The object of such organizations is to create what may be called a cake of custom.  All the actions of life are to be submitted to a single rule for a single object,—­that gradually created “hereditary drill” which science teaches to be essential, and which the early instinct of men saw to be essential too.  That this regime forbids free thought is not an evil,—­or rather, though an evil, it is the necessary basis for the greatest good; it is necessary for making the mold of civilization and hardening the soft fibre of early man.

BENEFITS OF FREE DISCUSSION IN MODERN TIMES

From ‘Physics and Politics’

In this manner polities of discussion broke up the old bonds of custom which were now strangling mankind, though they had once aided and helped it; but this is only one of the many gifts which those polities have conferred, are conferring, and will confer on mankind.  I am not going to write a eulogium on liberty, but I wish to set down three points which have not been sufficiently noticed.

Civilized ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is in many respects not at all suited to civilized circumstances.  A main and principal excellence in the early times of the human races is the impulse to action.  The problems before men are then plain and simple:  the man who works hardest, the man who kills the most deer, the man who catches the most fish—­even later on, the man who tends the largest herds or the man who tills the largest field—­is the man who succeeds; the nation which is quickest to kill its enemies or which kills most of its enemies is the nation which succeeds.  All the inducements of early society tend to foster immediate action, all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that “delays are dangerous,” and that the sluggish man—­the man “who roasteth not that which he took in hunting”—­will not prosper on the earth, and indeed will very soon perish out of it:  and in consequence an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.

Pascal said that most of the evils of life arose from “man’s being unable to sit still in a room”; and though I do not go that length, it is certain that we should have been a far wiser race than we are if we had been readier to sit quiet,—­we should have known much better the way in which it was best to act when we came to act.  The rise of physical science, the first great body of practical truth provable to all men, exemplifies this in the plainest way:  if it had not been for quiet people who sat still and studied the sections of the cone, if other quiet people had not sat still and studied the theory of infinitesimals, or other quiet people had not sat still and worked out the doctrine of chances (the most “dreamy moonshine,” as the purely