Experience in wood-chopping makes one a better chopper but does not necessarily increase his skill in sawing wood. Experience in bookkeeping increases one's ability in that particular, but does not appreciably increase his ability to handle men. Speed and accuracy of judgment secured in inspecting one sort of goods cannot be depended upon, if a different sort of goods is to be inspected.
The experience secured in responding to one situation will be valuable in responding to a similar situation because of the three following facts:--
(_a_) Two similar conditions may secure identical factors in our activity. Thus school life and the executive's work secure such identical activities as are involved in reading, in writing, or in arithmetic, and so forth, whether accomplished in the schoolroom or the office.
(_b_) The method developed in one experience may be applied equally well to another activity. In connection with a course in college, a student may acquire a scientific method of
procedure. At a later time he may (or he may not) apply this same method to the problems arising in his business or industrial life.
(_c_) Ideals developed in one experience may be projected into other experiences. If the ideals of promptness, neatness, accuracy, and honesty are developed in one relationship of life, the probabilities are somewhat increased that the same ideals will be applied to all experiences.
Provided that the four general conditions discussed are secured, we then have the more specific and important question to ask:--
WHAT EXPERIENCES ARE THE MOST VALUABLE?
Only those experiences are valuable that in an appreciable degree modify future action. One way in which an experience or a series of experiences modifies future action is in the formation of habits.
_Habit Formation_
Habit has a beneficial influence on future action in five particulars:--
(_a_) Habit reduces the necessary time of action. Repeating the twenty-six letters of the alphabet has become so habitual that I can repeat them forward in two seconds. To repeat them in any other than an habitual order, _e.g_. backwards, requires sixty seconds.
(_b_) Habit increases accuracy. I can repeat the alphabet forward without danger of error, but when I try to repeat it backward I am extremely likely to go astray.
(_c_) Habit reduces the attendant exhaustion. Reading English is for me more habitual than reading French. Hence the latter is the more exhausting process.
(_d_) Habit relieves the mind from the necessity of paying attention to the details of the successive steps of the act. When piano playing has been completely reduced to habit, the finger movement, the reading of the notes, etc., are all carried on successively with the minimum of thought.
(_e_) Habit gives a permanency to experience. For many years in playing tennis I served the ball in a way that had become for me perfectly
habitual. For an interval of three years I played no tennis, but when I began again I found that I could serve as well as ever. If the manner of service had not been so perfectly reduced to habit, I would have found after an interval of three years that I was completely out of practice, _i.e_. that my previous experience did not have a permanent value.
(The subject of habit formation will be more completely presented in Chapter XIII.)
A second form of experience that is capitalized and so predetermines a man's capacity to act and to think is the formation of what is known as practical judgments.
_Practical judgments_
By a practical judgment is meant the conscious recall of a concrete past experience and the determination of some action by means of this consciously recalled event. I find that it will be necessary for me to secure a new stenographer. I solve the problem by consciously recalling how I got one before. Upon the basis of that consciously recalled previous
experience I decide how to act now. This is a practical judgment.