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[Illustration: WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER (1902)]
FOLKWAYS
A Study of the Sociological Importance
of Usages, Manners, Customs,
Mores, and Morals
by
WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
Professor of Political and Social Science
in Yale University
Thus it is clearly seen that use, rather than
reason, has power to introduce new things amongst
us, and to do away with old things.--_Castiglione,
Il libro del Cortegiano_, I, § 1.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery,
That aptly is put on.--_Hamlet_, III, 4.
What custom wills, in all things should we do't.
_Coriolanus_, II, 3.
Ginn and Company
Boston · New York · Chicago · London
Atlanta · Dallas · Columbus · San Francisco
Entered at Stationers' Hall
Copyright, 1906, by
William Graham Sumner
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
733.1
+The Athenæum Press+
Ginn and Company · Proprietors ·
Boston · U.S.A.
PREFACE
In 1899 I began to write out a text-book of sociology from material
which I had used in lectures during the previous ten or fifteen years.
At a certain point in that undertaking I found that I wanted to
introduce my own treatment of the "mores." I could not refer to it
anywhere in print, and I could not do justice to it in a chapter of
another book. I therefore turned aside to write a treatise on the
"Folkways," which I now offer. For definitions of "folkways" and "mores"
see secs. 1, 2, 34, 39, 43, and 66. I formed the word "folkways" on the
analogy of words already in use in sociology. I also took up again the
Latin word "mores" as the best I could find for my purpose. I mean by it
the popular usages and traditions, when they include a judgment that
they are conducive to societal welfare, and when they exert a coercion
on the individual to conform to them, although they are not coördinated
by any authority (cf. sec. 42). I have also tried to bring the word
"Ethos" into familiarity again (secs. 76, 79). "Ethica," or "Ethology,"
or "The Mores" seemed good titles for the book (secs. 42, 43), but
Ethics is already employed otherwise, and the other words were very
unfamiliar. Perhaps "folkways" is not less unfamiliar, but its meaning
is more obvious. I must add that if any one is liable to be shocked by
_any_ folkways, he ought not to read about folkways at all. "Nature her
custom holds, let shame say what it will" (_Hamlet_, IV, 7, _ad fin._).
I have tried to treat all folkways, including those which are most
opposite to our own, with truthfulness, but with dignity and due respect
to our own conventions.
Chapter I contains elaborate definitions and expositions of the folkways
and the mores, with an analysis of their play in human society. Chapter
II shows the bearing of the folkways on human interests, and the way in
which they act or are acted on. The thesis which is expounded in these
two chapters is: that the folkways are habits of the individual and
customs of the society which arise from efforts to satisfy needs; they
are intertwined with goblinism and demonism and primitive notions of
luck (sec. 6), and so they win traditional authority. Then they become
regulative for succeeding generations and take on the character of a
social force. They arise no one knows whence or how. They grow as if by
the play of internal life energy. They can be modified, but only to a
limited extent, by the purposeful efforts of men. In time they lose
power, decline, and die, or are transformed. While they are in vigor
they very largely control individual and social undertakings, and they
produce and nourish ideas of world philosophy and life policy. Yet they
are not organic or material. They belong to a superorganic system of
relations, conventions, and institutional arrangements. The study of
them is called for by their _social_ character, by virtue of which they
are leading factors in the science of society.
When the analysis of the folkways has been concluded it is necessary
that it should be justified by a series of illustrations, or by a
setting forth of cases in which the operation of the mores is shown to
be what is affirmed in the analysis. Any such exposition of the mores in
cases, in order to be successful, must go into details. It is in details
that all the graphic force and argumentative value of the cases are to
be found. It has not been easy to do justice to the details and to
observe the necessary limits of space. The ethnographical facts which I
present are not subsequent justification of generalizations otherwise
obtained. They are selections from a great array of facts from which the
generalizations were deduced. A number of other very important cases
which I included in my plan of proofs and illustrations I have been
obliged to leave out for lack of space. Such are: Demonism, Primitive
Religion, and Witchcraft; The Status of Women; War; Evolution and the
Mores; Usury; Gambling; Societal Organization and Classes; Mortuary
Usages; Oaths; Taboos; Ethics; Æsthetics; and Democracy. The first four
of these are written. I may be able to publish them soon, separately. My
next task is to finish the sociology.
W. G. SUMNER
YALE UNIVERSITY
With the reprinting of _Folkways_ it seems in place to inform the
admirers of this book and of its author concerning the progress of
Professor Sumner's work between 1907 and his death, in his seventieth
year, in April, 1910. Several articles bearing on the mores, and
realizing in part the programme outlined in the last paragraph of the
foregoing Preface, have been published: "The Family and Social Change,"
in the _American Journal of Sociology_ for March, 1909 (14: 577-591);
"Witchcraft," in the _Forum_ for May, 1909 (41: 410-423); "The Status of
Women in Chaldea, Egypt, India, Judea, and Greece to the time of
Christ," in the _Forum_ for August, 1909 (42: 113-136); "Mores of the
Present and the Future," in the _Yale Review_ for November, 1909 (18:
233-245); and "Religion and the Mores," in the _American Journal of
Sociology_ for March, 1910 (15: 577-591). Of these the first and last
were presidential addresses before the American Sociological Society.
All are included in Volume I (War and Other Essays) of a four-volume set
of Sumner's writings, published since his death by the Yale University
Press.
Regarding the treatise on the "science of society" (for he had decided
to call it that instead of "sociology") mentioned in the Preface, it
should be said that Professor Sumner left a considerable amount of
manuscript in the rather rough form of a first draft, together with a
great mass of classified materials. He wrote very little on this
treatise after the completion of _Folkways_, and not infrequently spoke
of the latter to the present writer as "my last book." It is intended,
however, that the _Science of Society_ shall be, at some time in the
future, completed, and in such form as shall give to the world the
fruits of Professor Sumner's intellectual power, clarity of vision, and
truly herculean industry.
The present revision of _Folkways_ incorporates but few and unimportant
corrections. Certain of these are from the hand of the author, and
others from that of the present writer.
A photograph of Professor Sumner has been chosen for insertion in the
present edition. It was taken April 18, 1902, and is regarded by many as
being the most faithful representation in existence of Sumner's
expression and pose, as he appeared in later years. This is the Sumner
of the "mores," with mental powers at ripe maturity and bodily vigor as
yet unimpaired by age. The Yale commencement orator of 1909 said of
Sumner, in presenting him for the Doctorate of Laws: "His intellect has
broadened, his heart has mellowed, as he has descended into the vale of
years." While advancing age weakened in no respect the sheer power and
the steady-eyed fearlessness of mind and character which made Sumner a
compelling force in the university and in the wider world, it seems to
some of us that the essential kindliness of his nature came out with
especial clearness in his later years. And it is the suggestion of this
quality which lends a distinctive charm, in our eyes, to the portrait
chosen to head this volume.
A. G. KELLER
YALE UNIVERSITY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. FUNDAMENTAL NOTIONS OF THE FOLKWAYS AND OF THE
MORES 1
II. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MORES 75
III. THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 119
IV. LABOR, WEALTH 158
V. SOCIETAL SELECTION 173
VI. SLAVERY 261
VII. ABORTION, INFANTICIDE, KILLING THE OLD 308
VIII. CANNIBALISM 329
IX. SEX MORES 342
X. THE MARRIAGE INSTITUTION 395
XI. THE SOCIAL CODES 417
XII. INCEST 479
XIII. KINSHIP, BLOOD REVENGE, PRIMITIVE JUSTICE, PEACE
UNIONS 493
XIV. UNCLEANNESS AND THE EVIL EYE 509
XV. THE MORES CAN MAKE ANYTHING RIGHT AND PREVENT
CONDEMNATION OF ANYTHING 521
XVI. SACRAL HARLOTRY, CHILD SACRIFICE 533
XVII. POPULAR SPORTS, EXHIBITIONS, DRAMA 560
XVIII. ASCETICISM 605
XIX. EDUCATION, HISTORY 628
XX. LIFE POLICY, VIRTUE VS. SUCCESS 639
LIST OF BOOKS 655
(Titles are under the name of the author, or the leading word
of the title)
INDEX 671
FOLKWAYS
CHAPTER I
FUNDAMENTAL NOTIONS OF THE FOLKWAYS
AND OF THE MORES
Definition and mode of origin of the folkways.--The folkways are
a societal force.--Folkways are made unconsciously.--Impulse
and instinct; primeval stupidity; magic.--The strain of
improvement and consistency.--The aleatory element.--All
origins are lost in mystery.--Spencer on primitive custom.--
Good and bad luck; ills of life; goodness and happiness.--
Illustrations.--Immortality and compensation.--Tradition and
its restraints.--The concepts of "primitive society";
"we-groups" and "others-groups."--Sentiments in the in-group
towards out-groups.--Ethnocentrism.--Illustrations.--
Patriotism.--Chauvinism.--The struggle for existence and the
competition of life; antagonistic coöperation.--Four motives:
hunger, love, vanity, fear.--The process of making folkways.--
Suggestion and suggestibility.--Suggestion in education.--
Manias.--Suggestion in politics.--Suggestion and criticism.--
Folkways based on false inferences.--Harmful folkways.--How
"true" and "right" are found.--The folkways are right; rights;
morals.--The folkways are true.--Relations of world philosophy
to folkways.--Definition of the mores.--Taboos.--No primitive
philosophizing; myths; fables; notion of social welfare.--The
imaginative element.--The ethical policy and the success
policy.--Recapitulation.--Scope and method of the mores.--
Integration of the mores of a group or age.--Purpose of the
present work.--Why use the word "mores."--The mores are a
directive force.--Consistency in the mores.--The mores of
subgroups.--What are classes?--Classes rated by societal
value.--Class; race; group solidarity.--The masses and the
mores.--Fallacies about the classes and the masses.--Action of
the masses on ideas.--Organization of the masses.--Institutions
of civil liberty.--The common man.--The "people"; popular
impulses.--Agitation.--The ruling element in the masses.--The
mores and institutions.--Laws.--How laws and institutions
differ from mores.--Difference between mores and some cognate
things.--Goodness or badness of the mores.--More exact
definition of the mores.--Ritual.--The ritual of the mores.--
Group interests and policy.--Group interests and folkways.--
Force in the folkways.--Might and right.--Status.--
Conventionalization.--Conventions indispensable.--The "ethos"
or group character; Japan.--Chinese ethos.--Hindoo ethos.--
European ethos.
+1. Definition and mode of origin of the folkways.+ If we put together
all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about
primitive men and primitive society, we perceive that the first task of
life is to live. Men begin with acts, not with thoughts. Every moment
brings necessities which must be satisfied at once. Need was the first
experience, and it was followed at once by a blundering effort to
satisfy it. It is generally taken for granted that men inherited some
guiding instincts from their beast ancestry, and it may be true,
although it has never been proved. If there were such inheritances, they
controlled and aided the first efforts to satisfy needs. Analogy makes
it easy to assume that the ways of beasts had produced channels of habit
and predisposition along which dexterities and other psychophysical
activities would run easily. Experiments with newborn animals show that
in the absence of any experience of the relation of means to ends,
efforts to satisfy needs are clumsy and blundering. The method is that
of trial and failure, which produces repeated pain, loss, and
disappointments. Nevertheless, it is a method of rude experiment and
selection. The earliest efforts of men were of this kind. Need was the
impelling force. Pleasure and pain, on the one side and the other, were
the rude constraints which defined the line on which efforts must
proceed. The ability to distinguish between pleasure and pain is the
only psychical power which is to be assumed. Thus ways of doing things
were selected, which were expedient. They answered the purpose better
than other ways, or with less toil and pain. Along the course on which
efforts were compelled to go, habit, routine, and skill were developed.
The struggle to maintain existence was carried on, not individually, but
in groups. Each profited by the other's experience; hence there was
concurrence towards that which proved to be most expedient. All at last
adopted the same way for the same purpose; hence the ways turned into
customs and became mass phenomena. Instincts were developed in
connection with them. In this way folkways arise. The young learn them
by tradition, imitation, and authority. The folkways, at a time, provide
for all the needs of life then and there. They are uniform, universal in
the group, imperative, and invariable. As time goes on, the folkways
become more and more arbitrary, positive, and imperative. If asked why
they act in a certain way in certain cases, primitive people always
answer that it is because they and their ancestors always have done so.
A sanction also arises from ghost fear. The ghosts of ancestors would be
angry if the living should change the ancient folkways (see sec. 6).
+2. The folkways are a societal force.+ The operation by which folkways
are produced consists in the frequent repetition of petty acts, often by
great numbers acting in concert or, at least, acting in the same way
when face to face with the same need. The immediate motive is interest.
It produces habit in the individual and custom in the group. It is,
therefore, in the highest degree original and primitive. By habit and
custom it exerts a strain on every individual within its range;
therefore it rises to a societal force to which great classes of
societal phenomena are due. Its earliest stages, its course, and laws
may be studied; also its influence on individuals and their reaction on
it. It is our present purpose so to study it. We have to recognize it as
one of the chief forces by which a society is made to be what it is. Out
of the unconscious experiment which every repetition of the ways
includes, there issues pleasure or pain, and then, so far as the men are
capable of reflection, convictions that the ways are conducive to
societal welfare. These two experiences are not the same. The most
uncivilized men, both in the food quest and in war, do things which are
painful, but which have been found to be expedient. Perhaps these cases
teach the sense of social welfare better than those which are
pleasurable and favorable to welfare. The former cases call for some
intelligent reflection on experience. When this conviction as to the
relation to welfare is added to the folkways they are converted into
mores, and, by virtue of the philosophical and ethical element added to
them, they win utility and importance and become the source of the
science and the art of living.
+3. Folkways are made unconsciously.+ It is of the first importance to
notice that, from the first acts by which men try to satisfy needs, each
act stands by itself, and looks no further than the immediate
satisfaction. From recurrent needs arise habits for the individual and
customs for the group, but these results are consequences which were
never conscious, and never foreseen or intended. They are not noticed
until they have long existed, and it is still longer before they are
appreciated. Another long time must pass, and a higher stage of mental
development must be reached, before they can be used as a basis from
which to deduce rules for meeting, in the future, problems whose
pressure can be foreseen. The folkways, therefore, are not creations of
human purpose and wit. They are like products of natural forces which
men unconsciously set in operation, or they are like the instinctive
ways of animals, which are developed out of experience, which reach a
final form of maximum adaptation to an interest, which are handed down
by tradition and admit of no exception or variation, yet change to meet
new conditions, still within the same limited methods, and without
rational reflection or purpose. From this it results that all the life
of human beings, in all ages and stages of culture, is primarily
controlled by a vast mass of folkways handed down from the earliest
existence of the race, having the nature of the ways of other animals,
only the topmost layers of which are subject to change and control, and
have been somewhat modified by human philosophy, ethics, and religion,
or by other acts of intelligent reflection. We are told of savages that
"It is difficult to exhaust the customs and small ceremonial usages of a
savage people. Custom regulates the whole of a man's actions,--his
bathing, washing, cutting his hair, eating, drinking, and fasting. From
his cradle to his grave he is the slave of ancient usage. In his life
there is nothing free, nothing original, nothing spontaneous, no
progress towards a higher and better life, and no attempt to improve his
condition, mentally, morally, or spiritually."[1] All men act in this
way with only a little wider margin of voluntary variation.
+4. Impulse and instinct. Primeval stupidity. Magic.+ "The mores
(_Sitten_) rest on feelings of pleasure or pain, which either directly
produce actions or call out desires which become causes of action."[2]
"Impulse is not an attribute of living creatures, like instinct. The
only phenomenon to which impulse applies is that men and other animals
imitate what they see others, especially of their own species, do, and
that they accomplish this imitation the more easily, the more their
forefathers practiced the same act. The thing imitated, therefore, must
already exist, and cannot be explained as an impulse." "As soon as
instinct ceased to be sole ruler of living creatures, including inchoate
man, the latter must have made mistakes in the struggle for existence
which would soon have finished his career, but that he had instinct and
the imitation of what existed to guide him. This human primeval
stupidity is the ultimate ground of religion and art, for both come
without any interval, out of the magic which is the immediate
consequence of the struggle for existence when it goes beyond instinct."
"If we want to determine the origin of dress, if we want to define
social relations and achievements, e.g. the origin of marriage, war,
agriculture, cattle breeding, etc., if we want to make studies in the
psyche of nature peoples,--we must always pass through magic and belief
in magic. One who is weak in magic, e.g. a ritually unclean man, has a
'bad body,' and reaches no success. Primitive men, on the other hand,
win their success by means of their magical power and their magical
preparations, and hence become 'the noble and good.' For them there is
no other morality [than this success]. Even the technical dexterities
have certainly not been free from the influence of belief in magic."[3]
+5. The strain of improvement and consistency.+ The folkways, being ways
of satisfying needs, have succeeded more or less well, and therefore
have produced more or less pleasure or pain. Their quality always
consisted in their adaptation to the purpose. If they were imperfectly
adapted and unsuccessful, they produced pain, which drove men on to
learn better. The folkways are, therefore, (1) subject to a strain of
improvement towards better adaptation of means to ends, as long as the
adaptation is so imperfect that pain is produced. They are also (2)
subject to a strain of consistency with each other, because they all
answer their several purposes with less friction and antagonism when
they coöperate and support each other. The forms of industry, the forms
of the family, the notions of property, the constructions of rights, and
the types of religion show the strain of consistency with each other
through the whole history of civilization. The two great cultural
divisions of the human race are the oriental and the occidental. Each is
consistent throughout; each has its own philosophy and spirit; they are
separated from top to bottom by different mores, different standpoints,
different ways, and different notions of what societal arrangements are
advantageous. In their contrast they keep before our minds the possible
range of divergence in the solution of the great problems of human life,
and in the views of earthly existence by which life policy may be
controlled. If two planets were joined in one, their inhabitants could
not differ more widely as to what things are best worth seeking, or what
ways are most expedient for well living.
+6. The aleatory interest.+ If we should try to find a specimen society
in which expedient ways of satisfying needs and interests were found by
trial and failure, and by long selection from experience, as broadly
described in sec. 1 above, it might be impossible to find one. Such a
practical and utilitarian mode of procedure, even when mixed with ghost
sanction, is rationalistic. It would not be suited to the ways and
temper of primitive men. There was an element in the most elementary
experience which was irrational and defied all expedient methods. One
might use the best known means with the greatest care, yet fail of the
result. On the other hand, one might get a great result with no effort
at all. One might also incur a calamity without any fault of his own.
This was the aleatory element in life, the element of risk and loss,
good or bad fortune. This element is never absent from the affairs of
men. It has greatly influenced their life philosophy and policy. On one
side, good luck may mean something for nothing, the extreme case of
prosperity and felicity. On the other side, ill luck may mean failure,
loss, calamity, and disappointment, in spite of the most earnest and
well-planned endeavor. The minds of men always dwell more on bad luck.
They accept ordinary prosperity as a matter of course. Misfortunes
arrest their attention and remain in their memory.
Hence the ills of life are the mode of manifestation of the aleatory
element which has most affected life policy. Primitive men ascribed all
incidents to the agency of men or of ghosts and spirits. Good and ill
luck were attributed to the superior powers, and were supposed to be due
to their pleasure or displeasure at the conduct of men. This group of
notions constitutes goblinism. It furnishes a complete world philosophy.
The element of luck is always present in the struggle for existence.
That is why primitive men never could carry on the struggle for
existence, disregarding the aleatory element and employing a utilitarian
method only. The aleatory element has always been the connecting link
between the struggle for existence and religion. It was only by
religious rites that the aleatory element in the struggle for existence
could be controlled. The notions of ghosts, demons, another world, etc.,
were all fantastic. They lacked all connection with facts, and were
arbitrary constructions put upon experience. They were poetic and
developed by poetic construction and imaginative deduction. The nexus
between them and events was not cause and effect, but magic. They
therefore led to delusive deductions in regard to life and its meaning,
which entered into subsequent action as guiding faiths, and imperative
notions about the conditions of success. The authority of religion and
that of custom coalesced into one indivisible obligation. Therefore the
simple statement of experiment and expediency in the first paragraph
above is not derived directly from actual cases, but is a product of
analysis and inference. It must also be added that vanity and ghost fear
produced needs which man was as eager to satisfy as those of hunger or
the family. Folkways resulted for the former as well as for the latter
(see sec. 9).
+7. All origins are lost in mystery.+ No objection can lie against this
postulate about the way in which folkways began, on account of the
element of inference in it. All origins are lost in mystery, and it
seems vain to hope that from any origin the veil of mystery will ever be
raised. We go up the stream of history to the utmost point for which we
have evidence of its course. Then we are forced to reach out into the
darkness upon the line of direction marked by the remotest course of
the historic stream. This is the way in which we have to act in regard
to the origin of capital, language, the family, the state, religion, and
rights. We never can hope to see the beginning of any one of these
things. Use and wont are products and results. They had antecedents. We
never can find or see the first member of the series. It is only by
analysis and inference that we can form any conception of the
"beginning" which we are always so eager to find.
+8. Spencer on primitive custom.+ Spencer[4] says that "guidance by
custom, which we everywhere find amongst rude peoples, is the sole
conceivable guidance at the outset." Custom is the product of concurrent
action through time. We find it existent and in control at the extreme
reach of our investigations. Whence does it begin, and how does it come
to be? How can it give guidance "at the outset"? All mass actions seem
to begin because the mass wants to act together. The less they know what
it is right and best to do, the more open they are to suggestion from an
incident in nature, or from a chance act of one, or from the current
doctrines of ghost fear. A concurrent drift begins which is subject to
later correction. That being so, it is evident that instinctive action,
under the guidance of traditional folkways, is an operation of the first
importance in all societal matters. Since the custom never can be
antecedent to all action, what we should desire most is to see it arise
out of the first actions, but, inasmuch as that is impossible, the
course of the action after it is started is our field of study. The
origin of primitive customs is always lost in mystery, because when the
action begins the men are never conscious of historical action, or of
the historical importance of what they are doing. When they become
conscious of the historical importance of their acts, the origin is
already far behind.
+9. Good and bad luck; ills of life; goodness and happiness.+
There are in nature numerous antagonistic forces of growth or
production and destruction. The interests of man are between the
two and may be favored or ruined by either. Correct knowledge of
both is required to get the advantages and escape the injuries.
Until the knowledge becomes adequate the effects which are
encountered appear to be accidents or cases of luck. There is no
thrift in nature. There is rather waste. Human interests require
thrift, selection, and preservation. Capital is the condition
precedent of all gain in security and power, and capital is
produced by selection and thrift. It is threatened by all which
destroys material goods. Capital is therefore the essential means
of man's power over nature, and it implies the purest concept of
the power of intelligence to select and dispose of the processes
of nature for human welfare. All the earliest efforts in this
direction were blundering failures. Men selected things to be
desired and preserved under impulses of vanity and superstition,
and misconceived utility and interest. The errors entered into
the folkways, formed a part of them, and were protected by them.
Error, accident, and luck seem to be the only sense there is in
primitive life. Knowledge alone limits their sway, and at least
changes the range and form of their dominion. Primitive folkways
are marked by improvidence, waste, and carelessness, out of which
prudence, foresight, patience, and perseverance are developed
slowly, by pain and loss, as experience is accumulated, and
knowledge increases also, as better methods seem worth while. The
consequences of error and the effects of luck were always mixed.
As we have seen, the ills of life were connected with the
displeasure of the ghosts. _Per contra_, conduct which conformed
to the will of the ghosts was goodness, and was supposed to bring
blessing and prosperity. Thus a correlation was established, in
the faith of men, between goodness and happiness, and on that
correlation an art of happiness was built. It consisted in a
faithful performance of rites of respect towards superior powers
and in the use of lucky times, places, words, etc., with
avoidance of unlucky ones. All uncivilized men demand and expect
a specific response. Inasmuch as they did not get it, and indeed
the art of happiness always failed of results, the great question
of world philosophy always has been, What is the real relation
between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few
generations that men have found courage to say that there is
none. The whole strength of the notion that they are correlated
is in the opposite experience which proves that no evil thing
brings happiness. The oldest religious literature consists of
formulas of worship and prayer by which devotion and obedience
were to produce satisfaction of the gods, and win favor and
prosperity for men.[5] The words "ill" and "evil" have never yet
thrown off the ambiguity between wickedness and calamity. The two
ideas come down to us allied or combined. It was the rites which
were the object of tradition, not the ideas which they
embodied.[6]
+10. Illustrations.+ The notions of blessing and curse are
subsequent explanations by men of great cases of prosperity or
calamity which came to their knowledge. Then the myth-building
imagination invented stories of great virtue or guilt to account
for the prosperity or calamity.[7] The Greek notion of the
Nemesis was an inference from observation of good and ill fortune
in life. Great popular interest attached to the stories of
Croesus and Polycrates. The latter, after all his glory and
prosperity, was crucified by the satrap of Lydia. Croesus had
done all that man could do, according to the current religion, to
conciliate the gods and escape ill fortune. He was very pious and
lived by the rules of religion. The story is told in different
forms. "The people could not make up their minds that a prince
who had been so liberal to the gods during his prosperity had
been abandoned by them at the moment when he had the greatest
need of their aid."[8] They said that he expiated the crime of
his ancestor Gyges, who usurped the throne; that is, they found
it necessary to adduce some guilt to account for the facts, and
they introduced the notion of hereditary responsibility. Another
story was that he determined to sacrifice all his wealth to the
gods. He built a funeral pyre of it all and mounted it himself,
but rain extinguished it. The gods were satisfied. Croesus
afterwards enjoyed the friendship of Cyros, which was good
fortune. Still others rejected the doctrines of correlation
between goodness and happiness on account of the fate of
Croesus. In ancient religion "the benefits which were expected
from the gods were of a public character, affecting the whole
community, especially fruitful seasons, increase of flocks and
herds, and success in war. So long as the community flourished,
the fact that an individual was miserable reflected no discredit
on divine providence, but was rather taken to prove that the
sufferer was an evil-doer, justly hateful to the gods."[9] Jehu
and his house were blamed for the blood spilt at Israel, although
Jehu was commissioned by Elisha to destroy the house of Ahab.[10]
This is like the case of OEdipus, who obeyed an oracle, but
suffered for his act as for a crime. Jehovah caused the ruin of
those who had displeased him, by putting false oracles in the
mouths of prophets.[11] Hezekiah expostulated with God because,
although he had walked before God with a perfect heart and had
done what was right in His sight, he suffered calamity.[12] In
the seventy-third Psalm, the author is perplexed by the
prosperity of the wicked, and the contrast of his own fortunes.
