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The Ninth Lesson: The Mental Planes.631
conceptions. And the tendency is always upward and onward. The tendency
is constantly from Force and Restraint toward Love and Freedom. The ideal
condition would be one in which there were no laws and no necessity for
them—a condition in which men had ceased to do wrong because they
had outgrown the desire rather than from fear or restraint or force. And
while this condition as yet seems afar off, there is constantly going on an
unfoldment of higher planes and faculties of the mind, which when once
fully manifest in the race will work a complete revolution in ethics and laws
and government—and for the better, of course. In the meantime Mankind
moves along, doing the best it can, making a steady though slow progress.
There is another plane of the mind which is often called the “Instinct,” but
which is but a part of the plane of the Intellect, although its operations are
largely below the field of consciousness. We allude to what may be called
the “Habit Mind,” in order to distinguish it from the Instinctive Plane. The
difference is this: The Instinctive plane of mind is made up of the ordinary
operations of the mind below the plane of the Intellect, and yet above the
plane of the Vegetative mind—and also of the acquired experiences of the
race, which have been transmitted by heredity, etc. But the “Habit Mind”
contains only that which has been placed there by the person himself and
which he has acquired by experience, habit, and observation, repeated so
often until the mind knows it so well that it is carried below the field of
consciousness and becomes “second nature,” and akin to Instinct.
The text books upon psychology are filled with illustrations and examples
of the habit phase or plane of the mental operations, and we do not think
it necessary to repeat instances of the same kind here. Everyone is familiar
with the fact that tasks which at first are learned only by considerable work
and time soon become fixed in some part of the mind until their repetition
calls for little or no exercise of conscious mental operation. In fact, some
writers have claimed that no one really “learns” how to perform a task until
he can perform it almost automatically. The pupil who in the early stages of
piano playing finds it most difficult to control and manage his fingers, after a