Every progressive thinker is troubled by the following fact: In order to live rationally, we must organize and institutionalize our behavior, which implies giving a sort of mechanical or automatic power to yesterday’s thoughts. But as soon as any institution begins to be efficient, it resists rational inquiry with respect to itself. This is true of all institutions without exception. They resist--here is the heart of our difficulty--because they are not haphazard combinations but institutions, which is to say that they are a deposit of reason. Thus our necessary rational procedures imprison reason as naturally “as the sparks fly upward.” For “institution” we can substitute any term for a job that is deliberately done, or for any devotion that is a day old, and the proposition that reason imprisons reason still holds. Whenever thought makes a nest for itself where it can incubate, it turns out to have mated with unreason, and it produces a mongrel offspring. How the principle works can be seen in the relatively simple institution of the family. For example, a parent who, in the course of family government, makes a decision with respect to the children, immediately adopts this decision as a precedent that is binding upon himself also, he won’t budge from it; if it is questioned he finds reasons in support of it; or, if he is pushed into a corner, he reasserts it upon the ground of the inherent rationality of parental authority. That is, by a process of thought he identifies himself with what he has been, and he equates reason with one of its incidental products. Many a parent-child fellowship has been wrecked in this way. Just so, when the idea of sex-equality appeared upon the horizon, many a person prepared to defend the family against dissolution! Many a potential conjugal fellowship has been blasted because of unreadiness to re-think the old assumption of sex-servitude. One is unready to re-think it, not because of any imperious natural drive of the male to sex-mastery, not because the female naturally prefers submission, but because one has bound one’s mind by a partial use and habit of intelligence; a has-been-so has been taken as inherently natural and reasonable.