"Surely in vain have I cleansed my heart and washed my hands in
innocency, for all day long have I been plagued, and chastened
every morning." He says that at last the wicked were cast down.
He was brutish and ignorant not to see the solution. It is that
the wicked prosper for a time only. He will cleave unto God. The
book of Job is a discussion of the relation between goodness and
happiness. The crusaders were greatly perplexed by the victories
of the Mohammedans. It seemed to be proved untrue that God would
defend His own Name or the true and holy cause. Louis XIV, when
his armies were defeated, said that God must have forgotten all
which he had done for Him.
+11. Immortality and compensation.+ The notion of immortality has
been interwoven with the notion of luck, of justice, and of the
relation of goodness and happiness. The case was reopened in
another world, and compensations could be assumed to take place
there. In the folk drama of the ancient Greeks luck ruled. It was
either envious of human prosperity or beneficent.[13] Grimm[14]
gives more than a thousand ancient German apothegms, dicta, and
proverbs about "luck." The Italians of the fifteenth century saw
grand problems in the correlation of goodness and happiness.
Alexander VI was the wickedest man known in history, but he had
great and unbroken prosperity in all his undertakings. The only
conceivable explanation was that he had made a pact with the
devil. Some of the American Indians believed that there was an
hour at which all wishes uttered by men were fulfilled.[15] It is
amongst half-civilized peoples that the notion of luck is given
the greatest influence in human affairs. They seek devices for
operating on luck, since luck controls all interests. Hence
words, times, names, places, gestures, and other acts or
relations are held to control luck. Inasmuch as marriage is a
relationship in which happiness is sought and not always found,
wedding ceremonies are connected with acts "for luck." Some of
these still survive amongst us as jests. The fact of the aleatory
element in human life, the human interpretations of it, and the
efforts of men to deal with it constitute a large part of the
history of culture. They have produced groups of folkways, and
have entered as an element into folkways for other purposes.
+12. Tradition and its restraints.+ It is evident that the "ways" of the
older and more experienced members of a society deserve great authority
in any primitive group. We find that this rational authority leads to
customs of deference and to etiquette in favor of the old. The old in
turn cling stubbornly to tradition and to the example of their own
predecessors. Thus tradition and custom become intertwined and are a
strong coercion which directs the society upon fixed lines, and
strangles liberty. Children see their parents always yield to the same
custom and obey the same persons. They see that the elders are allowed
to do all the talking, and that if an outsider enters, he is saluted by
those who are at home according to rank and in fixed order. All this
becomes rule for children, and helps to give to all primitive customs
their stereotyped formality. "The fixed ways of looking at things which
are inculcated by education and tribal discipline, are the precipitate
of an old cultural development, and in their continued operation they
are the moral anchor of the Indian, although they are also the fetters
which restrain his individual will."[16]
+13. The concept of "primitive society"; we-group and others-group.+ The
conception of "primitive society" which we ought to form is that of
small groups scattered over a territory. The size of the groups is
determined by the conditions of the struggle for existence. The internal
organization of each group corresponds to its size. A group of groups
may have some relation to each other (kin, neighborhood, alliance,
connubium and commercium) which draws them together and differentiates
them from others. Thus a differentiation arises between ourselves, the
we-group, or in-group, and everybody else, or the others-groups,
out-groups. The insiders in a we-group are in a relation of peace,
order, law, government, and industry, to each other. Their relation to
all outsiders, or others-groups, is one of war and plunder, except so
far as agreements have modified it. If a group is exogamic, the women in
it were born abroad somewhere. Other foreigners who might be found in it
are adopted persons, guest friends, and slaves.
+14. Sentiments in the in-group and towards the out-group.+ The relation
of comradeship and peace in the we-group and that of hostility and war
towards others-groups are correlative to each other. The exigencies of
war with outsiders are what make peace inside, lest internal discord
should weaken the we-group for war. These exigencies also make
government and law in the in-group, in order to prevent quarrels and
enforce discipline. Thus war and peace have reacted on each other and
developed each other, one within the group, the other in the intergroup
relation. The closer the neighbors, and the stronger they are, the
intenser is the warfare, and then the intenser is the internal
organization and discipline of each. Sentiments are produced to
correspond. Loyalty to the group, sacrifice for it, hatred and contempt
for outsiders, brotherhood within, warlikeness without,--all grow
together, common products of the same situation. These relations and
sentiments constitute a social philosophy. It is sanctified by
connection with religion. Men of an others-group are outsiders with
whose ancestors the ancestors of the we-group waged war. The ghosts of
the latter will see with pleasure their descendants keep up the fight,
and will help them. Virtue consists in killing, plundering, and
enslaving outsiders.
+15. Ethnocentrism+ is the technical name for this view of things in
which one's own group is the center of everything, and all others are
scaled and rated with reference to it. Folkways correspond to it to
cover both the inner and the outer relation. Each group nourishes its
own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities,
and looks with contempt on outsiders. Each group thinks its own folkways
the only right ones, and if it observes that other groups have other
folkways, these excite its scorn. Opprobrious epithets are derived from
these differences. "Pig-eater," "cow-eater," "uncircumcised,"
"jabberers," are epithets of contempt and abomination. The Tupis called
the Portuguese by a derisive epithet descriptive of birds which have
feathers around their feet, on account of trousers.[17] For our present
purpose the most important fact is that ethnocentrism leads a people to
exaggerate and intensify everything in their own folkways which is
peculiar and which differentiates them from others. It therefore
strengthens the folkways.
+16. Illustrations of ethnocentrism.+ The Papuans on New Guinea
are broken up into village units which are kept separate by
hostility, cannibalism, head hunting, and divergences of language
and religion. Each village is integrated by its own language,
religion, and interests. A group of villages is sometimes united
into a limited unity by connubium. A wife taken inside of this
group unit has full status; one taken outside of it has not. The
petty group units are peace groups within and are hostile to all
outsiders.[18] The Mbayas of South America believed that their
deity had bidden them live by making war on others, taking their
wives and property, and killing their men.[19]
+17.+ When Caribs were asked whence they came, they answered, "We
alone are people."[20] The meaning of the name Kiowa is "real or
principal people."[21] The Lapps call themselves "men," or "human
beings."[22] The Greenland Eskimo think that Europeans have been
sent to Greenland to learn virtue and good manners from the
Greenlanders. Their highest form of praise for a European is that
he is, or soon will be, as good as a Greenlander.[23] The
Tunguses call themselves "men."[24] As a rule it is found that
nature peoples call themselves "men." Others are something
else--perhaps not defined--but not real men. In myths the origin
of their own tribe is that of the real human race. They do not
account for the others. The Ainos derive their name from that of
the first man, whom they worship as a god. Evidently the name of
the god is derived from the tribe name.[25] When the tribal name
has another sense, it is always boastful or proud. The Ovambo
name is a corruption of the name of the tribe for themselves,
which means "the wealthy."[26] Amongst the most remarkable people
in the world for ethnocentrism are the Seri of Lower California.
They observe an attitude of suspicion and hostility to all
outsiders, and strictly forbid marriage with outsiders.[27]
+18.+ The Jews divided all mankind into themselves and Gentiles.
They were the "chosen people." The Greeks and Romans called all
outsiders "barbarians." In Euripides' tragedy of _Iphigenia in
Aulis_ Iphigenia says that it is fitting that Greeks should rule
over barbarians, but not contrariwise, because Greeks are free,
and barbarians are slaves. The Arabs regarded themselves as the
noblest nation and all others as more or less barbarous.[28] In
1896, the Chinese minister of education and his counselors edited
a manual in which this statement occurs: "How grand and glorious
is the Empire of China, the middle kingdom! She is the largest
and richest in the world. The grandest men in the world have all
come from the middle empire."[29] In all the literature of all
the states equivalent statements occur, although they are not so
naïvely expressed. In Russian books and newspapers the civilizing
mission of Russia is talked about, just as, in the books and
journals of France, Germany, and the United States, the
civilizing mission of those countries is assumed and referred to
as well understood. Each state now regards itself as the leader
of civilization, the best, the freest, and the wisest, and all
others as inferior. Within a few years our own
man-on-the-curbstone has learned to class all foreigners of the
Latin peoples as "dagos," and "dago" has become an epithet of
contempt. These are all cases of ethnocentrism.
+19. Patriotism+ is a sentiment which belongs to modern states.
It stands in antithesis to the mediæval notion of catholicity.
Patriotism is loyalty to the civic group to which one belongs by
birth or other group bond. It is a sentiment of fellowship and
coöperation in all the hopes, work, and suffering of the group.
Mediæval catholicity would have made all Christians an in-group
and would have set them in hostility to all Mohammedans and other
non-Christians. It never could be realized. When the great modern
states took form and assumed control of societal interests, group
sentiment was produced in connection with those states. Men
responded willingly to a demand for support and help from an
institution which could and did serve interests. The state drew
to itself the loyalty which had been given to men (lords), and it
became the object of that group vanity and antagonism which had
been ethnocentric. For the modern man patriotism has become one
of the first of duties and one of the noblest of sentiments. It
is what he owes to the state for what the state does for him, and
the state is, for the modern man, a cluster of civic institutions
from which he draws security and conditions of welfare. The
masses are always patriotic. For them the old ethnocentric
jealousy, vanity, truculency, and ambition are the strongest
elements in patriotism. Such sentiments are easily awakened in a
crowd. They are sure to be popular. Wider knowledge always proves
that they are not based on facts. That we are good and others are
bad is never true. By history, literature, travel, and science
men are made cosmopolitan. The selected classes of all states
become associated; they intermarry. The differentiation by states
loses importance. All states give the same security and
conditions of welfare to all. The standards of civic institutions
are the same, or tend to become such, and it is a matter of pride
in each state to offer civic status and opportunities equal to
the best. Every group of any kind whatsoever demands that each of
its members shall help defend group interests. Every group
stigmatizes any one who fails in zeal, labor, and sacrifices for
group interests. Thus the sentiment of loyalty to the group, or
the group head, which was so strong in the Middle Ages, is kept
up, as far as possible, in regard to modern states and
governments. The group force is also employed to enforce the
obligations of devotion to group interests. It follows that
judgments are precluded and criticism is silenced.
+20. Chauvinism.+ That patriotism may degenerate into a vice is
shown by the invention of a name for the vice: chauvinism. It is
a name for boastful and truculent group self-assertion. It
overrules personal judgment and character, and puts the whole
group at the mercy of the clique which is ruling at the moment.
It produces the dominance of watchwords and phrases which take
the place of reason and conscience in determining conduct. The
patriotic bias is a recognized perversion of thought and judgment
against which our education should guard us.
+21. The struggle for existence and the competition of life;
antagonistic coöperation.+ The struggle for existence must be carried on
under life conditions and in connection with the competition of life.
The life conditions consist in variable elements of the environment, the
supply of materials necessary to support life, the difficulty of
exploiting them, the state of the arts, and the circumstances of
physiography, climate, meteorology, etc., which favor life or the
contrary. The struggle for existence is a process in which an individual
and nature are the parties. The individual is engaged in a process by
which he wins from his environment what he needs to support his
existence. In the competition of life the parties are men and other
organisms. The men strive with each other, or with the flora and fauna
with which they are associated. The competition of life is the rivalry,
antagonism, and mutual displacement in which the individual is involved
with other organisms by his efforts to carry on the struggle for
existence for himself. It is, therefore, the competition of life which
is the societal element, and which produces societal organization. The
number present and in competition is another of the life conditions. At
a time and place the life conditions are the same for a number of human
beings who are present, and the problems of life policy are the same.
This is another reason why the attempts to satisfy interest become mass
phenomena and result in folkways. The individual and social elements are
always in interplay with each other if there are a number present. If
one is trying to carry on the struggle for existence with nature, the
fact that others are doing the same in the same environment is an
essential condition for him. Then arises an alternative. He and the
others may so interfere with each other that all shall fail, or they may
combine, and by coöperation raise their efforts against nature to a
higher power. This latter method is industrial organization. The crisis
which produces it is constantly renewed, and men are forced to raise the
organization to greater complexity and more comprehensive power, without
limit. Interests are the relations of action and reaction between the
individual and the life conditions, through which relations the
evolution of the individual is produced. That evolution, so long as it
goes on prosperously, is well living, and it results in the
self-realization of the individual, for we may think of each one as
capable of fulfilling some career and attaining to some character and
state of power by the developing of predispositions which he possesses.
It would be an error, however, to suppose that all nature is a chaos of
warfare and competition. Combination and coöperation are so
fundamentally necessary that even very low life forms are found in
symbiosis for mutual dependence and assistance. A combination can exist
where each of its members would perish. Competition and combination are
two forms of life association which alternate through the whole organic
and superorganic domains. The neglect of this fact leads to many
socialistic fallacies. Combination is of the essence of organization,
and organization is the great device for increased power by a number of
unequal and dissimilar units brought into association for a common
purpose. McGee[30] says of the desert of Papagueria, in southwestern
Arizona, that "a large part of the plants and animals of the desert
dwell together in harmony and mutual helpfulness [which he shows in
detail]; for their energies are directed not so much against one another
as against the rigorous environmental conditions growing out of dearth
of water. This communality does not involve loss of individuality, ...
indeed the plants and animals are characterized by an individuality
greater than that displayed in regions in which perpetuity of the
species depends less closely on the persistence of individuals." Hence
he speaks of the "solidarity of life" in the desert. "The saguaro is a
monstrosity in fact as well as in appearance,--a product of
miscegenation between plant and animal, probably depending for its form
of life history, if not for its very existence, on its commensals."[31]
The Seri protect pelicans from themselves by a partial taboo, which is
not understood. It seems that they could not respect a breeding time, or
establish a closed season, yet they have such an appetite for the birds
and their eggs that they would speedily exterminate them if there were
no restraint. This combination has been well called antagonistic
coöperation. It consists in the combination of two persons or groups to
satisfy a great common interest while minor antagonisms of interest
which exist between them are suppressed. The plants and animals of the
desert are rivals for what water there is, but they combine as if with
an intelligent purpose to attain to a maximum of life under the
conditions. There are many cases of animals who coöperate in the same
way. Our farmers put crows and robins under a protective taboo because
the birds destroy insects. The birds also destroy grain and fruits, but
this is tolerated on account of their services. Madame Pommerol says of
the inhabitants of Sahara that the people of the towns and the nomads
are enemies by caste and race, but allies in interest. The nomads need
refuge and shelter. The townspeople need messengers and transportation.
Hence ties of contract, quarrels, fights, raids, vengeances, and
reconciliations for the sake of common enterprises of plunder.[32]
Antagonistic coöperation is the most productive form of combination in
high civilization. It is a high action of the reason to overlook lesser
antagonisms in order to work together for great interests. Political
parties are constantly forced to do it. In the art of the statesman it
is a constant policy. The difference between great parties and factions
in any parliamentary system is of the first importance; that difference
consists in the fact that parties can suppress minor differences, and
combine for what they think most essential to public welfare, while
factions divide and subdivide on petty differences. Inasmuch as the
suppression of minor differences means a suppression of the emotional
element, while the other policy encourages the narrow issues in regard
to which feeling is always most intense, the former policy allows far
less play to feeling and passion.
+22. Hunger, love, vanity, and fear.+ There are four great motives of
human action which come into play when some number of human beings are
in juxtaposition under the same life conditions. These are hunger, sex
passion, vanity, and fear (of ghosts and spirits). Under each of these
motives there are interests. Life consists in satisfying interests, for
"life," in a society, is a career of action and effort expended on both
the material and social environment. However great the errors and
misconceptions may be which are included in the efforts, the purpose
always is advantage and expediency. The efforts fall into parallel
lines, because the conditions and the interests are the same. It is now
the accepted opinion, and it may be correct, that men inherited from
their beast ancestors psychophysical traits, instincts, and dexterities,
or at least predispositions, which give them aid in solving the problems
of food supply, sex, commerce, and vanity. The result is mass phenomena;
currents of similarity, concurrence, and mutual contribution; and these
produce folkways. The folkways are unconscious, spontaneous,
uncoördinated. It is never known who led in devising them, although we
must believe that talent exerted its leadership at all times. Folkways
come into existence now all the time. There were folkways in stage coach
times, which were fitted to that mode of travel. Street cars have
produced ways which are suited to that mode of transportation in cities.
The telephone has produced ways which have not been invented and imposed
by anybody, but which are devised to satisfy conveniently the interests
which are at stake in the use of that instrument.
+23. Process of making folkways.+ Although we may see the process of
making folkways going on all the time, the analysis of the process is
very difficult. It appears as if there was a "mind" in the crowd which
was different from the minds of the individuals which compose it. Indeed
some have adopted such a doctrine. By autosuggestion the stronger minds
produce ideas which when set afloat pass by suggestion from mind to
mind. Acts which are consonant with the ideas are imitated. There is a
give and take between man and man. This process is one of development.
New suggestions come in at point after point. They are carried out. They
combine with what existed already. Every new step increases the number
of points upon which other minds may seize. It seems to be by this
process that great inventions are produced. Knowledge has been won and
extended by it. It seems as if the crowd had a mystic power in it
greater than the sum of the powers of its members. It is sufficient,
however, to explain this, to notice that there is a coöperation and
constant suggestion which is highly productive when it operates in a
crowd, because it draws out latent power, concentrates what would
otherwise be scattered, verifies and corrects what has been taken up,
eliminates error, and constructs by combination. Hence the gain from the
collective operation is fully accounted for, and the theories of
_Völkerpsychologie_ are to be rejected as superfluous. Out of the
process which has been described have come the folkways during the whole
history of civilization.
The phenomena of suggestion and suggestibility demand some attention
because the members of a group are continually affecting each other by
them, and great mass phenomena very often are to be explained by them.
+24. Suggestion; suggestibility.+ What has been called the psychology of
crowds consists of certain phenomena of suggestion. A number of persons
assembled together, especially if they are enthused by the same
sentiment or stimulated by the same interest, transmit impulses to each
other with the result that all the impulses are increased in a very high
ratio. In other words, it is an undisputed fact that all mental states
and emotions are greatly increased in force by transmission from man to
man, especially if they are attended by a sense of the concurrence and
coöperation of a great number who have a common sentiment or interest.
"The element of psychic coercion to which our thought process is subject
is the characteristic of the operations which we call suggestive."[33]
What we have done or heard occupies our minds so that we cannot turn
from it to something else. The consensus of a number promises triumph
for the impulse, whatever it is. _Ça ira._ There is a thrill of
enthusiasm in the sense of moving with a great number. There is no
deliberation or reason. Therefore a crowd may do things which are either
better or worse than what individuals in it would do. Cases of lynching
show how a crowd can do things which it is extremely improbable that the
individuals would do or consent to, if they were taken separately. The
crowd has no greater guarantee of wisdom and virtue than an individual
would have. In fact, the participants in a crowd almost always throw
away all the powers of wise judgment which have been acquired by
education, and submit to the control of enthusiasm, passion, animal
impulse, or brute appetite. A crowd always has a common stock of
elementary faiths, prejudices, loves and hates, and pet notions. The
common stock is acted on by the same stimuli, in all the persons, at the
same time. The response, as an aggregate, is a great storm of feeling,
and a great impulse to the will. Hence the great influence of omens and
of all popular superstitions on a crowd. Omens are a case of "egoistic
reference."[34] An army desists from a battle on account of an eclipse.
A man starting out on the food quest returns home because a lizard
crosses his path. In each case an incident in nature is interpreted as a
warning or direction to the army or the man. Thus momentous results for
men and nations may be produced without cause. The power of watchwords
consists in the cluster of suggestions which has become fastened upon
them. In the Middle Ages the word "heretic" won a frightful suggestion
of base wickedness. In the seventeenth century the same suggestions were
connected with the words "witch" and "traitor." "Nature" acquired great
suggestion of purity and correctness in the eighteenth century, which it
has not yet lost. "Progress" now bears amongst us a very undue weight of
suggestion. Suggestibility is the quality of liability to suggestive
influence.[35] "Suggestibility is the natural faculty of the brain to
admit any ideas whatsoever, without motive, to assimilate them, and
eventually to transform them rapidly into movements, sensations, and
inhibitions."[36] It differs greatly in degree, and is present in
different grades in different crowds. Crowds of different nationalities
would differ both in degree of suggestibility and in the kinds of
suggestive stimuli to which they would respond. Imitation is due to
suggestibility. Even suicide is rendered epidemic by suggestion and
imitation.[37] In a crisis, like a shipwreck, when no one knows what to
do, one, by acting, may lead them all through imitative suggestibility.
People who are very suggestible can be led into states of mind which
preclude criticism or reflection. Any one who acquires skill in the
primary processes of association, analogy, reiteration, and continuity,
can play tricks on others by stimulating these processes and then giving
them selected data to work upon. A directive idea may be suggested by a
series of ideas which lead the recipient of them to expect that the
series will be continued. Then he will not perceive if the series is
broken. In the Renaissance period no degree of illumination sufficed to
resist the delusion of astrology, because it was supported by a
passionate fantasy and a vehement desire to know the future, and because
it was confirmed by antiquity, the authority of whose opinions was
overwhelmingly suggested by all the faiths and prejudices of the
time.[38]
+25. Suggestion in education. Manias.+ Parents and teachers use
suggestion in rearing children. Persons who enjoy social
preëminence operate suggestion all the time, whether
intentionally or unintentionally. Whatever they do is imitated.
Folkways operate on individuals by suggestion; when they are
elevated to mores they do so still more, for then they carry the
suggestion of societal welfare. Ways and notions may be rejected
by an individual at first upon his judgment of their merits, but
repeated suggestion produces familiarity and dulls the effect
upon him of the features which at first repelled him. Familiar
cases of this are furnished by fashions of dress and by slang. A
new fashion of dress seems at first to be absurd, ungraceful, or
indecent. After a time this first impression of it is so dulled
that all conform to the fashion. New slang seems vulgar. It makes
its way into use. In India the lingam symbol is so common that no
one pays any heed to its sense.[39] This power of familiarity to
reduce the suggestion to zero furnishes a negative proof of the
power of the suggestion. Conventionalization also reduces
suggestion, perhaps to zero. It is a mischievous thing to read
descriptions of crime, vice, horrors, excessive adventures, etc.,
because familiarity lessens the abhorrent suggestions which those
things ought to produce. Swindlers and all others who have an
interest to lead the minds of their fellow-men in a certain
direction employ suggestion. They often develop great practical
skill in the operation, although they do not understand the
science of it. It is one of the arts of the demagogue and stump
orator. A man who wanted to be nominated for an office went
before the convention to make a speech. A great and difficult
question agitated the party. He began by saying that he would
state his position on that question frankly and fully. "But
first," said he, "let me say that I am a Democrat." This brought
out a storm of applause. Then he went on to boast of his services
to the party, and then he stopped without having said a word on
the great question. He was easily nominated. The witch
persecutions rested on suggestion. "Everybody knew" that there
were witches. If not, what were the people who were burned?
Philip IV of France wanted to make the people believe that the
templars were heretics. The people were not ready to believe
this. The king caused the corpse of a templar to be dug up and
burned, as the corpses of heretics were burned. This convinced
the people by suggestion.[40] What "they say," what "everybody
does," and what "everybody knows" are controlling suggestions.
Religious revivals are carried on by suggestion. Mediæval
flagellations and dances were cases of suggestion. In fact, all
popular manias are to be explained by it. Religious bodies
practice suggestion on themselves, especially on their children
or less enthusiastic members, by symbols, pictures, images,
processions, dramatic representations, festivals, relics, legends
of their heroes. In the Middle Ages the crucifix was an
instrument of religious suggestion to produce vivid apprehension
of the death of Jesus. In very many well-known cases the passions
of the crowd were raised to the point of very violent action. The
symbols and images also, by suggestion, stimulate religious
fervor. If numbers act together, as in convents, mass phenomena
are produced, and such results follow as the hysterical epidemics
in convents and the extravagances of communistic sects.[41]
Learned societies and numbers of persons who are interested in
the same subject, by meeting and imparting suggestions, make all
the ideas of each the common stock of all. Hyperboreans have a
mental disease which renders them liable to suggestion. The women
are afflicted by hysteria before puberty. Later they show the
phenomena of "possession,"--dancing and singing,--and still later
catalepsy.[42]
+26. Suggestion in politics.+ The great field for the use of the
devices and apparatus of suggestion at the present time is
politics. Within fifty years all states have become largely
popular. Suggestion is easy when it falls in with popular ideas,
the pet notions of groups of people, the popular common-places,
and the current habits of thought and feeling. Newspapers,
popular literature, and popular oratory show the effort to
operate suggestion along these lines. They rarely correct; they
usually flatter the accepted notions. The art of adroit
suggestion is one of the great arts of politics. Antony's speech
over the body of Cæsar is a classical example of it. In politics,
especially at elections, the old apparatus of suggestion is
employed again,--flags, symbols, ceremonies, and celebrations.
Patriotism is systematically cultivated by anniversaries,
pilgrimages, symbols, songs, recitations, etc. Another very
remarkable case of suggestion is furnished by modern
advertisements. They are adroitly planned to touch the mind of
the reader in a way to get the reaction which the advertiser
wants. The advertising pages of our popular magazines furnish
evidence of the faiths and ideas which prevail in the masses.
+27. Suggestion and criticism.+ Suggestion is a legitimate
device, if it is honestly used, for inculcating knowledge or
principles of conduct; that is, for education in the broadest
sense of the word. Criticism is the operation by which suggestion
is limited and corrected. It is by criticism that the person is
protected against credulity, emotion, and fallacy. The power of
criticism is the one which education should chiefly train. It is
difficult to resist the suggestion that one who is accused of
crime is guilty. Lynchers generally succumb to this suggestion,
especially if the crime was a heinous one which has strongly
excited their emotions against the unknown somebody who
perpetrated it. It requires criticism to resist this suggestion.
Our judicial institutions are devised to hold this suggestion
aloof until the evidence is examined. An educated man ought to be
beyond the reach of suggestions from advertisements, newspapers,
speeches, and stories. If he is wise, just when a crowd is filled
with enthusiasm and emotion, he will leave it and will go off by
himself to form his judgment. In short, individuality and
personality of character are the opposites of suggestibility.
Autosuggestion properly includes all the cases in which a man is
"struck by an idea," or "takes a notion," but it is more strictly
applied to fixed ideas and habits of thought. An irritation
suggests parasites, and parasites suggest an irritation. The fear
of stammering causes stammering. A sleeping man drives away a fly
without waking. If we are in a pose or rôle, we act as we have
heard that people act in that pose or rôle.[43] A highly trained
judgment is required to correct or select one's own ideas and to
resist fixed ideas. The supreme criticism is criticism of one's
self.
