A person is a portfolio of habits

Human beings in the 18th Century are assumed to be bundles of habits, some innate, some acquired, habits of which the outcome is moderated by occasional interventions of reason.

John Locke articulates this view with his usual deceptive lucidity.

His position is that Nature equips us with a portfolio of inclinations, desires and aversions to guide us into action that in most circumstances is good for us.

In certain special situations, however, these innate guides would if left unattended let us down. They would lead us to act in a way that would do us harm. It is in these circumstances that reason has occasion to intervene.

Instilling the power to resist irrational desires is the point of education, he believes. It is a power "to be got and improv'd by custom, made easy and familiar by an early practice".

Locke's way of thinking of the human being runs throughout the early Enlightenment.

Butler for example dwells at length on the connection between a person's "character" - understood as a set of habits - and the role of education: its task he believes is to mould a person's habits, and thus mould the person, so as to prepare them for eternal life:

'We are capable," he says, "not only of acting, and of having different momentary impressions made upon us, but of getting a new facility in any kind of action, and of settled alterations in our temper or character. The power of the last two is the power of habits. "

(Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, 1st published 1736, Ungar edition, New York, 1961, Frederick Ungar, p.71. )

Rousseau's conception of the aim of education was not quite the same, but like Locke and Butler, it was still a matter of addressing the portfolio of habits a child possesses. His message is that a person is born with a perfectly good set of habits, which education can so easily corrupt.

And Hume, towards the end of the Early Modern period, is to be found maintaining essentially the same conception of the human being - that a human being's 'character' is a set of habits - and that education, specifically moral education, is a matter of adjusting them.

"The end of all moral speculations is to teach us our duty; and, by proper representations of the deformity of vice and beauty of virtue, beget correspondent habits, and engage us to avoid the one, and embrace the other."

Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals Sec. 1 Para. 8/11 p. 172 gp. 172
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