sion, can commonly be
brought about only when the sentiments opposing it have been designedly
weakened or have suffered a natural decay. In this destructive process,
and in any constructive process by which it may be followed, reasoning,
often very bad reasoning, bears, at least in western communities, a
large share as cause, a still larger share as symptom; so that the
clatter of contending argumentation is often the most striking
accompaniment of interesting social changes. Its position, therefore,
and its functions in the social organism are frequently misunderstood.
People fall instinctively into the habit of supposing that, as it plays
a conspicuous part in the improvement or deterioration of human
institutions, it therefore supplies the very basis on which they may be
made to rest, the very mold to which they ought to conform; and they
naturally conclude that we have only got to reason more and to reason
better in order speedily to perfect the whole machinery by which human
felicity is to be secured.

Surely this is a great delusion. A community founded upon argument would
soon be a community no longer. It would dissolve into its constituent
elements. Think of the thousand ties most subtly woven out of common
sentiments, common tastes, common beliefs, nay, common prejudices, by
which from our very earliest childhood we are all bound unconsciously
but indissolubly together into a compacted whole. Imagine these to be
suddenly loosed and their places taken by some judicious piece of
reasoning on the balance of advantage, which, after taking all proper
deductions, still remains to the credit of social life. These things we
may indeed imagine if we please. Fortunately, we shall never see them.
Society is founded--and from the nature of the human beings which
constitute it, must, in the main, be always founded--not upon criticism
but upon feelings and beliefs, and upon the customs and codes by which
feelings and beliefs are, as it were, fixed and rendered stable. And
even where these harmonize, so far as we can judge, with sound reason,
they are in many cases not consciously based on reasoning; nor is their
fate necessarily bound up with that of the extremely indifferent
arguments by which, from time to time, philosophers, politicians, and, I
will add, divines have thought fit to support them.

We habitually talk as if a self-governing or free community was one
which managed its own affairs. In strictness, no community