Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/622

 6o6 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

dreadful homesickness punishes any wide departure from the old lines. The strange revulsions to the faith of childhood spring from the same longing that draws men back to the fatherland, the old homestead, the friends of boyhood. Evangelists know how potent is the memory of the old teaching at mother's knee, the old prayers from the trundlebed. Sometimes after periods of breathless innovation whole peoples are seized with a yearn- ing for the old-fashioned. After every radical movement histo- rians have learned to look for a reaction. As a mouse that has ventured from its hole suddenly runs back smitten with a cause- less terror, so man is liable to bolt the moment he realizes he is far from home. It is reason and convenience that lure him from the time-hallowed ; it is nostalgia that draws him back.

A little novelty charms, but a general invasion of the new makes the world look bleak and dreary. Socialist Utopias, no matter how thickly the felicity is spread, strike us as chill and forbidding, because we miss familiar features and homely detail. The main prop of custom is not the fear of the ancestral gods, but the dread of self-mutilation. For to give up the customary is to alienate portions of one's self, to tear away the sheath that protects our substance. Well says the musing Wallenstein : "For of the wholly common is man made,

And custom is his nurse ! Woe then to them

Who lay irreverent hands upon his old

House furniture, the dear inheritance

From his forefathers. For time consecrates ;

And what is gray with age becomes religion."'

It is the prerogative of custom to organize personal life on many lines, to fix bodily habits, language, costume, sports, pleasures, aims, and expression, as well as the attitude toward others. But one thing never forgotten in its organization of life is adaptatioti to requirements. The mold in which the life of the child is to be cast is for the most part not of the parents' own making, but is borne to them on the stream of social tradi- tion. Says Plato, speaking of primitive societies : The families " would have peculiar customs .... which they would have received from their several parents who had educated them ; and these customs would

' Tht Piccolomini, scene iv (Coleridge's translation).