Letting Habits Harden

Time passes with exceeding swiftness between the time when we are very young and free and flexible until the time when thoughts and habits and attitudes become somewhat firmly fixed. And since fixed impressions, fixed standards, and the hardening of habits are so early in evidence, the beginnings of traits and tendencies are exceedingly significant:

Here are some sentences from John Locke on this important subject: “Parents,” he said “being wisely ordain’d by nature to love their children, are very apt, . . . to cherish their faults too. They must not be cross’d, forsooth; they must be permitted to have their wills in all things; and they being in their infancies not capable of great vices, their parents think they may safely enough indulge their irregularities, and make themselves sport with that pretty perverseness which they think well enough becomes that innocent age. But to a fond parent, that would not have his child corrected for a perverse trick, but excus’d it, saying it was a small matter, Solon very well replied, ‘Aye, but custom [the habit, the tendency] is no small matter.’ . . . For you must always remember, that children [become] . . . men earlier than is thought . . . ”

The beginnings are always exceedingly important.

William James thus summarized the subject: “Nothing we ever do is in strict scientific literalness wiped our . . . Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil . . . Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar . . . We are . . . imitators and copiers of our past selves.”

It is true that an isolated act or instance may seem a small matter at the moment, but it is no small matter at any age to let a false standard get started, or to let a wrong habit harden.