The Commens Dictionary

Quote from ‘A Study of How to Reason Safely and Efficiently’

…by a Habit I shall mean a character of anything, say of B, this character consisting in the fact that under circumstances of a certain kind, say A, B would tend to be such as is signified by a determinate predicate, say C. The same thing might be more briefly expressed by saying that I call any real “Would-be” a habit of the subject of such predication, but by stating the matter more fully I bring into prominence the fact that a “Would-be” is a relation between three objects, A, B, and C.