2 PATTERNS OF CULTURE
a mass of detailed behaviour more astonishing than what
any one person can ever evolve in individual actions, no
matter how aberrant. Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of
the matter. The fact of first-rate importance is the pre-
dominant róle 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 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
particular traditional customs. John Dewey has said in all
seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the
behaviour of the individual as over against any way in
which he can affect traditional custom, is as the propor-‘
tion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue over
against those words of his own baby talk that are taken
up into the vernacular of his family. When one seriously
studies social orders that have had the opportunity to
develop autonomously, the figure becomes no more than
an exact and matter-of-fact observation. The life history
of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation
to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down
in his community. From the moment of his birth the
customs into which he is born shape his experience and
behaviour. By the time he can talk, he is the little crea
ture 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.
Every child that is born into his group will share them
with him, and no child born into one on the opposite side
of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part. There
is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to
understand than this of the role of custom. Until we are
intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicat-
ing facts of human life must remain unintelligible.