d the wherefore of accepted principles is
considered a pestilent person.

The conservative instinct, and the conservative doctrine which is its
consequence, are strengthened by superstition. If the social structure,
including the whole body of customs and opinions, is associated
intimately

[10] with religious belief and is supposed to be under divine patronage,
criticism of the social order savours of impiety, while criticism of the
religious belief is a direct challenge to the wrath of supernatural
powers.

The psychological motives which produce a conservative spirit hostile to
new ideas are reinforced by the active opposition of certain powerful
sections of the community, such as a class, a caste, or a priesthood,
whose interests are bound up with the maintenance of the established
order and the ideas on which it rests.

Let us suppose, for instance, that a people believes that solar eclipses
are signs employed by their Deity for the special purpose of
communicating useful information to them, and that a clever man
discovers the true cause of eclipses. His compatriots in the first place
dislike his discovery because they find it very difficult to reconcile
with their other ideas; in the second place, it disturbs them, because
it upsets an arrangement which they consider highly advantageous to
their community; finally, it frightens them, as an offence to their
Divinity. The priests, one of whose functions is to interpret the divine
signs, are alarmed and enraged at a doctrine which menaces their power.

In prehistoric days, these motives, operating

[11] strongly, must have made change slow in communities which
progressed, and hindered some communities from progressing at all. But
they have continued to operate more or less throughout history,
obstructing knowledge and progress. We can observe them at work to-day
even in the most advanced societies, where they have no longer the power
to arrest development or repress the publication of revolutionary
opinions. We still meet people who consider a new idea an annoyance and
probably a danger. Of those to whom socialism is repugnant, how many are
there who have never examined the arguments for and against it, but turn
away in disgust simply because the notion disturbs their mental universe
and implies a drastic criticism on the order of things to which they are
accustomed? And how many are there who would refuse to consider any
proposals for altering our imperfect