f supreme
importance to the individual and society. It is in one
sense a great advantage; it is an enormous saver of time. In
the famous words of James:[1]

The great thing, then, in all education, is to _make our nervous system
our ally instead of our enemy_. It is to fund and capitalize our
acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. _For this
we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many
useful actions as we can_, and guard against the growing into ways
that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we would guard
against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can
hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our
higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing
is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar,
the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every
day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express
volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the
deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in
him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there
be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let
him begin this very hour to set the matter right.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _Psychology_, vol. I, p. 122.]

The ideal of efficiency is the ideal of having the effective
thing habitually done with as little effort and difficulty as
possible. This in the case of human beings is, as James points
out, attained when good habits are early acquired and when
as large a proportion as possible of purely routine activity is
made effortless and below the level of consciousness. To do
as many things as possible without thinking is to free thinking
for new situations. Our experiences would be very restricted
indeed if we could not reduce a large portion of the things we
do to the mechanics of habit. Walking, eating, these, though
partly instinctive, were once problems requiring thought,
effort, and attention. If we had to spend all our lives learning
to dress and undress, to find our way about our own house
or city, to spell and to pronounce correctly, it is clear how
little variety and diversity we should ever attain in our lives.
By the time we are twenty these fundamental habits are so
firmly fixed in us that, for better or for worse, they