Page:Essays Vol 1 (Ives, 1925).pdf/174

154 street bade him stop at a certain door, for he himself had dragged his father only so far; that that was the limit of the hereditary humiliating treatment which, in their family, the children were accustomed to inflict on their fathers. From custom, says Aristotle, as often as from sickness, women tear their hair, gnaw their nails, eat coals and earth; and more from custom than from nature, males cohabit with males. The laws of conscience, which we say are engendered by nature, are born of custom; every man, holding in inward veneration the opinions and fashions approved and received around him, can not depart from them without [self] upbraiding, or conform to them without [self] commendation.

(b) When the Cretans, in old days, wished to curse some one, they besought the gods to involve him in some evil custom. (a) But the principal effect of her authority is to seize and grip us in such wise that it is scarcely in our power to. throw off her clutch, and to return into ourselves to reflect and reason about her decrees. In truth, because we suck these in with the milk of our birth, and because the face of the world presents itself in this guise to our earliest vision, we seem born necessarily to follow this course. And the common ideas that we find in credit around us, and infused in our minds by the seed of our fathers, seem to be universal and natural ideas. (c) Whence it it happens that whatever is unhinged from custom, we believe to be unhinged from reason, God knows how unreasonably in most instances. If, as we who study ourselves have learned to do, every one who hears a wise thought should consider instantly how it applies to his own case, he would find that it was not so much an excellent saying as an excellent blow at the usual stupidity of his judgement. But we receive the warnings of truth and its precepts as addressed to the common people, never to ourselves; and every one, instead of applying them