iated with old
recollections or habits. Habit will make a Frenchman like his melon with
salt, while an Englishman prefers it with sugar. An old association of
ideas will make an Englishman shrink from eating a frog or a snail,
though he would probably like each if he ate it without knowing it, and
he could easily learn to do so. The kind of cookery which one age or one
nation generally likes, another age or another nation finds distasteful.
The eye often governs the taste, and a dish which, when seen, excites
intense repulsion, would have no such repulsion to a blind man. Every
one who has moved much about the world, and especially in uncivilised
countries, will get rid of many old antipathies, will lose the
fastidiousness of his taste, and will acquire new and genuine tastes.
The original innate difference is not wholly destroyed, but it is
profoundly and variously modified.

These changes of taste are very analogous to what takes place in our
moral dispositions. They are for the most part in themselves simply
external to morals, though there is at least one conspicuous exception.
Many--it is to be hoped most--men might spend their lives with full
access to intoxicating liquors without even the temptation of getting
drunk. Apart from all considerations of religion, morals, social,
physical, or intellectual consequences, they abstain from doing so
simply as a matter of taste. With other men the pleasure of excessive
drinking is such that it requires an heroic effort of the will to resist
it. There are men who not only are so constituted that it is their
greatest pleasure, but who are even born with a craving for drink. In no
form is the terrible fact of heredity more clearly or more tragically
displayed. Many, too, who had originally no such craving gradually
acquire it: sometimes by mere social influence, which makes excessive
drinking the habit of their circle; more frequently through depression
or sorrow, which gives men a longing for some keen pleasure in which
they can forget themselves; or through the jaded habit of mind and body
which excessive work produces, or through the dreary, colourless,
joyless surroundings of sordid poverty. Drink and the sensual pleasures,
if viciously indulged, produce (doubtless through physical causes) an
intense craving for their gratification. This, however, is not the case
with all our pleasures. Many are keenly enjoyed when present, yet not
seriously missed when absent. Sometimes,