Kitap 2
18
Every habit and faculty is preserved and increased by correspondent actions; as the habit of walking, by walking; of running, by running. If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write. But if you do not read for a month together, but do something else, you will see what will be the consequence. So after sitting still for ten days, get up and attempt to take a long walk, and you will find how your legs are weakened. Upon the whole, then, whatever you would make habitual, practise it; and if you would not make a thing habitual, do not practise it, but habituate yourself to something else.
18
It is the same with regard to the operations of the soul. Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit, and added fuel to a fire. When you are overcome by the seductions of a woman, do not consider it as a single defeat alone, but that you have fed, that you have increased, your dissoluteness. For it is impossible but that habits and faculties must either be first produced, or strengthened and increased, by corresponding actions. Hence the philosophers derive the growth of all maladies. When you once desire money, for example, if reason be applied to produce a sense of the evil, the desire ceases, and the governing faculty of the mind regains its authority; whereas, if you apply no remedy, it returns no more to its former state, but being again similarly excited, it kindles at the desire more quickly than before; and by frequent repetitions at last becomes callous, and by this malady is the love of money fixed. For he who has had a fever, even after it has left him, is not in the same state of health as before, unless he was perfectly cured; and the same thing happens in distempers of the soul likewise. There are certain traces and blisters left in it, which, unless they are well effaced, whenever a new hurt is received in the same part, instead of blisters will become sores.
