A person who takes the trouble to form his own opinions and beliefs, will feel that he owes no responsibility to the majority for his conclusions. If he is a genuine lover of truth, if he is inspired by a passion for seeing things as they are and an abhorrence of holding ideas which do not conform to facts, he will be wholly independent of the assent of those around him. When he proceeds to apply his beliefs in the practical conduct of life, the position is different. There are then good reasons why his attitude should be less inflexible. The society in which he is placed is an ancient and composite growth. The people from whom he dissents have not come by their opinions, customs and by a process of mere haphazard.
These opinions and customs all had their origin in a certain real supposed fitness. They have certain depth of root in the lives of a proportion of the existing generation. Their congruity with one another may have come to an end. That is only one side of the truth. The most zealous propagandism cannot penetrate to them. In common language, we speak of a generation as something possessed of a kind of exact unity, with all its parts and members homogenous. Yet, plainly it is not this. It is a whole but a whole in a state of constant flux its factors and elements are eternally shifting. It is not one but many generations.
Each of the seven ages of man is neighbour to all the rest. The column of the veterans is already sinking into the last abyss, while the column of the newest recruits is forming to each its tradition, its tendency and its possibilities. Only a proportion of each can have nerve enough to grasp the banner of a new truth and endurance to bear it along rugged and untrodden ways. Thus we must remember the stuff of which life is made. We must consider what an overwhelming preponderence of the most tenacious energies and most concentrated interests of a society must be absorbed between material cares and the solitude of the affections.
It is obviously unreasonable to lose patience and quarrel with one’s time because it is tardy in throwing off its institutions and beliefs and slow to achieve the transformation which is the problem in front of it. Men and women have to live. The task for most of us is arduous enough to make us well pleased with even such imperfect shelter as we find in daily use and wont.
To insist on whole community being made at once to submit to the reign of new practices and ideas that have just begun to commend themselves to the most advanced speculative intelligence of the time, this even if it were a possible process, would do hurry on social dissolution.