Use and disuse

“ When it fails to use them it loses them. He also points to the hermit-crab as an illustration of this great fact in nature, that disuse means loss, and that to shirk responsibility is the road to degeneration. ”

“ Similarly then as the experiences of all people in all times—experiences that are embodied in maxims, proverbs, and moral precepts, and that are illustrated in biographies and histories, go to prove that organs, faculties, powers, capacities, or whatever else we call them grow by use and diminish from disuse, it is inferred that they will continue to do so. ”

“ With the decline of oratory, all attempts to make a study of action, manner, or even delivery, have been abandoned. Secondly, as speaking becomes less dramatic and more business-like, even unstudied action falls every day into greater disuse. ”

“ It may be taken for a general rule, that things which are produced by custom, may be undone or changed by disuse, or by a contrary custom. On the other hand, it is a strong argument, that an effect is not owing to custom, but to the constitution of nature, when a contrary custom long continued, is found neither to change nor weaken it. ”

“ But as men have now learned to form principles, and to draw consequences, it is necessary to change the batteries, and to make use of such arguments as will endure at least some scrutiny and examination. ”

“ In course of time its senses become atrophied through disuse, and it can, in truth, no longer see or hear. When this stage is reached the education of the individual is completed, and all civilisation’s requirements are satisfied. ”

“ These are means to clear and effective expression, and the failure to see and use them as means can produce a condition in which means and ends seem not discriminated, or even a subversion in which means seem to manipulate ends. That condition is one which social science, along with every other instrumentality of education, should be combating in the interest of a reasonable world. ”

“ This contravention of the natural order has produced, as such contravention always must produce, a certain confusion and false movement, of which we are now beginning to feel, in almost every direction, the inconvenience. In all directions our habitual causes of action seem to be losing efficaciousness, credit, and control, both with others and even with ourselves. Everywhere we see the beginnings of confusion, and we want a clue to some sound order and authority. ”

“ The substitution of action based on knowledge for action based on feeling is made possible in the individual and in society by the development of higher centers of control and the power of choice through inhibition and legislation. ”

“ Destroy the volitional nature, the definite subjective purposes, preferences, fondness for certain effects, forms, orders, and not the slightest motive would remain for the brute order of our experience to be remodelled at all. But, as we have the elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the remodelling must be effected, there is no escape. ”

“ Systems prematurely constructed, and under the impression of authority, have been especial impediments to our intellectual progress: and this truth has been remarkably exemplified in the works that have treated of the human mind. ”

“ Could blind chance constitute order and decorum, and consequently a providence? That wisdom, order, and design should be the production of nonentity, or of chaos, confusion, and old night, is too absurd to deserve a serious confutation, for it supposeth that there may be effects without a cause, viz.: produced by nonentity, or that chaos and confusion could produce the effects of power, wisdom, and goodness. Such absurdities as these we must assent to, or subscribe to the doctrine of a self-existent and providential being. ”

“ The danger of practice dissociated from principle is that of becoming time-serving, narrow, partisan, short-sighted; it tacks for every wind, loses its bearings, and sacrifices larger for smaller gains. ”

“ Shall our systems of instruction descend below them, throw an insurmountable barrier in the way of human improvement, and teach the false principles that actions can exist without an effect, or that there is a class of words which "express neither action or passion." ”

“ To which there comes the undeniable corollary that every law which serves to alter men's modes of action—compelling, or restraining, or aiding, in new ways—so affects them as to cause in course of time an adjusted nature. ”

“ Given the very young child struggling to evolve its working rule out of nebulæ, how do its elders aid it? The isolated fact without background or connection, the generalization with no regard to its particular application, the specific rule that will not fit the general case—these too often are its portion, resulting in lack of perspective, no sense of proportion, and no grasp of values. ”

“ It is, however, at times subjected to certain conditions, where the principles on which it is based are not sufficiently defined, and, therefore, becomes susceptible to a change, either of form or of nature. ”

“ Their will had no direct power except over their own actions. They made us what they did make us, by willing, not the end, but the requisite means; and we, when our habits are not too inveterate, can, by similarly willing the requisite means, make ourselves different. ”

“ But man has been trained to have his character formed, and to be governed by laws of his own making; his habits, manners, ideas, and associations of ideas have emanated, directly or indirectly, from his artificial and injurious source; and, in consequence, the mind, language, and practice of all individuals have become a chaos of confusion. ”

“ We confuse our thought in our effort to simplify it. We lose, we do not gain, by putting powers of radically different sorts together into the same categories, and driving them abreast, as if they pulled together, in the same propositions. ”

