[10] The phrases "The world in a welter," "nations in the melting pot," "life in the smelting oven," are commonly heard and suggest a solution stage prior to the hardening process, or antecedent to crystallization. [11] Following the French Revolution Wordsworth wrote: I lost All feeling of conviction and in fine Sick, wearied out with contrarieties Yielded up moral questions in despair. --_Prelude_, bk. xi. The principle that fluidity is fundamental to social change is also true, however, of the community. Fluidity is not the usual state of society. Most of the "functions" of society have no tendency to disturb the _status quo_. The round of love, marriage and reproduction, so long as births and death balance, production so far as it is balanced by consumption, exchange so long as the argosies of commerce carry goods and not ideas, education so far as it passes on the traditional culture, these together with recreation, social intercourse, worship, social control, government and the administration of justice are essentially statical. They might conceivably go on forever without producing change.[12] [12] Ross, _op. cit._, p. 200. Indeed the usual condition of the body politic is immobility, conservatism and "determined resistance to change." The chief reason for this immobility is habit:[13] When our habits are settled and running smoothly they most resemble the instincts of animals. And the great part of our life is lived in the region of habit. The habits like the instincts are safe and serviceable. They have been tried and are associated with a feeling of security. There consequently grows up in the folk mind a determined resistance to change ... a state of rapid and constant change implies loss of settled habits and disorganization. As a result, all societies view change with suspicion, and the attempt to revise certain habits is even viewed as immorality. Now it is possible under such conditions for a society to become stationary or to attempt to remain so. The effort of attention is to preserve the present status, rather than to re-accommodate. This condition is particularly marked among savages. In the absence of science and a proper estimate of the value of change they rely on ritual and magic and a minute unquestioning adhesion to the past. Change is consequently introduced with a maximum of resistance ... Indeed the only world in which change is at a premium and is systematically sought is the modern scientific world.[14] But when there comes the shattering of the matrix of custom by catastrophe, then mores are broken up and scattered right and left. Fluidity is accomplished at a stroke. There comes a sudden chance for permanent social change.