t to make a complete and accurate
picture of the mores of the English colonies in North America in the
seventeenth century. The mores are not recorded for the same reason that
meals, going to bed, sunrise, etc., are not recorded, unless the regular
course of things is broken.

+83. Inertia and rigidity of the mores.+ We see that we must conceive of
the mores as a vast system of usages, covering the whole of life, and
serving all its interests; also containing in themselves their own
justification by tradition and use and wont, and approved by mystic
sanctions until, by rational reflection, they develop their own
philosophical and ethical generalizations, which are elevated into
"principles" of truth and right. They coerce and restrict the newborn
generation. They do not stimulate to thought, but the contrary. The
thinking is already done and is embodied in the mores. They never
contain any provision for their own amendment. They are not questions,
but answers, to the problem of life. They present themselves as final
and unchangeable, because they present answers which are offered as "the
truth." No world philosophy, until the modern scientific world
philosophy, and that only within a generation or two, has ever presented
itself as perhaps transitory, certainly incomplete, and liable to be set
aside to-morrow by more knowledge. No popular world philosophy or life
policy ever can present itself in that light. It would cost too great a
mental strain. All the groups whose mores we consider far inferior to
our own are quite as well satisfied with theirs as we are with ours. The
goodness or badness of mores consists entirely in their adjustment to
the life conditions and the interests of the time and place (sec. 65).
Therefore it is a sign of ease and welfare when no thought is given to
the mores, but all cooperate in them instinctively. The nations of
southeastern Asia show us the persistency of the mores, when the
element of stability and rigidity in them becomes predominant. Ghost
fear and ancestor worship tend to establish the persistency of the mores
by dogmatic authority, strict taboo, and weighty sanctions. The mores
then lose their naturalness and vitality. They are stereotyped. They
lose all relation to expediency. They become an end in themselves. They
are imposed by imperative authority without regard to interests or
conditions (caste, child marriage, widows). When any society falls under
the dominion of this disea