G. A. Johnston

“ Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right. ”

“ On the other hand, the conception of the self becomes narrowed and more distinctly defined. The child realises that all he possesses is not equally himself. There is an inner core, which would remain though all his possessions should be lost and his body maimed and mutilated. His self, his personality, would still exist. What exactly the pure self means is a question over which philosophers are still wrangling. We may call it, if we care, the soul or spirit or the mind or Ego; but the important point is that the self or "I" is presupposed in all we do and all we think. ”

“ But the time comes when he must choose one of these fancied selves to be his real self. One of the possible selves must be actualised. He has only one life to live, he has only one self to live it; and if he wants to realise a character at all, he must choose some one walk in life in which to realise it.
Of course, he would like to be several different selves at once: all have their attractions. But he recognises that that is impossible. However severe the struggle, he must decide on some one self amid all the galaxy of his fancied selves; and this one self must become his real self. ”

“ The Self and its Habits. The importance of habit is now universally admitted, but it is not so widely recognised that habits are of no positive value until they are organised in the moral self. If our mental and moral and physical habits have been formed at haphazard, our lives will be but one stage removed from the capricious life of impulse. There is no more futile life than that which is at the mercy of chance impulses, but as a close second comes the life which is given up to habits which have grown up in accordance with no principle and in subordination to no system. ”

“ The great thing in education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. ... For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. ”

“ At first, of course, the child has no distinct notion of its "self." It gradually comes to realise that its body belongs to it in a peculiar way. It plays with its fingers and toes, and finds that it has more control over them than the fingers of its mother, with which it also plays. It becomes conscious, too, that it has feeling in its fingers and toes. These things belong specially to it; and thus the self comes to mean the body. But gradually this conception of self becomes both extended and narrowed. ”

“ But when the child really assimilates the lesson of the kind action, and gives its penny, knowing why it does so, and having a feeling of pity in its heart, then the action is really the action of the self. ”

“ It is essential for a consistent moral life that the self should be harmonious. The personality must be one and constant. Its attitudes may vary in different relations and under different circumstances, but the personality as a whole should be a unity, for only then will its conduct be consistent. It is one of the great tasks of education to help the child to develop a harmonious self, to secure that his "modes of feeling, thinking, and acting show unity, consistency, and distinctive individuality." ”

“ There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. ”

“ For influence means that the personality of the child develops in response to the personality of the teacher. The personality of the child is not suppressed when he is influenced. The child is not driven: he is influenced; he is attracted; and his individuality is elicited. The teacher should not impose his personality upon the child, but he cannot help bringing it into contact with the child. Personality counts for much everywhere: but nowhere does it count for more than in education. ”

“ The child feels abased if its clothing is not to its taste. Again, it feels personally elevated when it is attired in a new dress. The self also comes to include other possessions. Toys and dolls, balls and coins, all these form part of the self, and the child feels deprived of part of itself when the favourite doll or toy cannot be found. As the child grows up, those portions of his property which he has himself made seem more closely identified with himself than others. If these be lost, he experiences a shrinkage of personality. ”

“ No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved."
Of the importance of habit in the moral life there can be no manner of doubt; but we must also remember that habits are, after all, mechanical modes of behaviour, and that a universe of beings all acting uniformly and habitually with the precision of clockwork would not really be a moral world. ”

“ When education is so much standardised as it is, there is grave danger that it may tend to turn the children into human machines. The child's natural tendency to initiate, to invent, and to originate, may be repressed from the beginning. Education may end, after passing children through successive "standards," simply in producing dull mediocrity. To a considerable extent, this has happened in Germany, where education is excessively systematised. ”

“ Actions which were at first performed purely imitatively, as by a parrot or monkey, and hence were not really the actions of the self, now result directly from the activity of the self. Only those actions have moral value which are the actions of a self. If a child gives a penny to a beggar, simply because it sees its mother do so, the action is not really the child's. ”

“ Wholesale opposition will, no doubt, be very rare, except where sympathy between parent and child is entirely absent. Where sympathy does not exist between parent and child, or between teacher and pupil, the fault is very rarely the child's. If the teacher cannot create a sympathetic atmosphere in the class-room, the children's attitude to him will be antagonistic rather than imitative. And nothing could well be more fatal to the moral education of the child. The facility and willingness with which the child imitates is one of the conditions of moral progress. ”

