[29] W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 2d ed., p. 267. See also Coulanges, The Ancient City, bk. ii, chap. ix.
[30] Before this stage in civilization has been reached, religion is a hindrance to the widening of the moral sympathies; for in earlier stages “a man is held answerable to his god [only] for wrong done to a member of his own kindred or political community; ... he may deceive, rob, or kill an alien without offense to religion; the deity cares only for his own kinsfolk” (W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 2d ed., pp. 53 f.).
[31] It should be carefully noted that this is very different from saying that his life is immoral. To pronounce it immoral would be like pronouncing immoral the life of the child, in whom the sense of right and wrong has not yet arisen. The savage is a child not only in intellect but also in moral feeling. As Bagehot says, “We may be certain that the morality of prehistoric man was as imperfect and as rudimentary as his reason” (Physics and Politics (1873), p. 115).
[32] “At the beginning of the developmental series stands the bare animal impulse, stripped of all moral motives; at the end we have the complete interpenetration of organic requirement and moral idea.”—Wundt, Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life (1908), p. 191.
[33] See II, The Ethics of Industrialism, Chapter XVIII.
[34] Respecting certain Brazilian tribes the naturalist Bates remarks: “The goodness of these Indians, like that of most others amongst whom I lived, consisted perhaps more in the absence of active bad qualities than in the possession of good ones; in a word, it was negative rather than positive” (The Naturalist on the River Amazon). Cf. Edward Howard Griggs, The New Humanism, 6th ed., pp. 103 f.
[35] For the relation of motherhood and infancy to the beginnings of morality, see Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy (1875), vol. ii, pp. 340 ff.
[36] “The spring of virtuous action is the social instinct, which is set to work by the practice of comradeship.”—Clifford, Lectures and Essays (1901), vol. ii, p. 253. Cf. Peabody, The Approach to the Social Question (1909), p. 149.
[37] “This family worship (long-forgotten precursor of our modern family prayers) was always offered to the ancestors at the domestic hearth.”—Helen Bosanquet, The Family (1906), p. 18. Cf. Wundt, Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life (1908), p. 171.
[38] The blessing offered at the daily family meal is presumptively a survival from the consecrated communal meal of the primitive kinship group.