brought into play and controlled in its operation by free choice.
Therefore a habit that works almost automatically has less of the
character of a true habit, and passes rather out of morality into the
region of physics. Again, bad habits, vices to which a man is become a
slave against his better judgment, are less properly called habits
than virtues are; for such evil habits do not so much attend on
volition (albeit volition has created them) as drag the will in their
wake. For the like reason, habit is less properly predicable of brute
animals than of men: for brutes have no intelligent will to govern
their habits. The highest brutes are most susceptible of habit. They
are most like men in being most educable. And, of human progeny, some
take up habits, in the best and completest sense of the term, more
readily than others. They are better subjects for education: education
being nothing else than the formation of habits.

3. Knowledge consists of intellectual habits. But the habits of most
consequence to the moralist lie in the will, and in the sensitive
appetite as amenable to the control of the will. In this category come
the virtues, in the ordinary sense of that name, and secondarily the
vices.

4. A habit is acquired by acts. Whereupon this difficulty has been
started:--If the habit, say of mental application, comes from acts of
study, and again the acts from the habit, how ever is the habit
originally acquired? We answer that there are two ways in which one
thing may come from another. It may come in point of its very
existence, as child from parent; or in point of some mode of
existence, as scholar from master. A habit has its very existence from
acts preceding: but those acts have their existence independent of the
habit. The acts which are elicited after the habit is formed, owe to