others. For instance, the one habit of negligence, slovenliness, makes it easier to form others equally bad, until the entire character is honeycombed by the invasion of a family of bad habits. A man is often shocked when he suddenly discovers that he is considered a liar. He never dreamed of forming such a habit; but the little misrepresentations to gain some temporary end had, before he was aware of it, made a beaten track in the nerve and brain tisslie, until lying has become almost a physical necessity. He thinks he can easily overcome this habit, but he will not. He is bound to his habit with cords of steel; and only by painful, watchful and careful repetition of the exact truth, with a special effort of the will power at each act, cah he form a counter trunk line in the nerve and brain tissue.

Society is often shocked by the criminal act of a man who has always been considered upright and true. But if they could examine the habit map in his nervous mechanism and brain, they would find the beginnings of a path leading directly to his deed, in the tiny repetitions’ of what he regarded as trivial acts. All expert and technical education is built upon the theory that these trunk lines of habit become more and more sensitive to their accustomed stimuli, and respond mom and more readily. We are apt to overlook the physical basis of habit. Every repetition of an act makes us more likely to perform that act, and discovers in our wonderful mechanism a tendency to perpetual repetition, ; whose facility increases in exact proportion to the repetition. Finally the original act becomes voluntary from a natural reaction.’’*—* All through our lives the brain is constantly educating different parts of the body to form habits which will work automatically from reflex action, and thus is delegated to the nervous system a large part of life’s duties. This is nature’s wonderful economy to release the brain from the drudgery of individual acts, and leave it free to command all its forces for higher service. Men carelessly or playfully get into habits of speech or act which become so natural that they speak or act as they do not Intend, to their discomfiture. Beware of "small sins” and “white lies.” /