Even in the face of these facts, reverence for the past may amount to such religious veneration that change may come literally to be regarded as sacrilegious. In primitive tribes the reasons for this insistence are clear. Rites and rituals are used to secure the favor of the gods and any departure from traditional customs is looked upon as fraught with actual danger. But the past, as it lives in established forms and practices, is still by many, and in highly advanced societies, almost religiously cherished, sustained, and perpetuated. Every college, religion, and country has its traditional forms of life and practice, any infringement of which is regarded with the gravest disapproval.[2] In social life, generally, there are fixed forms for given occasions, forms of address, greeting, conversation, and clothes, all that commonly goes under the name of the "conventions" or "proprieties." In law, as is well known, there is developed sometimes to an almost absurd degree a ritual of procedure. In religion, traditional values become embodied in fixed rituals of music, processional, and prayer. In education, especially higher education, there has developed a fairly stable tradition in the granting of degrees, the elements of a curriculum, the forms of examination, and the like. To certain types of mind, fixed forms in all these fields have come to be regarded as of intrinsic importance. Love of "good form," the classicist point of view at its best, may develop into sheer pedantry and Pharisaism, an insistence on the fixed form when the intent is changed or forgotten, a regard for the letter rather than the spirit of the law. In a large number of cases, the fixed modes of life and practice which are our inheritance come to be regarded as symbols of eternal and changeless values. Thus many highly intelligent men find ritual in religion and traditional customs in education or in social life freighted with symbolic significance, and any infringement of them as almost sacrilegious in character. [Footnote 2: It has been said that a custom repeated on a college campus two years in succession constitutes a tradition.]