ABSTRACT
Ever since the rise of the association-psychology, there has been a strong and increasing tendency to explain by the principle of habit all behavior that exhibits improvement or adaptation through individual experience. In this chapter, the authors not only describe the habits of movement, but also describe the habits of feeling and of thought in animals. Animals are low in the scale of intelligence, animals which exhibit no trace of acquisition of skill, nevertheless exhibit the guidance of present actions through past experience. Professor W. S. Hunter has made ingenious and exact investigation of capacity of animals and young children to be guided by sense-perceptions that lie in the past. The modern study of uncontrollable habits has shown, in many instances, that the tic is the partial, often symbolical, expression of an impulse which is uncontrollable, because it forms part of a repressed or dissociated system; and that, when the repression is relieved or the dissociation resolved, tic is abolished.
