The natural effect of habit is to perfect the faculty,[341] to increase its energy, to make it more prompt to act, and thus to facilitate the performance of the act for which the habit disposes it. It also engenders and develops a natural need or tendency or desire to repeat the act, and a natural aversion from the acts opposed to the habit. Finally, according as the habit grows, the performance of the act demands less effort, calls for less actual attention; thus the habit diminishes the feeling of effort and tends to bring about a quasi-automatic and semi-conscious form of activity.
Good habits are those which perfect the nature of the agent, which advance it towards the realization of its end; bad habits are those which retard and prevent the realization of this end. Hence the ethical importance, to the human person, of forming, fostering and confirming good habits, as also of avoiding, resisting and eradicating bad habits, can scarcely be exaggerated.
The profound and all-pervading influence of habit in the mental and moral life of man is unfortunately far from being adequately appreciated even by those responsible for the secular, moral and religious education of the young. This is perhaps mainly due to the fact that the influence of habit on the conduct of life, enormous as it is in fact, is so secret, so largely unconscious, that it easily escapes notice. Careful reflection on our actions, diligent study of the springs of action in our everyday life, are needed to reveal this influence. But the more we analyse human conduct in ourselves and others, the more firmly convinced we become that human character and conduct are mainly dependent on the formation of habits. Habits are the grand conserving and perfecting—or the terrible undermining and destroying—force of life. They are the fruit of our past and the seed of our future. In them the words of Leibniz find their fullest verification: “the present is laden with the past and pregnant with the future”. By forming good habits we escape the disheartening difficulties of perpetual beginnings; and thus the labour we devote to the acquisition of wisdom and virtue has its first rich recompense in the facility it gives us to advance on the path of progress.
It has been truly and rightly said that all genuine education consists in the formation of good habits.
80. Powers, Faculties and Forces.—A natural operative power, faculty, or force (δύναμις, potentia, facultas, virtus agendi) is a quality which renders the nature of the individual agent apt to elicit certain actions. By impotence or incapacity (ἀδυναμία, impotentia, incapacitas) Aristotle meant not an opposite kind of quality, in contradistinction to power or faculty, but only a power of a weaker order, differing in degree, not in kind, from the real power which renders an agent proximately capable of acting; such weaker capacities, for instance, as the infant's power to walk, or the defective eyesight of the aged.
It is to the individual subsisting person or thing that all the actions proceeding from the latter are ascribed: actiones sunt suppositorum: the “suppositum” or person is the principium quod agit. And it acts in accordance with its nature; this latter is the principium quo agens agit: the nature is the substance or essence as a principle of the actions whereby the individual tends to realize its end. But is a created, finite nature the immediate or proximate principle of its activities, so that it is operative per se? [pg 299] Or is it only their remote principle, eliciting them not by itself but only by means of powers, faculties, forces, which are themselves accidental perfections of the substance and really distinct from it, qualities intermediate between the latter and its actions, being the proximate principles of the latter?
No doubt when any individual nature is acted upon by other agencies, when it undergoes real change under the influence of its environment, its passive potentiality is being so far forth actualized. Moreover when the nature itself acts immanently, the term of such action remaining within the agent itself to actualize or perfect it, some passive potentiality of the agent is being actualized. In these cases the nature before being thus actualized was really capable of such actualization. This passive potentiality, however, is itself nothing actual, it implies no actual perfection in the nature. But we must distinguish carefully from this passive or receptive potentiality of a nature its active or operative powers—potentiae operativae. These may be themselves actual perfections in the nature, accidental perfections actually in the nature, and perhaps really distinct from it.
That they are indeed actual perfections of the nature is fairly obvious: it is an actual perfection of a nature to be proximately and immediately, and without any further complement or addition to its reality, capable of acting; and this is true whether the action in question be immanent or transitive: if it be immanent, the perfection resulting from the action, the term of the latter, will be a perfection of the agent itself, and in this case the agent by virtue of its operative power will have had the capacity of perfecting itself; while if the action be transitive the agent will have had, in virtue of its operative power, the capacity of producing perfections in other things. In either case such capacity is undoubtedly an actual perfection of the agent that possesses it. Hence the truth of the scholastic formula: Omne agens agit in quantum est in actu, patiatur vero inquantum est in potentia.
Furthermore, all such operative powers are really distinct from the actions which immediately proceed from them: this, too, is obvious, for while the operative power is a stable, abiding characteristic of the agent, the actions elicited by means of it are transient.
But what is the nature of this operative power in relation to the nature itself of the agent? It is an actual perfection of this nature. It is, moreover, unlike acquired habits, native to this [pg 300] nature, born with it so to speak, naturally inseparable from it. Further still, operative powers would seem to be all properties ([69]) of their respective natures: inasmuch as it is only in virtue of the operative power that the nature can act, and there can be no nature without connatural operations whereby it tends to realize the full and final perfection of its being, the perfection which is the very raison d'être of its presence in the actual order of things. The question therefore narrows itself down to this: Are operative powers, which perfect the nature of which they are properties, really distinct from this nature, or are they only virtually distinct aspects under which we view the nature itself? For example, when we speak of intellect and will as being faculties of the human soul, do we merely mean that intellect is the soul itself regarded as capable of reasoning, and will the soul itself regarded as capable of willing? Or do we mean that the soul is not by itself and in virtue of its own essence capable of reasoning and willing; that it can reason and will only through the instrumentality of two realities of the accidental order, really distinct from, though at the same time necessarily rooted in and springing from, the substance of the soul itself: realities which we call powers or faculties? Or again, when we speak of a man or an animal as having various sense faculties—internal and external, cognitive, appetitive, executive—do we merely mean that the living, sentient organism is itself directly capable of eliciting acts of various kinds: of imagining, desiring, seeing, hearing, etc.? Or do we mean that the organism can elicit these various acts only by means of several accidental realities, really distinct from, and inhering in, itself?