Preconceptions are a work of habit impinging on a given temperamental bent; and where, as in these premises, the preconceptions have taken on an institutionalised form, have become conventionalised and commonly accepted, and so have been woven into the texture of popular common sense, they must needs be a work of protracted and comprehensive habituation impinging on a popular temperamental bent of so general a prevalence that it may be called congenital to the community at large.

A heritable bent pervading the group within which inheritance runs, does not change, so long as the racial complexion of the group remains passably intact; a conventionalised, commonly established habit of mind will change only slowly, commonly not without the passing of at least one generation, and only by grace of a sufficiently searching and comprehensive discipline of experience.

For good or ill, the current situation is to be counted on not to lose character over night or with a revolution of the seasons, so far as concerns these spiritual factors that make or mar the fortunes of nations.
At the same time these spiritual assets, being of the nature of habit, are also bound to change character more or less radically, by insensible shifting of ground, but incontinently,--provided only that the conditions of life, and therefore the discipline of experience, undergo any substantial change.

So the immediate interest shifts to the presumptive rate and character of those changes that are in prospect, due to the unremitting change of circumstances under which these modern peoples live and to the discipline of which they are unavoidably exposed.

For the present and for the immediate future the current state of things is a sufficiently stable basis of argument; but assurance as to the sufficiency of the premises afforded by the current state of things thins out in proportion as the perspective of the argument runs out into the succeeding years.