should improve but little in our way of doing things, no
matter how many times we did them over. We should now be obliged to go
through the same bungling process of dressing ourselves as when we
first learned it as children. Our writing would proceed as awkwardly in
the high school as the primary, our eating as adults would be as messy
and wide of the mark as when we were infants, and we should miss in a
thousand ways the motor skill that now seems so easy and natural. All
highly skilled occupations, and those demanding great manual dexterity,
likewise depend on our habit-forming power for the accurate and
automatic movements required.

So with mental skill. A great portion of the fundamentals of our
education must be made automatic--must become matters of habit. We set
out to learn the symbols of speech. We hear words and see them on the
printed page; associated with these words are meanings, or ideas. Habit
binds the word and the idea together, so that to think of the one is to
call up the other--and language is learned. We must learn numbers, so we
practice the "combinations," and with 4x6, or 3x8 we associate 24. Habit
secures this association in our minds, and lo! we soon know our
"tables." And so on throughout the whole range of our learning. We learn
certain symbols, or facts, or processes, and habit takes hold and
renders these automatic so that we can use them freely, easily, and with
skill, leaving our thought free for matters that cannot be made
automatic. One of our greatest dangers is that we shall not make
sufficiently automatic, enough of the necessary foundation material of
education. Failing in this, we shall at best be but blunderers
intellectually, handicapped because we failed to make proper use of
habit in our development.

For, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, there is a limit to our
mental energy and also to the number of objects to which we are able to
attend. It is only when attention has been freed from the many things
that can always be thought or done _in the same way_, that the mind can
devote itself to the real problems that require judgment, imagination or
reasoning. The writer whose spelling and punctuation do not take care of
themselves will hardly make a success of writing. The mathematician
whose number combinations, processes and formulae are not automatic in
his mind can never hope to make progress in mathematical thinking. The
speaker who, while speaking, has to think of his