Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/624

 6o8 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

for mental aliment. On the other hand, the adult who has passed the suggestible age and emerged from the family chrysa- lis allows the early organization of his life to dominate him, because habit is strong and the wrench of mental readjustment is painful. Chiefly upon these successive asce}ide?tcies — the ascend- ency of the surrojindings a7id later the ascendency of the past self over the present — rests the might of custom.

But there is another factor not to be overlooked. To a cer- tain extent suggestions are accepted according to the prestige of their source. Now, one effect of the overlapping of generations is to lend prestige to that which is old and in so far as it is old. Ancestor-worship, for instance, which is simply father-domina- tion writ large, throws the glance over the shoulder, turns the face toward the past. The worshiper trusts the dead more than the living ; all his light is from setting suns ; the sky is dark save just behind him. To him a custom is the cherished habit of some spirit, and the older the custom the more spirits there are who will make conformity to it a personal matter. On people of this mental habit the old is sure to impose, and the greater its antiquity the more it imposes. Have we not here the clue to that feeling which leads certain peoples to distrust positive laws and to throw everything into the form of immemorial custom ?

Says Sir Henry Maine : " Each individual in India is a slave to the customs of the group to which he belongs."'

"The council of village elders does not command anything, it merely declares what has always been. Nor does it generally declare that which it believes some higher power to have commanded ; those most entitled to speak on the subject deny that the natives of India necessarily require divine or political authority as the basis of their usages ; their antiquity is by itself assumed to be a sufficient reason for obeying them."'

But

" The body of persons to whose memory the customs are committed has always added to the stock of usage by tacitly inventing new rules to apply to cases which are really new."^

Now, apropos "of the invention of customary rules to meet cases which are really new" by the council of elders of the

' Village Communities, p. 13. »y?ja'., p. 68. ^Ibid., p. 75.