Meanwhile it is singular how long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly. For whole generations it continues standing, “with a ghastly affectation of life,” after all life and truth has fled out of it; so loth are men to quit their old ways; and, conquering indolence and inertia, venture on new. Great truly is the Actual; is the Thing that has rescued itself from bottomless deeps of theory and possibility, and stands there as a definite indisputable Fact, whereby men do work and live, or once did so. Widely shall men cleave to that, while it will endure; and quit it with regret, when it gives way under them. Rash enthusiast of Change, beware! Hast thou well considered all that Habit does in this life of ours; how all Knowledge and all Practice hang wondrous over infinite abysses of the Unknown, Impracticable; and our whole being is an infinite abyss, _overarched_ by Habit, as by a thin Earth-rind, laboriously built together?
But if “every man,” as it has been written, “holds confined within him a _mad_-man,” what must every Society do;—Society, which in its commonest state is called “the standing miracle of this world”! “Without such Earth-rind of Habit,” continues our author, “call it System of Habits, in a word, _fixed ways_ of acting and of believing,—Society would not exist at all. With such it exists, better or worse. Herein too, in this its System of Habits, acquired, retained how you will, lies the true Law-Code and Constitution of a Society; the only Code, though an unwritten one which it can in nowise _dis_obey. The thing we call written Code, Constitution, Form of Government, and the like, what is it but some miniature image, and solemnly expressed summary of this unwritten Code? _Is_,—or rather alas, is _not;_ but only should be, and always tends to be! In which latter discrepancy lies struggle without end.” And now, we add in the same dialect, let but, by ill chance, in such ever-enduring struggle,—your “thin Earth-rind” be once _broken!_ The fountains of the great deep boil forth; fire-fountains, enveloping, engulfing. Your “Earth-rind” is shattered, swallowed up; instead of a green flowery world, there is a waste wild-weltering chaos:—which has again, with tumult and struggle, to _make_ itself into a world.