+28. Folkways due to false inference.+ Furthermore, folkways have been
formed by accident, that is, by irrational and incongruous action, based
on pseudo-knowledge. In Molembo a pestilence broke out soon after a
Portuguese had died there. After that the natives took all possible
measures not to allow any white man to die in their country.[44] On the
Nicobar islands some natives who had just begun to make pottery died.
The art was given up and never again attempted.[45] White men gave to
one Bushman in a kraal a stick ornamented with buttons as a symbol of
authority. The recipient died leaving the stick to his son. The son
soon died. Then the Bushmen brought back the stick lest all should
die.[46] Until recently no building of incombustible materials could be
built in any big town of the central province of Madagascar, on account
of some ancient prejudice.[47] A party of Eskimos met with no game. One
of them returned to their sledges and got the ham of a dog to eat. As he
returned with the ham bone in his hand he met and killed a seal. Ever
afterwards he carried a ham bone in his hand when hunting.[48] The
Belenda women (peninsula of Malacca) stay as near to the house as
possible during the period. Many keep the door closed. They know no
reason for this custom. "It must be due to some now forgotten
superstition."[49] Soon after the Yakuts saw a camel for the first time
smallpox broke out amongst them. They thought the camel to be the agent
of the disease.[50] A woman amongst the same people contracted an
endogamous marriage. She soon afterwards became blind. This was thought
to be on account of the violation of ancient customs.[51] A very great
number of such cases could be collected. In fact they represent the
current mode of reasoning of nature people. It is their custom to reason
that, if one thing follows another, it is due to it. A great number of
customs are traceable to the notion of the evil eye, many more to ritual
notions of uncleanness.[52] No scientific investigation could discover
the origin of the folkways mentioned, if the origin had not chanced to
become known to civilized men. We must believe that the known cases
illustrate the irrational and incongruous origin of many folkways. In
civilized history also we know that customs have owed their origin to
"historical accident,"--the vanity of a princess, the deformity of a
king, the whim of a democracy, the love intrigue of a statesman or
prelate. By the institutions of another age it may be provided that no
one of these things can affect decisions, acts, or interests, but then
the power to decide the ways may have passed to clubs, trades unions,
trusts, commercial rivals, wire-pullers, politicians, and political
fanatics. In these cases also the causes and origins may escape
investigation.
+29. Harmful folkways.+ There are folkways which are positively harmful.
Very often these are just the ones for which a definite reason can be
given. The destruction of a man's goods at his death is a direct
deduction from other-worldliness; the dead man is supposed to want in
the other world just what he wanted here. The destruction of a man's
goods at his death was a great waste of capital, and it must have had a
disastrous effect on the interests of the living, and must have very
seriously hindered the development of civilization. With this custom we
must class all the expenditure of labor and capital on graves, temples,
pyramids, rites, sacrifices, and support of priests, so far as these
were supposed to benefit the dead. The faith in goblinism produced
other-worldly interests which overruled ordinary worldly interests.
Foods have often been forbidden which were plentiful, the prohibition of
which injuriously lessened the food supply. There is a tribe of Bushmen
who will eat no goat's flesh, although goats are the most numerous
domestic animals in the district.[53] Where totemism exists it is
regularly accompanied by a taboo on eating the totem animal. Whatever
may be the real principle in totemism, it overrules the interest in an
abundant food supply. "The origin of the sacred regard paid to the cow
must be sought in the primitive nomadic life of the Indo-European race,"
because it is common to Iranians and Indians of Hindostan.[54] The
Libyans ate oxen but not cows.[55] The same was true of the
Phoenicians and Egyptians.[56] In some cases the sense of a food taboo
is not to be learned. It may have been entirely capricious. Mohammed
would not eat lizards, because he thought them the offspring of a
metamorphosed clan of Israelites.[57] On the other hand, the protective
taboo which forbade killing crocodiles, pythons, cobras, and other
animals enemies of man was harmful to his interests, whatever the
motive. "It seems to be a fixed article of belief throughout southern
India, that all who have willfully or accidentally killed a snake,
especially a cobra, will certainly be punished, either in this life or
the next, in one of three ways: either by childlessness, or by leprosy,
or by ophthalmia."[58] Where this faith exists man has a greater
interest to spare a cobra than to kill it. India furnishes a great
number of cases of harmful mores. "In India every tendency of humanity
seems intensified and exaggerated. No country in the world is so
conservative in its traditions, yet no country has undergone so many
religious changes and vicissitudes."[59] "Every year thousands perish of
disease that might recover if they would take proper nourishment, and
drink the medicine that science prescribes, but which they imagine that
their religion forbids them to touch." "Men who can scarcely count
beyond twenty, and know not the letters of the alphabet, would rather
die than eat food which had been prepared by men of lower caste, unless
it had been sanctified by being offered to an idol; and would kill their
daughters rather than endure the disgrace of having unmarried girls at
home beyond twelve or thirteen years of age."[60] In the last case the
rule of obligation and duty is set by the mores. The interest comes
under vanity. The sanction of the caste rules is in a boycott by all
members of the caste. The rules are often very harmful. "The authority
of caste rests partly on written laws, partly on legendary fables or
narratives, partly on the injunctions of instructors and priests, partly
on custom and usage, and partly on the caprice and convenience of its
votaries."[61] The harm of caste rules is so great that of late they
have been broken in some cases, especially in regard to travel over sea,
which is a great advantage to Hindoos.[62] The Hindoo folkways in regard
to widows and child marriages must also be recognized as socially
harmful.
+30. How "true" and "right" are found.+ If a savage puts his hand too
near the fire, he suffers pain and draws it back. He knows nothing of
the laws of the radiation of heat, but his instinctive action conforms
to that law as if he did know it. If he wants to catch an animal for
food, he must study its habits and prepare a device adjusted to those
habits. If it fails, he must try again, until his observation is "true"
and his device is "right." All the practical and direct element in the
folkways seems to be due to common sense, natural reason, intuition, or
some other original mental endowment. It seems rational (or
rationalistic) and utilitarian. Often in the mythologies this ultimate
rational element was ascribed to the teaching of a god or a culture
hero. In modern mythology it is accounted for as "natural."
Although the ways adopted must always be really "true" and "right" in
relation to facts, for otherwise they could not answer their purpose,
such is not the primitive notion of true and right.
+31. The folkways are "right." Rights. Morals.+ The folkways are the
"right" ways to satisfy all interests, because they are traditional, and
exist in fact. They extend over the whole of life. There is a right way
to catch game, to win a wife, to make one's self appear, to cure
disease, to honor ghosts, to treat comrades or strangers, to behave when
a child is born, on the warpath, in council, and so on in all cases
which can arise. The ways are defined on the negative side, that is, by
taboos. The "right" way is the way which the ancestors used and which
has been handed down. The tradition is its own warrant. It is not held
subject to verification by experience. The notion of right is in the
folkways. It is not outside of them, of independent origin, and brought
to them to test them. In the folkways, whatever is, is right. This is
because they are traditional, and therefore contain in themselves the
authority of the ancestral ghosts. When we come to the folkways we are
at the end of our analysis. The notion of right and ought is the same in
regard to all the folkways, but the degree of it varies with the
importance of the interest at stake. The obligation of conformable and
coöperative action is far greater under ghost fear and war than in other
matters, and the social sanctions are severer, because group interests
are supposed to be at stake. Some usages contain only a slight element
of right and ought. It may well be believed that notions of right and
duty, and of social welfare, were first developed in connection with
ghost fear and other-worldliness, and therefore that, in that field
also, folkways were first raised to mores. "Rights" are the rules of
mutual give and take in the competition of life which are imposed on
comrades in the in-group, in order that the peace may prevail there
which is essential to the group strength. Therefore rights can never be
"natural" or "God-given," or absolute in any sense. The morality of a
group at a time is the sum of the taboos and prescriptions in the
folkways by which right conduct is defined. Therefore morals can never
be intuitive. They are historical, institutional, and empirical.
World philosophy, life policy, right, rights, and morality are all
products of the folkways. They are reflections on, and generalizations
from, the experience of pleasure and pain which is won in efforts to
carry on the struggle for existence under actual life conditions. The
generalizations are very crude and vague in their germinal forms. They
are all embodied in folklore, and all our philosophy and science have
been developed out of them.
+32. The folkways are "true."+ The folkways are necessarily "true" with
respect to some world philosophy. Pain forced men to think. The ills of
life imposed reflection and taught forethought. Mental processes were
irksome and were not undertaken until painful experience made them
unavoidable.[63] With great unanimity all over the globe primitive men
followed the same line of thought. The dead were believed to live on as
ghosts in another world just like this one. The ghosts had just the same
needs, tastes, passions, etc., as the living men had had. These
transcendental notions were the beginning of the mental outfit of
mankind. They are articles of faith, not rational convictions. The
living had duties to the ghosts, and the ghosts had rights; they also
had power to enforce their rights. It behooved the living therefore to
learn how to deal with ghosts. Here we have a complete world philosophy
and a life policy deduced from it. When pain, loss, and ill were
experienced and the question was provoked, Who did this to us? the world
philosophy furnished the answer. When the painful experience forced the
question, Why are the ghosts angry and what must we do to appease them?
the "right" answer was the one which fitted into the philosophy of ghost
fear. All acts were therefore constrained and trained into the forms of
the world philosophy by ghost fear, ancestral authority, taboos, and
habit. The habits and customs created a practical philosophy of welfare,
and they confirmed and developed the religious theories of goblinism.
+33. Relation of world philosophy and folkways.+ It is quite impossible
for us to disentangle the elements of philosophy and custom, so as to
determine priority and the causative position of either. Our best
judgment is that the mystic philosophy is regulative, not creative, in
its relation to the folkways. They reacted upon each other. The faith in
the world philosophy drew lines outside of which the folkways must not
go. Crude and vague notions of societal welfare were formed from the
notion of pleasing the ghosts, and from such notions of expediency as
the opinion that, if there were not children enough, there would not be
warriors enough, or that, if there were too many children, the food
supply would not be adequate. The notion of welfare was an inference and
resultant from these mystic and utilitarian generalizations.
+34. Definition of the mores.+ When the elements of truth and right are
developed into doctrines of welfare, the folkways are raised to another
plane. They then become capable of producing inferences, developing into
new forms, and extending their constructive influence over men and
society. Then we call them the mores. The mores are the folkways,
including the philosophical and ethical generalizations as to societal
welfare which are suggested by them, and inherent in them, as they grow.
+35. Taboos.+ The mores necessarily consist, in a large part, of taboos,
which indicate the things which must not be done. In part these are
dictated by mystic dread of ghosts who might be offended by certain
acts, but they also include such acts as have been found by experience
to produce unwelcome results, especially in the food quest, in war, in
health, or in increase or decrease of population. These taboos always
contain a greater element of philosophy than the positive rules, because
the taboos contain reference to a reason, as, for instance, that the
act would displease the ghosts. The primitive taboos correspond to the
fact that the life of man is environed by perils. His food quest must be
limited by shunning poisonous plants. His appetite must be restrained
from excess. His physical strength and health must be guarded from
dangers. The taboos carry on the accumulated wisdom of generations,
which has almost always been purchased by pain, loss, disease, and
death. Other taboos contain inhibitions of what will be injurious to the
group. The laws about the sexes, about property, about war, and about
ghosts, have this character. They always include some social philosophy.
They are both mystic and utilitarian, or compounded of the two.
Taboos may be divided into two classes, (1) protective and (2)
destructive. Some of them aim to protect and secure, while others aim to
repress or exterminate. Women are subject to some taboos which are
directed against them as sources of possible harm or danger to men, and
they are subject to other taboos which put them outside of the duties or
risks of men. On account of this difference in taboos, taboos act
selectively, and thus affect the course of civilization. They contain
judgments as to societal welfare.
+36. No primitive philosophizing; myths; fables; notion of societal
welfare.+ It is not to be understood that primitive men philosophize
about their experience of life. That is our way; it was not theirs. They
did not formulate any propositions about the causes, significance, or
ultimate relations of things. They made myths, however, in which they
often presented conceptions which are deeply philosophical, but they
represented them in concrete, personal, dramatic and graphic ways. They
feared pain and ill, and they produced folkways by their devices for
warding off pain and ill. Those devices were acts of ritual which were
planned upon their vague and crude faiths about ghosts and the other
world. We develop the connection between the devices and the faiths, and
we reduce it to propositions of a philosophic form, but the primitive
men never did that. Their myths, fables, proverbs, and maxims show that
the subtler relations of things did not escape them, and that reflection
was not wanting, but the method of it was very different from ours. The
notion of societal welfare was not wanting, although it was never
consciously put before themselves as their purpose. It was pestilence,
as a visitation of the wrath of ghosts on all, or war, which first
taught this idea, because war was connected with victory over a
neighboring group. The Bataks have a legend that men once married their
fathers' sisters' daughters, but calamities followed and so those
marriages were tabooed.[64] This inference and the cases mentioned in
sec. 28 show a conception of societal welfare and of its relation to
states and acts as conditions.
+37. The imaginative element.+ The correct apprehension of facts and
events by the mind, and the correct inferences as to the relations
between them, constitute knowledge, and it is chiefly by knowledge that
men have become better able to live well on earth. Therefore the
alternation between experience or observation and the intellectual
processes by which the sense, sequence, interdependence, and rational
consequences of facts are ascertained, is undoubtedly the most important
process for winning increased power to live well. Yet we find that this
process has been liable to most pernicious errors. The imagination has
interfered with the reason and furnished objects of pursuit to men,
which have wasted and dissipated their energies. Especially the
alternations of observation and deduction have been traversed by vanity
and superstition which have introduced delusions. As a consequence, men
have turned their backs on welfare and reality, in order to pursue
beauty, glory, poetry, and dithyrambic rhetoric, pleasure, fame,
adventure, and phantasms. Every group, in every age, has had its
"ideals" for which it has striven, as if men had blown bubbles into the
air, and then, entranced by their beautiful colors, had leaped to catch
them. In the very processes of analysis and deduction the most
pernicious errors find entrance. We note our experience in every action
or event. We study the significance from experience. We deduce a
conviction as to what we may best do when the case arises again.
Undoubtedly this is just what we ought to do in order to live well. The
process presents us a constant reiteration of the sequence,--act,
thought, act. The error is made if we allow suggestions of vanity,
superstition, speculation, or imagination to become confused with the
second stage and to enter into our conviction of what it is best to do
in such a case. This is what was done when goblinism was taken as the
explanation of experience and the rule of right living, and it is what
has been done over and over again ever since. Speculative and
transcendental notions have furnished the world philosophy, and the
rules of life policy and duty have been deduced from this and introduced
at the second stage of the process,--act, thought, act. All the errors
and fallacies of the mental processes enter into the mores of the age.
The logic of one age is not that of another. It is one of the chief
useful purposes of a study of the mores to learn to discern in them the
operation of traditional error, prevailing dogmas, logical fallacy,
delusion, and current false estimates of goods worth striving for.
+38. The ethical policy of the schools and the success policy.+ Although
speculative assumptions and dogmatic deductions have produced the
mischief here described, our present world philosophy has come out of
them by rude methods of correction and purification, and "great
principles" have been deduced which now control our life philosophy;
also ethical principles have been determined which no civilized man
would now repudiate (truthfulness, love, honor, altruism). The
traditional doctrines of philosophy and ethics are not by any means
adjusted smoothly to each other or to modern notions. We live in a war
of two antagonistic ethical philosophies: the ethical policy taught in
the books and the schools, and the success policy. The same man acts at
one time by the school ethics, disregarding consequences, at another
time by the success policy, in which the consequences dictate the
conduct; or we talk the former and act by the latter.[65]
+39. Recapitulation.+ We may sum up this preliminary analysis as
follows: men in groups are under life conditions; they have needs which
are similar under the state of the life conditions; the relations of the
needs to the conditions are interests under the heads of hunger, love,
vanity, and fear; efforts of numbers at the same time to satisfy
interests produce mass phenomena which are folkways by virtue of
uniformity, repetition, and wide concurrence. The folkways are attended
by pleasure or pain according as they are well fitted for the purpose.
Pain forces reflection and observation of some relation between acts and
welfare. At this point the prevailing world philosophy (beginning with
goblinism) suggests explanations and inferences, which become entangled
with judgments of expediency. However, the folkways take on a philosophy
of right living and a life policy for welfare. Then they become mores,
and they may be developed by inferences from the philosophy or the rules
in the endeavor to satisfy needs without pain. Hence they undergo
improvement and are made consistent with each other.
+40. The scope and method of the mores.+ In the present work the
proposition to be maintained is that the folkways are the widest, most
fundamental, and most important operation by which the interests of men
in groups are served, and that the process by which folkways are made is
the chief one to which elementary societal or group phenomena are due.
The life of society consists in making folkways and applying them. The
science of society might be construed as the study of them. The
relations of men to each other, when they are carrying on the struggle
for existence near each other, consist in mutual reactions (antagonisms,
rivalries, alliances, coercions, and coöperations), from which result
societal concatenations and concretions, that is, more or less fixed
positions of individuals and subgroups towards each other, and more or
less established sequences and methods of interaction between them, by
which the interests of all members of the group are served. The same
might be said of all animals. The social insects especially show us
highly developed results of the adjustment of adjacent interests and
life acts into concatenations and concretions. The societal concretions
are due to the folkways in this way,--that the men, each struggling to
carry on existence, unconsciously coöperate to build up associations,
organization, customs, and institutions which, after a time, appear full
grown and actual, although no one intended, or planned, or understood
them in advance. They stand there as produced by "ancestors." These
concretions of relation and act in war, labor, religion, amusement,
family life, and civil institutions are attended by faiths, doctrines of
philosophy (myths, folklore), and by precepts of right conduct and duty
(taboos). The making of folkways is not trivial, although the acts are
minute. Every act of each man fixes an atom in a structure, both
fulfilling a duty derived from what preceded and conditioning what is to
come afterwards by the authority of traditional custom. The structure
thus built up is not physical, but societal and institutional, that is
to say, it belongs to a category which must be defined and studied by
itself. It is a category in which custom produces continuity, coherence,
and consistency, so that the word "structure" may properly be applied to
the fabric of relations and prescribed positions with which societal
functions are permanently connected. The process of making folkways is
never superseded or changed. It goes on now just as it did at the
beginning of civilization. "Use and wont" exert their force on all men
always. They produce familiarity, and mass acts become unconscious. The
same effect is produced by customary acts repeated at all recurring
occasions. The range of societal activity may be greatly enlarged,
interests may be extended and multiplied, the materials by which needs
can be supplied may become far more numerous, the processes of societal
coöperation may become more complicated, and contract or artifice may
take the place of custom for many interests; but, if the case is one
which touches the ways or interests of the masses, folkways will develop
on and around it by the same process as that which has been described as
taking place from the beginning of civilization. The ways of carrying on
war have changed with all new inventions of weapons or armor, and have
grown into folkways of commanding range and importance. The factory
system of handicrafts has produced a body of folkways in which artisans
live, and which distinguish factory towns from commercial cities or
agricultural villages. The use of cotton instead of linen has greatly
affected modern folkways. The applications of power and machinery have
changed the standards of comfort of all classes. The folkways, however,
have kept their character and authority through all the changes of form
which they have undergone.
+41. Integration of the mores of a group or age.+ In further development
of the same interpretation of the phenomena we find that changes in
history are primarily due to changes in life conditions. Then the
folkways change. Then new philosophies and ethical rules are invented to
try to justify the new ways. The whole vast body of modern mores has
thus been developed out of the philosophy and ethics of the Middle Ages.
So the mores which have been developed to suit the system of great
secular states, world commerce, credit institutions, contract wages and
rent, emigration to outlying continents, etc., have become the norm for
the whole body of usages, manners, ideas, faiths, customs, and
institutions which embrace the whole life of a society and characterize
an historical epoch. Thus India, Chaldea, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Rome,
the Middle Ages, Modern Times, are cases in which the integration of the
mores upon different life conditions produced societal states of
complete and distinct individuality (ethos). Within any such societal
status the great reason for any phenomenon is that it conforms to the
mores of the time and place. Historians have always recognized
incidentally the operation of such a determining force. What is now
maintained is that it is not incidental or subordinate. It is supreme
and controlling. Therefore the scientific discussion of a usage, custom,
or institution consists in tracing its relation to the mores, and the
discussion of societal crises and changes consists in showing their
connection with changes in the life conditions, or with the readjustment
of the mores to changes in those conditions.
+42. Purpose of the present work.+ "Ethology" would be a convenient term
for the study of manners, customs, usages, and mores, including the
study of the way in which they are formed, how they grow or decay, and
how they affect the interests which it is their purpose to serve. The
Greeks applied the term "ethos" to the sum of the characteristic usages,
ideas, standards, and codes by which a group was differentiated and
individualized in character from other groups. "Ethics" were things
which pertained to the ethos and therefore the things which were the
standard of right. The Romans used "mores" for customs in the broadest
and richest sense of the word, including the notion that customs served
welfare, and had traditional and mystic sanction, so that they were
properly authoritative and sacred. It is a very surprising fact that
modern nations should have lost these words and the significant
suggestions which inhere in them. The English language has no derivative
noun from "mores," and no equivalent for it. The French _moeurs_ is
trivial compared with "mores." The German _Sitte_ renders "mores" but
very imperfectly. The modern peoples have made morals and morality a
separate domain, by the side of religion, philosophy, and politics. In
that sense, morals is an impossible and unreal category. It has no
existence, and can have none. The word "moral" means what belongs or
appertains to the mores. Therefore the category of morals can never be
defined without reference to something outside of itself. Ethics, having
lost connection with the ethos of a people, is an attempt to systematize
the current notions of right and wrong upon some basic principle,
generally with the purpose of establishing morals on an absolute
doctrine, so that it shall be universal, absolute, and everlasting. In a
general way also, whenever a thing can be called moral, or connected
with some ethical generality, it is thought to be "raised," and
disputants whose method is to employ ethical generalities assume
especial authority for themselves and their views. These methods of
discussion are most employed in treating of social topics, and they are
disastrous to sound study of facts. They help to hold the social
sciences under the dominion of metaphysics. The abuse has been most
developed in connection with political economy, which has been almost
robbed of the character of a serious discipline by converting its
discussions into ethical disquisitions.
+43. Why use the word mores.+ "Ethica," in the Greek sense, or
"ethology," as above defined, would be good names for our present work.
We aim to study the ethos of groups, in order to see how it arises, its
power and influence, the modes of its operation on members of the group,
and the various attributes of it (ethica). "Ethology" is a very
unfamiliar word. It has been used for the mode of setting forth manners,
customs, and mores in satirical comedy. The Latin word "mores" seems to
be, on the whole, more practically convenient and available than any
other for our purpose, as a name for the folkways with the connotations
of right and truth in respect to welfare, embodied in them. The analysis
and definition above given show that in the mores we must recognize a
dominating force in history, constituting a condition as to what can be
done, and as to the methods which can be employed.
+44. Mores are a directive force.+ Of course the view which has been
stated is antagonistic to the view that philosophy and ethics furnish
creative and determining forces in society and history. That view comes
down to us from the Greek philosophy and it has now prevailed so long
that all current discussion conforms to it. Philosophy and ethics are
pursued as independent disciplines, and the results are brought to the
science of society and to statesmanship and legislation as authoritative
dicta. We also have _Völkerpsychologie_, _Sozialpolitik_, and other
intermediate forms which show the struggle of metaphysics to retain
control of the science of society. The "historic sense," the
_Zeitgeist_, and other terms of similar import are partial recognitions
of the mores and their importance in the science of society. It can be
seen also that philosophy and ethics are products of the folkways. They
are taken out of the mores, but are never original and creative; they
are secondary and derived. They often interfere in the second stage of
the sequence,--act, thought, act. Then they produce harm, but some
ground is furnished for the claim that they are creative or at least
regulative. In fact, the real process in great bodies of men is not one
of deduction from any great principle of philosophy or ethics. It is one
of minute efforts to live well under existing conditions, which efforts
are repeated indefinitely by great numbers, getting strength from habit
and from the fellowship of united action. The resultant folkways become
coercive. All are forced to conform, and the folkways dominate the
societal life. Then they seem true and right, and arise into mores as
the norm of welfare. Thence are produced faiths, ideas, doctrines,
religions, and philosophies, according to the stage of civilization and
the fashions of reflection and generalization.
+45. Consistency in the mores.+ The tendency of the mores of a period to
consistency has been noticed (sec. 5). No doubt this tendency is greatly
strengthened when people are able to generalize "principles" from acts.
This explains the modern belief that principles are causative. The
passion for equality, the universal use of contract, and the sentiments
of humanitarianism are informing elements in modern society. Whence did
they come? Undoubtedly they came out of the mores into which they return
again as a principle of consistency. Respect for human life, horror at
cruelty and bloodshed, sympathy with pain, suffering, and poverty
(humanitarianism), have acted as "causes" in connection with the
abolition of slavery, the reform of the criminal law and of prisons, and
sympathy with the oppressed, but humanitarianism was a generalization
from remoter mores which were due to changes in life conditions. The
ultimate explanation of the rise of humanitarianism is the increased
power of man over nature by the acquisition of new land, and by advance
in the arts. When men ceased to crowd on each other, they were all
willing to adopt ideas and institutions which made the competition of
life easy and kindly.
+46. The mores of subgroups.+ Each class or group in a society has its
own mores. This is true of ranks, professions, industrial classes,
religious and philosophical sects, and all other subdivisions of
society. Individuals are in two or more of these groups at the same
time, so that there is compromise and neutralization. Other mores are
common to the whole society. Mores are also transmitted from one class
to another. It is necessary to give precision to the notion of classes.
+47. What are classes?+ Galton[66] made a classification of society by a
standard which he did not strictly define. He called it "their natural
gifts." It might be understood to be mental power, reputation, social
success, income from societal work, or societal value. Ammon took up the
idea and developed it, making a diagrammatic representation of it, which
is reproduced on the following page.[67]
+48.+ If we measure and classify a number of persons by any physical
characteristic (stature, weight) we find that the results always fall
under a curve of probable error. That they should do so is, in fact, a
truism. If a number of persons with different degrees of power and
resistance are acted on by the same influences, it is most probable that
the greatest number of them will reach the same and a mean degree of
self-realization, and others in proportion to their power and
resistance. The fact has been statistically verified so often, and for
such a great variety of physical traits, that we may infer its truth for
all traits of mind and character for which we have no units, and which
we cannot therefore measure or statistically classify.
