of drink. He has not convinced me that there is an inherited "drink
craving" any more than there is an inherited tea craving or an
inherited morphia craving.

In the first place I would propound a certain view of the general
question of habits. My own private observations in psychology incline
me to believe that people vary very much in their power of acquiring
habits and in the strength and fixity of the habits they acquire. My
most immediate subject of psychological study, for example, is a man of
untrustworthy memory who is nearly incapable of a really deep-rooted
habit. Nothing is automatic with him. He crams and forgets languages
with an equal ease, gives up smoking after fifteen years of constant
practice; shaves with a conscious effort every morning and is capable
of forgetting to do so if intent upon anything else. He is generally
self-indulgent, capable of keen enjoyment and quite capable of
intemperance, but he has no invariable delights and no besetting sin.
Such a man will not become an habitual drunkard; he will not become
anything "habitual." But with another type of man habit is indeed
second nature. Instead of the permanent fluidity of my particular case,
such people are continually tending to solidify and harden. Their
memories set, their opinions set, their methods of expression set,
their delights recur and recur, they convert initiative into mechanical
habit day by day. Let them taste any pleasure and each time they taste
it they deepen a need. At last their habits become imperative needs.
With such a disposition, external circumstances and suggestions, I
venture to believe, may make a man either into an habitual church-goer
or an habitual drunkard, an habitual toiler or an habitual rake. A
self-indulgent rather unsocial habit-forming man may very easily become
what is called a dipsomaniac, no doubt, but that is not the same thing
as an inherited specific craving. With drink inaccessible and other