Habit (Extract)

2022-04-27 05:04:56WilliamJames

英語學習 2022年4期

William James

學習任務

Activity 1

Think about the following questions, and write down your answers before reading the essay.

(1) What is the habit you want to remove most? When did you get into it? What have you done to remove it? Have you succeeded?

(2) What role do you think habits play in human society?

Activity 2

Read the essay, and try to fill in the blanks.

It is ________ to change habits, but it is also ________ to form them in our formative years.

“Habit a second nature! Habit is ten times nature,” the Duke of Wellington is said to have exclaimed; and the degree to which this is true no one can probably appreciateas well as one who is a veteran soldier himself. The daily drill and the years of discipline end by fashioninga man completely over again, as to most of the possibilities of his conduct.

“There is a story, which is credibleenough, though it may not be true,of a practical joker, who, seeing a discharged veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out, ‘Attention!’ whereupon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton and potatoes in the gutter.The drill had been thorough, and its effects had become embodiedin the man’s nervous structure.”

1. If you appreciate a situation or problem, you understand it and know what it involves.

2. If you fashion an object or a work of art, you make it.

3. Credible means able to be trusted or believed.

4. If something is embodied in a particular thing, the second thing contains or consists of the fi rst.

Riderless cavalry-horses, at many a battle, have been seen to come together and go through their customary evolutions at the sound of the bugle call. Most trained domestic animals, dogs and oxen, and omnibus- and car-horses, seem to be machines almost pure and simple,undoubtingly, unhesitatingly doing from minute to minute the duties they have been taught, and giving no sign that the possibility of an alternative ever suggests itself to their mind. Men grown old in prison have asked to be readmitted after being once set free. In a railroad accident to a traveling menageriein the United States some time in 1884, a tiger,whose cage had broken open, is said to have emerged, but presently crept back again, as if too much bewilderedby his new responsibilities, so that he was without dif fi culty secured.

Habit is thus the enormous flywheelof society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to treadtherein. It keeps the fi sherman and the deck hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fi ght out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fi tted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty- fi ve you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveler,on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counselor at

5. This is used after the noun that it refers to in order to emphasize that there is nothing but the thing you have just mentioned involved in sth.

6. A menagerie is a collection of wild animals.

7. If something bewilders you, it is so confusing or dif fi cult that you cannot understand it.

8. A fl ywheel is a heavy wheel that is part of some engines. It regulates the engine’s rotation, making it operate at a steady speed.

9. An ordinance is an of fi cial rule or order.

10. If you tread in a particular way, you walk that way.law. You see the little lines of cleavagerunning through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the “shop”, in a word, from which the man can by and by no more escape than his coat sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical one in the formation of intellectual and professional habits, the period below twenty is more important still for the fi xing of personal habits, properly so called, such as vocalization and pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address. Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty spoken without a foreign accent;hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vicesof speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he even learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest “swell”,but he simply cannot buy the right things. An invisible law, as strong as gravitation, keeps him within his orbit, arrayed this year as he was the last;and how his better-bred acquaintances contrive to get the things they wear will be for him a mystery till his dying day.

The great thing, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. 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

11. A cleavage between two people or things is a division or disagreement between them.

12. A vice is a habit which is regarded as a weakness in someone’s character, but not usually as a serious fault.

13. Plague or the plague here is a very infectious disease which usually results in death. The patient has a severe fever and swellings on his or her body.

14. The proper thing is the one that is correct or most suitable.work. 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. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right.