X
|
*
*|*
* | * Genius
*--|--*
* | * Talent
* | *
P *-------|-------* Q
* | *
* | *
* | *
* | * M } T
* | * e } h
* | * d } e
* | * i }
* | * o } M
M---*--------------------|--------------------*-----c--N--} a
* |D * r } s
* |C * i } s
* |B * t } e
* R |A S * y } s
*---------------|---------------*
* |a *
Unskilled and * |b * Illiterate
* |c *
* |d *
*-----|-----*
* | * Proletariat
*--|--*
Defective, * | * Dependent and
*|*
Delinquent
*
|
x
+49. Classes rated by societal value.+ If we take societal value as the
criterion of the classification of society, it has the advantage of
being germane to the interests which are most important in connection
with classification, but it is complex. There is no unit of it.
Therefore we could never verify it statistically. It conforms, in the
main, to mental power, but it must contain also a large element of
practical sense, health, and opportunity (luck). On the simplest
analysis, there are four elements,--intellectual, moral, economic, and
physical; but each of these is composite. If one of them is present in a
high degree, and the others in a low degree, the whole is inharmonic,
and not highly advantageous. The highest societal value seems to go with
a harmonious combination, although it may be of lower grades. A man of
talent, practical sense, industry, perseverance, and moral principle is
worth more to society than a genius, who is not morally responsible, or
not industrious. Societal value also conforms, in a general way, to
worldly success and to income from work contributed to the industrial
organization, for genius which was not effective would have no societal
value. On the other hand, however, so long as scientific work and books
of the highest value to science and art pay the authors nothing, the
returns of the market, and income, only imperfectly measure societal
value. All these limitations being allowed for, nevertheless societal
value is a concrete idea, especially on its negative side (paupers,
tramps, social failures, and incompetents). The defective, dependent,
and delinquent classes are already fully differentiated, and are made
objects of statistical enumeration. The rest only differ in degree. If,
therefore, all were rated and scaled by this value, the results would
fall under a curve of probable error. In the diagram the axis _Xx_ is
set perpendicular and the ordinates are divided equally upon it in order
to make the divisions correspond to "up" and "down" as we use those
words in social discussion. Then _MN_ is the line of the greatest
number. From _O_ upwards we may cut off equal sections, _OA_, _AB_,
etc., to indicate grades of societal value above that of the greatest
number, and from _O_ downwards we may cut off equal sections of the same
magnitude to indicate grades of societal value less than that of the
greatest number. At the top we have a small number of men of genius.
Below these we may cut off another section which includes the men of
talent. At the bottom we find the dependent, defective, and delinquent
classes which are a burden on society. Above them is another stratum,
the proletariat, which serves society only by its children. Persons of
this class have no regular mode of earning a living, but are not, at the
moment at which the classification is made, dependent. These are the
only ones to whom the term "proletarian" could with any propriety be
applied. Next above these is another well-defined stratum,--the
self-supporting, but unskilled and illiterate. Then all who fall between
_PQ_ and _RS_ are characterized by mediocrity, and they constitute "the
masses." In all new countries, and as it would seem at the present time
also in central Europe, there is a very strong current upwards from the
lower to the upper strata of _PQRS_. Universal education tends to
produce such a current. Talented men of the period are very often born
in humble circumstances, but succeed in taking their true place in the
societal scale. It is true, of course, that there is a counter-current
of degenerate sons and grandsons. The present diagram is made
unsymmetrical with respect to _MN_ to express the opinion that the upper
strata of _PQRS_ (the lower professional and the semiprofessional
classes) are now, in any civilized society, larger in proportion than
symmetry would indicate.[68] The line _MN_ is therefore a mode, and the
class upon it is the modal class of the society, by means of which one
society might be compared with another.
+50.+ Galton estimated the number of men of genius in all history at
four hundred. An important fraction of these were related by blood. The
"men of the time" he rates at four hundred and fifty in a million, and
the more distinguished of them at two hundred and fifty in a million.
These latter he defines by saying that a man, to be included amongst
them, "should have distinguished himself pretty frequently, either by
purely original work, or as a leader of opinion." He finds that
illustrious men are only one in a million. On the other hand, idiots and
imbeciles in England and Wales are one in four hundred, of whom thirty
per cent can be educated so as to be equal to one third of a normal man
each; forty per cent can be made worth two thirds of a man; twenty-five
or thirty per cent pass muster in a crowd. Above these are silly persons
whose relatives shield them from public knowledge. Then above these come
the Dundreary type.[69]
+51. Class; race; group solidarity.+ If the group which is classified is
a large one, and especially if it is a genetic unit (race, tribe, or
nation), there are no gaps in the series. Each individual falls into his
place by virtue of his characteristic differences. Just as no two are
anthropologically alike, so we may believe that no two are alike or
equal in societal value. That all men should be alike or equal, by any
standard whatever, is contrary to all the facts of human nature and all
the conditions of human life. Any group falls into subdivisions, the
members of each of which are approximately equal, when measured by any
standard, because the classification is imperfect. If we make it more
refined, the subdivisions must be subdivided again. We are in a dilemma:
we cannot describe mankind at all without categories, and if we go on to
make our categories more and more exact, each one of them would at last
contain only one person. Two things result which are practically
important, and which furnish us with scientific concepts which we can
employ in further study: (1) The classification gives us the notion of
the relative position of one, or a subdivision, in the entire group.
This is the sense of "class."[70] (2) The characteristic differences
furnish the notion of individuality and personality. The concept of a
race, as the term is now used, is that of a group clustered around a
mean with respect to some characteristic, and great confusion in the use
of the word "race" arises from the attempt to define races by their
boundaries, when we really think of them by the mean or mode, e.g. as to
skin color. The coherence, unity, and solidarity of a genetic group is
a very striking fact. It seems to conceal a play of mystic forces. It
is, in fact, no more mysterious than the run of dice. The propositions
about it would all become, in the last analysis, identical propositions;
e.g. it is most probable that we shall meet with the thing which is
present in the greatest number; or, it is most probable that the most
probable thing will happen. In the middle of the nineteenth century,
when attention was first called to the solidarity and internal
correlations of groups, especially if they were large and genetic, it
was believed that occult and far-reaching laws had been discovered. That
opinion has long been abandoned. If there are four dice in a box, each
having from one to six dots on its faces, the chance of throwing four
sixes is just the same as that of throwing four ones. The mean of the
sums of the dots which may fall uppermost is fourteen, which can be
produced by one hundred and forty-six throws. Suppose that the
components of social value are four,--intellectual, moral, physical,
economic,--represented by the four dice, and that the degrees are
represented by the dots. We should get four sixes once in twelve hundred
and ninety-six throws. Of the one hundred and forty-six throws which
give the mean fourteen, seventy-two show one six up. That might be a
Hercules fit only for a dime museum. Seventy-eight of the combinations
are inharmonious, but have one strong element.[71] In societal matters
it is by no means indifferent whether the equal sums of societal value
are made up of very unequal, or of harmonious, components. So in a group
of a million persons the chance of a great genius, who would stand alone
towards _X_ is just the same as that of an utter idiot who would stand
alone towards _x_, and the reason why the number at the mode is so great
is that the societal value is the sum of components, of which many sums
may be equal, although the components are very unequal. Two strata at
equal distances above and below _O_ are equal in number, so far as their
useful powers and resistances go, but education introduces a new
component which destroys their equality and forces a redistribution.
Galton[72] suggests that, if people who would when adults fall in
classes _V_, _W_, or _X_ in our diagram could be recognized in infancy,
and could be bought for money, it would be a great bargain for a nation,
England for instance, to buy them for much money and rear them as
Englishmen. Farr estimated the baby of an agricultural laborer as worth
£5, capital value. A baby who could be reared to take a place in the
class _X_ would have a capital value of thousands of pounds. The capital
value would be like that of land of different degrees of natural
advantage, but none of it yet exploited.
+52. The masses and the mores.+ In connection with the mores the masses
are of very great importance. The historical or selected classes are
those which, in history, have controlled the activities and policy of
generations. They have been differentiated at one time by one standard,
at another time by another. The position which they held by inheritance
from early society has given them prestige and authority. Merit and
societal value, according to the standards of their time, have entered
into their status only slightly and incidentally. Those classes have had
their own mores. They had the power to regulate their lives to some
extent according to their own choice, a power which modern civilized men
eagerly desire and strive for primarily by the acquisition of wealth.
The historical classes have, therefore, selected purposes, and have
invented ways of fulfilling them. Their ways have been imitated by the
masses. The classes have led the way in luxury, frivolity, and vice, and
also in refinement, culture, and the art of living. They have introduced
variation. The masses are not large classes at the base of a social
pyramid; they are the core of the society. They are conservative. They
accept life as they find it, and live on by tradition and habit. In
other words, the great mass of any society lives a purely instinctive
life just like animals. We must not be misled by the conservatism of
castes and aristocracies, who resist change of customs and institutions
by virtue of which they hold social power. The conservatism of the
masses is of a different kind. It is not produced by interests, but it
is instinctive. It is due to inertia. Change would make new effort
necessary to win routine and habit. It is therefore irksome. The masses,
moreover, have not the power to reach out after "improvements," or to
plan steps of change by which needs might be better satisfied. The mores
of any society, at a period, may be characterized by the promptness or
reluctance of the masses to imitate the ways of the classes. It is a
question of the first importance for the historian whether the mores of
the historical classes of which he finds evidence in documentary remains
penetrated the masses or not. The masses are the real bearers of the
mores of the society. They carry tradition. The folkways are their ways.
They accept influence or leadership, and they imitate, but they do so as
they see fit, being controlled by their notions and tastes previously
acquired. They may accept standards of character and action from the
classes, or from foreigners, or from literature, or from a new religion,
but whatever they take up they assimilate and make it a part of their
own mores, which they then transmit by tradition, defend in its
integrity, and refuse to discard again. Consequently the writings of the
literary class may not represent the faiths, notions, tastes, standards,
etc., of the masses at all. The literature of the first Christian
centuries shows us scarcely anything of the mores of the time, as they
existed in the faith and practice of the masses. Every group takes out
of a new religion which is offered to it just what it can assimilate
with its own traditional mores. Christianity was a very different thing
amongst Jews, Egyptians, Greeks, Germans, and Slavs. It would be a great
mistake to suppose that any people ever accepted and held philosophical
or religious teaching as it was offered to them, and as we find it
recorded in the books of the teachers. The mores of the masses admit of
no such sudden and massive modification by doctrinal teaching. The
process of assimilation is slow, and it is attended by modifying
influences at every stage. What the classes adopt, be it good or ill,
may be found pervading the mass after generations, but it will appear as
a resultant of all the vicissitudes of the folkways in the interval. "It
was the most frightful feature of the corruption of ancient Rome, that
it extended through every class in the community."[73] "As in the
Renaissance, so now [in the Catholic reaction] vice trickled downward
from above, infiltrating the mass of the people with its virus."[74] It
is the classes who produce variation; it is the masses who carry forward
the traditional mores.
+53. Fallacies about the masses and classes.+ It is a fallacy to infer
that the masses have some occult wisdom or inspiration by virtue of
which they select what is wise, right, and good from what the classes
offer. There is, also, no device by which it is possible to obtain from
the masses, in advance or on demand, a judgment on any proposed changes
or innovations. The masses are not an oracle. If any answers can be
obtained on the problems of life, such answers will come rather from the
classes. The two sections of society are such that they may coöperate
with advantage to the good of all. Neither one has a right or a better
claim to rule the society.
+54. Action of the masses on thoughts.+ Fifty years ago Darwin put some
knowledge into the common stock. The peasants and artisans of his time
did nothing of the kind. What the masses do with thoughts is that they
rub them down into counters just as they take coins from the mint and
smooth them down by wear until they are only disks of metal. The masses
understand, for instance, that Darwin said that "men are descended from
monkeys." Only summary and glib propositions of that kind can ever get
currency. The learned men are all the time trying to recoin them and
give them at least partial reality. Ruskin set afloat some notions of
art criticism, which have penetrated all our cultivated classes. They
are not lost, but see what has become of them in fifty years by
popularization. A little later a new gospel of furniture and house
decoration was published. The masses have absorbed it. See what they
have made of it. Eastlake wanted no machine work, but machinery was not
to be defeated. It can make lopsided things if those are the fashion,
and it can make all the construction show if Eastlake has got the notion
into the crowd that the pegs ought to be on the outside. Thinking and
understanding are too hard work. If any one wants to blame the masses
let him turn to his own case. He will find that he thinks about and
understands only his own intellectual pursuit. He could not give the
effort to every other department of knowledge. In other matters he is
one of the masses and does as they do. He uses routine, set formulæ,
current phrases, caught up from magazines and newspapers of the better
class.
+55. Organization of the masses.+ Masses of men who are on a substantial
equality with each other never can be anything but hopeless savages. The
eighteenth-century notion that men in a state of nature were all equal
is wrong-side up. Men who were equal would be in a state of nature such
as was imagined. They could not form a society. They would be forced to
scatter and wander, at most two or three together. They never could
advance in the arts of civilization. The popular belief that out of some
such horde there has come by the spontaneous development of innate
forces all the civilization which we possess is entirely unfounded.
Masses of men who are approximately equal are in time exterminated or
enslaved. Only when enslaved or subjugated are some of them carried up
with their conquerors by organization and discipline (negroes and
Indians amongst us). A horde in which the only differences are those of
age and sex is not capable of maintaining existence. It fights because
only by conquering or being conquered can it endure. When it is
subjugated and disciplined it consists of workers to belabor the ground
for others, or tax payers to fill a treasury from which others may
spend, or food for gunpowder, or voting material for demagogues. It is
an object of exploitation. At one moment, in spite of its aggregate
muscle, it is helpless and imbecile; the next moment it is swept away
into folly and mischief by a suggestion or an impulse. Organization,
leadership, and discipline are indispensable to any beneficial action by
masses of men. If we ignore this fact, we see the machine and the boss
evolved out of the situation which we create.
+56. Institutions of civil liberty.+ Institutions also must be produced
which will hold the activities of society in channels of order,
deliberation, peace, regulated antagonism of interests, and justice,
according to the mores of the time. These institutions put an end to
exploitation and bring interests into harmony under civil liberty. But
where do the institutions come from? The masses have never made them.
They are produced out of the mores by the selection of the leading men
and classes who get control of the collective power of the society and
direct it to the activities which will (as they think) serve the
interests which they regard as most important. If changes in life
conditions occur, the interests to be served change. Great inventions
and discoveries, the opening of new continents, new methods of
agriculture and commerce, the introduction of money and financial
devices, improved state organization, increase the economic power of the
society and the force at the disposal of the state. Industrial interests
displace military and monarchical interests as the ones which the state
chiefly aims to serve, not because of any tide of "progress," but
because industrialism gives greater and more varied satisfactions to the
rulers. The increase of _power_ is the primary condition. The classes
strive with each other for the new power. Peace is necessary, for
without peace none of them can enjoy power. Compromise, adjustment of
interests, antagonistic coöperation (sec. 21), harmony, are produced,
and institutions are the regulative processes and apparatus by which
warfare is replaced by system. The historical process has been full of
error, folly, selfishness, violence, and craft. It is so still. The
point which is now important for us is that the masses have never
carried on the struggles and processes by which civilized society has
been made into an arena, within which exploitation of man by man is to
some extent repressed, and where individual self-realization has a large
scope, under the institutions of civil liberty. It is the historical and
selected classes which have done this, often enough without intending or
foreseeing the results of actions which they inaugurated with quite
other, perhaps selfish, class purposes in view. A society is a whole
made up of parts. All the parts have a legitimate share in the acts and
sufferings of the society. All the parts contribute to the life and work
of the society. We inherit all the consequences of all their acts. Some
of the consequences are good and some are bad. It is utterly impossible
to name the classes which have done useful work and made beneficial
sacrifices only, and the other classes which have been idle burdens and
mischief makers only. All that has been done has been done by all. It is
evident that no other view than this can be rational and true, for one
reason because the will and intention of the men of to-day in what they
do has so little to do with the consequences to-morrow of what they do.
The notion that religion, or marriage, or property, or monarchy, as we
have inherited them, can be proved evil, or worthy of condemnation and
contempt on account of the selfishness and violence interwoven with
their history, is one of the idlest of all the vagaries of the social
philosophers.
+57. The common man.+ Every civilized society has to carry below the
lowest sections of the masses a dead weight of ignorance, poverty,
crime, and disease. Every such society has, in the great central section
of the masses, a great body which is neutral in all the policy of
society. It lives by routine and tradition. It is not brutal, but it is
shallow, narrow-minded, and prejudiced. Nevertheless it is harmless. It
lacks initiative and cannot give an impulse for good or bad. It produces
few criminals. It can sometimes be moved by appeals to its fixed ideas
and prejudices. It is affected in its mores by contagion from the
classes above it. The work of "popularization" consists in bringing
about this contagion. The middle section is formed around the
mathematical mean of the society, or around the mathematical mode, if
the distribution of the subdivisions is not symmetrical. The man on the
mode is the "common man," the "average man," or the "man in the street."
Between him and the democratic political institutions--the pulpit, the
newspapers, and the public library--there is a constant reaction by
which mores are modified and preserved. The aim of all the institutions
and literature in a modern state is to please him. His aim is to get out
of them what suits him. The yellow newspapers thrive and displace all
the others because he likes them. The trashy novels pay well because his
wife and daughters like them. The advertisements in the popular
magazines are addressed to him. They show what he wants. The "funny
items" are adjusted to his sense of humor. Hence all these things are
symptoms. They show what he "believes in," and they strengthen his
prejudices. If all art, literature, legislation, and political power are
to be cast at his feet, it makes some difference who and what he is. His
section of society determines the mores of the whole.
+58. "The people." Popular impulses.+ In a democratic state the great
middle section would rule if it was organized independently of the rest.
It is that section which constitutes "the people" in the special
technical sense in which that expression is current in political use. It
is to it that the Jeffersonian doctrines about the "wisdom" of the
people would apply. That section, however, is never organized
independently; that is to say, "the people" never exist as a body
exercising political power. The middle section of a group may be
enthused by an impulse which is adapted to its ways and notions. It
clings to persons, loves anecdotes, is fond of light emotions, and
prides itself on its morality. If a man wins popularity in that section,
the impulse which his name can give to it may be irresistible
(Jefferson, Jackson). The middle section is greatly affected by
symbolism. "The flag" can be developed into a fetich. A cult can be
nourished around it. Group vanity is very strong in it. Patriotic
emotions and faiths are its favorite psychological exercises, if the
conjuncture is favorable and the material well-being is high. When the
middle section is stirred by any spontaneous and consentaneous impulses
which arise from its nature and ways, it may produce incredible results
with only a minimum of organization. "A little prosperity and some
ideas, as Aristotle saw, are the ferment which sets the masses in
ebullition. This offers an opportunity. A beginning is made. The further
development is unavoidable."[75]
+59. Agitation.+ Every impulse given to the masses is, in its nature,
spasmodic and transitory. No systematic enterprise to enlighten the
masses ever can be carried out. Campaigns of education contain a
fallacy. Education takes time. It cannot be treated as subsidiary for a
lifetime and then be made the chief business for six months with the
desired result. A campaign of education is undemocratic. It implies that
some one is teacher and somebody else pupil. It can only result in the
elucidation of popular interests and the firmer establishment of popular
prejudice. On the other hand, an agitation which appeals skillfully to
pet notions and to latent fanaticism may stampede the masses. The Middle
Ages furnished a number of cases. The Mahdis who have arisen in
Mohammedan Africa, and other Moslem prophets, have produced wonderful
phenomena of this kind. The silver agitation was begun, in 1878, by a
systematic effort of three or four newspapers in the middle West,
addressed to currency notions which the greenback proposition had
popularized. What is the limit to the possibilities of fanaticism and
frenzy which might be produced in any society by agitation skillfully
addressed to the fallacies and passions of the masses? The answer lies
in the mores, which determine the degree of reserved common sense, and
the habit of observing measure and method, to which the masses have been
accustomed. It follows that popular agitation is a desperate and
doubtful method. The masses, as the great popular jury which, at last,
by adoption or rejection, decides the fate of all proposed changes in
the mores, needs stability and moderation. Popular agitation introduces
into the masses initiative and creative functions which destroy its
judgment and call for quite other qualities.
+60. The ruling element in the masses.+ The masses are liable to
controlling influences from elements which they contain. When crises
arise in a democratic state attention is concentrated on the most
numerous strata nearest to _MN_ (see the diagram, p. 40), but they
rarely possess self-determination unless the question at issue appeals
directly to popular interest or popular vanity. Moreover, those strata
cannot rule unless they combine with those next above and below. So the
critical question always is, in regard to the masses _PQRS_, which parts
of it will move the whole of it. Generally the question is, more
specifically, What is the character of the strata above a line through
_A_ or _B_, and what is their relation to the rest of _PQRS_? If the
upper part of the section _PQRS_ consists of employers and the lower
part of employés, and if they hate and fight each other, coherence and
sympathy in the society will cease, the mores will be characterized by
discord, passion, and quarrelsomeness, and political crises will arise
which may reach any degree of severity, for the political parties will
soon coincide with the class sections. The upper part of _PQRS_ is made
up of the strata which possess comfort without luxury, but also culture,
intelligence, and the best family mores. They are generally disciplined
classes, with strong moral sense, public spirit, and sense of
responsibility. If we are not in error as to the movement in civilized
states of the present time from the lower into the upper strata of
_PQRS_, by virtue of ambition and education, then it follows that the
upper strata are being constantly reënforced by all the elements in the
society which have societal value, after those elements have been
developed and disciplined by labor and self-denial. The share which the
upper strata of the masses have in determining the policy of the masses
is therefore often decisive of public welfare. On the other hand, it is
when the masses are controlled by the strata next above _RS_ that there
is most violent impulsiveness in societal movements. The movements and
policies which are characterized as revolutionary have their rise in
these classes, although, in other cases, these classes also adhere most
stubbornly to popular traditions in spite of reason and fact. Trade
unionism is, at the present time, a social philosophy and a programme of
policy which has its origin in the sections of the masses next above
_RS_.
The French Revolution began with the highest strata of the masses, and
the control of it passed on down from one to another of the lower
strata, until it reached the lowest,--the mob gathered in the slums of a
great city.
+61. The mores and institutions.+ Institutions and laws are produced out
of mores. An institution consists of a concept (idea, notion, doctrine,
interest) and a structure. The structure is a framework, or apparatus,
or perhaps only a number of functionaries set to coöperate in prescribed
ways at a certain conjuncture. The structure holds the concept and
furnishes instrumentalities for bringing it into the world of facts and
action in a way to serve the interests of men in society. Institutions
are either crescive or enacted. They are crescive when they take shape
in the mores, growing by the instinctive efforts by which the mores are
produced. Then the efforts, through long use, become definite and
specific. Property, marriage, and religion are the most primary
institutions. They began in folkways. They became customs. They
developed into mores by the addition of some philosophy of welfare,
however crude. Then they were made more definite and specific as regards
the rules, the prescribed acts, and the apparatus to be employed. This
produced a structure and the institution was complete. Enacted
institutions are products of rational invention and intention. They
belong to high civilization. Banks are institutions of credit founded on
usages which can be traced back to barbarism. There came a time when,
guided by rational reflection on experience, men systematized and
regulated the usages which had become current, and thus created positive
institutions of credit, defined by law and sanctioned by the force of
the state. Pure enacted institutions which are strong and prosperous are
hard to find. It is too difficult to invent and create an institution,
for a purpose, out of nothing. The electoral college in the constitution
of the United States is an example. In that case the democratic mores of
the people have seized upon the device and made of it something quite
different from what the inventors planned. All institutions have come
out of mores, although the rational element in them is sometimes so
large that their origin in the mores is not to be ascertained except by
an historical investigation (legislatures, courts, juries, joint stock
companies, the stock exchange). Property, marriage, and religion are
still almost entirely in the mores. Amongst nature men any man might
capture and hold a woman at any time, if he could. He did it by superior
force which was its own supreme justification. But his act brought his
group and her group into war, and produced harm to his comrades. They
forbade capture, or set conditions for it. Beyond the limits, the
individual might still use force, but his comrades were no longer
responsible. The glory to him, if he succeeded, might be all the
greater. His control over his captive was absolute. Within the
prescribed conditions, "capture" became technical and institutional, and
rights grew out of it. The woman had a status which was defined by
custom, and was very different from the status of a real captive.
Marriage was the institutional relation, in the society and under its
sanction, of a woman to a man, where the woman had been obtained in the
prescribed way. She was then a "wife." What her rights and duties were
was defined by the mores, as they are to-day in all civilized society.
+62. Laws.+ Acts of legislation come out of the mores. In low
civilization all societal regulations are customs and taboos, the origin
of which is unknown. Positive laws are impossible until the stage of
verification, reflection, and criticism is reached. Until that point is
reached there is only customary law, or common law. The customary law
may be codified and systematized with respect to some philosophical
principles, and yet remain customary. The codes of Manu and Justinian
are examples. Enactment is not possible until reverence for ancestors
has been so much weakened that it is no longer thought wrong to
interfere with traditional customs by positive enactment. Even then
there is reluctance to make enactments, and there is a stage of
transition during which traditional customs are extended by
interpretation to cover new cases and to prevent evils. Legislation,
however, has to seek standing ground on the existing mores, and it soon
becomes apparent that legislation, to be strong, must be consistent with
the mores.[76] Things which have been in the mores are put under police
regulation and later under positive law. It is sometimes said that
"public opinion" must ratify and approve police regulations, but this
statement rests on an imperfect analysis. The regulations must conform
to the mores, so that the public will not think them too lax or too
strict. The mores of our urban and rural populations are not the same;
consequently legislation about intoxicants which is made by one of these
sections of the population does not succeed when applied to the other.
The regulation of drinking places, gambling places, and disorderly
houses has passed through the above-mentioned stages. It is always a
question of expediency whether to leave a subject under the mores, or to
make a police regulation for it, or to put it into the criminal law.
Betting, horse racing, dangerous sports, electric cars, and vehicles are
cases now of things which seem to be passing under positive enactment
and out of the unformulated control of the mores. When an enactment is
made there is a sacrifice of the elasticity and automatic
self-adaptation of custom, but an enactment is specific and is provided
with sanctions. Enactments come into use when conscious purposes are
formed, and it is believed that specific devices can be framed by which
to realize such purposes in the society. Then also prohibitions take the
place of taboos, and punishments are planned to be deterrent rather than
revengeful. The mores of different societies, or of different ages, are
characterized by greater or less readiness and confidence in regard to
the use of positive enactments for the realization of societal purposes.
