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Now custom has not been commonly regarded as a subject of any great importance. The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behavior at its most commonplace. As a matter of fact, it is the other way around. Traditional custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behavior more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions. Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of firsi-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief and the very great varieties it may manifest.
No man ever looks at the world with pristine(未受外界影响的)eyes.He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particulartraditional customs. John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behavior of the individual as over against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of che total vocabulary of his mother tongue over against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the language of his family. When one seriously studies social orders that have had the opportunity to develop independently, the figure (比喻)becomes no more than an exact and matter-of-fact observation. The life history of the individual is first and foremost an adjustment to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth t
he customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits,its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities.
