From a college window by A.C. Benson — Read

Walter Pater says, in his most oracular mood, in that fine manifesto of a lofty Epicureanism which is known as the Conclusion to the Renaissance essays, that to form habits is failure in life. The difficulty in uttering oracles is that one is obliged for the sake of being forcible to reduce a statement to its simplest terms; and when one does that, there are generally a whole group of cases which appear to be covered by the statement, which contradict it. It is nearly impossible to make any general statement both simple enough and large enough. In the case of Pater's pronouncement, he had fixed his mental gaze so firmly on a particular phenomenon, that he forgot that his words might prove misleading when applied to the facts of life.

What he meant, no doubt, was that one of the commonest of mental dangers is to form intellectual and moral prejudices early in life, and so to stereotype them that we are unable to look round them, or to give anything that we instinctively dislike a fair trial. Most people in fact, in matters of opinion, tend to get infected with a species of Toryism by the time that they reach middle age, until they get into the frame of mind which Montaigne describes, of thinking so highly of their own conjectures as to be prepared to burn other people for not regarding them as certainties. This frame of mind is much to be reprobated, but it is unhappily common. How often does one meet sensible, shrewd, and intelligent men, who say frankly that they are not prepared to listen to any evidence which tells against their beliefs.