+63. How laws and institutions differ from mores.+ When folkways have
become institutions or laws they have changed their character and are to
be distinguished from the mores. The element of sentiment and faith
inheres in the mores. Laws and institutions have a rational and
practical character, and are more mechanical and utilitarian. The great
difference is that institutions and laws have a positive character,
while mores are unformulated and undefined. There is a philosophy
implicit in the folkways; when it is made explicit it becomes technical
philosophy. Objectively regarded, the mores are the customs which
actually conduce to welfare under existing life conditions. Acts under
the laws and institutions are conscious and voluntary; under the
folkways they are always unconscious and involuntary, so that they have
the character of natural necessity. Educated reflection and skepticism
can disturb this spontaneous relation. The laws, being positive
prescriptions, supersede the mores so far as they are adopted. It
follows that the mores come into operation where laws and tribunals
fail. The mores cover the great field of common life where there are no
laws or police regulations. They cover an immense and undefined domain,
and they break the way in new domains, not yet controlled at all. The
mores, therefore, build up new laws and police regulations in time.
+64. Difference between mores and some cognate things.+ Products of
intentional investigation or of rational and conscious reflection,
projects formally adopted by voluntary associations, rational methods
consciously selected, injunctions and prohibitions by authority, and all
specific conventional arrangements are not in the mores. They are
differentiated by the rational and conscious element in them. We may
also make a distinction between usages and mores. Usages are folkways
which contain no principle of welfare, but serve convenience so long as
all know what they are expected to do. For instance, Orientals, to show
respect, cover the head and uncover the feet; Occidentals do the
opposite. There is no inherent and necessary connection between respect
and either usage, but it is an advantage that there should be a usage
and that all should know and observe it. One way is as good as another,
if it is understood and established. The folkways as to public decency
belong to the mores, because they have real connection with welfare
which determines the only tenor which they can have. The folkways about
propriety and modesty are sometimes purely conventional and sometimes
inherently real. Fashions, fads, affectations, poses, ideals, manias,
popular delusions, follies, and vices must be included in the mores.
They have characteral qualities and characteral effect. However
frivolous or foolish they may appear to people of another age, they have
the form of attempts to live well, to satisfy some interest, or to win
some good. The ways of advertisers who exaggerate, use tricks to win
attention, and appeal to popular weakness and folly; the ways of
journalism; electioneering devices; oratorical and dithyrambic
extravagances in politics; current methods of humbug and
sensationalism,--are not properly part of the mores but symptoms of
them. They are not products of the concurrent and coöperative effort of
all members of the society to live well. They are devices made with
conscious ingenuity to exert suggestion on the minds of others. The
mores are rather the underlying facts in regard to the faiths, notions,
tastes, desires, etc., of that society at that time, to which all these
modes of action appeal and of whose existence they are evidence.
+65. What is goodness or badness of the mores.+ It is most important to
notice that, for the people of a time and place, their own mores are
always good, or rather that for them there can be no question of the
goodness or badness of their mores. The reason is because the standards
of good and right are in the mores. If the life conditions change, the
traditional folkways may produce pain and loss, or fail to produce the
same good as formerly. Then the loss of comfort and ease brings doubt
into the judgment of welfare (causing doubt of the pleasure of the gods,
or of war power, or of health), and thus disturbs the unconscious
philosophy of the mores. Then a later time will pass judgment on the
mores. Another society may also pass judgment on the mores. In our
literary and historical study of the mores we want to get from them
their educational value, which consists in the stimulus or warning as to
what is, in its effects, societally good or bad. This may lead us to
reject or neglect a phenomenon like infanticide, slavery, or witchcraft,
as an old "abuse" and "evil," or to pass by the crusades as a folly
which cannot recur. Such a course would be a great error. Everything in
the mores of a time and place must be regarded as justified with regard
to that time and place. "Good" mores are those which are well adapted to
the situation. "Bad" mores are those which are not so adapted. The mores
are not so stereotyped and changeless as might appear, because they are
forever moving towards more complete adaptation to conditions and
interests, and also towards more complete adjustment to each other.
People in mass have never made or kept up a custom in order to hurt
their own interests. They have made innumerable errors as to what their
interests were and how to satisfy them, but they have always aimed to
serve their interests as well as they could. This gives the standpoint
for the student of the mores. All things in them come before him on the
same plane. They all bring instruction and warning. They all have the
same relation to power and welfare. The mistakes in them are component
parts of them. We do not study them in order to approve some of them
and condemn others. They are all equally worthy of attention from the
fact that they existed and were used. The chief object of study in them
is their adjustment to interests, their relation to welfare, and their
coördination in a harmonious system of life policy. For the men of the
time there are no "bad" mores. What is traditional and current is the
standard of what ought to be. The masses never raise any question about
such things. If a few raise doubts and questions, this proves that the
folkways have already begun to lose firmness and the regulative element
in the mores has begun to lose authority. This indicates that the
folkways are on their way to a new adjustment. The extreme of folly,
wickedness, and absurdity in the mores is witch persecutions, but the
best men of the seventeenth century had no doubt that witches existed,
and that they ought to be burned. The religion, statecraft,
jurisprudence, philosophy, and social system of that age all contributed
to maintain that belief. It was rather a culmination than a
contradiction of the current faiths and convictions, just as the dogma
that all men are equal and that one ought to have as much political
power in the state as another was the culmination of the political
dogmatism and social philosophy of the nineteenth century. Hence our
judgments of the good or evil consequences of folkways are to be kept
separate from our study of the historical phenomena of them, and of
their strength and the reasons for it. The judgments have their place in
plans and doctrines for the future, not in a retrospect.
+66. More exact definition of the mores.+ We may now formulate a more
complete definition of the mores. They are the ways of doing things
which are current in a society to satisfy human needs and desires,
together with the faiths, notions, codes, and standards of well living
which inhere in those ways, having a genetic connection with them. By
virtue of the latter element the mores are traits in the specific
character (ethos) of a society or a period. They pervade and control the
ways of thinking in all the exigencies of life, returning from the world
of abstractions to the world of action, to give guidance and to win
revivification. "The mores [_Sitten_] are, before any beginning of
reflection, the regulators of the political, social, and religious
behavior of the individual. Conscious reflection is the worst enemy of
the mores, because mores begin unconsciously and pursue unconscious
purposes, which are recognized by reflection often only after long and
circuitous processes, and because their expediency often depends on the
assumption that they will have general acceptance and currency,
uninterfered with by reflection."[77] "The mores are usage in any group,
in so far as it, on the one hand, is not the expression or fulfillment
of an absolute natural necessity [e.g. eating or sleeping], and, on the
other hand, is independent of the arbitrary will of the individual, and
is generally accepted as good and proper, appropriate and worthy."[78]
+67. Ritual.+ The process by which mores are developed and established
is ritual. Ritual is so foreign to our mores that we do not recognize
its power. In primitive society it is the prevailing method of activity,
and primitive religion is entirely a matter of ritual. Ritual is the
perfect form of drill and of the regulated habit which comes from drill.
Acts which are ordained by authority and are repeated mechanically
without intelligence run into ritual. If infants and children are
subjected to ritual they never escape from its effects through life.
Galton[79] says that he was, in early youth, in contact with the
Mohammedan ritual idea that the left hand is less worthy than the right,
and that he never overcame it. We see the effect of ritual in breeding,
courtesy, politeness, and all forms of prescribed behavior. Etiquette is
social ritual. Ritual is not easy compliance with usage; it is strict
compliance with detailed and punctilious rule. It admits of no exception
or deviation. The stricter the discipline, the greater the power of
ritual over action and character. In the training of animals and the
education of children it is the perfection, inevitableness,
invariableness, and relentlessness of routine which tells. They should
never experience any exception or irregularity. Ritual is connected with
words, gestures, symbols, and signs. Associations result, and, upon a
repetition of the signal, the act is repeated, whether the will assents
or not. Association and habit account for the phenomena. Ritual gains
further strength when it is rhythmical, and is connected with music,
verse, or other rhythmical arts. Acts are ritually repeated at the
recurrence of the rhythmical points. The alternation of night and day
produces rhythms of waking and sleeping, of labor and rest, for great
numbers at the same time, in their struggle for existence. The seasons
also produce rhythms in work. Ritual may embody an idea of utility,
expediency, or welfare, but it always tends to become perfunctory, and
the idea is only subconscious. There is ritual in primitive
therapeutics, and it was not eliminated until very recent times. The
patient was directed, not only to apply remedies, but also to perform
rites. The rites introduced mystic elements. This illustrates the
connection of ritual with notions of magical effects produced by rites.
All ritual is ceremonious and solemn. It tends to become sacred, or to
make sacred the subject-matter with which it is connected. Therefore, in
primitive society, it is by ritual that sentiments of awe, deference to
authority, submission to tradition, and disciplinary coöperation are
inculcated. Ritual operates a constant suggestion, and the suggestion is
at once put in operation in acts. Ritual, therefore, suggests
sentiments, but it never inculcates doctrines. Ritual is strongest when
it is most perfunctory and excites no thought. By familiarity with
ritual any doctrinal reference which it once had is lost by familiarity,
but the habits persist. Primitive religion is ritualistic, not because
religion makes ritual, but because ritual makes religion. Ritual is
something to be done, not something to be thought or felt. Men can
always perform the prescribed act, although they cannot always think or
feel prescribed thoughts or emotions. The acts may bring up again, by
association, states of the mind and sentiments which have been connected
with them, especially in childhood, when the fantasy was easily affected
by rites, music, singing, dramas, etc. No creed, no moral code, and no
scientific demonstration can ever win the same hold upon men and women
as habits of action, with associated sentiments and states of mind,
drilled in from childhood. Mohammedanism shows the power of ritual. Any
occupation is interrupted for the prayers and prescribed genuflections.
The Brahmins also observe an elaborate daily ritual. They devote to it
two hours in the morning, two in the evening, and one at midday.[80]
Monks and nuns have won the extreme satisfaction of religious sentiment
from the unbroken habit of repeated ritual, with undisturbed opportunity
to develop the emotional effects of it.
+68. The ritual of the mores.+ The mores are social ritual in which we
all participate unconsciously. The current habits as to hours of labor,
meal hours, family life, the social intercourse of the sexes, propriety,
amusements, travel, holidays, education, the use of periodicals and
libraries, and innumerable other details of life fall under this ritual.
Each does as everybody does. For the great mass of mankind as to all
things, and for all of us for a great many things, the rule to do as all
do suffices. We are led by suggestion and association to believe that
there must be wisdom and utility in what all do. The great mass of the
folkways give us discipline and the support of routine and habit. If we
had to form judgments as to all these cases before we could act in them,
and were forced always to act rationally, the burden would be
unendurable. Beneficent use and wont save us this trouble.
+69. Group interests and policy.+ Groups select, consciously and
unconsciously, standards of group well living. They plan group careers,
and adopt purposes through which they hope to attain to group
self-realization. The historical classes adopt the decisions which
constitute these group plans and acts, and they impose them on the
group. The Greeks were enthused at one time by a national purpose to
destroy Troy, at another time by a national necessity to ward off
Persian conquest. The Romans conceived of their rivalry with Carthage as
a struggle from which only one state could survive. Spain, through an
effort to overthrow the political power of the Moors in the peninsula
and to make it all Christian, was educated up to a national purpose to
make Spain a pure "Christian" state, in the dogmatic and ecclesiastical
sense of the word. Moors and Jews were expelled at great cost and loss.
Germany and Italy cherished for generations a national hope and desire
to become unified states. Some attempts to formulate or interpret the
Monroe doctrine would make it a national policy and programme for the
United States. In lower civilization group interests and purposes are
less definite. We must believe that barbarous tribes often form notions
of their group interests, and adopt group policies, especially in their
relations with neighboring groups. The Iroquois, after forming their
confederation, made war on neighboring tribes in order either to
subjugate them or to force them to come into the peace pact. Pontiac and
Tecumseh united the red men in a race effort to drive the whites out of
North America.
+70. Group interests and folkways.+ Whenever a group has a group purpose
that purpose produces group interests, and those interests overrule
individual interests in the development of folkways. A group might adopt
a pacific and industrial purpose, but historical cases of this kind are
very few. It used to be asserted that the United States had as its great
social purpose to create a social environment which should favor that
development of the illiterate and unskilled classes into an independent
status for which the economic conditions of a new country give
opportunity, and it was asserted that nothing could cause a variation
from this policy, which was said to be secured in the political
institutions and political ideas of the people. Within a few years the
United States has been affected by an ambition to be a world power. (A
world power is a state which expects to have a share in the settlement
of every clash of interests and collision of state policies which occurs
anywhere on the globe.) There is no reason to wonder at this action of a
democracy, for a democracy is sure to resent any suggestion that it is
limited in its functions, as compared with other political forms. At the
same time that the United States has moved towards the character of a
world power it has become militant. Other states in the past which have
had group purposes have been militant. Even when they arrived at
commerce and industry they have pursued policies which involved them in
war (Venice, Hansa, Holland). Since the group interests override the
individual interests, the selection and determination of group purposes
is a function of the greatest importance and an act of the greatest
effect on individual welfare. The interests of the society or nation
furnish an easy phrase, but such phrases are to be regarded with
suspicion. Such interests are apt to be the interests of a ruling clique
which the rest are to be compelled to serve. On the other hand, a really
great and intelligent group purpose, founded on correct knowledge and
really sound judgment, can infuse into the mores a vigor and consistent
character which will reach every individual with educative effect. The
essential condition is that the group purpose shall be "founded on
correct knowledge and really sound judgment." The interests must be
real, and they must be interests of the whole, and the judgment as to
means of satisfying them must be correct.
+71. Force in the folkways.+ Here we notice also the intervention of
force. There is always a large element of force in the folkways. It
constitutes another modification of the theory of the folkways as
expedient devices, developed in experience, to meet the exigencies of
life. The organization of society under chiefs and medicine men greatly
increased the power of the society to serve its own interests. The same
is true of higher political organizations. If Gian Galeazzo Visconti or
Cesare Borgia could have united Italy into a despotic state, it is an
admissible opinion that the history of the peninsula in the following
four or five hundred years would have been happy and prosperous, and
that, at the present time, it would have had the same political system
which it has now. However, chiefs, kings, priests, warriors, statesmen,
and other functionaries have put their own interests in the place of
group interests, and have used the authority they possessed to force the
societal organization to work and fight for their interests. The force
is that of the society itself. It is directed by the ruling class or
persons. The force enters into the mores and becomes a component in
them. Despotism is in the mores of negro tribes, and of all Mohammedan
peoples. There is an element of force in all forms of property,
marriage, and religion. Slavery, however, is the grandest case of force
in the mores, employed to make some serve the interests of others, in
the societal organization. The historical classes, having selected the
group purposes and decided the group policy, use the force of the
society itself to coerce all to acquiesce and to work and fight in the
determined way without regard to their individual interests. This they
do by means of discipline and ritual. In different kinds of mores the
force is screened by different devices. It is always present, and
brutal, cruel force has entered largely into the development of all our
mores, even those which we think most noble and excellent.
+72. Might and right.+ Modern civilized states of the best form are
often called jural states because the concept of rights enters so
largely into all their constitutions and regulations. Our political
philosophy centers around that concept, and all our social discussions
fall into the form of propositions and disputes about rights. The
history of the dogma of rights has been such that rights have been
believed to be self-evident and self-existent, and as having prevailed
especially in primitive society. Rights are also regarded as the
opposite of force. These notions only prove the antagonism between our
mores and those of earlier generations. In fact, it is a characteristic
of our mores that the form of our thinking about all points of political
philosophy is set for us by the concept of rights. Nothing but might has
ever made right, and if we include in might (as we ought to) elections
and the decisions of courts, nothing but might makes right now. We must
distinguish between the anterior and the posterior view of the matter in
question. If we are about to take some action, and are debating the
right of it, the might which can be brought to support one view of it
has nothing to do with the right of it. If a thing has been done and is
established by force (that is, no force can reverse it), it is right in
the only sense we know, and rights will follow from it which are not
vitiated at all by the force in it. There would be no security at all
for rights if this were not so. We find men and parties protesting,
declaiming, complaining of what is done, and which they say is not
"right," but only force. An election decides that those shall have power
who will execute an act of policy. The defeated party denounces the
wrong and wickedness of the act. It is done. It may be a war, a
conquest, a spoliation; every one must help to do it by paying taxes and
doing military service or other duty which may be demanded of him. The
decision of a lawsuit leaves one party protesting and complaining. He
always speaks of "right" and "rights." He is forced to acquiesce. The
result is right in the only sense which is real and true. It is more to
the purpose to note that an indefinite series of consequences follow,
and that they create or condition rights which are real and just. Many
persons now argue against property that it began in force and therefore
has no existence in right and justice. They might say the same of
marriage or religion. Some do say the same of the state. The war of the
United States with Mexico in 1845 is now generally regarded as
unjustified. That cannot affect the rights of all kinds which have been
contracted in the territory then ceded by Mexico or under the status
created on the land obtained by the treaty of peace with that country.
The whole history of mankind is a series of acts which are open to
doubt, dispute, and criticism, as to their right and justice, but all
subsequent history has been forced to take up the consequences of those
acts and go on. The disputants about "rights" often lose sight of the
fact that the world has to go on day by day and dispute must end. It
always ends in force. The end always leaves some complaining in terms of
right and rights. They are overborne by force of some kind. Therefore
might has made all the right which ever has existed or exists now. If it
is proposed to reverse, reform, or change anything which ever was done
because we now think that it was wrong, that is a new question and a new
case, in which the anterior view alone is in place. It is for the new
and future cases that we study historical cases and form judgments on
them which will enable us to act more wisely. If we recognize the great
extent to which force now enters into all which happens in society, we
shall cease to be shocked to learn the extent to which it has been
active in the entire history of civilization. The habit of using jural
concepts, which is now so characteristic of our mores, leads us into
vague and impossible dreams of social affairs, in which metaphysical
concepts are supposed to realize themselves, or are assumed to be real.
+73. Status in the folkways.+ If now we form a conception of the
folkways as a great mass of usages, of all degrees of importance,
covering all the interests of life, constituting an outfit of
instruction for the young, embodying a life policy, forming character,
containing a world philosophy, albeit most vague and unformulated, and
sanctioned by ghost fear so that variation is impossible, we see with
what coercive and inhibitive force the folkways have always grasped the
members of a society. The folkways create status. Membership in the
group, kin, family, neighborhood, rank, or class are cases of status.
The rights and duties of every man and woman were defined by status. No
one could choose whether he would enter into the status or not. For
instance, at puberty every one was married. What marriage meant, and
what a husband or wife was (the rights and duties of each), were fixed
by status. No one could alter the customary relations. Status, as
distinguished from institutions and contract, is a direct product of the
mores. Each case of status is a nucleus of leading interest with the
folkways which cluster around it. Status is determined by birth.
Therefore it is a help and a hindrance, but it is not liberty. In modern
times status has become unpopular and our mores have grown into the
forms of contract under liberty. The conception of status has been lost
by the masses in modern civilized states. Nevertheless we live under
status which has been defined and guaranteed by law and institutions,
and it would be a great gain to recognize and appreciate the element of
status which historically underlies the positive institutions and which
is still subject to the action of the mores. Marriage (matrimony or
wedlock) is a status. It is really controlled by the mores. The law
defines it and gives sanctions to it, but the law always expresses the
mores. A man and a woman make a contract to enter into it. The mode of
entering into it (wedding) is fixed by custom. The law only ratifies it.
No man and woman can by contract make wedlock different for themselves
from the status defined by law, so far as social rights and duties are
concerned. The same conception of marriage as a status in the mores is
injured by the intervention of the ecclesiastical and civil formalities
connected with it. An individual is born into a kin group, a tribe, a
nation, or a state, and he has a status accordingly which determines
rights and duties for him. Civil liberty must be defined in accordance
with this fact; not outside of it, or according to vague metaphysical
abstractions above it. The body of the folkways constitutes a societal
environment. Every one born into it must enter into relations of give
and take with it. He is subjected to influences from it, and it is one
of the life conditions under which he must work out his career of
self-realization. Whatever liberty may be taken to mean, it is certain
that liberty never can mean emancipation from the influence of the
societal environment, or of the mores into which one was born.
+74. Conventionalization.+ If traditional folkways are subjected to
rational or ethical examination they are no longer naïve and
unconscious. It may then be found that they are gross, absurd, or
inexpedient. They may still be preserved by conventionalization.
Conventionalization creates a set of conditions under which a thing may
be tolerated which would otherwise be disapproved and tabooed. The
special conditions may be created in fact, or they may be only a fiction
which all agree to respect and to treat as true. When children, in play,
"make believe" that something exists, or exists in a certain way, they
employ conventionalization. Special conditions are created in fact when
some fact is regarded as making the usual taboo inoperative. Such is the
case with all archaic usages which are perpetuated on account of their
antiquity, although they are not accordant with modern standards. The
language of Shakespeare and the Bible contains words which are now
tabooed. In this case, as in very many others, the conventionalization
consists in ignoring the violation of current standards of propriety.
Natural functions and toilet operations are put under conventionalization,
even in low civilization. The conventionalization consists in ignoring
breaches of the ordinary taboo. On account of accidents which may occur,
wellbred people are always ready to apply conventionalization to mishaps
of speech, dress, manner, etc. In fairy stories, fables, romances, and
dramas all are expected to comply with certain conventional understandings
without which the entertainment is impossible; for instance, when beasts
are supposed to speak. In the mythologies this kind of conventionalization
was essential. One of us, in studying mythologies, has to acquire a
knowledge of the conventional assumptions with which the people who
believed in them approached them. Modern Hindoos conventionalize the
stories of their mythology.[81] What the gods are said to have done is
put under other standards than those now applied to men. Everything in
the mythology is on a plane by itself. It follows that none of the
rational or ethical judgments are formed about the acts of the gods
which would be formed about similar acts of men, and the corruption of
morals which would be expected as a consequence of the stories and
dramas is prevented by the conventionalization. There is no deduction
from what gods do to what men may do. The Greeks of the fifth century
B.C. rationalized on their mythology and thereby destroyed it. The
mediæval church claimed to be under a conventionalization which would
prevent judgment on the church and ecclesiastics according to current
standards. Very many people heeded this conventionalization, so that
they were not scandalized by vice and crime in the church. This
intervention of conventionalization to remove cases from the usual
domain of the mores into a special field, where they can be protected
and tolerated by codes and standards modified in their favor, is of very
great importance. It accounts for many inconsistencies in the mores. In
this way there may be nakedness without indecency, and tales of adultery
without lewdness. We observe a conventionalization in regard to the
Bible, especially in regard to some of the Old Testament stories. The
theater presents numerous cases of conventionalization. The asides,
entrances and exits, and stage artifices, require that the spectators
shall concede their assent to conventionalities. The dresses of the
stage would not be tolerated elsewhere. It is by conventionalization
that the literature and pictorial representations of science avoid
collision with the mores of propriety, decency, etc. In all artistic
work there is more or less conventionalization. Uncivilized people, and
to some extent uneducated people amongst ourselves, cannot tell what a
picture represents or means because they are not used to the
conventionalities of pictorial art. The ancient Saturnalia and the
carnival have been special times of license at which the ordinary social
restrictions have been relaxed for a time by conventionalization. Our
own Fourth of July is a day of noise, risk, and annoyance, on which
things are allowed which would not be allowed at any other time. We
consent to it because "it is Fourth of July." The history of wedding
ceremonies presents very many instances of conventionalization. Jests
and buffoonery have been tolerated for the occasion. They became such an
annoyance that people revolted against them, and invented means to
escape them. Dress used in bathing, sport, the drama, or work is
protected by conventionalization. The occasion calls for a variation
from current usage, and the conventionalization, while granting
toleration, defines it also, and makes a new law for the exceptional
case. It is like taboo, and is, in fact, the form of taboo in high
civilization. Like taboo, it has two aspects,--it is either destructive
or protective. The conventionalization bars out what might be offensive
(i.e. when a thing may be done only under the conditions set by
conventionalization), or it secures toleration for what would otherwise
be forbidden. Respect, reverence, sacredness, and holiness, which are
taboos in low civilization, become conventionalities in high
civilization.
+75. Conventions indispensable.+ Conventionality is often denounced as
untrue and hypocritical. It is said that we ought to be natural.
Respectability is often sneered at because it is a sum of
conventionalities. The conventionalizations which persist are the
resultant of experiments and experience as to the devices by which to
soften and smoothen the details of life. They are indispensable. We
might as well renounce clothes as to try to abolish them.
+76. The ethos or group character.+ All that has been said in this
chapter about the folkways and the mores leads up to the idea of the
group character which the Greeks called the ethos, that is, the totality
of characteristic traits by which a group is individualized and
differentiated from others. The great nations of southeastern Asia were
long removed from familiar contact with the rest of mankind and
isolated from each other, while they were each subjected to the
discipline and invariable rule of traditional folkways which covered all
social interests except the interferences of a central political
authority, which perpetrated tyranny in its own interest. The
consequence has been that Japan, China, and India have each been molded
into a firm, stable, and well-defined unit group, having a character
strongly marked both actively and passively. The governing classes of
Japan have, within fifty years, voluntarily abandoned their traditional
mores, and have adopted those of the Occident, while it does not appear
that they have lost their inherited ethos. The case stands alone in
history and is a cause of amazement. In the war with Russia, in 1904,
this people showed what a group is capable of when it has a strong
ethos. They understand each other; they act as one man; they are capable
of discipline to the death. Our western tacticians have had rules for
the percentage of loss which troops would endure, standing under fire,
before breaking and running. The rule failed for the Japanese. They
stood to the last man. Their prowess at Port Arthur against the
strongest fortifications, and on the battlefields of Manchuria,
surpassed all record. They showed what can be done in the way of
concealing military and naval movements when every soul in the
population is in a voluntary conspiracy not to reveal anything. These
traits belong to a people which has been trained by generations of
invariable mores. It is apparently what the mediæval church wanted to
introduce in Europe, but the Japanese have got it without selfish
tyranny of the ruling persons and classes. Of course, it admits of no
personal liberty, and the consequences of introducing occidental notions
of liberty into it have yet to be seen. "The blacksmith squats at his
anvil wielding a hammer such as no western smith could use without long
practice. The carpenter pulls instead of pushing his extraordinary plane
and saw. Always the left is the right side, and the right side the
wrong. Keys must be turned, to open or close a lock, in what we are
accustomed to think the wrong direction." "The swordsman, delivering his
blow with both hands, does not pull the blade towards him in the moment
of striking, but pushes it from him. He uses it indeed, as other
Asiatics do, not on the principle of the wedge, but of the saw."[82] In
family manners the Japanese are gentle. Cruelty even to animals appears
to be unknown. "One sees farmers coming to town, trudging patiently
beside their horses or oxen, aiding their dumb companions to bear the
burden, and using no whips or goads. Drivers or pullers of carts will
turn out of their way, under the most provoking circumstances, rather
than overrun a lazy dog or a stupid chicken."[83] Etiquette is refined,
elaborate, and vigorous. Politeness has been diffused through all ranks
from ancient times.[84] "The discipline of the race was self-imposed.
