THE POWER OF CUSTOM.

Evening Post, Volume XLII, Issue 82, 3 October 1891, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE POWER OF CUSTOM.

All men are apt to have a high conceit of their own understandings, and to be tenacious of the opinions they profess; and yet almost all men are guided by the understandings of others, not by their own; and may be said more truly to adopt, than to beget, their opinions. Nurses, parents, pedagogues, and, after them all, and above them all, that universal pedagogue, custom, nil the mind with notions which it has no sbaro iv framing, which it receives as passively as it receives the impression of outward objects; and which, left to itseif, it would never have framed, perhaps, or would have examined afterwards. Thus, prejudices are established byeducation, and habits by custom. We are taught to think what others think, not how to think for ourselves; and whilst the memory is loaded, the understanding is unexercised, or exercised in such trammels as constrain its motions and direct its pace, till that which was artificial .becomes in tome tort natural,

and the mind can go no other. It may sound oddly, but it is true, in many cases, to say, that if men had (learned less, their way to knowledge jwould be shorter and easier. It is, indeed, shorter and easier to proceed from ignorance to knowledge than from error. They who are in the last must unlearn before they can learn to any good purpose ; and the first part of this task is not, in many respectx, the least difficult; for which reason it is Beldom undertaken. — Lord Bolingbroke.