CHAPTER IV

FORMATION OF STUDY-HABITS


As already intimated, this book adopts the view that education is a
process of forming habits in the brain. In the formation of habits
there are several principles that must be observed. Accordingly we
shall devote a chapter to the consideration of habits in general before
discussing the specific habits involved in various kinds of study.

Habit may be defined roughly as the tendency to act time after time in
the same way. Thus defined, you see that the force of habit extends
throughout the entire universe. It is a habit for the earth to revolve
on its axis once every twenty-four hours and to encircle the sun once
every year. When a pencil falls from your hand it has a habit of
dropping to the floor. A piece of paper once folded tends to crease in
the same place. These are examples of the force of habit in nonliving
matter. Living matter shows its power even more clearly. If you assume
a petulant expression for some time, it gets fixed and the expression
becomes habitual. The hair may be trained to lie this way or that.
These are examples of habit in living tissue. But there is one
particular form of living tissue which is most susceptible to habit;
that is nerve tissue. Let us review briefly the facts which underlie
this characteristic. In nerve tissue, impressibility, conductivity and
modifiability are developed to a marked degree. The nerve-cells in the
sense organs are impressed by stimulations from the outside world. The
nervous current thus generated is conducted over long nerve fibers,
through the spinal cord to the brain where it is received and we