ght decision comes largely
without effort and without struggle. Otherwise the strain is too great,
and defeat will occasionally come; and defeat means weakness and at last
disaster, after the spirit has tired of the constant conflict. And so on
in a hundred lines. Good habits are more to be coveted than individual
victories in special cases, much as these are to be desired. For good
habits mean victories all along the line.

HABIT THE FOUNDATION OF PERSONALITY.--The biologist tells us that it is
the _constant_ and not the _occasional_ in the environment that
impresses itself on an organism. So also it is the _habitual_ in our
lives that builds itself into our character and personality. In a very
real sense we _are_ what we are in the habit of doing and thinking.

Without habit, personality could not exist; for we could never do a
thing twice alike, and hence would be a new person each succeeding
moment. The acts which give us our own peculiar individuality are our
habitual acts--the little things that do themselves moment by moment
without care or attention, and are the truest and best expression of our
real selves. Probably no one of us could be very sure which arm he puts
into the sleeve, or which foot he puts into the shoe, first; and yet
each of us certainly formed the habit long ago of doing these things in
a certain way. We might not be able to describe just how we hold knife
and fork and spoon, and yet each has his own characteristic and habitual
way of handling them. We sit down and get up in some characteristic way,
and the very poise of our heads and attitudes of our bodies are the
result of habit. We get sleepy and wake up, become hungry and thirsty at
certain hours, through force of habit. We form the habit of liking a
certain chair, or nook, or corner, or path, or desk, and then seek this
to the exclusion of all others. We habitually use a particular pitch of
voice and type of enunciation in speaking, and this becomes one of our
characteristic marks; or we form the habit of using barbarisms or
solecisms of language in youth, and these cling to us and become an
inseparable part of us later in life.

On the mental side the case is no different. Our thinking is as
characteristic as our physical acts. We may form the habit of thinking
things out logically, or of jumping to conclusions; of thinking
critically and independently, or of taking things unquestioningly on the
authority of others. We may form the hab