e of action is explicitly suggested, and even when one
attempts to keep him from acting.

Psychologically such a person is dominated by habit. And this means
that his nervous system sets, either by its hereditary tendencies or
by the undue predominance of certain elements in his education,
quickly in the direction of motor discharge. The great channels of
readiest out-pouring from the brain into the muscles have become fixed
and pervious; it is hard for the processes once started in the sense
centres, such as those of sight, hearing, etc., to hold in their
energies. They tend to unstable equilibrium in the direction of
certain motor combinations, which in their turn represent certain
classes of acts. This is habit; and the person of the extreme motor
type is always a creature of habit.

Now what is the line of treatment that such a child should have? The
necessity for getting an answer to this question is evident from what
was said above--i. e., that the very rise of the condition itself is
due, apart from heredity, oftener than not to the fact that he has not
had proper treatment from his teachers.

The main point for a teacher to have in mind in dealing with such a
boy or girl--the impulsive, active one, always responsive, but almost
always in error in what he says and does--is that here is a case of
habit. Habit is good; indeed, if we should go a little further we
should see that all education is the forming of habits; but here, in
this case, what we have is not habits, but habit. This child shows a
tendency to habit _as such_: to habits of any and every kind. The
first care of the teacher in order to the control of the formation of
habits is in some way to bring about a little inertia of habit, so to
speak--a short period of organic hesitation, during which the reasons
pro and con for each habit may be brought into the consciousness of
the child.

The means by which this tendency to crude, inconsiderate action on the
part of the child is to be controlled and regulated is one of the most
typical questions for the intelligent teacher. Its answer must be
different for children of different ages. The one thing to do, in
general, however, from the psychologist's point of view, is in some
way to bring about greater complications in the motor processes which
the child uses most habitually, and with this complication to get
greater inhibition along the undesirable lines of his activity.
Inhibition is the damming up of