“ It is a real expression of the self or personality.
Throughout we have seen that the self is essentially social. The consciousness of self grows through intercourse with other selves. The rudimentary self of the child gains its experience and realises itself by observing and imitating and opposing the other selves in its social environment. Apart from the influence of these other selves, it would not develop at all. And the consciousness of self always includes relations to other selves. My self-consciousness contains the conviction that I am in such and such a social position. ”

“ One reason why the particular occupation often seems to have little direct influence on the development of personality is that much of the experience which goes to the moulding of character is acquired by a man in his leisure hours. Much of it is derived from domestic and social and religious relationships, which are common to all men.
This is the explanation of the fact that the self that a man develops may not be internally consistent. A man may develop different selves, according to the different relations in which he stands to different groups of people. ”

“ If he leaves for good the home in which all his early experiences have been gained, he feels as if he had really abandoned part of his real self. Hence the self comes to mean all that the man is or has. "In its widest possible sense, a man's self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and his children, his ancestors and his friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. ”

“ The Growth of the Self In former chapters, in dealing with the child's instincts, his impulses and desires, and his emotions and sentiments, we have seen that all involve some reference to the self. But we have not yet asked, What is the self? That question we must now try to answer. It will be convenient to begin by describing how the child first comes to recognise the existence of his self. ”

“ Rather do they work together for good. The child learns that certain habits and actions should be imitated, and it follows that certain other actions and habits should be eschewed. Imitation of one set of habits leads to or implies opposition to another set.
Now, the child has not been blindly attending to, imitating, and opposing other persons. Everything it imitates or opposes has been contributing to the development of its own personality. The self assimilates the actions and customs which it began by imitating. They have become part of itself, close-woven into its structure. ”

“ While, then, we recognise the significance of habit, and the help it may give in the conduct of life, we must repeat that habits are morally valuable only in so far as they contribute to the maintenance of the distinctive individuality of the self.
§5. Some Educational Aspects of the Development of Personality. The great educational maxim is that the individuality of the child should be respected, and should be allowed full scope for development. We all know that the aim of education is not to turn out children all of the same brand, as the factory turns out sewing-machines or type-writers. ”

“ A life is not morally good simply because it is composed of habits. People who have given over large tracts of their lives to habit have not always been careful to scrutinise the kinds of habits that have been formed. ”

“ The child imitates not only its parents, but also everybody with whom it comes in contact, and even the examples suggested to it by fairy tales and the ideals inspired by religious instruction. The child's personality is gradually developed, as it acquires these traits and qualities which it imitates in others. ”

“ Indeed, it was one of the most hopeless features of their character that, having absolute licence to indulge in the pleasures of life, they could get no good of it. They might dabble in the pond all day, hunt the chickens, climb trees in the most uncompromising Sunday clothes ”

“ He could not become conscious of himself at all, did he not come into contact with other selves. Thus the self is thoroughly social. At first the child does not distinguish between "things" and "persons." He treats them all alike, he treats them, in fact, just as he treats himself. Tables and chairs are regarded as persons, and so are animals. But the child gradually comes to see that there are important differences between persons and things. Things are much more constant in their behaviour than persons. They can always be counted upon ”

“ The business-self may be dishonest, the religious self pious. There is an internal conflict between the two selves: the man is really trying to serve God and Mammon. But in other cases, the apparently different selves may be perfectly consistent. The officer may be stern towards the soldiers whom he commands, but as gentle as a woman towards his children. Such a self would, in reality, be perfectly harmonious, though it appears in one aspect in its attitude to one group of people, and in another aspect in relation to another group. ”

“ When the child resembles his parents closely in character, the similarity is usually due far more to the influence of the early home environment than to the direct inheritance of particular qualities. ”

“ Even after it has been decided which self is to be realised, the vocation of realising this self may not be consistently followed. Many a medical student feels that his self as realised in the work of the Army or Church would be a nobler thing, many a divinity student thinks how much more useful his self would be if he had decided to actualise it in the ministry of healing the body. ”

“ It is necessary, above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right. ... The need of securing success at the outset is imperative. Failure at first is apt to dampen the energy of all future attempts, while past experience of success nerves one to future vigour."
(4) "Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. ”