A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

49.
The similarity between this passage and the following account of Tito
Melema is ,unmistakable. VIe learn that "in this first distinct colloquy
with himself the ideas which had previously been scattered and interrupted
had now concentrated themselves; the little rills of selfishness had
united and made a channel, so that they could never again meet with the
same resistance. 1I
36 Tito's selfishness has become fixed and established
as a habit, an automatic action, and the suggestion, even, is that this
has caused there to be laid dovm in his nervous system neurological circuits
which become permanent and irreducible.
The laws of association psychology describe the learning process and
tell how 17£ come to acqui.:r:e habits; they also suggest the inevitable corollary
that habits once established in this way become enormously difficult
to eradicate. Maggie Tulliver, returning in a tired and depressed
state from a spell of schoolteaching, compares her state of mind to that
of a bear continuously pacing out the same confines. She says to Lucy,
"'It is with me as I used to think it would be with the poor uneasy
white bear I saw at the show. I thought he must have got so stupid vdth
the habit of turning backwards and forwards in that narrow space, that he
would keep doing it if they set him free. One gets a ba.d habit of being
unhappy. II 37
A habit of unhappiness obviously constitutes a. ba.d habit; if there
are laws which state categorically how such' habits are formed, obviously
they can be used in the formation of good and valuable habits; the problem
becomes one of determining how to eliminate such entrenched habits as
the one Maggie has just described. As Spencer in !h£. Principles of
Psychology (1855) declare~ "where a certain relation has been daily exp;·;rienced
throughout oU!" whole lives, vdth scarcely an exception, it becomes
extremely difficult for us to conceive it as otherwise--to break
the connection between the states of consciousness representing it •••• " 38