The people have gradually created their own social conditions."[85]
"Demeanor was [in ancient times] most elaborately and mercilessly
regulated, not merely as to obeisances, of which there were countless
grades, varying according to sex as well as class, but even in regard to
facial expression, the manner of smiling, the conduct of the breath, the
way of sitting, standing, walking, rising."[86] "With the same merciless
exactitude which prescribed rules for dress, diet, and manner of life,
all utterance was regulated both positively and negatively, but
positively much more than negatively.... Education cultivated a system
of verbal etiquette so multiform that only the training of years could
enable any one to master it. The astonishment evoked by Japanese
sumptuary laws, particularly as inflicted upon the peasantry, is
justified, less by their general character than by their implacable
minuteness,--their ferocity of detail." "That a man's house is his
castle cannot be asserted in Japan, except in the case of some high
potentate. No ordinary person can shut his door to lock out the rest of
the world. Everybody's house must be open to visitors; to close its
gates by day would be regarded as an insult to the community, sickness
affording no excuse. Only persons in very great authority have the right
of making themselves inaccessible.... By a single serious mistake a man
may find himself suddenly placed in solitary opposition to the common
will,--isolated, and most effectively ostracized." "The events of the
[modern] reconstruction strangely illustrate the action of such
instinct [of adaptation] in the face of peril,--the readjustment of
internal relations to sudden changes of environment. The nation had
found its old political system powerless before the new conditions, and
it transformed that system. It had found its military organization
incapable of defending it, and it reconstructed that organization. It
had found its educational system useless in the presence of unforeseen
necessities, and it had replaced that system, simultaneously crippling
the power of Buddhism, which might otherwise have offered serious
opposition to the new developments required."[87] To this it must be
added that people who have had commercial and financial dealings with
Japanese report that they are untruthful and tricky in transactions of
that kind. If they cannot "reform" these traits there will be important
consequences of them in the developments of the near future.
+77. Chinese ethos.+ It is evident that we have in the Japanese a case
of an ethos, from the habits of artisans to the manners of nobles and
the military system, which is complete, consistent, authoritative, and
very different from our own. A similar picture of the Chinese might be
drawn, from which it would appear that they also have a complete and
firm ethos, which resembles in general the Japanese, but has its
individual traits and characteristic differences.[88] The ethos of the
Japanese, from the most ancient times, has been fundamentally militant.
That of the Chinese is industrial and materialistic.
+78. Hindoo ethos.+ The Hindoos, again, have a strongly marked ethos.
They have a name for it--_kharma_, which Nivedita says might be
translated "national righteousness." It "applies to that whole system of
complex action and interaction on planes moral, intellectual, economic,
industrial, political, and domestic, which we know as India, or the
national habit.... By their attitude to it, Pathan, Mogul, and
Englishman are judged, each in his turn, by the Indian peasantry."[89]
The ethos of one group always furnishes the standpoint from which it
criticises the ways of any other group.
+79. European ethos.+ We are familiar with the notion of "national
character" as applied to the nations of Europe, but these nations do not
have each an ethos. There is a European ethos, for the nations have so
influenced each other for the last two thousand years that there is a
mixed ethos which includes local variations. The European _kharma_ is
currently called Christian. In the ancient world Egypt and Sparta were
the two cases of groups with the firmest and best-defined ethos. In
modern European history the most marked case is that of Venice. In no
one of these cases did the elements of moral strength and societal
health preponderate, but the history of each showed the great stability
produced by a strong ethos. Russia has a more complete and defined ethos
than any other state in Europe, although the efforts which have been
made since Peter the Great to break down the traditions and limitations
of the national ethos, and to adopt the ethos of western Europe, have
produced weakness and confusion. It is clear what is the great power of
a strong ethos. The ethos of any group deserves close study and
criticism. It is an overruling power for good or ill. Modern scholars
have made the mistake of attributing to _race_ much which belongs to the
ethos, with a resulting controversy as to the relative importance of
nature and nurture. Others have sought a "soul of the people" and have
tried to construct a "collective psychology," repeating for groups
processes which are now abandoned for individuals. Historians, groping
for the ethos, have tried to write the history of "the people" of such
and such a state. The ethos individualizes groups and keeps them apart.
Its opposite is cosmopolitanism. It degenerates into patriotic vanity
and chauvinism. Industrialism weakens it, by extending relations of
commerce with outside groups. It coincides better with militancy. It has
held the Japanese people like a single mailed fist for war. What
religion they have has lost all character except that of a cohesive
agent to hold the whole close organization tight together.
[1] JAI, XX, 140.
[2] Lazarus in _Ztsft. für Völkerpsy_., I, 452.
[3] Preuss in _Globus_, LXXXVII, 419.
[4] _Princ. of Sociology_, sec. 529.
[5] Rogers, _Babyl. and Assyria_, I, 304; Jastrow, in
Hastings, _Dict. Bible_, Supp. vol., 554.
[6] Pietschmann, _Phoenizier_, 154.
[7] Pietschmann, _Phoenizier_, 115.
[8] Maspero, _Peuples de l'Orient_, III, 618.
[9] W. R. Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, 259.
[10] Hosea i. 4; 2 Kings ix. 8.
[11] 1 Kings xxii. 22; Judges ix. 23; Ezek. xiv. 9; 2 Thess. ii.
11.
[12] 2 Kings xx. 3.
[13] Reich, _Mimus_, 718.
[14] _Teuton. Mythol._, 1777.
[15] Leland and Prince, _Kuloskap_, 150.
[16] _Globus_, LXXXVII, 128.
[17] Martius, _Ethnog. Brasil._, 51.
[18] Krieger, _New Guinea_, 192.
[19] Tylor, _Anthropology_, 225.
[20] Martius, _Ethnog. Brasil._, 51.
[21] _Bur. Eth._, XIV, 1078.
[22] Wiklund, _Om Lapparna i Sverige_, 5.
[23] Fries, _Grönland_, 139.
[24] Hiekisch, _Tungusen_, 48.
[25] Hitchcock in _U. S. Nat. Mus._, 1890, 432.
[26] Ratzel, _Hist. Mankind_, II, 539.
[27] _Bur. Eth._, XVII (Part I), 154.
[28] Von Kremer, _Kulturgesch. d. Orients_, II, 236.
[29] Bishop, _Korea_, 438.
[30] _Amer. Anthrop._, VIII, 365.
[31] Cf. also _Bur. Eth._, XVII (Part I), 190.
[32] _Une Femme chez les Sahariennes_, 105.
[33] Stoll, _Suggestion und Hypnotismus_, 702.
[34] Friedmann, _Wahnideen im Völkerleben_, 222.
[35] Binet, _La Suggestibilité_, treats of its use in education.
[36] Lefevre, _La Suggestion_, 102.
[37] Funck-Brentano, _Le Suicide_, 117.
[38] Burckhardt, _Renaissance_, 512.
[39] Nivedita, _Web of Indian Life_, 212.
[40] Schotmüller, _Untergang des Templer-Ordens_, I, 136.
[41] Regnard, _Les Maladies Epidemiques de l'Esprit_.
[42] _Globus_, LXXXV, 262.
[43] Lefèvre, _Suggestion_, 98.
[44] Bastian, _San Salvador_, 104.
[45] Ratzel, _Anthropogeog._, II, 699.
[46] Lichtenstein, _South Africa_, II, 61.
[47] Sibree, _Great African Island_, 301.
[48] _Bur. Eth._, XVIII (Part I), 325.
[49] _Ztsft. f. Eth._, XXVIII, 170.
[50] Wilken, _Volkenkunde_, 546.
[51] Sieroshevski, _Yakuty_, 558.
[52] See Chapter XIV.
[53] Ratzel, _Hist. Mankind_, II, 276.
[54] W. R. Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, 299.
[55] Herodotus, IV, 186.
[56] Porphyry, _De Abstin._, II, 11; _Herodotus_, II, 41.
[57] W. R. Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, 88.
[58] Monier-Williams, _Brahmanism and Hinduism_, 324.
[59] _Ibid._, 101.
[60] Wilkins, _Hinduism_, 299.
[61] _Ibid._, 125.
[62] JASB, IV, 353.
[63] Fritsch, _Eingeborenen Südafr._, 57.
[64] _Bijdragen tot T. L. en V.-kunde_, XLI, 203.
[65] See Chapter XX
[66] _Hereditary Genius_, 34.
[67] Ammon, _Gesellschaftsordnung_, 53.
[68] Ammon made the diagram symmetrical.
[69] _Hereditary Genius_, 25, 47.
[70] Lapouge affirms that "in different historical periods, and
over the whole earth, racial differences between classes of the
same people are far greater than between analogous classes of
different peoples," and that "between different classes of the
same population there may be greater racial differences than
between different populations" (_Pol. Anth. Rev._, III, 220,
228). He does not give his definition of class.
[71] Ammon, _Gesellschaftsordnung_, 49.
[72] PSM, LX, 218.
[73] Lecky, _Morals_, I, 262.
[74] Symonds, _Catholic Reaction_, I, 455.
[75] Gumplowicz, _Soziologie_, 126.
[76] "In the reigns of Theodosius and Honorius, imperial edicts
and rescripts were paralyzed by the impalpable, quietly
irresistible force of a universal social need or
sentiment."--Dill, _Rome from Nero to M. Aurel._, 255.
[77] v. Hartmann, _Phänom. des Sittl. Bewusztseins_, 73.
[78] Lazarus in _Ztsft. für Völkerpsy._, I, 439.
[79] _Human Faculty_, 216.
[80] Wilkins, _Mod. Hinduism_, 195.
[81] Wilkins, _Mod. Hinduism_, 317.
[82] Hearn, _Japan_, 11.
[83] _Ibid._, 16.
[84] _Ibid._, 391.
[85] _Ibid._, 199.
[86] _Ibid._, 191.
[87] Hearn, _Japan_, 107, 187, 411.
[88] Williams, _Middle Kingdom_; Smith, _Chinese
Characteristics_.
[89] Nivedita, _Web of Indian Life_, 150.
CHAPTER II
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MORES
Introduction.--The mores have the authority of facts.--Whites
and blacks in southern society.--The mores are unrecorded.--
Inertia and rigidity of the mores.--Persistency of the mores.--
Persistency against new religion.--Roman law.--Effects of Roman
law on later mores.--Variability of the mores.--The mores of
New England.--Revolution.--The possibility of modifying the
mores.--Russia.--Emancipation in Russia and in the United
States.--Arbitrary change in the mores.--The case of Japan.--
The case of India.--The reforms of Joseph II.--Adoption of the
mores of another age.--What changes are possible.--Dissent from
the mores. Group orthodoxy.--Retreat and isolation to start new
mores.--Social policy.--Degenerate and evil mores.--The
correction of aberrations in the mores.--The mores of advance
and decline; cases.--The Greek temper in prosperity.--Greek
pessimism.--Greek degeneracy.--Sparta.--The optimism of
advance and prosperity.--Antagonism between an individual and
the mores of the group.--Antagonism of earlier and later
mores.--Antagonism between groups in respect to mores.--
Missions and mores.--Missions and antagonistic mores.--
Modification of the mores by agitation.--Capricious interest of
the masses.--How the group becomes homogeneous.--Syncretism.--
The art of administering society.
In this chapter we have to study the persistency of the mores with their
inertia and rigidity, even against a new religion or a new "law," i.e. a
new social system (secs. 80-87); then their variability under changed
life conditions or under revolution (secs. 88-90); then the possibility
of making them change by intelligent effort, considering the cases of
Japan, India, and the reforms of Joseph II (secs. 91-97); or the
possibility of changing one's self to adopt the mores of another group
or another age (secs. 98-99). We shall then consider the dissent of an
individual or a sect from the current mores, with judgment of
disapproval on them (secs. 100-104), and the chance of correcting them
(sec. 105). Next we shall consider the great movements of the mores,
optimism and pessimism, which correspond to a rising or falling economic
conjuncture (secs. 106-111). Then come the antagonisms between an
individual and the mores, between the mores of an earlier and a later
time, and between the groups in respect to mores, with a notice of the
problem of missions (secs. 112-118). Finally, we come to consider
agitation to produce changes in the mores, and we endeavor to study the
ways in which the changes in the mores do come about, especially
syncretism (secs. 119-121).
+80. The mores have the authority of facts.+ The mores come down to us
from the past. Each individual is born into them as he is born into the
atmosphere, and he does not reflect on them, or criticise them any more
than a baby analyzes the atmosphere before he begins to breathe it. Each
one is subjected to the influence of the mores, and formed by them,
before he is capable of reasoning about them. It may be objected that
nowadays, at least, we criticise all traditions, and accept none just
because they are handed down to us. If we take up cases of things which
are still entirely or almost entirely in the mores, we shall see that
this is not so. There are sects of free-lovers amongst us who want to
discuss pair marriage (sec. 374). They are not simply people of evil
life. They invite us to discuss rationally our inherited customs and
ideas as to marriage, which, they say, are by no means so excellent and
elevated as we believe. They have never won any serious attention. Some
others want to argue in favor of polygamy on grounds of expediency. They
fail to obtain a hearing. Others want to discuss property. In spite of
some literary activity on their part, no discussion of property,
bequest, and inheritance has ever been opened. Property and marriage are
in the mores. Nothing can ever change them but the unconscious and
imperceptible movement of the mores. Religion was originally a matter of
the mores. It became a societal institution and a function of the state.
It has now to a great extent been put back into the mores. Since laws
with penalties to enforce religious creeds or practices have gone out of
use any one may think and act as he pleases about religion. Therefore it
is not now "good form" to attack religion. Infidel publications are now
tabooed by the mores, and are more effectually repressed than ever
before. They produce no controversy. Democracy is in our American mores.
It is a product of our physical and economic conditions. It is
impossible to discuss or criticise it. It is glorified for popularity,
and is a subject of dithyrambic rhetoric. No one treats it with complete
candor and sincerity. No one dares to analyze it as he would aristocracy
or autocracy. He would get no hearing and would only incur abuse. The
thing to be noticed in all these cases is that the masses oppose a deaf
ear to every argument against the mores. It is only in so far as things
have been transferred from the mores into laws and positive institutions
that there is discussion about them or rationalizing upon them. The
mores contain the norm by which, if we should discuss the mores, we
should have to judge the mores. We learn the mores as unconsciously as
we learn to walk and eat and breathe. The masses never learn how we
walk, and eat, and breathe, and they never know any reason why the mores
are what they are. The justification of them is that when we wake to
consciousness of life we find them facts which already hold us in the
bonds of tradition, custom, and habit. The mores contain embodied in
them notions, doctrines, and maxims, but they are facts. They are in the
present tense. They have nothing to do with what ought to be, will be,
may be, or once was, if it is not now.
+81. Blacks and whites in southern society.+ In our southern states,
before the civil war, whites and blacks had formed habits of action and
feeling towards each other. They lived in peace and concord, and each
one grew up in the ways which were traditional and customary. The civil
war abolished legal rights and left the two races to learn how to live
together under other relations than before. The whites have never been
converted from the old mores. Those who still survive look back with
regret and affection to the old social usages and customary sentiments
and feelings. The two races have not yet made new mores. Vain attempts
have been made to control the new order by legislation. The only result
is the proof that legislation cannot make mores. We see also that mores
do not form under social convulsion and discord. It is only just now
that the new society seems to be taking shape. There is a trend in the
mores now as they begin to form under the new state of things. It is not
at all what the humanitarians hoped and expected. The two races are
separating more than ever before. The strongest point in the new code
seems to be that any white man is boycotted and despised if he
"associates with negroes" (sec. 114, at the end). Some are anxious to
interfere and try to control. They take their stand on ethical views of
what is going on. It is evidently impossible for any one to interfere.
We are like spectators at a great natural convulsion. The results will
be such as the facts and forces call for. We cannot foresee them. They
do not depend on ethical views any more than the volcanic eruption on
Martinique contained an ethical element. All the faiths, hopes,
energies, and sacrifices of both whites and blacks are components in the
new construction of folkways by which the two races will learn how to
live together. As we go along with the constructive process it is very
plain that what once was, or what any one thinks ought to be, but
slightly affects what, at any moment, is. The mores which once were are
a memory. Those which any one thinks ought to be are a dream. The only
thing with which we can deal are those which are.
+82. The mores are unrecorded.+ A society is never conscious of its
mores until it comes in contact with some other society which has
different mores, or until, in higher civilization, it gets information
by literature. The latter operation, however, affects only the literary
classes, not the masses, and society never consciously sets about the
task of making mores. In the early stages mores are elastic and plastic;
later they become rigid and fixed. They seem to grow up, gain strength,
become corrupt, decline, and die, as if they were organisms. The phases
seem to follow each other by an inherent necessity, and as if
independent of the reason and will of the men affected, but the changes
are always produced by a strain towards better adjustment of the mores
to conditions and interests of the society, or of the controlling
elements in it. A society does not record its mores in its annals,
because they are to it unnoticed and unconscious. When we try to learn
the mores of any age or people we have to seek our information in
incidental references, allusions, observations of travelers, etc.
Generally works of fiction, drama, etc., give us more information about
the mores than historical records. It is very difficult to construct
from the Old Testament a description of the mores of the Jews before the
captivity. It is also very difficult to make a complete and accurate
picture of the mores of the English colonies in North America in the
seventeenth century. The mores are not recorded for the same reason that
meals, going to bed, sunrise, etc., are not recorded, unless the regular
course of things is broken.
+83. Inertia and rigidity of the mores.+ We see that we must conceive of
the mores as a vast system of usages, covering the whole of life, and
serving all its interests; also containing in themselves their own
justification by tradition and use and wont, and approved by mystic
sanctions until, by rational reflection, they develop their own
philosophical and ethical generalizations, which are elevated into
"principles" of truth and right. They coerce and restrict the newborn
generation. They do not stimulate to thought, but the contrary. The
thinking is already done and is embodied in the mores. They never
contain any provision for their own amendment. They are not questions,
but answers, to the problem of life. They present themselves as final
and unchangeable, because they present answers which are offered as "the
truth." No world philosophy, until the modern scientific world
philosophy, and that only within a generation or two, has ever presented
itself as perhaps transitory, certainly incomplete, and liable to be set
aside to-morrow by more knowledge. No popular world philosophy or life
policy ever can present itself in that light. It would cost too great a
mental strain. All the groups whose mores we consider far inferior to
our own are quite as well satisfied with theirs as we are with ours. The
goodness or badness of mores consists entirely in their adjustment to
the life conditions and the interests of the time and place (sec. 65).
Therefore it is a sign of ease and welfare when no thought is given to
the mores, but all coöperate in them instinctively. The nations of
southeastern Asia show us the persistency of the mores, when the
element of stability and rigidity in them becomes predominant. Ghost
fear and ancestor worship tend to establish the persistency of the mores
by dogmatic authority, strict taboo, and weighty sanctions. The mores
then lose their naturalness and vitality. They are stereotyped. They
lose all relation to expediency. They become an end in themselves. They
are imposed by imperative authority without regard to interests or
conditions (caste, child marriage, widows). When any society falls under
the dominion of this disease in the mores it must disintegrate before it
can live again. In that diseased state of the mores all learning
consists in committing to memory the words of the sages of the past who
established the formulæ of the mores. Such words are "sacred writings,"
a sentence of which is a rule of conduct to be obeyed quite
independently of present interests, or of any rational considerations.
+84. Persistency.+ Asiatic fixity of the mores is extreme, but the
element of persistency in the mores is always characteristic of them.
They are elastic and tough, but when once established in familiar and
continued use they resist change. They give stability to the social
order when they are well understood, regular, and undisputed. In a new
colony, with a sparse population, the mores are never fixed and
stringent. There is great "liberty." As the colony always has traditions
of the mores of the mother country, which are cherished with respect but
are never applicable to the conditions of a colony, the mores of a
colony are heterogeneous and are always in flux. That is because the
colonists are all the time learning to live in a new country and have no
traditions to guide them, the traditions of the old country being a
hindrance. Any one bred in a new country, if he goes to an old country,
feels the "conservatism" in its mores. He thinks the people stiff, set
in their ways, stupid, and unwilling to learn. They think him raw,
brusque, and uncultivated. He does not know the ritual, which can be
written in no books, but knowledge of which, acquired by long
experience, is the mark of fit membership in the society.
+85. Persistency in spite of change of religion.+ Matthews saw votive
effigies in Mandan villages just like those which Catlin had seen and
put into his pictures seventy years before.[90] In the meantime the
Mandans had been nearly exterminated by war and disease, and the remnant
of them had been civilized and Christianized. The mores of the Central
American Indians inculcate moderation and restraint. Their ancient
religion contained prescriptions of that character, and those
prescriptions are still followed after centuries of life under
Christianity.[91] In the Bible we may see the strife between old mores
and a new religious system two or three times repeated. The so-called
Mosaic system superseded an older system of mores common, as it appears,
to all the Semites of western Asia. The prophets preached a reform of
the Jahveh religion and we find them at war with the inherited
mores.[92] The most striking feature of the story of the prophets is
their antagonism to the mores which the people would not give up.
Monotheism was not established until after the captivity.[93] The
recurrence, vitality, popularity, and pervasiveness of traditional mores
are well shown in the Bible story. The result was a combination of
ritual monotheism with survivals of ancient mores and a popular religion
in which demonism was one of the predominant elements. The New Testament
represents a new revival and reform of the religion. The Jews to this
day show the persistency of ancient mores. Christianity was a new
adjustment of both heathen and Jewish mores to a new religious system.
The popular religion once more turned out to be a grand revival of
demonism. The masses retained their mores with little change. The mores
overruled the religion. Therefore Jewish Christians and heathen
Christians remained distinguishable for centuries. The Romans never
could stamp out the child sacrifices of the Carthaginians.[94] The Roman
law was an embodiment of all the art of living and the mores of the
Roman people. It differed from the mores of the German peoples, and when
by the religion the Roman system was brought to German people conflict
was produced. In fact, it may be said that the process of remolding
German mores by the Roman law never was completed,[95] and that now the
German mores have risen against the Roman law and have accepted out of
it only what has been freely and rationally selected. Marriage amongst
the German nations was a domestic and family function. Even after the
hierocratic system was firmly established, it was centuries before the
ecclesiastics could make marriage a clerical function.[96] In the usages
of German peasants to-day may be found numerous survivals of heathen
notions and customs.[97] In England the German mores accepted only a
limited influence from the Roman law. The English have adopted the
policy of the Romans in dealing with subject peoples. They do not meddle
with local customs if they can avoid it. This is wise, since nothing
nurses discontent like interference with folkways. The persistency of
the mores is often shown in survivals,--senseless ceremonies whose
meaning is forgotten, jests, play, parody, and caricature, or
stereotyped words and phrases, or even in cakes of a prescribed form or
prescribed foods at certain festivals.
+86. Roman law.+ In the Roman law everything proceeds from the emperor.
He is the possessor of all authority, the fountain of honor, the author
of all legislation, and the referee in all disputes. Lawyers trained by
the study of this code learned to conceive of all the functions of the
state as acts, powers, and rights of a monarchical sovereign. They stood
beside the kings and princes of the later Middle Ages ready to construe
the institutions of suzerainty into this monarchical form. They broke
down feudalism and helped to build the absolutist dynastic state,
wherever the Roman law was in force, and wherever it had greatly
influenced the legal system. The church also had great interest to
employ the Roman law, because it included the ecclesiastical legislation
of the Christian emperors of the fourth and fifth centuries, and because
the canon law was imitated from it in spirit and form. In all matters of
private rights the provisions of the Justinian code were good and
beneficial, so that those provisions won their own way by their own
merit.[98] In the _Sachsenspiegel_ there was no distinction of property
between man and wife, but this meant that all which both had was a
joint capital for use in their domestic economy. When the marriage was
dissolved the property returned to the side from which it came. Later,
in many districts, this arrangement developed into a real community of
goods under various forms. "It was in regard to these adjustments of
property rights that the jurists of the Middle Ages did most harm by
introducing the Roman law, for it was especially in regard to this
matter that the Roman law stood in strongest contrast to the German
notions, and the resistance of the German people is to be seen in the
numerous local systems of law, which remained in use in most of Germany;
unfortunately not everywhere, nor uniformly."[99]
+87. The Roman law: its effect on later mores.+ Throughout the
north of Europe, upon conversion to Christianity, tithes were the
stumbling-block between the old mores and the new system.[100]
The authority for the tithe system came from the Roman system. It
was included in the Roman jurisprudence which the church adopted
and carried wherever it extended. After the civil code was
revived it helped powerfully to make states. This was a work,
however, which was hostile to the church. The royal lawyers found
in the civil code a system which referred everything in society
to the emperor as the origin of power, rights, and honor. They
adopted this standpoint for the kings of the new dynastic states
and, in the might of the Roman law, they established royal
absolutism, which was unfavorable to the church and the feudal
nobles. They found their allies in the cities which loved written
law, institutions, and defined powers. Stubbs[101] regards the
form of the Statute of Westminster (1275) as a proof that the
lawyers, who "were at this time getting a firm grasp on the law
of England," were introducing the principle that the king could
enact by his own authority. The spirit of the Roman law was
pitiless to peasants and artisans, that is, to all who were, or
were to be made, unfree. The Norman laws depressed the Saxon
ceorl to a slave.[102] In similar manner they came into war with
all Teutonic mores which contained popular rights and primary
freedom. Stammler[103] denies that the Roman law, in spite of
lawyers and ecclesiastics, ever entered into the flesh and blood
of the German people. That is to say, it never displaced
completely their national mores. The case of the property of
married persons is offered as a case in which the German mores
were never overcome.[104] A compromise was struck between the
ancient mores and the new ways, which the Roman Catholic religion
approved.
+88. Variability.+ No less remarkable than the persistency of the mores
is their changeableness and variation. There is here an interesting
parallel to heredity and variation in the organic world, even though the
parallel has no significance. Variation in the mores is due to the fact
that children do not perpetuate the mores just as they received them.
The father dies, and the son whom he has educated, even if he continues
the ritual and repeats the formulæ, does not think and feel the same
ideas and sentiments as his father. The observance of Sunday; the mode
of treating parents, children, servants, and wives or husbands;
holidays; amusements; arts of luxury; marriage and divorce; wine
drinking,--are matters in regard to which it is easy to note changes in
the mores from generation to generation, in our own times. Even in Asia,
when a long period of time is taken into account, changes in the mores
are perceptible. The mores change because conditions and interests
change. It is found that dogmas and maxims which have been current do
not verify; that established taboos are useless or mischievous
restraints; that usages which are suitable for a village or a colony are
not suitable for a great city or state; that many things are fitting
when the community is rich which were not so when it was poor; that new
inventions have made new ways of living more economical and healthful.
