t,
the French philosopher and humanitarian: "M. Diderot, in all
your schemes of reform, you entirely forget the difference in
our position; you work only on paper, which endures all things;
it offers no obstacle, either to your pen or your imagination.
But I, poor Empress that I am, work on a far more delicate and
irritable substance, the human skin."]

Again, the maintenance of ways that have been practiced
in the past has a large hold over people, for reasons already
discussed in the chapter on Habit. The old and the accustomed
are comfortable and facile; change means inconvenience
and frustration of habitual desires. This is in part
the explanation of the increasing conservatism of men as
they grow older. Not only do they have a keener sense of
the difficulty of introducing changes, but their own fixed
habits of mind and emotion make part of the difficulty.
They like the old ways and persist in them just as they like
and keep old books, old friends, and old shoes.

ROMANTIC IDEALIZATION OF THE PAST. Reverence for the past
may also be due to a romantic idealization of it. In such
cases, it is not an interest in maintaining the present order;
it is rather a contempt for the present and wistful yearning
for the "good old days." Everyone indulges more or less
in such idealization. Such halos are made possible because
we retain the pleasant rather than the painful and dreary
aspects of our past experience. The college alumnus returning
to the campus tells of the since unsurpassed intellectual
and athletic feats of the freshman class of which he was a
member. The elderly gentleman sighs over his newspaper
at the bad ways into which the world is degenerating, and
yearns for the old days when the plays were better,
conversation more interesting, houses more comfortable, and
men more loyal. In similar trivial instances we are all
inclined to indulge in such mythology. The universality and
age of this tendency has been well described by a student of
Greek civilization.

This is the belief of the old school of every age--there was once a
"good" time; and it matters not at all in the study of moral ideals
that no such time can be shown to have existed. The men of the
fourth century [B.C.] say that it was in the fifth; those of the fifth
say it was in the sixth; and so on infinitely. The same ideal was at
work when William Morris looked to the thirteenth century, forgetting
that Dante looked to a still earlier period; and