with the familiar. It is this primitive stratum of habits which principally
determines our deepest belief which all must have over and above knowledge—
to which men revert in mature years from youthful vagaries. If good acts are a
diet and not a medicine, are repeated over and over again, as every new beat of
the loom pounds in one new thread, and sense of justice and right is wrought into
the very nerve-cells and fibers; if this ground texture of the soul, this "memory
and habit-plexus," this sphere of thoughts we oftenest think and acts we oftenest
do, is early, rightly and indiscerptibly wrought, not only does it become a web of
destiny for us, so all-determining is it, but we have something perdurable to fall
back on if moral shock or crisis or change or calamity shall have rudely broken
up the whole structure of later associations. Not only the more we mechanize
thus, the more force of soul is freed for higher work, but we are insured against
emergencies in which the choice and deed is likely to follow the nearest motive,
or that which acts quickest, rather than to pause and be influenced by higher and
perhaps intrinsically stronger motives. Reflection always brings in a new set of
later-acquired motives and considerations, and if these are better than habit-
mechanism, then pause is good; if not, he who deliberates is lost. Our purposive
volitions are very few compared with the long series of desires, acts and
reactions, often contradictory, many of which were never conscious, and many
once willed but now lapsed to reflexes, the traces of which crowding the
unknown margins of the soul, constitute the organ of the conscious will.
It is only so far as this primitive will is wrong by nature or training, that drastic
reconstructions of any sort are needed. Only those who mistake weakness for
innocence, or simplicity for candor, or forget that childish faults are no less
serious because universal, deny the, at least, occasional depravity of all children,
or fail to see that fear and pain are among the indispensables of education, while
a parent, teacher, or even a God, all love, weakens and relaxes the will. Children
do not cry for the alphabet; the multiplication table is more like medicine than
confectionery, and it is only affected thoroughness that omits all that is hard.
"The fruits of learning may be sweet, but its roots are always bitter," and it is this
alone that makes it possible to strengthen the will while instructing the mind.
The well-schooled will comes, like Herder, to scorn the luxury of knowing
without the labor of learning. We must anticipate the future penalties of sloth as
well as of badness. The will especially is a trust we are to administer for the
child, not as he may now wish, but as he will wish when more mature. We must
now compel what he will later wish to compel himself to do. To find his habits
already formed to the same law that his mature will and the world later enjoin,
cements the strongest of all bonds between mentor and child. Nothing, however,