w thus: 'Any habitual course of conduct
changes voluntary actions into automatic or involuntary (_i.e._,
reflex) actions.' By practice man forms habits, and habitual action
is automatic action, requiring no exercise of will except at the
beginning of the series of acts. The law of association does the
rest. As voluntary acts are transformed into automatic, the will is
set free to devote itself to higher efforts and larger attainments.
After telling the truth a while by an effort, we tell the truth
naturally, necessarily, automatically. After giving to good objects
for a while from principle, we give as a matter of course. Honesty
becomes automatic; self-control becomes automatic. We rule over our
spirit, repress ill-temper, keep down bad feelings, first by an
effort, afterwards as a matter of course.

"Possibly these virtues really become incarnate in the bodily
organization. Possibly goodness is made flesh and becomes
consolidate in the fibres of the brain. Vices, beginning in the
soul, seem to become at last bodily diseases; why may not virtues
follow the same law? If it were not for some such law of
accumulation as this, the work of life would have to be begun
forever anew. Formation of character would be impossible. We should
be incapable of progress, our whole strength being always employed
in battling with our first enemies, learning evermore anew our
earliest lessons. But by our present constitution he who has taken
one step can take another, and life may become a perpetual advance
from good to better. And the highest graces of all--Faith, Hope, and
Love--obey the same law." See James Freeman Clarke, Every-Day
Religion, p. 122.]

There has been therefore in the successive forms and stages of
animal life a clear sequence of dominant nervous actions. The
actions of all animals below the annelid are mainly reflex or
automatic, unconscious and involuntary. But in insects and lower
vertebrates the highest actions at least are instinctive.
Consciousness plays a continually more important part. Still the
actions are controlled by hereditary tendency far more than by the
will of the individual. But in man instinct has been almost entirely
replaced by conscious, voluntary, intelligent action. And yet in
man, as rapidly as possible, actions which at first require
conscious effort become, through repetition and habit, reflex and
automatic. All our conscious effort and t