[Habit is the] general cause of our progress on the one hand, of our blindness on the otherIt is

to habit that we owe the facility, the precision, and the extreme rapidity of our movements and
voluntary operations; but it is habit which also hides from us their nature and quantity
Pierre Maine de Biran, The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking (1!!"
!he process [by which any individual settles into new opinions] is always the same !he
individual has a stoc" of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a
strain #omebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict
each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which
they cease to satisfy !he result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a
stranger, and from which he see"s to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions He
saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives!he
point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played by the older truths!heir
influence is absolutely controlling $oyalty to them is the first principle % in most cases it is the
only principle; for by far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would
ma"e for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse
those who bear witness for them
#illia$ %a$e&, #hat Prag$ati&$ Mean& (1!'("
!he principle defect of all materialism up to now % including that of &euerbach % is that the
external ob'ect, reality, the sensible world, is grasped in the form of an ob)ect or an intuition* but
not as concrete hu$an acti+ity, as ,ractice, in a sub'ective way !his is why the active aspect was
developed by idealism, in opposition to materialism % but only in an abstract way, since idealism
naturally does not "now real concrete activity as such-
../arl Mar0, The&e& on Feuerbach
1