However far we go back, the first form of life in common seems to be the horde, an unstable, unorganised aggregate, without recognised kinships, drawn together instinctively in view of utility and defence. But the true social unit, which arose at an early period in various parts of the globe, is the clan (and analogous institutions), a fixed, stable, coherent, closed aggregate, founded on religious or other affiliation (but not on descent), independent of family conditions: a man cannot belong to two clans at once, and in most cases each of these groups is in a hostile attitude towards the rest. How has this social molecule been able to aggregate to itself others, and this closed organism to break its narrow limits, in order to extend itself by increase and fusion? This is a somewhat obscure question; perhaps by exogamy, i.e., the imperative custom which forbade marriage within the group (yet in other groups the rule was endogamy, i.e., the prohibition of marriage outside them); more probably the great agent of assimilation and fusion was war, followed by the assimilation of the conquered.
This simple comparison shows that the family and the clan are not similar institutions: the first is an autonomous group belonging to a master, and having for its end the enjoyment of property; the second is a group of another nature having for its end the common struggle for existence. “Where the interests defended by the family are less important than those of the clan, the family is influenced by the ideas which regulate the clan organisation; and this fact repeats itself in all primitive societies when defence against an outside enemy is the dominant necessity.”[[177]] The family group and the social group have each sprung from different tendencies, from distinct needs; each has its special, independent psychological origin, and there is no possible derivation from one to the other.
III.
Life in common, even under the gregarious form, requires certain ways of acting, and habits founded on sympathy and determined by the concerted aim pursued by all. In order that it may become stable and constitute a society, an element of fixity must be added—the more or less clear consciousness of an obligation, of a rule, of what has to be done or avoided. This is the appearance of the moral sentiment. All conceptions of morality, coarse or refined, theoretical or purely practical, agree on this point; divergences exist, in practice, only as to the characteristics of the act reputed obligatory; in theory, only as to its origin.
All real morality which has lived, i.e. governed a human society, large or small, which has existed, not in the academic abstractions of moralists, but in the concrete development of history, and has run its complete course, passes through two principal periods.
One of these is instinctive, spontaneous, unconscious, unreflecting, determined by the conditions of existence of a given group at a given moment. It expresses itself in custom—a heterogeneous mixture of beliefs and actions which, from the point of view of reason and of a more advanced culture, we consider sometimes as moral, sometimes as immoral, sometimes as unmoral, i.e., puerile and futile, but all of which have been rigorously observed.
The other is conscious, reflecting, many-sided, complex, like the higher forms of social and moral life. It expresses itself in institutions, written laws, religious or civil codes; and still more in the abstract speculations of philosophical moralists. Then, the apogee being reached, vague aspirations reach out towards a new, dimly apprehended ideal, and the cycle begins over again.
Most constructors of a scientific system of morality have forgotten or neglected the first period; but wrongly so, for it is the source of the second. This, too, is the reason for the two opposite views held with regard to the origin of moral development.
Some seek it in the order of knowledge, whence they deduce all the rest; they suppose innate ideas, or an adaptation acquired through a long process and fixed by heredity (Spencer), or the consciousness of a categorical imperative, or the notion of utility; all of which are intellectual solutions.
Others seek it in the order of instinct and feeling. They admit tendencies, impulses implanted in us by nature, i.e., forming part of our organisation, like thirst and hunger, whose satisfaction produces pleasure and their non-satisfaction pain; this is the emotional view.