Character is considered less with reference to its absolute qualities
than as an interesting scene strewn with scattered rudiments, survivals,
inherited predispositions. Opinions are counted rather as phenomena to
be explained than as matters of truth and falsehood. Of usages, we are
beginning first of all to think where they came from, and secondarily
whether they are the most fitting and convenient that men could be got
to accept. In the last century men asked of a belief or a story, Is it
true? We now ask, How did men come to take it for true? In short the
relations among social phenomena which now engage most attention, are
relations of original source, rather than those of actual consistency in
theory and actual fitness in practice. The devotees of the current
method are more concerned with the pedigree and genealogical connections
of a custom or an idea than with its own proper goodness or badness, its
strength or its weakness.

Though there is no necessary or truly logical association between
systematic use of this method rightly limited, and a slack and slipshod
preference of vague general forms over definite ideas, yet every one can
see its tendency, if uncorrected, to make men shrink from importing
anything like absolute quality into their propositions. We can see also,
what is still worse, its tendency to place individual robustness and
initiative in the light of superfluities, with which a world that goes
by evolution can very well dispense. Men easily come to consider
clearness and positiveness in their opinions, staunchness in holding and
defending them, and fervour in carrying them into action, as equivocal
virtues of very doubtful perfection, in a state of things where every
abuse has after all had a defensible origin; where every error has, we
must confess, once been true relatively to other parts of belief in
those who held the error; and where all parts of life are so bound up
with one another, that it is of no avail to attack one evil, unless you