The local experience is entirely true in its own sphere; it
becomes misleading when it is accepted as the experience of all time
and all men. It is this mistake which breeds that narrowness and
uncertainty of taste and opinion from which culture furnishes the only
escape. A small community, isolated from other communities by the
accidents of position, often comes to believe that its way of doing
things is the way of the world; a small body of religious people,
devoutly attentive to their own observances, often reach the
conclusion that these observances are the practice of that catholic
church which includes the pious-minded of all creeds and rituals; a
group of radical reformers, by passionate advocacy of a single reform,
come to believe that there have been no reformers before them, and
that none will be needed after them; a band of fresh and audacious
young practitioners of any of the arts, by dint of insistence upon a
certain manner, rapidly generate the conviction that art has no other
manner.
Society is full of provincialism in art, politics, religion, and
economics; and the essence of this provincialism is always the
same,--the substitution of a part for the whole.
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