cide what is allowable and what is forbidden, what is
advantageous and what is disadvantageous.

Sec. 32. As relates to form, habit may be either passive or active. The
passive is that which teaches us to bear the vicissitudes of nature as
well as of history with such composure that we shall hold our ground
against them, being always equal to ourselves, and that we shall not
allow our power of acting to be paralyzed through any mutations of
fortune. Passive habit is not to be confounded with obtuseness in
receiving impressions, a blank abstraction from the affair in hand which
at bottom is found to be nothing more than a selfishness which desires
to be left undisturbed: it is simply composure of mind in view of
changes over which we have no control. While we vividly experience joy
and sorrow, pain and pleasure--inwoven as these are with the change of
seasons, of the weather, &c.--with the alternation of life and death, of
happiness and misery, we ought nevertheless to harden ourselves against
them so that at the same time in our consciousness of the supreme worth
of the mind we shall build up the inaccessible stronghold of Freedom in
ourselves.--Active habit [or behavior] is found realized in a wide range
of activity which appears in manifold forms, such as skill, dexterity,
readiness of information, &c. It is a steeling of the internal for
action upon the external, as the Passive is a steeling of the internal
against the influences of the external.

[Sidenote: _Formation of Habits._]

Sec. 33. Habit is the general form which instruction takes. For since it
reduces a condition or an activity within ourselves to an instinctive
use and wont, it is necessary for any thorough instruction. But as,
according to its content, it may be either proper or improper,
advantageous or disadvantageous, good or bad, and according to its form
may be the assimilation of the external by the internal, or the impress
of the internal upon the external, Education must procure for the pupil
the power of being able to free himself from one habit and to adopt
another. Through his freedom he must be able not only to renounce any
habit formed, but to form a new one; and he must so govern his system of
habits that it shall exhibit a constant progress of development into
greater freedom. We must discipline ourselves, as a means toward the
ever-changing realization of the Good in us, constantly to form and to
break habits.

--We must characterize