Rather it plays round the edges of custom; religion especially, with its suggestion of the general sacredness of custom, helping it to do so.

There is found in primitive society plenty of vague speculation that seeks to justify the existing.
But to take the machine to bits in order to put it together differently is out of the reach of a type of intelligence which, though competent to grapple with details, takes its principles for granted.

When progress comes, it comes by stealth, through imitating the letter, but refusing to imitate the spirit; until by means of legal fictions, ritual substitutions, and so on, the new takes the place of the old without any one noticing the fact.
Freedom, in the sense of intellectual freedom, may perhaps be said to have been born in one place and at one time--namely, in Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.[7] Of course, minglings and clashings of peoples had prepared the way.

Ideas begin to count as soon as they break away from their local context.

But Greece, in teaching the world the meaning of intellectual freedom, paved a way towards that most comprehensive form of freedom which is termed moral.
Moral freedom is the will to give out more than you take in; to repay with interest the cost of your social education.