Habits may be divided into active and passive;— those things which we do by an act of the will, and those things which we suffer by the agency of some external power. I begin with the active habits; and, after stating a few of the most familiar of them, I will shortly analyse the examples, in order to show that they are merely referable to association. It may be as well, perhaps, to give a specimen of the life of a man whose existence was, at last, entirely dependent upon the habits he had contracted: it is a fair picture of the dominion which habit establishes over us, at the close of life. "The professed rule of Mr. Hobbes," says Dr. White Kennet, in his Memoirs of the Cavendish Family, was to dedicate the morning to exercise, and the evening to study. At his first rising, he walked out, "and climbed up a hill: if the weather was not dry, "he made a point of fatiguing himself within doors, so "as to perspire; remarking constantly, that an old man "had more moisture than heat; and by such motion, "heat was to be acquired, and moisture expelled. After "this, the philosopher took a very comfortable breakfast, "and then went round the lodgings to wait upon the "earl, the countess, the children, and any considerable

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strangers; paying some short addresses to all of them. "He kept these rounds till about twelve o'clock, when "he had a little dinner provided for him, which he eat "always by himself, without ceremony. Soon after "dinner, he retired to his study, and had his candle, "with ten or twelve pipes of tobacco, laid by him; "then, shutting the door, he fell to smoking, thinking, "and writing, for several hours. He could never en"dure to be left in an empty house; whenever the earl " removed, he would go along with him, even to his last stage, from Chatsworth to Hardwick. This was the "constant tenor of his life, from which he never varied, no, not a moment, nor an atom."

This is the picture of a man whose life appears to

have been entirely regulated by the past; who did a thing because he had done it; who, so far as bodily actions were concerned, could hardly be said to have any fresh motives; but was impelled by one regular set of volitions, constantly recurring at fixt periods. Now, take any one of his habits, and examine its progress; it will afford a natural history of this law of the mind, and will show what circumstances in that law are most worthy of observation.

He smoked: how did this begin? It might have begun any how. He was staying, perhaps, at some house where smoking was in fashion, and began to smoke out of compliance with the humours of other persons. At first, he thought it unpleasant; and as all the expirations and inspirations were new, and difficult, it required considerable attention; and at the close of the evening he could have distinctly recollected, if he had tried to do so, that his mind had been employed in thinking how he was to manage and manœuvre the pipe. The practice goes on; the disgust vanishes; much less attention is necessary to smoke well: in a few days the association is formed; the moment the cloth is taken away after supper, the idea of smoking occurs: if any accident happen to prevent it, a slight pain is felt in consequence; it seems as if things did not go on in their regular track, and some confusion had crept into the arrangements of the evening. As the association goes on, it gathers strength from the circumstances connected with it; from the mirth and conversation with which it is joined: at last, after a lapse of years, we see the philosopher of Malmsbury advanced from one, to one dozen of pipes; so perfect in all the tactics of a smoker, so dexterous in all the manual of his dirty recreation, that he would fill, light, and smoke out his pipe, without the slightest remembrance of what he had been doing, or the most minute interruption to any immoral, irreligious, or unmathematical track of thought, in which he hap

pened to be engaged: but we must not forget, that though his amusement occupied him so little, and was past over with such a small share of his attention, the want of it, would have occupied him so much, that he could have done nothing without it; all his speculations would have been at an end, and without his twelve pipes he might have been a friend to devotion, to freedom, or anything else which, in the customary tenor of his thoughts, he certainly was not. The phenomena observable here is, that the physical taste lost its effect; that which was nauseous, ceased to be so. Next, the habit began with a considerable difficulty of bodily action, and with a full attention of the mind to what was passing. It was not easy to smoke, and the philosopher was compelled to be careful, in order to do it properly; but as the habit increased, he indulged in it with such little attention of mind or exertion of body, that he did it without knowing he did it. Lastly, any interruption of the habit would have occasioned to him the greatest uneasiness. As these are the circumstances observable in all habits, they will each require and deserve some consideration. 1st. It appears to be a general law, that habit diminishes physical sensibility: whatever affects any organ of the body, affects it less by repetition. Brandy is begun in tea-spoons; but the effect is so soon lost, that a more generous and expanded vehicle is very soon had recourse to: the same heat to the stomach, and the same intoxication to the head, cannot be produced by the same quantity of the liquor. So with perfumes; wear scented powder, and in a month you will cease to perceive it. Habituate yourself to cold or to heat, and they cease to affect you. Eat Cayenne pepper, and you will find it perpetually necessary to increase the quantity, in order to produce the effect. My perfumed doublet," says Montaigne, "gratifies "my own smelling at first, as well as that of others; "but after I have worn it three or four days together,

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"I no more perceive it: but it is yet more strange, that "custom, notwithstanding the long intermissions and "intervals, should yet have the power to unite and "establish the effect of its impressions upon our senses, "as is manifest in those who live near to steeples and "the frequent noise of bells. I myself lie at home in a tower, where every morning and evening a very great "bell rings out the Ave Maria, the noise of which shakes my very tower, and at first seemed insupportable to 66 me; but having now a good while kept that lodging, "I am so used to it, that I hear it without any manner "of offence, and often without awaking at it. Plato "reprehends a boy for playing at some childish game: "Thou reprovest me,' says the boy, ' for a very little thing.' Custom,' replied Plato, is no little thing.' "And he was in the right; for I find that our greatest "vices derive their first propensity from our most "tender infancy, and that our principal education de"pends upon the nurse."*

In all these cases, the sensibility of the different parts of the body is diminished by repetition; and the same substances applied to them, cannot produce the same effects. The habit, it should be observed, does not act by individual substances, but often by classes: if you have accustomed yourself to opium, all soporific drugs have less effect upon you; if to one species of wine, you are capable of bearing a greater quantity of any other: the sensibility of the body is not only diminished towards that object, but towards many others similar to it; chiefly, however, towards the object upon which the habit was founded. There are some facts, which do not, at the first view, appear to fall in with this doctrine. A taster of wines increases in his power of discrimination. A man accustomed to judge of the fineness of cloths by feeling them, feels them with more accuracy from prac

tice. A blind man, from mere habit, improves so astonishingly in the power of touch, that his nicety in this respect, is hardly to be credited by a person endowed with sight. Whence comes it, if habit lessens bodily sensibility, that habit increases it in these instances? My answer is, that it is not habit which increases the sensibility in these instances; that the sensibility is actually diminished; and better judgments made, with impaired sensibility, and increased attention, than others make with more sensibility and less attention. The man who has been rubbing cloths all his life-time between his finger and thumb, has most probably not such an acute feeling as I have, who have made no such use of my finger and thumb; but he has a fixt and lively attention to what feeling he has, and he knows the quality of cloth, of which that feeling is the indication. In all feeling, where attention is not concerned, he is just like every one else: heat affects him less if he has been exposed to it frequently; so does cold in his own particular art he does not deviate from the general law of diminished sensibility; but counteracts that law, by his great increase of attention. This rule of the diminution of sensibility by habit, includes, of course, pleasure as well as pain: nothing which we eat or drink constantly, can remain either pleasant or painful; repetition infallibly diminishes both the pleasure and the pain. If the common part of our diet is not originally insipid,— as bread or water, it becomes uninteresting, and no notice is taken of the flavour, as is the case with salt. Tastes that are luscious, repetition not only destroys, but converts into disgusts. The habits of mankind are not so frequently formed upon these tastes, as they are upon others, slightly disagreeable at their origin; as coffee, olives, port wine, and tobacco: none of these are agreeable in their origin. The reason of this is, perhaps, rather moral than physical. In the luscious taste you set off from a pleasure,