One Custom Overcomes Another––But one custom overcomes another. The watchful mother sets up new tracks in other directions; and she sees to it, that while she is leading new thoughts through the new way, the old, deeply worn ‘way of thinking’ is quite disused. Now, the cerebrum is in a state of rapid waste and rapid growth. The new growth takes shape from the new thought: the old is lost in the steady waste, and the child is reformed, physically as well as morally and mentally. That the nervous tissue of the cerebrum should be thus the instrument of the mind need not surprise us when we think how the muscles and joints of the tumbler, the vocal organs of the singer, the finger-ends of the watchmaker; the palate of the tea-taster, grow to the uses they are steadily put to; and, much more, both in the case of the brain and all other organs, grow to the uses they are earliest put to.
This meets in a wonderful way the case of the parent who sets himself to cure a moral failing. He sets up the course of new thoughts, and hinders those of the past, until the new thoughts shall have become automatic and run of their own accord. All the time a sort of disintegration is going on in the place that held the disused thoughts; and here is the parent’s advantage. If the boy return (as, from inherited tendency, he still may do) to his old habits of thought, behold, there is no more place for them in his physical being; to make a new place is a work of time, and in this work the parent can overtake and hinder him without much effort