We would now direct your attention to habit—one of the most obvious and important elements in the formation of character. Its influence is felt in every sphere of your activity, its power extends to every faculty of your nature, and affects your personal, social, civil, and religious thought, feeling, and conduct. The nature of habit may be considered in two lights: first, an ease and excellence in doing a thing from having done it frequently; and secondly, a disposition to perform certain actions in the same way as you have done them before. Habit is thus the specific law of repetition. Dr. Reid explains the law of association by that of habit, and thus ascribes the effect of habit to a peculiar ultimate principle of the mind. He says, “That the trains of thinking, which, by frequent repetition, have become familiar, should spontaneously offer themselves to our fancy, seems to require no other original quality but the power of habit.” To this error, which others have fallen into, Sir W. Hamilton’s reply is unanswerable: “We can as well explain habit by association, as association by habit.” The first form of the influence of habit, then, which we have to consider, is that by which it occasions greater facility and skill in the performance of particular actions. In the lower animals, habits arise from the force of mere instinct, and, properly speaking, are not acquired by repetition. The bee builds its first cell, and gathers honey from the first flower, as easily and as well as at any future period. The bird selects the same material for its first nest that it selects for its last, and constructs it in the same sort of place, and of the same shape; and all as perfectly and easily the first time as ever afterwards. The beaver fells his first tree, and makes his first dam, with as little difficulty and as much skill as in any after period of his life. You have much more of reason than of instinct, and consequently acquire habits by repetition. Having chosen a certain course of action, you find that as you proceed you get on better, and that what was at first difficult, in course of time becomes easy. The pianist, sweeping the keys of her instrument, and emitting melodious notes and melting harmony; the rope-dancer, performing her wondrous feats, and keeping the exact point of equilibrium and graceful attitude, are illustrations—not so much of native talent, as of the degree to which habit may be developed. The second kind of influence which habit exercises, is a tendency to repeat the same actions under the same circumstances. Dr. Brown thus illustrates the power of indulged habit: “In the corruption of a great city, it is scarcely possible to look around, without perceiving some warning example of that blasting and deadening influence, before which, everything that was generous and benevolent in the heart has withered, while everything which was noxious has flourished with more rapid maturity; like those plants which can extend their roots, indeed, even in pure soil, and fling out a few leaves amid balmy airs and odours, but which burst out in all their luxuriance only from a soil that is fed with constant putrescency, and in an atmosphere which it is poison to inhale. It is not vice—not cold and insensible and contented vice, that has never known any better feelings—which we view with melancholy regret. It is virtue—at least what was once virtue—that has yielded progressively and silently to an influence, scarcely perceived, till it has become the very thing it abhorred. Nothing can be more just than the picture of this sad progress described in the well-known lines of Pope:
‘Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet, seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.’
“In the slow progress of some insidious disease, which is scarcely regarded by its cheerful and unconscious victim, it is mournful to mark the smile of gaiety as it plays over that very bloom, which is not the freshness of health, but the flushing of approaching mortality; amid studies, perhaps, just opening into intellectual excellence, and hopes and plans of generous ambition that are never to be fulfilled. But how much more painful is it to behold that equally insidious and far more desolating progress with which guilty passion steals upon the heart, when there is still sufficient virtue to feel remorse and to sigh at the remembrance of purer years, but not sufficient to throw off the guilt which is felt to be oppressive, and to return to that purity in which it would again, in its bitter moments, gladly take shelter, if only it had energy to vanquish the almost irresistible habits that would tear it back.
‘Crimes lead to greater crimes, and link so straight,
What first was accident, at last is fate:
The unhappy servant sinks into a slave,
And virtue’s last sad strugglings cannot save.’