which becomes every day less and less, and at last terminates in a disgust. This is a good reason why you should stop. In the case of the olives and the coffee, you set off with a slight disgust, and go on to a negative state, or slight pleasure: and the reason why you encounter the first disgust, is fashion, or health; or some use which you propose to derive from the disgustful object: thus, coffee clears the head, olives provoke to the use of wine, and so on. Hitherto I have endeavoured to show the effect of habit on those pleasures and pains which have the body for their cause; and that effect appears to be, a diminution of every kind of sensibility. The next subject for consideration will be, whether habit weakens our passive impressions, where the body is not concerned; that is, whether because we have felt a passion, we are less likely to feel it again; that there is a less proneness to that kind of sensibility, than there was before? The general rule is in the affirmative, that habit strengthens our active determinations, while it weakens our passive impressions: this, I say, is the general rule; I suppose it is the true one; but as I cannot reconcile innumerable cases to that rule, I shall very frankly, but at the same time in all humility, avow my dissent. If this rule were true, it would follow that a man is less liable to feel the passion of anger again in proportion as he has felt it often before. This man is a very irritable man; why so? because we have never seen him in a passion; - but here is another man, whom you may trust with the utmost impunity; we have beheld him in such violent and such frequent fits of anger, that we are convinced he is the most peaceable man in the world. Habit weakens passive impressions, and previous irritation must therefore be the best security for the absence of all irritable feeling. If this rule were true, the best method of teaching a child good-temper, would be to irritate him as much as possible. He might be cured of avarice by being taught to hoard; rendered benevolent by being indulged in malice; and cured of every vice, to the practice of which he had been diligently trained. - - Take fear; there is a certain degree, at least, of that passion, which does not diminish the passive impression: he who has been once heartily frightened by a great dog flying at him, is not likely, for anything I can see, to be the less alarmed if he is attacked by a bull the following day, but rather the more. To have slept in a house which caught fire, to have run a narrow risk for life by the fall of a horse,—would not improve the confidence of a horseman, nor add to the soundness of sleep. Fear seems to increase the liability to fear, rather than to diminish it. What has led to a contrary opinion, seems to be this, that we become less afraid of the same object, or same class of objects. The first time I make a voyage to the West Indies, I am afraid; the tenth time, I am not; why? not because my sensibility is blunted, but because my reason is instructed: I perceive there are much greater resources in skill and science, than I imagined; that the ship can ride with safety over those monstrous waves which at first bid fair to destroy; that an unctuous and weather-beaten personage, by turning a wheel near him, can guide the prodigious animal, in whose inside I am sailing, with the most unerring precision. It is not that I meet the same danger better, but that I have found out it is a much less danger. In almost all the instances where men encounter those perils to which they are accustomed, with greater resolution than at first, it is because they have found out new resources and methods, by which they may be opposed; or, because experience convinces them, the danger itself, independently of all methods of obviating it, was not so great as they had begun with supposing. Compassion is in favour of the rule; for it is always worn out where it is frequently exercised. It is quite impossible that a surgeon can feel much at an operation, - that a bookseller can have any very strong compassion for authors, or that an overseer of the who lives poor, in the midst of misery, can care for it in a very lively manner. This is true in such extreme cases; but then, again, a certain degree of exercise rather increases the passion than diminishes it; for a man who had carefully stifled every emotion of compassion for half his life, would be ten times more unfeeling than he who had been over-stimulated by the too frequent contemplation of wretchedness. So that this fact, respecting compassion, contradicts the rule, as much as the other confirms it. Envy is perpetually and uniformly increased by habit; so is jealousy: by all that we have indulged in these two feelings, exactly in the same proportion are we likely to be affected by them again. So that I really cannot comprehend how the rule can be true, stated in so very general a manner. Some passions are increased by habit, others are decreased by habit; others increased up to a certain point, then decreased. So that, in fact, there is no general rule about the matter; and the effect of habit must be learnt in each particular passion. It seems as if the rule had been taken from the organs of the body, and applied to the passions of the mind. Mr. Stewart's principal inferences are all taken from the body; nor does he seem to doubt, but that they both follow the same law: "I shall have occasion afterwards to show, in treat"ing of our moral powers, that experience diminishes "the influence of passive impressions on the mind, "but strengthens our active principles. A course of "debauchery deadens the sense of pleasure, but increases the desire of gratification. An immoderate use of strong liquors destroys the sensibility of the "palate, but strengthens the habit of intemperance. "The enjoyments we derive from any favourite pursuit, gradually decay as we advance in years: and yet we 66 D D "continue to prosecute our favourite pursuits with in"creasing steadiness and vigour. "On these two laws of our nature is founded our "capacity of moral improvement. In proportion as we "are accustomed to obey our sense of duty, the influ"ence to the temptation to vice is diminished; while at "the same time, our habit of virtuous conduct is con"firmed. How many passive impressions, for instance, "must be overcome, before the virtue of beneficence "can exert itself uniformly and habitually! How many circumstances are there in the distresses of "others, which have a tendency to alienate our hearts "from them, and which prompt us to withdraw from "the sight of the miserable! The impressions we re"ceive from these, are unfavourable to virtue: their force, however, every day diminishes; and it may, perhaps, by perseverance, be wholly destroyed. It is "thus that the character of the beneficent man is "formed. The passive impressions which he felt originally, and which counteracted his sense of duty, have "lost their influence, and a habit of beneficence is be66 come a part of his nature."* It is clear from this passage, that Mr. Stewart conceives the same rule to obtain respecting the feelings of the body, and the feelings of the mind. The doctrine itself, he avows himself to have taken from Butler: it may be found in the 121st page of his " Analogy." It may very likely be true; and in dissenting from such truly great authorities, I am only stating the nature and extent of my own ignorance: but it is better to do this candidly at once, than to subscribe to opinions, which, after all the attention I am capable of giving to them, appear to me to be wrong. I remarked in my picture of Hobbes and his smoking, the pain the philosopher would have experienced if * Stewart's Elements, p. 525. any circumstance had interrupted his habit. A very curious part of habit, that though we feel no pleasure in doing the thing, we feel a great pain from not doing it: and the pain is not infrequently felt, before the cause is ascertained; you don't feel as you have been accustomed to feel; and, after some time, perceive that somebody is missing, whom you have been accustomed to see, or somebody or something present, which you have not been accustomed to see, that you have left some insignificant thing behind you, which you always carried with you: the habitual current of your thoughts and actions has been interrupted, and you are awakened by the pain of that interruption, to examine into the cause. Habit uniformly and constantly strengthens all our active exertions: whatever we do often, we become more and more apt to do. A snuff-taker begins with a pinch of snuff per day, and ends with a pound or two every month. Swearing begins in anger; it ends by mingling itself with ordinary conversation. Such-like instances are of too common notoriety to need that they be adduced; but, as I before observed, at the very time that the tendency to do the thing is every day increasing, the pleasure resulting from it is, by the blunted sensibility of the bodily organ, diminished; and the desire is irresistible, though the gratification is nothing. There is rather an entertaining example of this in Fielding's "Life of Jonathan Wild," in that scene where he is represented as playing at cards with the Count, a professed gambler. "Such," says Mr. Fielding, " was "the power of habit over the minds of these illustrious persons, that Mr. Wild could not keep his hands out "of the Count's pockets, though he knew they were empty; nor could the Count abstain from palming a "card, though he was well aware Mr. Wild had no money to pay him." 66 |