In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike.

Pater is arguing that what we call “habit” depends on treating the world as repetitive and standardized. If we were fully attentive—if our perception were less “rough”—we would notice the fine-grained differences that make each person, object, and moment irreducibly particular. The “failure” to form habits is therefore not mere weakness or inconsistency; it can be a sign of heightened sensibility, an aesthetic and intellectual refusal to let experience harden into routine categories. The remark aligns with Pater’s broader emphasis on cultivating vivid, discriminating perception and resisting the deadening effects of convention, which flatten the uniqueness of lived experience.