to his morals, impresses them on his memory, very foolishly and very uselessly.
Let us return to the authority of custom. Peoples brought up in liberty, and to rule themselves, consider every other form of government monstrous and contrary to nature. Those who are accustomed to monarchy think after the same fashion; and whatever facility for change fortune affords them, even when they have with great difficulty rid themselves of the burden of a master, they hasten to install a new one with the like difficulty, because they can not resolve to regard with detestation the being lorded over. It is through the intervention of custom that every one is content with the place where nature has planted him; and the savages of Scotland have no use for Touraine, nor the Scythians for Thessaly.[1]
(a) Darius asked certain Greeks what would induce them to adopt the Indian custom of eating their deceased fathers (for that was their habit, deeming that they could give them no more propitious sepulture than within themselves); they replied that not for any thing in the world would they do it; but [Darius] having also tried to persuade the Indians to lay aside their custom and adopt that of the Greeks, which was to burn their fathers’ bodies, he horrified them even more.[2] Each one of us acts in the same way, inasmuch as habit conceals from us the true aspect of things.
Nil adeo magnum, nec tam mirabile quicquam
Principio, quod non minuant mirarier omnes
Paulatim.[3]
Having occasion once to to show the value of some one of our regulations, accepted with settled authority on all sides of us; not desiring, as is commonly done, to establish it solely
- ↑ This last sentence is not found in the Édition Municipale, but was added in 1595.
- ↑ See Herodotus, III, 38.
- ↑ There is nothing so great or so admirable at first, that we do not gradually admire it less. — Lucretius, II, 1028. In modern texts the last two lines are: — Quod non paulatim minuant mirarier omnes.
Principio —
