There is one mark of age that strikes me more than any of the
physical ones;--I mean the formation of Habits. An old man who
shrinks into himself falls into ways that become as positive and as
much beyond the reach of outside influences as if they were
governed by clock-work. The ANIMAL functions, as the physiologists
call them, in distinction from the ORGANIC, tend, in the process of
deterioration to which age and neglect united gradually lead them,
to assume the periodical or rhythmical type of movement. Every
man's HEART (this organ belongs, you know, to the organic system)
has a regular mode of action; but I know a great many men whose
BRAINS, and all their voluntary existence flowing from their
brains, have a systole and diastole as regular as that of the heart
itself. Habit is the approximation of the animal system to the
organic. It is a confession of failure in the highest function of
being, which involves a perpetual self-determination, in full view
of all existing circumstances. But habit, you see, is an action in
present circumstances from past motives. It is substituting a vis
a tergo for the evolution of living force.
When a man, instead of burning up three hundred pounds of carbon a
year, has got down to two hundred and fifty, it is plain enough he
must economize force somewhere. Now habit is a labor-saving
invention which enables a man to get along with less fuel,--that is
all; for fuel is force, you know, just as much in the page I am
writing for you as in the locomotive or the legs that carry it to
you.
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