The new spirit is not going to be accepted at once by society.  There must first be some wailing and much gnashing of teeth; and the monster, custom, which all sense doth eat, will still for a time be antagonistic as it has been in the past.  “In no society has life ever been completely controlled by the reason,” remarks Professor Thomas, “but mainly by the instincts and the habits and the customs growing out of these.  Speaking in a general way, it may be said that all conduct both of men and animals tends to be right rather than wrong.  They do not know why they behave in such and such ways, but their ancestors behaved in those ways and survival is the guaranty that the behaviour was good.  We must admit that within the scope of their lives the animals behave with almost unerring propriety.  Their behaviour is simple and unvarying, but they make fewer mistakes than ourselves.  The difficulty in their condition is, that having little power of changing their behaviour they have little chance of improvement.  Now, in human societies, and already among gregarious animals, one of the main conditions of survival was common sentiment and behaviour.  So long as defence of life and preying on outsiders were main concerns of society, unanimity and conformity had the same value which still attaches to military discipline in warfare and to team work in our sports.  Morality therefore became identified with uniformity.  It was actually better to work upon some system, however bad, than to work on none at all, and early society had no place for the dissenter.  Changes did take place, for man had the power of communicating his experiences through speech and the same power of imitation which we show in the adoption of fashions, but these changes took place with almost imperceptible slowness, or if they did not, those who proposed them were considered sinners and punished with death or obloquy.

“And it has never made any difference how bad the existing order of things might be.  Those who attempted to reform it were always viewed with suspicion.  Consequently our practices usually run some decades or centuries behind our theories and history is even full of cases where the theory was thoroughly dead from the standpoint of reason before it began to do its work in society.  A determined attitude of resistance to change may therefore be classed almost with the instincts, for it is not a response to the reason alone, but is very powerfully bound up with the emotions which have their seat in the spinal cord.

“It is true that this adhesion to custom is more absolute and astonishing in the lower races and in the less educated classes, but it would be difficult to point out a single case in history where a new doctrine has not been met with bitter resistance.  We justly regard learning and freedom of thought and investigation as precious, and we popularly think of Luther and the Reformation as standing at the beginning of the movement toward these, but Luther himself had