Although this question is asked in regard to an individual’s past, the answer to it holds quite as good for the race as for the individual.  She repudiates all theories which give the individual authority to follow inclination, or even to follow some inner or personal guide.  The true wisdom is always social, always grows out of the experiences of the race, and not out of any personal inspiration or enlightenment.  Tradition furnishes the materials for reason to use, but reason does not penetrate into new regions, or bring to us wisdom apart from that we obtain through inherited experiences.  George Eliot compares these two with each other in The Spanish Gypsy in the words of Sephardo.

                              I abide
  By that wise spirit of listening reverence
  Which marks the boldest doctors of our race. 
  For Truth, to us, is like a living child
  Born of two parents:  if the parents part
  And will divide the child, how shall it live? 
  Or, I will rather say:  Two angels guide
  The path of man, both aged and yet young,
  As angels are, ripening through endless years. 
  On one he leans:  some call her Memory,
  And some, Tradition; and her voice is sweet,
  With deep mysterious accords:  the other,
  Floating above, holds down a lamp which streams
  A light divine and searching on the earth,
  Compelling eyes and footsteps.  Memory yields,
  Yet clings with loving check, and shines anew
  Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp
  Our angel Reason holds.  We had not walked
  But for Tradition; we walk evermore
  To higher paths, by brightening Reason’s lamp.

Man leans on tradition, it is the support of his life, by its strength he is able to move forward.  Reason is a lamp which lights the way, gives direction to tradition; it is a beacon and not a support.  Tradition not only brings us the wisdom of all past experience, but it develops into a spiritual atmosphere in which we live, move and have our being.  This was Comte’s idea, that the spiritual life is developed out of tradition, that the world’s experiences have produced for us intangible hopes, yearnings and aspirations; awe, reverence and sense of subtle mystery:  mystic trust, faith in invisible memories, joy in the unseen power of thought and love; and that these create for us a spiritual world most real in its nature, and most powerful in its influence.  On every hand man is touched by the invisible, mystical influences of the past, spiritual voices call to him out of the ages, unseen hands point the way he is to go.  He breathes this atmosphere of spiritual memories, he is fed on thoughts other men have made for his sustenance, he is inspired by the heroisms of ages gone before.  In an article in the Westminster Review in July, 1856, on “The Natural History of German Life,” in review of W.H.  Riehl’s books on the German peasant, and on land and climate,