"It seems difficult, sometimes, to believe that there was a time when sentiments now become habitual, sentiments that imply not only the original imperative of conduct, but the original metaphysic of living, were by no means altogether habitual"
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Abercrombie draws attention to how easily the present hardens into a sense of the natural. Sentiments that now feel automatic once had to be imagined, argued for, and lived into existence. Habits of feeling embody not only rules for behavior but an entire picture of reality: what a person is, what a life is for, what counts as good or true. When these sentiments become habitual, they pass for the way things simply are, and it grows difficult to conceive that they were once unfamiliar, contested, or even unthinkable.
The phrase original imperative of conduct points to the primal moment when a moral demand first takes shape, before it becomes custom. The original metaphysic of living names the underlying vision of existence that makes such a demand intelligible. Over time, both lose the vividness of their origin. They become furniture in the mind. One forgets that human rights, romantic love as a foundation for marriage, or the value placed on individual privacy are not timeless givens but achievements of particular histories. The forgetfulness is not trivial; it obscures the creative, risky labor by which communities refashion their world.
As a poet-critic writing in early 20th-century Britain, Abercrombie was alive to the pressures that make such forgetting attractive: rapid social change, the prestige of new sciences, the erosion of shared religious frameworks. He suggests that culture survives not by mistaking habit for truth, but by periodically recovering the originating energies behind its settled forms. Poetry and criticism, for him, are not ornaments; they are ways of returning to first experience, testing whether inherited sentiments still answer to reality or need to be renewed.
The line is both a caution and an invitation. It cautions against the complacency that takes the present as inevitable. It invites a historical and imaginative conscience: to remember that what feels necessary was once a choice, and so can be examined, deepened, or changed.
The phrase original imperative of conduct points to the primal moment when a moral demand first takes shape, before it becomes custom. The original metaphysic of living names the underlying vision of existence that makes such a demand intelligible. Over time, both lose the vividness of their origin. They become furniture in the mind. One forgets that human rights, romantic love as a foundation for marriage, or the value placed on individual privacy are not timeless givens but achievements of particular histories. The forgetfulness is not trivial; it obscures the creative, risky labor by which communities refashion their world.
As a poet-critic writing in early 20th-century Britain, Abercrombie was alive to the pressures that make such forgetting attractive: rapid social change, the prestige of new sciences, the erosion of shared religious frameworks. He suggests that culture survives not by mistaking habit for truth, but by periodically recovering the originating energies behind its settled forms. Poetry and criticism, for him, are not ornaments; they are ways of returning to first experience, testing whether inherited sentiments still answer to reality or need to be renewed.
The line is both a caution and an invitation. It cautions against the complacency that takes the present as inevitable. It invites a historical and imaginative conscience: to remember that what feels necessary was once a choice, and so can be examined, deepened, or changed.
Quote Details
| Topic | Habits |
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