This leads to a fourth maxim. Don’t preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract.  Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do.  The strokes of behavior are what give the new set to the character, and work the good habits into its organic tissue.  Preaching and talking too soon become an ineffectual bore.

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There is a passage in Darwin’s short autobiography which has been often quoted, and which, for the sake of its bearing on our subject of habit, I must now quote again.  Darwin says:  “Up to the age of thirty or beyond it, poetry of many kinds gave me great pleasure; and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays.  I have also said that pictures formerly gave me considerable, and music very great delight.  But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry.  I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.  I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music....  My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts; but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive....  If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept alive through use.  The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

We all intend when young to be all that may become a man, before the destroyer cuts us down.  We wish and expect to enjoy poetry always, to grow more and more intelligent about pictures and music, to keep in touch with spiritual and religious ideas, and even not to let the greater philosophic thoughts of our time develop quite beyond our view.  We mean all this in youth, I say; and yet in how many middle-aged men and women is such an honest and sanguine expectation fulfilled?  Surely, in comparatively few; and the laws of habit show us why.  Some interest in each of these things arises in everybody at the proper age; but, if not persistently fed with the appropriate matter, instead of growing into a powerful and necessary habit, it atrophies and dies, choked by the rival interests to which the daily food is given.  We make ourselves into Darwins in this negative respect by persistently ignoring the essential practical conditions of our case.  We say abstractly:  “I mean to enjoy poetry, and to absorb a lot of it, of course.  I fully intend to keep up my love of music, to read the books that shall give new