THE EFFECTS OF CUSTOM

Custom and repetition has the biggest effect in:

• increasing and reducing our passions
• converting:
  • pleasure into pain
  • pain into pleasure

Custom has two original effects on the mind. ◦ It bestows a facility in the performance of any action or the conception of any object. ◦ It afterwards bestows a tendency or inclination towards it. ▪ We may account from these all its other effects, however extraordinary.

• When the soul applies itself to perform any action or conception of any object it is not accustomed to, there is:
    ◦ a certain unpliableness in the faculties
    ◦ a difficulty of the spirit’s moving in their new direction.
• This difficulty excites the spirits.
    ◦ This surprise is:
        ▪ the source of wonder, surprise, and all the emotions arising from novelty.
        ▪ very agreeable in itself, like everything which enlivens the mind.
    ◦ Yet it:
        ▪ puts the spirits in agitation
        ▪ augments our agreeable and painful affections, according to the foregoing principle, that every emotion which precedes or attends a passion, is easily converted into that passion.
• Hence everything that is new:
    ◦ is most affecting
    ◦ gives us more pleasure or pain, than what naturally belongs to it.
• When it often returns on us:
    ◦ the novelty wears off
    ◦ the passions subside
    ◦ the hurry of the spirits is over
• We survey the objects with greater tranquility.

• By degrees, the repetition produces:
    ◦ a facility of the human mind
    ◦ an infallible source of pleasure, where the facility does not go beyond a certain degree.
• It is remarkable that the pleasure arising from a moderate facility does not have the same tendency with the pleasure arising from novelty to augment the painful and agreeable affections.
    ◦ The pleasure of facility does not so much consist in any ferment of the spirits, as in their orderly motion.
        ▪ This motion will sometimes be so powerful as even to:
            • convert pain into pleasure
            • give us a relish in time what at first was most harsh and disagreeable.

• Facility converts pain into pleasure.
    ◦ It often converts pleasure into pain when it is too great.
    ◦ It renders the mind’s actions so faint and languid, that they are no longer able to interest and support it.
• No other objects become disagreeable through custom, but those naturally attended with some emotion or affection, which is destroyed by the too frequent repetition.
    ◦ One can consider the clouds, and heavens, and trees, and stones, however frequently repeated, without ever feeling any aversion.

But when the fair sex, or music, or good cheer, or anything, that naturally should be agreeable, becomes indifferent, it easily produces the opposite affection.

• Custom gives a facility to perform any action.
    ◦ It also gives an inclination and tendency towards action, where it:
        ▪ is not entirely disagreeable
        ▪ can never be the object of inclination.
• This is why custom increases all active habits, but reduces the passive, according to the observation of a late eminent philosopher.
    ◦ The facility takes off from the force of the passive habits by rendering the motion of the spirits faint and languid.
• But as in the active, the spirits are sufficiently supported of themselves, the tendency of the mind gives them new force, and bends them more strongly to the action.