All this separatism, evasion, and self-sophistication leads on with entire naturalness to the habit of reliance upon authority and finally upon force. Respectability never quite commits the adjudication of its interests to open ethical thinking. It regards its case as already closed. In other words, it claims for itself a privileged position for which the only remaining defence is force in one form or another--economic force, partizan laws, ostracism, defamation, blacklisting, the denial of freedom of speech, war. All these are, in fact, appropriate once the main assumption has been accepted, and consistency is a virtue, is it not? Hence it is that these acts, some of which are positively base and not merely muddle-headed, do not produce self-condemnation among good people. So depraved can our respectable faults finally become! This is not the hardness, of course, of minds that see themselves as they are and yet do not blush; it is still worse than this, for it is the hardness of the paralyzed nerve, the hardness of the eye that sends no light to the intelligence, the hardness of a blocked intelligence that closes the heart to its proper world. Socrates maintained that to do wrong knowingly is not as bad as to do it ignorantly. XXIII EVEN OUR PASSIONS ARE PRECEDENT-RIDDEN The problem with which we are wrestling is, How account for the low average performance of beings as highly endowed as ourselves? The usual explanation--that we are made up of two natures, a higher and rational one, and a lower and irrational one--turns out not to explain, for neither an unmixed lower nature nor an unmixed higher nature can be anywhere discerned. A wide vista into the sources of our trouble opened, however, when we inspected reason, the discriminating and thinking function, not in abstraction or as an ideal, but in operation as a guide to behavior. We behold it saving us, indeed, from utter rawness and brutish fixity by analysis that indefinitely enlarges the range of selection within experience; but at the same time we discovered that it customarily stumbles over its own products, checks its own progress, and becomes an instrument of the very rawness that it should leave behind. This difficulty we found to be inherent in reason as such because thinking depends upon memory, and thought-guided conduct upon precedents. Precedents are necessary to thought-guided action, but they imprison us, especially through the social process, wholesome and necessary as this is.