and therefore, it is among the most trite principles of education, to discover the particular habits to which we are exposed by situation and profession; and, when they are discovered, to resist them. Without any intentional efforts to resist professional habits, they are unconsciously resisted by the magnitude and variety of some men's minds; and by the liberal pursuits which they contrive to connect with their professions. There is an effect of custom and habit to which we are all extremely indebted, and that is, that it regulates everything which nothing else regulates, where there is no propriety, and no duty, to be consulted. The reference is always to habit, — in dress, in ceremony, in equipage, in all the circumstances of life where almost any conduct would be virtuous, a compliance with custom is the only conduct that is wise, and a man of sense is rather pleased that the public legislate for him on points where choice would neither be easy nor useful. It is a strong mark of a good understanding, to allow to custom an easy empire on these occasions. It is a much surer mark of talent, that a man should rise above the influence of habit, and be better and greater than that to which the circumstances of their lives, or the character of their age, would appear to doom them. This is the reason why we admire men, who, born in poverty, and accustomed to objects of sense, have been able to conceive the dignity, the value, and the pleasure of intellectual gratification; who, deviating from every model they had seen, and guided only by their inward light, have steadily, and successfully, pursued the path of virtuous fame. By this subjugation of habitual thoughts, and escape from habitual objects, Bacon the friar, Czar Peter, Lord Verulam, and all great men, in law and in arts, have preceded the ages in which they lived, and become the beacons of future times. The mass of men, say whatever is said, do whatever is done, think whatever is thought, and cannot easily conceive

anything greater and better than what is already created. But, in the grossest period of monastic ignorance, Bacon saw that the whole art of war might be changed. by the invention of gunpowder: the Czar pulled down a nation habitually victorious, roused and elevated a people habitually stupid and depressed: Lord Verulam looked upon his own times with the same cool estrangement, from the influence of habit, as if he were contemplating a nation of the ancient world; and was so little imposed upon by the imperfect philosophy which then prevailed, that he effected that entire revolution. in physical reasoning, by which we are all benefited to the present hour. Such victories over present objects, -such power of reflecting, where attention is not stimulated by novelties, -are generally great triumphs of the human understanding, and decisive proofs of its vigour and excellence, in every individual instance where they are found. Whoever is learned in an ignorant age; whoever is liberal in a bigoted age; whoever is temperate and respectable in a licentious age; whoever is elegant and enlarged in his views, where his profession chains him down to technical rules and narrow limits; whoever has gained any good which habit opposes, or avoided any evil which habit might induce, that man has vindicated the dignity and the power of his mind, by the fairest of all tests - by doing what

the mass of mankind cannot do.

There is no degree of disguise, or distortion, which human nature may not be made to assume from habit; it grows in every direction in which it is trained, and accommodates itself to every circumstance which caprice or design places in its way. It is a plant with such various aptitudes, and such opposite propensities, that it flourishes in a hot-house, or the open air; is terrestrial, or aquatic; parasitical, or independent; looks well in exposed situations, thrives in protected ones; can bear its own luxuriance, admits of amputation; succeeds in

perfect liberty, and can submit to be bent down into any of the forms of art: it is so flexible and ductile, so accommodating and vivacious, that of two methods of managing it- - completely opposite neither the one nor the other need to be considered as mistaken and bad. Not that habit can give any new principle; but of those numerous principles which do exist in our nature, it entirely determines the order and the force. The horror of bodily pain is a very strong principle; but an American chief invites it. At the very moment that his body is burning, and his sinews snapping asunder in the flames, he tells his murderers that they are quite ignorant of the science of tormenting; that if they were bound to the stake instead of him, he would torment them with much more ingenious and exquisite cruelty than they have employed against him: he never for an instant bewails his fate, or seems to look upon it as extraordinary; it is the end that he has looked to habitually, and he has from his earliest infancy reared up a fabric of magnanimous courage to endure it. What feeling more powerful than the love of life! A Spartan soldier, however, combed his hair, set up a song, and in a very few minutes was no more. An Indian widow burns herself to death, from etiquette. Who could imagine that men and women would shut themselves up in monasteries, and nunneries, living the absurd life which they do, in such sort of places?—yet, the greater part of nuns and friars, who came over here, immediately shut out the day-light of common sense, and fell to forming nunneries and monasteries again.

The Indian settlement in Paraguay, formed by the Jesuits, is among the most curious victories of habit over the ordinary propensities of nature. It presents the curious spectacle of several millions of human creatures leading the life of school-boys; all desire of power, all love of property, swallowed up in a blind and habitual obedience to the Jesuits. One village was exactly

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a model for the manners and customs of another. certain hour, all the nation was put to work; in the middle of the day, they dined by ring of bell; and in the same way, were sent to bed by the curfew. It is an instance quite equal, in point of singularity, to anything that is told of the power of habit among the Spartans. In like manner, there is not a single principle of our nature, which may not be cherished to the complete exclusion and subjugation of the rest.

Such deeply-rooted habits have so much the air and appearance of nature, that many men have doubted whether it is not absurd to speak at all of the moral nature of man; whether what we call the trammels of the Chinese and the Hindoo, are not as natural a state of existence as the comparative liberty of thinking and acting enjoyed in Europe. What is the fact with respect to these former nations? One or two of the principles of our nature, has, by the help of education and religion, gained an ascendancy over all the rest. The Turk does not cultivate letters, and acquire knowledge. Why? Not because he does not feel that same principle of novelty which has impelled us, but because other principles of his nature have been unduly strengthened, to the destruction of that principle: his pride, as applied to the Mahomedan religion; his contempt, as applied to Europeans: which makes him imagine that everything worth knowing is to be found in the Koran; and which makes him averse to receive instruction from those whom he looks upon to be so far beneath him. A Hindoo is of the same trade as his father; and so it has gone on for centuries. Why? Not because the son of a Hindoo tradesman may not have talents and feelings to rouse him to something better; but because the whole force of law and religion, have been directed to cherish the principles of imitation and obedience, to the exclusion of all others. In the same manner, a sincere Quaker does not fight; - not because he wants the

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element of resentment from nature, but because he has taken care to choke and overlay it. Therefore, as all men acquire very early the same active powers, and impelling principles, it is fair to say that that people is in the most natural state, where all those principles are developed; and where one or two leading principles do not operate to the complete exclusion and subjugation of the rest. A Spartan, who cared nothing about his wife, or his children, and merely thought of the more extended relation of country, was not in a natural state of mind. The principle was natural, but not natural in that degree. A head is natural, but a disproportionate head is not. Wherever any one of the few great principles of our nature is missing, or wherever any one of them operates in a whole people, to the exclusion of the rest, it is an abuse of terms to speak of that as a state of nature. Outward nature is an upright body, endowed with life and strength, and capable of motion: there must be the hand for grasping, and the leg for moving, and the foot for support. Inward nature is grief, joy, resentment, the love of power, the love of esteem, the love of possession, and all the great feelings which I have been so long endeavouring to describe: if the greater part of these are exhausted and destroyed, the remnant may be nature, but it is nature abridged in principle, and mutilated in form.

The mere body itself, independent of any influence of mind, is acted on by habit. Opium, and every kind of medicine, loses its effects by habit. The body of a Russian is not injured by rolling in the snow, after he comes out of a warm bath. So very much is the body the creature of habit, that it not only must have all the feelings it has been accustomed to, but have them precisely in the same order of time. Wine is drunk at dinner, and tea at breakfast: they both agree perfectly well with the body, taken in this order of time; but many delicate constitutions would be seriously indis