Word: instinctive
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...hold of the custom lies mainly in that conservative instinct which makes us all slow to give up an old usage, even though a mischievous one; and doubly so when its abandonment may seem due to lack of spirit. This instinct is strongest where experience is least; and young men can hardly be expected to resolve not to do what their predecessors for generations have done, unless they receive in this course encouragement and support from the emphatic counsels and warnings of those whose opinions and advice they have learned to respect and follow...
...wretched Emperor with unbated breath; he shows his teeth like a hunted rat, now in one corner, now in another; at last he exposes his neck at Canossa to the spring of the cat that for twenty years has patiently waited in the Vatican. But endow him with an instinct amounting to foreknowledge, with a tact in the management of men that turns them into passive instruments in his hands, and renders him long invulnerable to counterplots and adverse chance, and he becomes, in fact, the Fate of his age. His history is no longer one of the several greatest...
...rest to abstain from hazing, should myself be roughed, - is indeed a galling thought! Perhaps, then, the Sophomore theory that "the conceit must be taken out of Freshmen" was not so absurd a one after all. Who knows but that the propensity to haze was a divinely seated instinct, created for good purposes, and that the College has done an unwise thing in attempting to root it out? Surely the Freshman's mind, when he comes here, is in a somewhat critical condition. Reared among the comforts and refinements, to be sure, of home, but also among its restrictions...