hese, with cynicism or despair.
Criticism of established customs and ways of life frequently
rests with the exhibition of absurdities in men's ways, finding
refuge in laughter or rebellion. There is no one so cynical as
the man who has been recently wakened out of dogmatic and
innocent faith in the traditions to which he has been reared.

The child receives from the herd the doctrines, let us say, that
truthfulness is the most valuable of all the virtues, that honesty is
the best policy, that to the religious man death has no terrors, and
that there is in store a future life of perfect happiness and delight.
And yet experience tells him with persistence that truthfulness as
often as not brings him punishment, that his dishonest playfellow has
as good if not a better time than he, that the religious man shrinks
from death with as great a terror as the unbeliever, is as broken-hearted
by bereavement, and as determined to continue his hold
upon this imperfect life rather than trust himself to what he declares
to be the certainty of future bliss.... Who of us is there who cannot
remember the vague feeling of dissatisfaction, the obscure and elusive
sense of something being wrong, which is left by these and
similar conflicts?[1]

[Footnote 1: Trotter: _Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War_, p. 49.]

A little reflection is, in morals, a dangerous thing. It discovers
difficulties, and does not solve them. It finds that
human life is darkly strewn with hypocrisies, with shams, with
makeshifts and compromises. And having made this discovery,
it sighs or satirizes or forgets. It is notorious with
what frequency men "go to pieces" when they are loosed from
the moorings of their childhood moralities, before they have
had a chance to acquire new and more reasonable constraints.
Plato, in protesting that young men should not study philosophy
too early, has well described the dangers of shallow
analysis.[2]

[Footnote 2: "And will it not be one great precaution to forbid
their meddling with it [philosophy] while young? For I suppose
you have noticed, that whenever boys taste dialectic for the
first time, they pervert it into an amusement, and always employ
it for purposes of contradiction, and imitate in their own persons
the artifices of those who study refutation,--delighting, like
puppies, in pulling and tearing to pieces with logic any one who
comes near them.... Hence, when they have experienced many triumphs
and many de