for there can not be a greater instance of vanity than that, to which a man is liable to be deluded, from the cradle to the grave, with fleeting shadows of happiness; his pleasures die in the possession, and fresh enjoyments do not rise fast enough to fill his mind with satisfaction. When I see persons sick of themselves any longer than they are called away by something that is of force enough to chain down the present thought; when I see them hurry from one place to another, and then back again; continually shifting postures, and placing life in all the different lights they can think of,-surely, say I to myself, life is vain, and the man beyond expression stupid or prejudiced, who, from the vanity of life can not gather, that he is designed for immortality." Q

LECTURE XXVI.

ON HABIT.

It appears to be the law of our nature, that our past thoughts and actions should exercise a very material influence upon those which are to come. Whatever ideas and whatever actions have been joined together, have, ever after, a disposition to unite, exactly in proportion to the frequency of their previous union; till at last, the adhesion becomes so strong, that it frequently overcomes the earliest and the most powerful passions of our nature. This power of habit extends to the brute creation; and appears to have some effect upon organized matter, as I shall hereafter endeavor to show. Why we should be thus affected by habit, I presume can not be explained. We might have been so constituted as not to have had the smallest disposition to do again, what we had been constantly doing for ten years before; we might have found it as difficult to pursue a track of thought to which we had been accustomed, as it is to strike into one entirely new: the fact is the reverse,—and that is all we can say; when we get there, we arrive at the end of all human reasoning. Every one must be familiar with the effects of habit. A walk upon the quarter-deck, though intolerably confined, becomes so agreeable by custom, that a sailor, in his walk on shore, very often confines himself within the same bounds. "I knew a man," says Lord Kames, "who had relinquished the sea, for a country life in the corner of his garden he reared an artificial mount, with a level summit, resembling most accurately a quarter-deck, not only in shape, but in size; and here he generally walked. In Minorca, Governor Kane made an excel

lent road, the whole length of the island, and yet the inhabitants adhered to the old road, though not only longer, but extremely bad. The merchants of Bristol have an excellent and commodious Exchange, but they always meet in the street. There is hardly any convenience of life, or any notion of utility or beauty, which may not be entirely changed by habit; it is needless to multiply the instances.'

When ideas are united together in consequence of their having been previously joined by some accident, we call it association. There are various kinds of associations; and it may, perhaps, render what I am going to say more clear, if I recapitulate a few of the different kinds of association. One idea may be associated to another idea; the lowing of a cow may, in my mind, be constantly united with the idea of a green field. 2dly. An idea and a feeling may be constantly associated together. Peter, the Wild Boy, as Lord Monboddo informs us, could never bear the sight of an apothecary; it threw him into the most violent fits of rage: a practitioner had once given him so very nauseous a draught, that he never afterward forgot it, and could with the utmost difficulty be restrained from flying at any of the faculty that came within his reach.

In the like manner, joy, or any other passion, may suggest ideas. A good father, when he is visiting any beautiful country, or partaking of any amusement, may wish that his wife and children were there to participate in his satisfaction. Here the feeling of joy, introduces the idea of his family; and this, in a benevolent mind, may grow into an association.

A state of body may be associated with an idea. A man who had been very often to the high northern latitudes, might very possibly associate the idea of whales and bears with the feeling of cold; or an East Indian might associate a state of heat with the idea of his white cotton dress, or any of the peculiar habits or objects of his country.

A state of body might be associated with a passion; cold might always produce joy in a Norwegian, if it reminded him of the scenes where he had passed a happy

infancy; or heat would produce unhappiness in a man who had been confined three or four years in the prisons of Seringapatam, and who had suffered dreadfully in such a situation from the ardor of the climate. Now, when all these conjunctions of ideas, feelings, and states of body, are confined merely to the intellect, they pass under the name of association: but whenever we begin to act in a customary manner, whenever any outward observable action becomes a member of the series, there, we begin to use the word habit.

If a person, by accident, had lived with a great number of snuff-takers, and had been accustomed to perceive that in any little pause of conversation, they all took out their snuff-boxes, the silence would immediately produce the idea of snuff,-and this we should call association of ideas; but if he were a snuff-taker himself, the silence would probably animate him to a pinch,—and this we should call habit. Whatever passes in the mind, only in consequence of custom or repetition, is association: where there is outward action, it is habit. There is no use whatever in the two names: they are, on the contrary, an evil; because they multiply names without multiplying ideas; but the reason is, that the effects of habit have long been observed, because every one notices actions. It is not above a century since association has been thought of, or much attended to, because it is very difficult to trace and to describe the operations of the mind.

Habits may be divided into active and passive ;—those things which we do by an act of the will, and those things which we suffer by the agency of some external power. I begin with the active habits; and, after stating a few of the most familiar of them, I will shortly analyze the examples, in order to show that they are merely referable to association. It may be as well, perhaps, to give a specimen of the life of a man whose existence was, at last, entirely dependent upon the habits he had contracted: it is a fair picture of the dominion. which habit establishes over us, at the close of life. "The professed rule of Mr. Hobbes," says Dr. White Kennet, in his Memoirs of the Cavendish Family, "was

to dedicate the morning to exercise, and the evening to study. At his first rising, he walked out, and climbed up a hill if the weather was not dry, he made a point of fatiguing himself within doors, so as to perspire; remarking constantly, that an old man had more moisture than heat; and by such motion, heat was to be acquired, and moisture expelled. After this, the philosopher took a very comfortable breakfast, and then went round the lodgings to wait upon the earl, the countess, the children, and any considerable strangers; paying some short addresses to all of them. He kept these rounds till about twelve o'clock, when he had a little dinner provided for him, which he eat always by himself, without ceremony. Soon after dinner, he retired to his study, and had his candle, with ten or twelve pipes of tobacco, laid by him; then, shutting the door, he fell to smoking, thinking, and writing, for several hours. He could never endure to be left in an empty house; whenever the earl removed, he would go along with him, even to his last stage, from Chatsworth to Hardwick. This was the constant tenor of his life, from which he never varied, no, not a moment, nor an atom."

This is the picture of a man whose life appears to have been entirely regulated by the past; who did a thing because he had done it; who, so far as bodily actions were concerned, could hardly be said to have any fresh motives; but was impelled by one regular set of volitions, constantly recurring at fixed periods. Now, take any one of his habits, and examine its progress; it will afford a natural history of this law of the mind, and will show what circumstances in that law are most worthy of observation.

He smoked how did this begin? It might have begun any how. He was staying, perhaps, at some house where smoking was in fashion, and began to smoke out of compliance with the humors of other persons. At first, he thought it unpleasant; and as all the expirations and inspirations were new, and difficult, it required considerable attention; and at the close of the evening he could have distinctly recollected, if he had tried to do so, that his mind had been employed in thinking how he