"Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment"
About this Quote
The subtext is disciplinary ambition. Hall helped professionalize psychology in the United States, and in that late-19th/early-20th-century moment, the field wanted hard mechanisms, not introspective poetry. By framing “activities” as “automatic reflexes,” he borrows the credibility of physiology and turns everyday life into something measurable: habits that can be conditioned, routines that can be engineered, citizens that can be shaped. “Stimuli of his environment” widens the net further. It quietly relocates responsibility away from inner character and toward surroundings - schools, factories, cities, families - the whole modern system producing standardized behavior.
That’s why the sentence lands with a faintly unsettling efficiency. It reads like a diagnosis and a justification: if people are mostly automated, then reform isn’t just about persuading them, it’s about redesigning the cues that run them. In an era of mass schooling, industrial schedules, and rising social-science management, Hall’s claim doubles as a blueprint for social control dressed up as neutral description.
Quote Details
| Topic | Habits |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene (G. Stanley Hall, 1906)
Evidence: Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment. (Chapter V , “Gymnastics” (Project Gutenberg eBook #9173: around the section beginning “B. In practise the above ideal…”)). This wording appears verbatim in G. Stanley Hall’s own book Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene. In the Project Gutenberg HTML text, it occurs in Chapter V (“Gymnastics”) in a paragraph discussing “increased volitional control,” immediately followed by: “Every new power of controlling these by the will frees man from slavery and widens the field of freedom.” ([gutenberg.org](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9173.html.images)) About “first published”: many quote sites point to Hall’s Adolescence (1904) or to later reprints, but those are secondary/derivative attributions unless verified in the original 1904 text. I verified the sentence directly in Hall’s Youth (a 1906 work that Hall describes as an epitome/adaptation of conclusions from Adolescence). To conclusively prove an *earlier* first appearance, you’d need to check the 1904 Adolescence volumes (or any earlier paper) for the exact sentence; I have not verified that earlier occurrence from a primary scan in this search session. ([gutenberg.org](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9173.html.images)) Other candidates (1) Adolescence - Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiol... (G. Stanley Hall, 2011) compilation96.9% G. Stanley Hall. physical salvation thus wrought will be, when adequately written, one of the ... Man is largely a cr... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Hall, G. Stanley. (2026, February 13). Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/man-is-largely-a-creature-of-habit-and-many-of-146074/
Chicago Style
Hall, G. Stanley. "Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment." FixQuotes. February 13, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/man-is-largely-a-creature-of-habit-and-many-of-146074/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment." FixQuotes, 13 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/man-is-largely-a-creature-of-habit-and-many-of-146074/. Accessed 25 Feb. 2026.
