The most important social product of the human evolution on the lower levels of civilization was the patriarchal family or clan. This community of kinsfolk is the great history-making group. It was the seed plot and nursery not only of almost every social and political institution of the historic peoples, but of their morality as well. In the bosom of this group were born and nurtured the chief of those affections and sentiments into which enters an ethical element and which form the basis of the moral life.[26]
The fundamental bond uniting this group was the bond of blood. The members of the group were, or believed themselves to be, the actual descendants of a common ancestor. It was this tie of blood, this physical relationship real or assumed, that rendered the clan such a closely knit body and created its feeling of corporate oneness. “The members of one kindred,” says W. Robertson Smith in describing this characteristic of the Semitic clan, “looked on themselves as one living whole, a single animated mass of blood, flesh, and bones, of which no member could be touched without all the members suffering.... If one of the clan has been murdered, they say ‘Our blood has been shed.’”[27] Compared with this sense of solidarity as it is found among certain of the negro clans in Africa, the feeling of solidarity of the family among European peoples “is thin and feeble.”[28]
It was this corporate consciousness of the primitive clan that created its moral solidarity. It naturally called into existence those altruistic sentiments that formed the ground out of which grew man’s earliest feelings of moral obligation.
The religious bond— ancestor worship
There was a second bond uniting the members of the kinship group. They were united not only by the ties of physical kinship but also by the bonds of a common cult. This was the worship of ancestors. To realize the ethical educative value of this worship we must recall the remarkable constitution of the clan. This group of kinsmen has a visible and an invisible side. There are the earthly members of the group and the spirit members—the souls of the dead. These spirit members are the protectors of the little group, the punishers of wrongdoing, the conservators of morals. Among the most sacred duties of the earthly members are the duties they owe to these spirit members; for these spirits have need of many things, especially of meat and drink at the grave, and it is the duty of their earthly kinsmen to supply all these wants. The earth group is thus enveloped in a sort of sacred atmosphere, and in this atmosphere are nurtured those ethical sentiments which form the most precious product of history.
As an agency in the moralizing of the life of the race it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of ancestor worship. To no other form of religion, save ethical monotheism, does morality owe so large a debt. In this cult religion and morality are at one almost at the outset,[29] whereas in nature cults, or the cults of nature gods, it is generally only at a late period that these elements are united. It was this cult of ancestors which formed the basis of an essential part of the morality of the Greeks and Romans, particularly the latter, at the first appearance of these peoples in history, and which to-day, as the chief religion of the Chinese, Japanese, and other peoples of the Far East, fosters the best virtues of a third of the human race.
Conceptions of the god world
Another influence determining the moral code of primitive man is his ideas of the god world. It is true that the conceptions formed of the gods by the untutored mind are for the most part crude and unethical. But man ever makes and remakes his gods in his own image; therefore as soon as an ethical element begins to enter into his own life he begins to moralize the character of his gods. At this stage the god world begins to react favorably upon the moral life of man. The gods are now conceived as taking notice of the conduct of men and as approving certain acts as right and disapproving certain other acts as wrong. Especially are they believed to punish atrocious crimes, such as the slaying of a kinsman and the breaking of the word sworn by the oath-god. In this way primitive man’s ideas of deity react favorably upon his morality.
The gods further advance morality by being invoked as the witnesses and guardians of treaties between clans and tribes. By thus giving an added sanctity to solemn engagements mutually entered into by communities they widen the moral domain and become the promoters of intertribal morality.[30]
The fact that competition is between communities and not between individuals