From the book
Centuries of Meditations
Thomas Traherne · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordCustom is an acquired way of thinking or acting, maintained by repetition and social agreement.
- In TraherneThe chief danger of custom is its power to educate perception before a person can judge the education.
- In this edition“Custom” here ordinarily means social usage, not a commercial payment.
- A place to beginThe difficulty of thinking well is assigned to acquired habit and custom rather than to nature.
Meaning
Custom is an acquired way of thinking or acting, maintained by repetition and social agreement. It can make what has merely become familiar seem natural, necessary, or true. Traherne often couples the word with opinion, conceit, and habit.
Use in the book
The chief danger of custom is its power to educate perception before a person can judge the education. The child reverences adults, imitates their valuations, and gradually forgets goods that their conversation never mentions. A whole society can therefore agree in an error without correcting it. Recovery requires more than exchanging one opinion for another: the soul must become strange to the conventions that have coloured its sight. Traherne nevertheless explains this susceptibility through the originally good desire to please others. Custom corrupts a social power that properly belongs to love.
Places to read
- I.8The difficulty of thinking well is assigned to acquired habit and custom rather than to nature.
- III.7Adult examples and an education inattentive to felicity eclipse the child’s first apprehensions.
- III.8Outward opinion and custom receive a startlingly greater share of blame than inward corruption.
- IV.44The natural wish to give pleasure becomes conformity to mistaken communal valuations.
In this edition
“Custom” here ordinarily means social usage, not a commercial payment. The attack on custom is not a rejection of every learned practice: sustained good thinking itself requires cultivation.