[Day 710 2016-09-05] Lesson 44-3
Patterns of culture
By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities. Every child that is born into his group will share them with him, and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part. There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.
The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been accepted, and some of these propositions have been violently opposed. In the first place, any scientific study requires that there be no preferential weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its consideration.
生字：
1.preliminary(adj):事前的,預備
prelimimnary examination初試
2.preferential(adj.)優待的,優先的
give preferential treatment to
3.incumbent(adj.)富有職責的
It's?incumbent?on you to warn them