It is necessary to prosperity that the mores should have a due degree of
firmness, but also that they should be sufficiently elastic and flexible
to conform to changes in interests and life conditions. A herding or an
agricultural people, if it moves into a new country, rich in game, may
revert to a hunting life. The Tunguses and Yakuts did so as they moved
northwards.[105] In the early days of the settlement of North America
many whites "Indianized"; they took to the mode of life of Indians. The
Iranians separated from the Indians of Hindostan and became
agriculturists. They adopted a new religion and new mores. Men who were
afraid of powerful enemies have taken to living in trees, lake
dwellings, caves, and joint houses. Mediæval serfdom was due to the need
of force to keep the peasant on his holding, when the holding was really
a burden to him in view of the dues which he must pay. He would have run
away if he had not been kept by force. In the later Middle Ages the
villain had a valuable right and property in his holding. Then he wanted
security of tenure so that he could not be driven away from it. In the
early period it was the duty of the lord to kill the game and protect
the peasant's crops. In the later period it became the monopoly right of
the lord to kill game. Thus the life conditions vary. The economic
conjuncture varies. The competition of life varies. The interests vary
with them. The mores all conform, unless they have been fixed by dogma
with mystic sanctions so that they are ritual obligations, as is, in
general, the case now in southeastern Asia. The rights of the parties,
and the right and wrong of conduct, after the mores have conformed to
new life conditions, are new deductions. The philosophers follow with
their systems by which they try to construe the whole new order of acts
and thoughts with reference to some thought fabric which they put before
the mores, although it was found out after the mores had established the
relations. In the case in which the fixed mores do not conform to new
interests and needs crises arise. Moses, Zoroaster, Manu, Solon,
Lycurgus, and Numa are either mythical or historical culture heroes, who
are said to have solved such crises by new "laws," and set the society
in motion again. The fiction of the intervention of a god or a hero is
necessary to account for a reconstruction of the mores of the ancestors
without crime.
+89. Mores of New England.+ The Puritan code of early New England has
been almost entirely abandoned, so far as its positive details are
concerned, while at the same time some new restrictions on conduct have
been introduced, especially as to the use of spirituous liquors, so
that not all the changes have been in the way of relaxation. The mores
of New England, however, still show deep traces of the Puritan temper
and world philosophy. Perhaps nowhere else in the world can so strong an
illustration be seen both of the persistency of the spirit of the mores
and of their variability and adaptability. The mores of New England have
extended to a large immigrant population and have won large control over
them. They have also been carried to the new states by immigrants, and
their perpetuation there is an often-noticed phenomenon. The
extravagances in doctrine and behavior of the seventeenth-century
Puritans have been thrown off and their code of morals has been shorn of
its angularity, but their life policy and standards have become to a
very large extent those of the civilized world.
+90. Revolution.+ In higher civilization crises produced by the
persistency of old mores after conditions have changed are solved by
revolution or reform. In revolutions the mores are broken up. Such was
the case in the sixteenth century, in the French Revolution of 1789, and
in minor revolutions. A period follows the outburst of a revolution in
which there are no mores. The old are broken up; the new are not formed.
The social ritual is interrupted. The old taboos are suspended. New
taboos cannot be enacted or promulgated. They require time to become
established and known. The masses in a revolution are uncertain what
they ought to do. In France, under the old régime, the social ritual was
very complete and thoroughly established. In the revolution, the
destruction of this ritual produced social anarchy. In the best case
every revolution must be attended by this temporary chaos of the mores.
It was produced in the American colonies. Revolutionary leaders expect
to carry the people over to new mores by the might of two or three
dogmas of political or social philosophy. The history of every such
attempt shows that dogmas do not make mores. Every revolution suffers a
collapse at the point where reconstruction should begin. Then the old
ruling classes resume control, and by the use of force set the society
in its old grooves again. The ecclesiastical revolution of the sixteenth
century resulted in a wreck whose discordant fragments we have
inherited. It left us a Christendom, half of which is obscurantist and
half scientific; half is ruled by the Jesuits and half is split up into
wrangling sects. The English Revolution of the seventeenth century was
reversed when it undertook to reconstruct the mores of the English
people. The French revolutionists tried to abolish all the old mores and
to replace them by products of speculative philosophy. The revolution
was, in fact, due to a great change in conditions, which called for new
mores, and so far as the innovations met this demand they became
permanent and helped to create a conviction of the beneficence of
revolution. Napoleon abolished many innovations and put many things in
the old train again. Many other things have changed name and face, but
not character. Many innovations have been half assimilated. Some
interests have never yet been provided for (see sec. 165).
+91. Possibility of modifying mores.+ The combination in the mores of
persistency and variability determines the extent to which it is
possible to modify them by arbitrary action. It is not possible to
change them, by any artifice or device, to a great extent, or suddenly,
or in any essential element; it is possible to modify them by slow and
long-continued effort if the ritual is changed by minute variations. The
German emperor Frederick II was the most enlightened ruler of the Middle
Ages. He was a modern man in temper and ideas. He was a statesman and he
wanted to make the empire into a real state of the absolutist type. All
the mores of his time were ecclesiastical and hierocratic. He dashed
himself to pieces against them. Those whom he wanted to serve took the
side of the papacy against him. He became the author of the laws by
which the civil institutions of the time were made to serve
ecclesiastical domination. He carried the purpose of the crusades to a
higher degree of fulfillment than they ever reached otherwise, but this
brought him no credit or peace. The same drift in the mores of the time
bore down the Albigenses when they denounced the church corporation, the
hierarchy, and the papacy. The pope easily stirred up all Europe against
them. The current opinion was that every state must be a Christian state
according to the mores of the time. The people could not conceive of a
state which could answer its purpose if it was not such. But a
"Christian state" meant one which was in harmony with the pope and the
ecclesiastical organization. This demand was not affected by the faults
of the organization, or the corruption and venality of the hierarchy.
The popes of the thirteenth century rode upon this tide, overwhelming
opposition and consolidating their power. In our time the state is
charged with the service of a great number of interests which were then
intrusted to the church. It is against our mores that ecclesiastics
should interfere with those interests. There is no war on religion.
Religion is recognized as an interest by itself, and is treated with
more universal respect than ever before, but it is regarded as occupying
a field of its own, and if there should be an attempt in its name to
encroach on any other domain, it would fail, because it would be against
the mores of our time.
+92. Russia.+ When Napoleon said: "If you scratch a Russian you find a
Tartar," what he had perceived was that, although the Russian court and
the capital city have been westernized by the will of the tsars,
nevertheless the people still cling to the strongly marked national
mores of their ancestors. The tsars, since Peter the Great, have, by
their policing and dragooning, spoilt one thing without making another,
and socially Russia is in the agonies of the resulting confusion. Russia
ought to be a democracy by virtue of its sparse population and wide area
of unoccupied land in Siberia. In fact all the indigenous and most
ancient usages of the villages are democratic. The autocracy is exotic
and military. It is, however, the only institution which holds Russia
together as a unit. On account of this political interest the small
intelligent class acquiesce in the autocracy. The autocracy imposes
force on the people to crush out their inherited mores, and to force on
them western institutions. The policy is, moreover, vacillating. At one
time the party which favored westernizing has prevailed at court; at
another time the old Russian or pan-Slavic party. There is internal
discord and repression. The ultimate result of such an attempt to
control mores by force is an interesting question of the future. It
also is a question which affects most seriously the interests of western
civilization. The motive for the westernizing policy is to get influence
in European politics. All the interference of Russia in European
politics is harmful, menacing, and unjustifiable. She is not, in
character, a European power, and she brings no contribution to European
civilization, but the contrary. She has neither the capital nor the
character to enable her to execute the share in the world's affairs
which she is assuming. Her territorial extensions for two hundred years
have been made at the cost of her internal strength. The latter has
never been at all proportioned to the former. Consequently the debt and
taxes due to her policy of expansion and territorial greatness have
crushed her peasant class, and by their effect on agriculture have
choked the sources of national strength. The people are peaceful and
industrious, and their traditional mores are such that they would
develop great productive power and in time rise to a strong civilization
of a truly indigenous type, if they were free to use their powers in
their own way to satisfy their interests as they experience them from
the life conditions which they have to meet.
+93. Emancipation in Russia and the United States.+ In the time of Peter
the Great the ancient national mores of Russia were very strong and
firmly established. They remain to this day, in the mass of the
population, unchanged in their essential integrity. There is, amongst
the upper classes, an imitation of French ways, but it is unimportant
for the nation. The autocracy is what makes "Russia," as a political
unit. The autocracy is the apex of a military system, by which a great
territory has been gathered under one control. That operation has not
affected the old mores of the people. The tsar Alexander II was
convinced by reading the writings of the great literary coterie of the
middle of the nineteenth century that serfdom ought to be abolished, and
he determined that it should be done.[106] It is not in the system of
autocracy that the autocrat shall have original opinions and adopt an
independent initiative. The men whom he ordered to abolish serfdom had
to devise a method, and they devised one which was to appear
satisfactory to the tsar, but was to protect the interests which they
cared for. One is reminded of the devices of American politicians to
satisfy the clamor of the moment, but to change nothing. The reform had
but slight root in public opinion, and no sanction in the interests of
the influential classes; quite the contrary. The consequence is that the
abolition of serfdom has thrown Russian society into chaos, and as yet
reconstruction upon the new system has made little growth. In the United
States the abolition of slavery was accomplished by the North, which had
no slaves and enforced emancipation by war on the South, which had them.
The mores of the South were those of slavery in full and satisfactory
operation, including social, religious, and philosophical notions
adapted to slavery. The abolition of slavery in the northern states had
been brought about by changes in conditions and interests. Emancipation
in the South was produced by outside force against the mores of the
whites there. The consequence has been forty years of economic, social,
and political discord. In this case free institutions and mores in which
free individual initiative is a leading element allow efforts towards
social readjustment out of which a solution of the difficulties will
come. New mores will be developed which will cover the situation with
customs, habits, mutual concessions, and coöperation of interests, and
these will produce a social philosophy consistent with the facts. The
process is long, painful, and discouraging, but it contains its own
guarantees.
+94. Arbitrary change.+ We often meet with references to Abraham Lincoln
and Alexander II as political heroes who set free millions of slaves or
serfs "by a stroke of the pen." Such references are only flights of
rhetoric. They entirely miss the apprehension of what it is to set men
free, or to tear out of a society mores of long growth and wide reach.
Circumstances may be such that a change which is imperative can be
accomplished in no other way, but then the period of disorder and
confusion is unavoidable. The stroke of the pen never does anything but
order that this period shall begin.
+95. Case of Japan.+ Japan offers a case of the voluntary resolution of
the ruling class of a nation to abandon their mores and adopt those of
other nations. The case is unique in history. Humbert says that the
Japanese were in the first throes of internal revolution when
foreigners intervened.[107] Schallmeyer infers that the "adaptability of
an intelligent and disciplined people is far greater than we, judging
from other cases, have been wont to believe."[108] Le Bon absolutely
denies that culture can be transmitted from people to people. He says
that the ruin of Japan is yet to come, from the attempt to adopt foreign
ways.[109] The best information is that the mores of the Japanese masses
have not been touched. The changes are all superficial with respect to
the life of the people and their character.[110] "Iyéyasu was careful to
qualify the meaning of 'rude.' He said that the Japanese term for a rude
fellow signified 'an other-than-expected person'--so that to commit an
offense worthy of death it was only necessary to act in an 'unexpected
manner,' that is to say, contrary to prescribed etiquette."[111] "Even
now the only safe rule of conduct in a Japanese settlement is to act in
all things according to local custom; for the slightest divergence from
rule will be observed with disfavor. Privacy does not exist; nothing can
be hidden; everybody's vices or virtues are known to everybody else.
Unusual behavior is judged as a departure from the traditional standard
of conduct; all oddities are condemned as departures from custom, and
tradition and custom still have the force of religious obligations.
Indeed, they really _are_ religious and obligatory, not only by reason
of their origin, but by reason of their relation also to the public
cult, which signifies the worship of the past. The ethics of Shinto were
all included in conformity to custom. The traditional rules of the
commune--these were the morals of Shinto: to obey them was religion; to
disobey them impiety."[112] Evidently this is a description of a society
in which tradition and current usage exert complete control. It is idle
to imagine that the masses of an oriental society of that kind could, in
a thousand years, assimilate the mores of the Occident.
+96. Case of the Hindoos.+ Nivedita[113] thinks that the Hindoos have
adopted foreign culture easily. "One of the most striking features of
Hindoo society during the past fifty years has been the readiness of the
people to adopt a foreign form of culture, and to compete with those
who are native to that culture on equal terms." Monier-Williams tells
us, however, that each Hindoo "finds himself cribbed and confined in all
his movements, bound and fettered in all he does by minute traditional
regulations. He sleeps and wakes, dresses and undresses, sits down and
stands up, goes out and comes in, eats and drinks, speaks and is silent,
acts and refrains from acting, according to ancient rule."[114] As yet,
therefore, this people assumes competition with the English without
giving up its ancient burdensome social ritual. It accepts the handicap.
+97. Reforms of Joseph II.+ The most remarkable case of reform attempted
by authority, and arbitrary in its method, is that of the reforms
attempted by Joseph II, emperor of Germany. His kingdoms were suffering
from the persistence of old institutions and mores. They needed
modernizing. This he knew and, as an absolute monarch, he ordained
changes, nearly all of which were either the abolition of abuses or the
introduction of real improvements. He put an end to survivals of
mediæval clericalism, established freedom of worship, made marriage a
civil contract, abolished class privilege, made taxation uniform, and
replaced serfdom in Bohemia by the form of villanage which existed in
Austria. In Hungary he ordered the use of the German language instead of
Latin, as the civil language. Interferences with language act as counter
suggestion. Common sense and expediency were in favor of the use of the
German language, but the order to use it provoked a great outburst of
national enthusiasm which sought demonstration in dress, ceremonies, and
old usages. Many of the other changes made by the emperor antagonized
vested interests of nobles and ecclesiastics, and he was forced to
revoke them. He promulgated orders which affected the mores, and the
mental or moral discipline of his subjects. If a man came to enroll
himself as a deist a second time, he was to receive twenty-four blows
with the rod, not because he was a deist, but because he called himself
something about which he could not know what it is. No coffins were to
be used, corpses were to be put in sacks and buried in quicklime.
Probably this law was wise from a purely rational point of view, but it
touched upon a matter in regard to which popular sentiment is very
tender even when the usage is most irrational. "Many a usage and
superstition was so closely interwoven with the life of the people that
it could not be torn away by regulation, but only by education."
Non-Catholics were given full civil rights. None were to be excluded
from the cemeteries. The unilluminated Jews would have preferred that
there should be no change in the laws. Frederick of Prussia said that
Joseph always took the second step without having taken the first. In
the end the emperor revoked all his changes and innovations except the
abolition of serfdom and religious toleration.[115] Some of his measures
were gradually realized through the nineteenth century. Others are now
an object of political effort.
+98. Adoption of mores of another age.+ The Renaissance was a period in
which an attempt was made by one age to adopt the mores of another, as
the latter were known through literature and art. The knowledge was very
imperfect and mistaken, as indeed it necessarily must be, and the
conceptions which were formed of the model were almost as fantastic as
if they had been pure creations of the imagination. The learning of the
Renaissance was necessarily restricted to the selected classes, and the
masses either remained untouched by the faiths and fads of the learned,
or accepted the same in grotesquely distorted forms. A phrase of a
classical writer, or a fanciful conception of some hero of Plutarch,
sufficed to enthuse a criminal, or to upset the mental equilibrium of a
political speculator. The jumble of heterogeneous mores, and of ideas
conformable to different mores, caused numbers to lose their mental
equilibrium and to become victims either of enthusiasm or of
melancholy.[116] The phenomena of suggestion were astounding and
incalculable.[117] The period was marked by the dominion of dogmatic
ideas, accepted as regulative principles for the mores. The result was
the dominion of the phrase and the prevalence of hollow affectation. The
men who were most thoroughly interested in the new learning, and had
lost faith in the church and the religion of the Middle Ages, kept up
the ritual of the traditional system. The Renaissance never made any new
ritual. That is why it had no strong root and passed away as a temporary
fashion. Hearn[118] is led from his study of Japan to say that "We could
no more mingle with the old Greek life, if it were resurrected for us,
no more become a part of it, than we could change our mental
identities." The modern classicists have tried to resuscitate Greek
standards, faiths, and ways. Individuals have met with a measure of
success in themselves, and university graduates have to some extent
reached common views of life and well living, but they have necessarily
selected what features they would imitate, and so they have arbitrarily
overruled their chosen authority. They have never won wide respect for
it in modern society. The New England Puritans, in the seventeenth
century, tried to build a society on the Bible, especially the books of
Moses. The attempt was in every way a failure. It may well be doubted if
any society ever existed of which the books referred to were a
description, and the prescriptions were found ill adapted to
seventeenth-century facts. The mores made by any age for itself are good
and right for that age, but it follows that they can suit another age
only to a very limited extent.
+99. What changes are possible.+ All these cases go to show that changes
which run with the mores are easily brought about, but that changes
which are opposed to the mores require long and patient effort, if they
are possible at all. The ruling clique can use force to warp the mores
towards some result which they have selected, especially if they bring
their effort to bear on the ritual, not on the dogmas, and if they are
contented to go slowly. The church has won great results in this way,
and by so doing has created a belief that religion, or ideas, or
institutions, make mores. The leading classes, no matter by what
standard they are selected, can lead by example, which always affects
ritual. An aristocracy acts in this way. It suggests standards of
elegance, refinement, and nobility, and the usages of good manners,
from generation to generation, are such as have spread from the
aristocracy to other classes. Such influences are unspoken, unconscious,
unintentional. If we admit that it is possible and right for some to
undertake to mold the mores of others, of set purpose, we see that the
limits within which any such effort can succeed are very narrow, and the
methods by which it can operate are strictly defined. The favorite
methods of our time are legislation and preaching. These methods fail
because they do not affect ritual, and because they always aim at great
results in a short time. Above all, we can judge of the amount of
serious attention which is due to plans for "reorganizing society," to
get rid of alleged errors and inconveniences in it. We might as well
plan to reorganize our globe by redistributing the elements in it.
+100. Dissent from the mores; group orthodoxy.+ Since it appears that
the old mores are mischievous if they last beyond the duration of the
conditions and needs to which they were adapted, and that constant,
gradual, smooth, and easy readjustment is the course of things which is
conducive to healthful life, it follows that free and rational criticism
of traditional mores is essential to societal welfare. We have seen that
the inherited mores exert a coercion on every one born in the group. It
follows that only the greatest and best can react against the mores so
as to modify them. It is by no means to be inferred that every one who
sets himself at war with the traditional mores is a hero of social
correction and amelioration. The trained reason and conscience never
have heavier tasks laid upon them than where questions of conformity to,
or dissent from, the mores are raised. It is by the dissent and free
judgment of the best reason and conscience that the mores win
flexibility and automatic readjustment. Dissent is always unpopular in
the group. Groups form standards of orthodoxy as to the "principles"
which each member must profess and the ritual which each must practice.
Dissent seems to imply a claim of superiority. It evokes hatred and
persecution. Dissenters are rebels, traitors, and heretics. We see this
in all kinds of subgroups. Noble and patrician classes, merchants,
artisans, religious and philosophical sects, political parties,
academies and learned societies, punish by social penalties dissent
from, or disobedience to, their code of group conduct. The modern trades
union, in its treatment of a "scab," only presents another example. The
group also, by a majority, adopts a programme of policy and then demands
of each member that he shall work and make sacrifices for what has been
resolved upon for the group interest. He who refuses is a renegade or
apostate with respect to the group doctrines and interests. He who
adopts the mores of another group is a still more heinous criminal. The
mediæval definition of a heretic was one who varied in life and
conversation, dress, speech, or manner (that is, the social ritual) from
the ordinary members of the Christian community. The first meaning of
"Catholic" in the fourth century was a summary of the features which
were common to all Christians in social and ecclesiastical behavior;
those were Catholic who conformed to the mores which were characteristic
of Christians.[119] If a heretic was better than the Catholics, they
hated him more. That never excused him before the church authorities.
They wanted loyalty to the ecclesiastical corporation. Persecution of a
dissenter is always popular in the group which he has abandoned.
Toleration of dissent is no sentiment of the masses.
+101. Retreat and isolation to make new mores. Quakers.+ In the stage of
half-civilization and above there have been many cases of sects which
have "withdrawn from the world" and lived an isolated life. They were
dissenters from the world philosophy or the life policy current in the
society to which they belonged. The real issue was that they were at war
with its mores. In that war they could not prevail so as to change the
mores. They could not even realize their own plan of life in the midst
of uncongenial mores. The English Puritans of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries tried to transform the mores of their age. Many of
them emigrated to uninhabited territory in order to make a society in
which their ideal mores should be realized. Very many sects and parties
emigrated to North America in the seventeenth century with the same
purpose. The Quakers went to the greatest extreme in adopting dress,
language, manners, etc., which should be different from the current
usages. In all this they were multiplying ritual means of isolation and
of cultivation of their chosen ways of life. They were not strenuous
about theological dogmas. Their leading notions were really about the
mores and bore on social policy. In the Netherlands, in 1657, they
appeared as a militant sect of revolutionary communists and
levelers.[120] In New England they courted persecution. They wanted to
cultivate states of mind and traits of social character which they had
selected as good, and their ritual was devised to that end (humility,
simplicity, peacefulness, friendliness, truth). They are now being
overpowered and absorbed by the mores of the society which surrounds
them. The same is true of Shakers, Moravians, and other sects of
dissenters from the mores of the time and place.
+102. Social policy.+ In Germany an attempt has been made to develop
social policy into an art (_Socialpolitik_). Systematic attempts are
made to study demographical facts in order to deduce from them
conclusions as to the things which need to be done to make society
better. The scheme is captivating. It is one of the greatest needs of
modern states, which have gone so far in the way of experimental devices
for social amelioration and rectification, at the expense of tax payers,
that those devices should be tested and that the notions on which they
are based should be verified. So far as demographical information
furnishes these tests it is of the highest value. When, however, the
statesmen and social philosophers stand ready to undertake any
manipulation of institutions and mores, and proceed on the assumption
that they can obtain data upon which to proceed with confidence in that
undertaking, as an architect or engineer would obtain data and apply his
devices to a task in his art, a fallacy is included which is radical and
mischievous beyond measure. We have, as yet, no calculus for the
variable elements which enter into social problems and no analysis which
can unravel their complications. The discussions always reveal the
dominion of the prepossessions in the minds of the disputants which are
in the mores. We know that an observer of nature always has to know his
own personal equation. The mores are a societal equation. When the
mores are the thing studied in one's own society, there is an operation
like begging the question. Moreover, the convictions which are in the
mores are "faiths." They are not affected by scientific facts or
demonstration. We "believe in" democracy, as we have been brought up in
it, or we do not. If we do, we accept its mythology. The reason is
because we have grown up in it, are familiar with it, and like it.
Argument would not touch this faith. In like manner the people of one
state believe in "the state," or in militarism, or in commercialism, or
in individualism. Those of another state are sentimental, nervous, fond
of rhetorical phrases, full of group vanity. It is vain to imagine that
any man can lift himself out of these characteristic features in the
mores of the group to which he belongs, especially when he is dealing
with the nearest and most familiar phenomena of everyday life. It is
vain to imagine that a "scientific man" can divest himself of prejudice
or previous opinion, and put himself in an attitude of neutral
independence towards the mores. He might as well try to get out of
gravity or the pressure of the atmosphere. The most learned scholar
reveals all the philistinism and prejudice of the man-on-the-curbstone
when mores are in discussion. The most elaborate discussion only
consists in revolving on one's own axis. One only finds again the
prepossessions which he brought to the consideration of the subject,
returned to him with a little more intense faith. The philosophical
drift in the mores of our time is towards state regulation, militarism,
imperialism, towards petting and flattering the poor and laboring
classes, and in favor of whatever is altruistic and humanitarian. What
man of us ever gets out of his adopted attitude, for or against these
now ruling tendencies, so that he forms judgments, not by his ruling
interest or conviction, but by the supposed impact of demographic data
on an empty brain. We have no grounds for confidence in these ruling
tendencies of our time. They are only the present phases in the endless
shifting of our philosophical generalizations, and it is only proposed,
by the application of social policy, to subject society to another set
of arbitrary interferences, dictated by a new set of dogmatic
prepossessions that would only be a continuation of old methods and
errors.
+103. Degenerate and evil mores. Mores of advance and decline.+ The case
is somewhat different when attempts are made by positive efforts to
prevent the operation of bad mores, or to abolish them. The historians
have familiarized us with the notion of corrupt or degenerate mores.
Such periods as the later Roman empire, the Byzantine empire, the
Merovingian kingdom, and the Renaissance offer us examples of evil
mores. We need to give more exactitude to this idea. Bad mores are those
which are not well fitted to the conditions and needs of the society at
the time. But, as we have seen, the mores produce a philosophy of
welfare, more or less complete, and they produce taboos which are
concentrated inhibitions directed against conduct which the philosophy
regards as harmful, or positive injunctions to do what is judged
expedient and beneficial. The taboos constitute morality or a moral
system which, in higher civilization, restrains passion and appetite,
and curbs the will. Various conjunctures arise in which the taboos are
weakened or the sanctions on them are withdrawn. Faith in the current
religion may be lost. Then its mystic sanctions cease to operate. The
political institutions may be weak or unfit, and the civil sanctions may
fail. There may not be the necessary harmony between economic conditions
and political institutions, or the classes which hold the social forces
in their hands may misuse them for their selfish interest at the expense
of others. The philosophical and ethical generalizations which are
produced by the mores rise into a realm of intellect and reason which is
proud, noble, and grand. The power of the intelligence is a human
prerogative. If the power is correctly used the scope of achievement in
the satisfaction of needs is enormously extended. The penalty of error
in that domain is correspondingly great. When the mores go wrong it is,
above all, on account of error in the attempt to employ the
philosophical and ethical generalizations in order to impose upon mores
and institutions a movement towards selected and "ideal" results which
the ruling powers of the society have determined to aim at. Then the
energy of the society may be diverted from its interests. Such a drift
of the mores is exactly analogous to a vice of an individual, i.e.
energy is expended on acts which are contrary to welfare. The result is
a confusion of all the functions of the society, and a falseness in all
its mores. Any of the aberrations which have been mentioned will produce
evil mores, that is, mores which are not adapted to welfare, so that a
group may fall into vicious mores just as an individual falls into
vicious habits.