“ But to find words or actions which will enable us to rectify what is now amiss with us, is a task indeed. Moreover, the present is not, perhaps, the time for entering into every point: but if only you can confirm the policy which you have chosen by some suitable action, it may be that other conditions will each in turn show some improvement. ”

“ Paradox and confusion have been created by the historical treatment of one event as if it were the other, and by the treatment of the necessary conditions for one event as if they were necessary conditions for the other. ”

“ Men mistook the order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence imagined that the control which they have, or seem to have, over their thoughts, permitted them to exercise a corresponding control over things. ”

“ Few people will dispute that all the typical movements of our time are upon this road towards simplification. Each system seeks to be more fundamental than the other; each seeks, in the literal sense, to undermine the other. ”

“ Granted that all, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or things, is, if we dwell upon it and take it seriously, an outrage upon our understandings which common sense alone enables us to brook ”

“ Few men’s minds can at once shake off a familiar and consistent system of doctrines, and adopt a novel and strange set of principles as soon as presented; but all can see that one change produces many, and that change, in itself, is a source of inconvenience and danger. ”

“ It does not suffice to pronounce always the two or three essential formulas to resolve all problems. The adaptation of these formulas to the movement of life, the incessant confronting them with facts, infers a perpetual awakening of thought. ”

“ Behind the loftiest estimates of value by which the history of thought has hitherto been governed, misunderstandings of the bodily constitution, either of individuals, classes, or entire races are concealed. ”

“ And so difficult is it to conceive any cessation that at once many observers leap from the general principle to the particular conclusion that all the modes in which the action and reaction, the attractions and repulsions of individuals and groups, have operated in the past must needs operate in the future. ”

“ They opposed system to system, conception to conception, but also, at the risk of shock, they decided, they dared; they knew that the old world was ended, decomposed, that it was necessary to clear away its ruins and to institute a new society and, at the risk of clash and distraction, they brought forward, one and another, plans, conceptions, and systems. ”

“ We shall next advert to a rather more intricate operation of the same principle, namely, when the cause does not merely continue in action, but undergoes, during the same time, a progressive change in those of its circumstances which contribute to determine the effect. ”

“ They are, one and all, radicals in thought, and, with differing strength of intention, reformers of society, inasmuch as their speculations and aspirations are relevant to practical problems of living. ”

“ I can see now a significance back of these seemingly trivial things: they reveal an unenviable complexity of nature. In first one thing, then another, I have stood out against conforming to customs, if my own ideas of right and wrong prohibited me, but alas! so often has come the ultimate defeat—concessions to conventions, customs, overpowering circumstances, or instincts. ”

“ Every project of reform is, in their eyes, the result of ignorance or insanity, and the most compassionate it is who condescend to accuse you of what they call the bewilderment of your understanding. ‘They think themselves wiser than their fathers,’ says one, and with that the matter seems decided. ”

“ But, by slow degrees, we will say that you perceive a want in the system in which you have been educated, and, after many years of careful study and thought, you are obliged to reject your former beliefs and to accept that other system which shall most recommend itself to you. ”

“ What is your notion of the original which you pretend to be about to restore? The problem that presents itself becomes more difficult, more complex, the longer you look at it—the problem, namely, what you are going to restore. ”

“ Would that I had the ability to write with the penetration and the clearness of statement that the [p.101] subject should certainly elicit, upon the strange equanimity with which mankind, in science or in practical life, receives and faces a direct negative or an open contradiction. Perhaps the habit of easy division into positive and negative, the ready resort to dichotomy, explains the mystery; perhaps the fact that negation or opposition is and can only be in kind, that there never is or can be any real change or need of change in a mere negation, is at least an important factor in the case ”

“ Practice might bend to the temporary aberration through which local circumstances might compel them to pass, it might bend before unreasoning or unreasonable prejudice, but theory once recognised could never be departed from, and this principle must be maintained at any cost. ”

“ No other knowable object modifies its conduct from consideration of its being understood or misunderstood. This modification does not, of course, take place throughout the whole range of human relations. ”

“ All action is for the sake of some end, and rules of action, it seems natural to suppose, must take their whole character and colour from the end to which they are subservient. ”

“ These spontaneous beliefs have gradually fallen into disuse, not because they have been disproved, but because mankind has become more enlightened as to its wants and the scope of its powers, and has gradually given an entirely new direction to its speculative efforts. ”

“ In order to contribute our share to the success of just principles, we propose to pass in review, as rapidly as possible, some of the arguments, or phrases claiming to be arguments, which have been employed to vindicate a system full of absurdity and injustice. ”

“ Now, when the advocates of free-agency insist that motive is not the efficient cause of volition, and that mind is the efficient cause thereof, we suppose them to employ the expression, efficient cause, in one and the same sense in both branches of the proposition. ”