governed by the lower nerve centers and taking care of itself, so to speak,
without the interference of consciousness. Everyone has observed how much
easier in the performance and more skillful in its execution is the act, be it
playing a piano, painting a picture, or driving a nail, when the movements
involved have ceased to be consciously directed and become automatic.
Habit Increases Skill and Efficiency.—Practically all increase in skill, whether
physical or mental, depends on our ability to form habits. Habit holds fast to the
skill already attained while practice or intelligence makes ready for the next step
in advance. Could we not form habits we should improve but little in our way of
doing things, no matter how many times we did them over. We should now be
obliged to go through the same bungling process of dressing ourselves as when
we first learned it as children. Our writing would proceed as awkwardly in the
high school as the primary, our eating as adults would be as messy and wide of
the mark as when we were infants, and we should miss in a thousand ways the
motor skill that now seems so easy and natural. All highly skilled occupations,
and those demanding great manual dexterity, likewise depend on our habit-
forming power for the accurate and automatic movements required.
So with mental skill. A great portion of the fundamentals of our education must
be made automatic—must become matters of habit. We set out to learn the
symbols of speech. We hear words and see them on the printed page; associated
with these words are meanings, or ideas. Habit binds the word and the idea
together, so that to think of the one is to call up the other—and language is
learned. We must learn numbers, so we practice the "combinations," and with
4×6, or 3×8 we associate 24. Habit secures this association in our minds, and lo!
we soon know our "tables." And so on throughout the whole range of our
learning. We learn certain symbols, or facts, or processes, and habit takes hold
and renders these automatic so that we can use them freely, easily, and with
skill, leaving our thought free for matters that cannot be made automatic. One of
our greatest dangers is that we shall not make sufficiently automatic, enough of
the necessary foundation material of education. Failing in this, we shall at best
be but blunderers intellectually, handicapped because we failed to make proper
use of habit in our development.
For, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, there is a limit to our mental energy
and also to the number of objects to which we are able to attend. It is only when
attention has been freed from the many things that can always be thought or
done in the same way, that the mind can devote itself to the real problems that
require judgment, imagination or reasoning. The writer whose spelling and