Volume 1

Analytic psychology.

  • George Frederick Stout
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Analytic psychology. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    ditions with a regularity which may be called machine-like, as compared with the fluctuating and variable acts of the same complexity for which custom has not prepared us. To act from habit is to act mechanically and ijuasi instinctively. (2) A habitual series of movements is also more facile. To see this we have only to compare the slow and bungling efforts of the learner who is continually taking false steps and having to retrace them, with the sure and rapid procedure of the prac- tised adept. (3) A rooted habit is also, as such, a conation. We are prone to do what we are used to do. This holds good universally, where there is no more powerful counteracting motive. Every interruption to our routine way of doing things is felt as a disturbance and annoyance. “ I conceive it to be a part of our constitution,” says Reid, “ that what we have been accustomed to do, we acquire, not only a facility, but a proneness to do on like occasions ; so that it requires a particular will and effort to forbear it, but to do it requires very often no will at all. We are carried by habit as by a stream in swimming, if we make no resistance.” 1 Dr. Car- penter tells that he was “ assured by a large outfitter that all his workwomen in a particular department refused to work for a fortnight, merely because they were required to make a slight alteration (not productive of the least additional trouble to themselves) in the pattern of a particular garment ”.2 In general, the proneness to action which has become habitual, manifests itself in two ways : (a) the more firmly fixed the habit the slighter the cue required to prompt the customary reaction, and in the same proportion the reaction is less liable to disturbance from accompanying circumstances; (b) when the customary course of action is interrupted or repressed by obstacles, or by the absence of some of its necessary external conditions, the propensity becomes a conscious desire, accom- panied by aversion to the disturbing conditions. (4) It is a