+104. Illustrations.+ This was well illustrated at Byzantium. The
development of courtesans and prostitutes into a great and flourishing
institution; the political rule, by palace intrigues, of favorites,
women, and eunuchs; the decisive interference of royal guards; the vices
of public amusements and baths; the miseries and calamities of talented
men and the consequent elimination of that class from the society; the
sycophancy of clients; the servitude of peasants and artisans, with
economic exhaustion as a consequence; demonism, fanaticism, and
superstition in religion, combined with extravagant controversies over
pedantic trifles,--such are some of the phenomena of mores disordered by
divorce from sober interests, and complicated by arbitrary dogmas of
politics and religion, not forgetting the brutal and ignorant measures
of selfish rulers. In the Merovingian kingdom barbaric and corrupt Roman
mores were intermingled in a period of turmoil. In the Renaissance in
Italy all the taboos were broken down, or had lost their sanctions, and
vice and crime ran riot through social disorder. As to the degeneracy of
mores, we meet with a current opinion that in time the mores tend to
"run down," by the side of another current opinion that there is, in
time, a tendency of the mores to become more refined and purer. If the
life conditions do not change, there is no reason at all why the mores
should change. Some barbarian peoples have brought their mores into true
adjustment to their life conditions, and have gone on for centuries
without change. What is true, however, is that there are periods of
social advance and periods of social decline, that is, advance or
decline in economic power, material prosperity, and group strength for
war. In either case all the mores fall into a character, temper, and
spirit which conform to the situation. The early centuries of the
Christian era were a period of decline. Tertullian[121] has a passage in
which he describes in enthusiastic terms the prosperity and progress of
his time (end of the second century). He did not perceive that society
was in a conjuncture of decline. Many, however, from the time of
Augustus saw evil coming. The splendors of the empire did not delude
them. Tacitus feared evil from the Germans; others from the
Parthians.[122] The population of the Roman empire felt its inferiority
to its ancestors. One thing after another gave way. Nothing could serve
as a fulcrum for resisting decline, or producing recovery. In such a
period despair wins control. The philosophy is pessimistic. The world is
supposed to be coming to an end. Life is not valued. Ascetic practices
fall in with the prevailing temper. Martyrdom has no great terrors; such
as it has can be overcome by a little enthusiasm. Inroads of barbarians
only add a little to the other woes, or hasten an end which is
inevitable and is expected with resignation. At such a time a religion
of demonism, other-worldliness, resignation, retirement from the world,
and renunciation appeals both to those who want a dream of escape and to
those who despair. Our own time, on the other hand, is one of advance on
account of great unoccupied territories now opened at little or no cost
to those who have nothing. Such a period is one of hope, power, and gain
for the masses. Optimism is the philosophy. All the mores get their
spirit from it. "Progress" is an object of faith. A philosophy of
resignation and renunciation is unpopular. There is nothing which we
cannot do, and will not do, if we choose. No mistake will cost much. It
can be easily rectified. In the Renaissance in Italy, besides the
rejection of religion and the disorder of the state, there was a great
movement of new power derived from the knowledge which was changing the
life conditions. Great social forces were set loose. Men of heroic
dimensions, both in good and ill, appeared in great numbers. They had
astounding ability to accomplish achievements, and appeared to be
possessed by devils, so superhuman was their energy in vice and crime as
well as in war, art, discovery, and literature. No doubt this phenomenon
of heroic men belongs to an age of advance with a great upbursting of
new power under more favorable conditions. It is to be noticed also that
reproduction responds to conditions of advance or decline. In decline
marriage and family become irksome. Celibacy arises in the mores. In
times of advance sex vice and excess reach a degree, as in the
Renaissance, which seems to constitute a social paroxysm. The sex
passion rises to a frenzy to which everything else is sacrificed. The
notion that mores grow either better or worse by virtue of some inherent
tendency is to be rejected. Goodness or badness of the mores is always
relative only. Their purpose is to serve needs, and their quality is to
be defined by the degree to which they do it. We have noticed that there
is in them a strain towards consistency, due to the fact that they are
more efficient when consistent. They are consistent also in aberration
and error when they fall under the dominion of any one of the false
tendencies above described. Hence we may have the phenomena of
degenerate mores characterizing a period; being a case of change in the
mores not due to any external and determinable cause, and analogous
either to vice or disease.
+105. The correction of aberrations.+ It is possible to arrest or avert
such an aberration in the mores at its beginning or in its early stages.
It is, however, very difficult to do so, and it would be very difficult
to find a case in which it has been done. Necessarily the effort to do
it consists in a prophecy of consequences. Such prophecy does not appeal
to any one who does not himself foresee error and harm. Prophets have
always fared ill, because their predictions were unwelcome and they were
unpopular. The pension system which has grown up in the United States
since the civil war has often been criticised. It is an abuse of extreme
peril in a democracy. Demagogues easily use it to corrupt the voters
with their own money. It is believed that it will soon die out by its
own limitations. There is, however, great doubt of this. It is more
likely to cause other evil measures, in order that it may not die out.
If we notice the way in which, in this case, people let a thing go on in
order to avoid trouble, we may see how aberrant mores come in and grow
strong.
+106. Mores of advance or decline.+ Seeck thinks that a general
weariness of life in the Greco-Roman world caused indifference to
procreation. It accounts for the readiness to commit suicide and for the
indifference to martyrdom. Life was hardly worth having. He says that
during the whole period of the empire there was no improvement in the
useful arts, no new invention, and no new device to facilitate
production. Neither was there any improvement in the art of war, in
literature, or the fine arts. As to transportation and commerce there
seems to have been gain in the first centuries of the Christian
era.[123] Such inventions as were made required a very long time to work
their way into general use. This sluggishness is most apparent in mental
labor. After the time of Hadrian science cannot be said to have existed.
The learned only cited their predecessors. Philosophy consisted in
interpreting old texts. The only gains were in religion, and those all
were won by Semites or other peoples of western Asia.[124] Both Greeks
and Romans exterminated the _élite_ of their societies, and pursued a
policy which really was a selection of the less worthy.[125] Men fled
from the world. They wanted to get out of human society. They especially
wanted to escape the state. The reason was that they suffered pain in
society, especially from the political institutions. The Christian
church gave to this renunciation of social rights and duties the
character of a religious virtue. "Pessimism took possession of the old
peoples at the beginning of the Christian era. This world is regarded as
delivered over to destruction. Men long for a better life and the
immortality of the gods, outside of this transitory existence. To this
sentiment corresponds the division of the universe into a world of light
above, the realm of the good, and a world of darkness below, where the
evil powers dwell. Men live in a middle space. Myths explained how our
world arose as a mixture of good and evil, between the two realms of
good and evil. Man belongs to both; to the world of light by his soul,
to the world of darkness by his body. Men struggle for redemption from
this world and from carnality, and long to soar through the series of
the heavens, so as to come before the face of the highest God, there to
live forever. This one can do after death, if he has during life
undergone the necessary consecration, and has learned the words which
can open heaven for him. In order to impart the consecration, and break
the powers of darkness, one of the higher gods, the Redeemer-God,
himself descended to earth. This religious theory is held by secret
sects. The folk religions are dead. They can no longer satisfy the wants
of men. Those of the same faiths and sentiments meet in secret
brotherhood. The East must have been full of such secret sects, which
corresponded to the petty states of the earlier period."[126] There was
a very widespread opinion that the world was old and used up so that it
could produce no more, just as a woman beyond her prime could no longer
bear children.[127] "Whenever in any people, consciousness of its
decline becomes vivid, a strange tendency to self-destruction arises in
it. This is not to be explained scientifically, although it has been
often observed." The best commit suicide first, for they do not fear
death.[128] Romans of wealth and rank committed suicide in the first and
second century with astonishing levity; Christians, of the masses, went
to martyrdom in the same way. Pliny expresses the feeling that life had
little or no value.[129]
+107. The Greek temper in prosperity.+ The Greeks, until the fourth
century before Christ, were characterized by the joy of life. They lived
in close touch with nature, and the human body was to them not a clog or
a curse, but a model of beauty and a means of participating in the
activities of nature. Their mores were full of youthful exuberance.
Their life philosophy was egoistic and materialistic. They wanted to
enjoy all which their powers could win, yet their notion of _olbos_ was
so elevated that our modern languages have no word for it. It meant
opulence, with generous liberality of sentiment and public spirit. "I do
not call him who lives in prosperity, and has great possessions, a man
of _olbos_, but only a well-to-do treasure keeper."[130] Such were the
mores of the age of advance in wealth, population, military art,
knowledge, mental achievement, and fine arts,--all of which evidently
were correlative and coherent parts of an expanding prosperity and
group life.
+108. Greek pessimism.+ It is true that this light-hearted, gay, and
artistic temper was boyish. Behind it there always was a pessimistic
world philosophy. The gods envied men any happiness and success, and
would cast down any one who was successful. The joyous temper always was
that of the man who has made up his mind to enjoy himself and forget,
since to take thought and care would do no good. This philosophy
embittered all prosperity. The epic heroes suffered painful ends, and
when the tragedians took up the stories again they heaped up crime and
woe.[131] Pessimism was in the myths. While things went well the life
policy of joyous carelessness overbore the pessimism, but when things
began to go ill the conviction arose that life is not worth living. The
abuses of democracy in the cities took away all the joy of success. It
was wisdom just to take things as they came. Life was not worth having,
for itself. If circumstances turned the balance of joy and pain so that
the latter predominated a little, suicide was a rational relief.
Religion did not cause this pessimism, but also it did not oppose it.
Suicide was no offense to the gods, because they did not give life.[132]
The Greeks held their doctrine of pessimism, the envy of the gods, etc.,
to be a correct induction from observation of life. Herodotus brought
back a conviction of it from his travels.[133] Tradition ascribed to
Solon the saying that "there is not a single happy mortal to be found
amongst all the sun shines on."[134]
+109. Greek degeneracy.+ The decline of the Greeks in the three
centuries before our era is so great and sudden that it is very
difficult to understand it. The best estimate of the population of the
Peloponnesus in the second century B.C. puts it at one hundred and nine
per square mile.[135] Yet the population was emigrating, and population
was restricted. A pair would have but one or two children. The cities
were empty and the land was uncultivated.[136] There was neither war
nor pestilence to account for this. It may be that the land was
exhausted. There must have been a loss of economic power so that labor
was unrewarded. The mores all sank together. There can be no achievement
in the struggle for existence without an adequate force. Our
civilization is built on steam. The Greek and Roman civilization was
built on slavery, that is, on an aggregation of human power. The result
produced was, at first, very great, but the exploitation of men entailed
other consequences besides quantities of useful products. It was these
consequences which issued in the mores, for, in a society built on
slavery as the form of productive industry, all the mores, obeying the
strain of consistency, must conform to that as the chief of the
folkways. It was at the beginning of the empire that the Romans began to
breed slaves because wars no longer brought in new supplies.[137] Sex,
vice, laziness, decline of energy and enterprise, cowardice, and
contempt for labor were consequences of slavery, for the free.[138] The
system operated, in both the classical states, as a selection against
the superior elements in the population. This effect was intensified by
the political system. The city became an arena of political struggle for
the goods of life which it was a shame to work for. Tyrannies and
democracies alternated with each other, but both alike used massacre and
proscription, and both thought it policy to get rid of troublesome
persons, that is, of those who had convictions and had courage to avow
them. Every able man became a victim of terrorism, exerted by idle
market-place loafers. The abuse of democratic methods by
those-who-had-not to plunder those-who-had must also have had much to do
with the decline of economic power, and with the general decline of joy
in life and creative energy. It would also make marriage and children a
great and hopeless burden. Abortion and sex vice both directly and
indirectly lessened population, by undermining the power of
reproduction, while their effect to destroy all virile virtues could not
fail to be exerted.[139] It was another symptom of disease in the mores
that the number of males in the Roman empire greatly exceeded the
number of females.[140] The Roman system used up women.
+110. Sparta.+ The case of Sparta is especially interesting because the
Spartan mores were generally admired and envied in the fourth century
B.C. They were very artificial and arbitrary. They developed into a
catastrophe. The population declined to such a point that it was like
group suicide. The nation incased itself in fossilized mores and
extremest conservatism, by which its own energies were crushed. The
institutions produced consequences which were grotesque compared with
what had been expected from them.[141]
+111. Optimism of prosperity.+ "I apprehend that the key to the joyful
character of the antique religions known to us [in western Asia] lies in
the fact that they took their shape in communities that were progressive
and, on the whole, prosperous." Weak groups were exterminated. Those
which survived "had all the self-confidence and elasticity that are
engendered by success in the struggle of life." "The religious gladness
of the Semites tended to assume an orgiastic character and become a sort
of intoxication of the senses, in which anxiety and sorrow were drowned
for the moment."[142]
+112. Antagonism between an individual and the mores.+ The case of
dissent from the mores, which was considered above (sec. 100), is the
case in which the individual voluntarily sets himself in antagonism to
the mores of the society. There are cases in which the individual finds
himself in involuntary antagonism to the mores of the society, or of
some subgroup to which he belongs. If a man passes from one class to
another, his acts show the contrast between the mores in which he was
bred and those in which he finds himself. The satirists have made fun of
the _parvenu_ for centuries. His mistakes and misfortunes reveal the
nature of the mores, their power over the individual, their pertinacity
against later influences, the confusion in character produced by
changing them, and the grip of habit which appears both in the
persistence of old mores and the weakness of new ones. Every emigrant is
forced to change his mores. He loses the sustaining help of use and
wont. He has to acquire a new outfit of it. The traveler also
experiences the change from life in one set of mores to life in another.
The experience gives him the best power to criticise his native mores
from a standpoint outside of them. In the North American colonies white
children were often stolen by Indians and brought up by them in their
ways. Whether they would later, if opportunity offered, return to white
society and white mores, or would prefer to remain with the Indians,
seems to have depended on the age at which they were captured.
Missionaries have often taken men of low civilization out of the society
in which they were born, have educated them, and taught them white men's
mores. If a single clear and indisputable case could be adduced in which
such a person was restored to his own people and did not revert to their
mode of life, it would be a very important contribution to ethnology. We
are forced to believe that, if a baby born in New England was taken to
China and given to a Chinese family to rear and educate, he would become
a Chinaman in all which belongs to the mores, that is to say, in his
character, conduct, and code of life.
+113. Antagonism of earlier and later mores.+ When, in the course of
time, changes occur in the mores, the men of a later generation find
themselves in antagonism to the mores of their ancestors. In the Homeric
poems cases are to be found of disapproval by a later generation of the
mores of a former one. The same is true of the tragedies of the fifth
century in respect to the mythology and heroism in Homer. The punishment
of Melantheus, the unfaithful goatherd, was savage in the extreme, but
when Eurykleia exulted over the dead suitors, Ulysses told her that it
was a cruel sin to rejoice over slain enemies.[143] In the _Iliad_
boastful shouts over the dead are frequent. In the _Odyssey_ such shouts
are forbidden.[144] Homer thinks that it was unseemly for Achilles to
drag the corpse of Hector behind his chariot.[145] He says that the gods
disapproved, which is the mystic way of describing a change in the
mores.[146] He also disapproves of the sacrifice of Trojan youths on the
pyre of Patroclus.[147] It was proposed to Pausanias that he should
repay on the corpse of Mardonius the insults which Xerxes had practiced
on the corpse of Leonidas at Thermopylæ, but he indignantly
refused.[148] In the _Eumenides_ of Æschylus the story of Orestes is
represented as a struggle between the mores of the father family and
those of the mother family. In the _Herakleidæ_ there is a struggle
between old and new mores as to the killing of captives. Many such
contrasts are drawn between Greek and barbarian mores, the latter being
old and abandoned customs which have become abominable to the Greeks
(incest, murder of strangers). In the fourth century the Greeks were so
humbled by their own base treatment of each other that this contrast
ceased to be drawn.[149] Similar contrasts between earlier and later
mores appear in the Bible. Our own mores set us in antagonism to much
which we find in the Bible (slavery, polygamy, extirpation of
aborigines). The mores always bring down in tradition a code which is
old. Infanticide, slavery, murder of the old, human sacrifices, etc.,
are in it. Later conditions force a new judgment, which is in revolt and
antagonism to what always has been done and what everybody does. Slavery
is an example of this in recent history.
+114. Antagonism between groups in respect to mores.+ When different
groups come in contact with each other their mores are brought into
contrast and antagonism. Some Australian girls consider that their honor
requires that they shall be knocked senseless and carried off by the men
who thereby become their husbands. If they are the victims of violence,
they need not be ashamed. Eskimo girls would be ashamed to go away with
husbands without crying and lamenting, glad as they are to go. They are
shocked to hear that European women publicly consent in church to be
wives, and then go with their husbands without pretending to regret it.
In Homer girls are proud to be bought and to bring to their fathers a
bride price of many cows. In India _gandharva_ marriage is one of the
not-honorable forms. It is love marriage. It rests on passion and is
considered sensual; moreover, it is due to a transitory emotion. If
property is involved in marriage the institution rests on a permanent
interest and is guaranteed. Kaffirs also ridicule Christian love
marriage. They say that it puts a woman on a level with a cat, the only
animal which, amongst them, has no value.[150] Where polygamy prevails
women are ashamed to be wives of men who can afford only one each; under
monogamy they think it a disgrace to be wives of men who have other
wives. The Japanese think the tie to one's father the most sacred. A man
who should leave father and mother and cleave to his wife would become
an outcast. Therefore the Japanese think the Bible immoral and
irreligious.[151] Such a view in the mores of the masses will long
outlast the "adoption of western civilization." The Egyptians thought
the Greeks unclean. Herodotus says that the reason was because they ate
cow's flesh.[152] The Greeks, as wine drinkers, thought themselves
superior to the Egyptians, who drank beer. A Greek people was considered
inferior if it had no city life, no agora, no athletics, no share in the
games, no group character, and if it kept on a robber life.[153] The
real reason for the hatred of Jews by Christians has always been the
strange and foreign mores of the former. When Jews conform to the mores
of the people amongst whom they live prejudice and hatred are greatly
diminished, and in time will probably disappear. The dislike of the
colored people in the old slave states of the United States and the
hostility to whites who "associate with negroes" is to be attributed to
the difference in the mores of whites and blacks. Under slavery the
blacks were forced to conform to white ways, as indeed they are now if
they are servants. In the North, also, where they are in a small
minority, they conform to white ways. It is when they are free and form
a large community that they live by their own mores. The civil war in
the United States was due to a great divergence in the mores of the
North and the South, produced by the presence or absence of slavery. The
passionate dislike and contempt of the people of one section for those
of the other was due to the conception each had formed of the other's
character and ways. Since the abolition of slavery the mores of the two
sections have become similar and the sectional dislike has disappeared.
The contrast between the mores of English America and Spanish America is
very great. It would long outlast any political combination of parts of
the two, if such should be brought about.
+115. Missions and mores.+ The contrasts and antagonisms of the mores of
different groups are the stumbling-blocks in the way of all missionary
enterprise, and they explain many of the phenomena which missions
present. We think that our "ways" are the best, and that their
superiority is so obvious that all heathen, Mohammedans, Buddhists,
etc., will, as soon as they learn what our ways are, eagerly embrace
them. Nothing could be further from the truth. "It is difficult to an
untraveled Englishman, who has not had an opportunity of throwing
himself into the spirit of the East, to credit the disgust and
detestation that numerous everyday acts, which appear perfectly harmless
to his countrymen, excite in many Orientals."[154] If our women are
shocked at polygamy and the harem, Mohammedan women are equally shocked
at the ball and dinner dresses of our ladies, at our dances, and at the
manners of social intercourse between the sexes. Negroes in East Africa
are as much disgusted to see white men eat fowl or eggs as we are at any
of their messes. Missions always offer something from above downwards.
They contain an assumption of superiority and beneficence.
Half-civilized people never admit the assumption. They meet it just as
we would meet a mission of Mohammedans or Buddhists to us. Savages and
barbarians dismiss "white man's ways" with indifference. The virtues and
arts of civilization are almost as disastrous to the uncivilized as its
vices. It is really the great tragedy of civilization that the contact
of lower and higher is disastrous to the former, no matter what may be
the point of contact, or how little the civilized may desire to do
harm.
+116. Missions and antagonistic mores.+ Missionaries always have to try
to act on the mores. The ritual and creed of a religion, and reading and
writing, would not fulfill the purpose. The attempt is to teach the
social ritual of civilized people. Missionaries almost always first
insist on the use of clothing and monogamy. The first of these has, in a
great number of cases, produced disease and hastened the extinction of
the aborigines. The second very often causes a revolution in the
societal organization, either in the family form, the productive
industry, or the political discipline. The Hawaiians were a people of a
very cheerful and playful disposition. The missionaries trained the
children in the schools to serious manners and decorum. Such was the
method in fashion in our own schools at the time. The missionary society
refused the petition of the Hawaiians for teachers who would teach them
the mechanic arts.[155] This is like the refusal of the English
missionary society to support Livingstone's policy in South Africa
because it was not religious. Until very recent times no white men have
understood the difference between the mother family and the father
family. Missionaries have all grown up in the latter. Miss Kingsley
describes the antagonism which arises in the mind of a West African
negro, brought up in the mother family, against the teaching of the
missionary. The negro husband and wife have separate property. Neither
likes the white man's doctrine of the community of goods. The woman
knows that that would mean that she would have none. The man would not
take her goods if he must take her children too. "White culture expects
a man to think more of his wife and children than he does of his mother
and sisters, which to the uncultured African is absurd."[156] Evidently
it is these collisions and antagonisms of the mores which constitute the
problems of missions. We can quote but a single bit of evidence that an
aboriginal people has gained benefit from contact with the civilized. Of
the Bantu negroes it is said that such contact has increased their vigor
and vitality.[157] The "missionary-made man" is not a good type,
according to the military, travelers, and ethnographers.[158] Of the
Basutos it is said that the converted ones are the worst. They are
dishonest and dirty.[159] In Central America it is said that the
judgment is often expressed that "an Indian who can read and write is a
good-for-nothing." The teachers in the schools teach the Indian children
to despise the ways of their race. Then they lose the virtues of
trustworthiness and honesty, for which the Indians were noteworthy.[160]
There is no such thing as "benevolent assimilation." To one who knows
the facts such a phrase sounds like flippant ignorance or a cruel jest.
Even if one group is reduced to a small remnant in the midst of a great
nation, assimilation of the residue does not follow. Black and white, in
the United States, are now tending to more strict segregation. The
remnants of our Indians partly retain Indian mores, partly adopt white
mores. They languish in moral isolation and homelessness. They have no
adjustment to any social environment. Gypsies have never adopted the
mores of civilized life. They are morally and physically afloat in the
world. There are in India and in the Russian empire great numbers of
remnants of aboriginal tribes, and there are, all over the world, groups
of pariahs, or _races maudites_, which the great groups will not
assimilate. The Jews, although more numerous, and economically far
stronger, are in the same attitude to the peoples amongst which they
live.
+117. Modification of the mores by agitation.+ To this point all
projects of missions and reform must come. It must be recognized that
what is proposed is an arbitrary action on the mores. Therefore nothing
sudden or big is possible. The enterprise is possible only if the mores
are ready for it. The conditions of success lie in the mores. The
methods must conform to the mores. That is why the agitator, reformer,
prophet, reorganizer of society, who has found out "the truth" and wants
to "get a law passed" to realize it right away, is only a
mischief-maker. He has won considerable prestige in the last hundred
years, but if the cases are examined it will be found that when he had
success it was because he took up something for which the mores were
ready. Wilberforce did not overthrow slavery. Natural forces reduced to
the service of man and the discovery of new land set men "free" from
great labor, and new ways suggested new sentiments of humanity and
ethics. The mores changed and all the wider deductions in them were
repugnant to slavery. The free-trade agitators did not abolish the corn
laws. The interests of the English population had undergone a new
distribution. It was the redistribution of population and political
power in the United States which made the civil war. Witchcraft and
trial by torture were not abolished by argument. Critical knowledge and
thirst for reality made them absurd. In Queen Anne's reign prisons in
England were frightful sinks of vice, misery, disease, and cruel
extortion. "So the prisons continued until the time of Howard,"[161]
seventy-five years later. The mores had then become humanitarian. Howard
was able to get a response.
+118. Capricious interest of the masses.+ Whether the masses will think
certain things wrong, cruel, base, unjust, and disgusting; whether they
will think certain pleas and demands reasonable; whether they will
regard certain projects as sensible, ridiculous, or fantastic, and will
give attention to certain topics, depends on the convictions and
feelings which at the time are dominant in the mores. No one can predict
with confidence what the response will be to any stimulus which may be
applied. The fact that certain American products of protected industries
are sold abroad cheaper than at home, so that the protective tariff
taxes us to make presents to foreigners, has been published scores of
times. It might be expected to produce a storm of popular indignation.
It does not do so. The abuses of the pension system have been exposed
again and again. There is no popular response in condemnation of the
abuse, or demand for reform. The error and folly of protection have been
very fully exposed, but the free-trade agitation has not won ground. In
truth, however, that agitation has never been carried on sincerely and
persistently. Many of those who have taken part in it have not aimed to
put an end to the steal, but to be taken into it. The notion of "making
something out of the government" in one way or another has got into the
mores. It is the vice of modern representative government. Civil-service
reform has won but little popular support because the masses have
learned that the successful party has a right to distribute the offices
amongst its members. That has become accepted doctrine in the mores. A
local boss said: "There is but one issue in the Fifth Maryland district.
It is this, Can any man get more from Uncle Sam for the hard-working
Republicans of the district than I can?"[162] This sentiment wins wide
sympathy. Prohibitory legislation accords with the mores of the rural,
but not of the urban, population. It therefore produces in cities deceit
and blackmail, and we meet with the strange phenomenon, in a
constitutional state, that publicists argue that administrative officers
in cities ought to ignore the law. Antipolygamy is in the mores;
antidivorce is not. Any injustice or arbitrary action against polygamy
is possible. Reform of divorce legislation is slow and difficult. We are
told that "respect for law" is in our mores, but the frequency of
lynching disproves it. Let those who believe in the psychology of crowds
write for us a logic of crowds and tell how the corporate mind operates.
+119. How the group becomes homogeneous.+ The only way in which, in the
course of time, remnants of foreign groups are apparently absorbed and
the group becomes homogeneous, is that the foreign element dies out. In
like manner people who live by aberrant mores die. The aberrant forms
then cease to be, and the mores become uniform. In the meantime, there
is a selection which determines which mores shall survive and which
perish. This is accomplished by syncretism.
+120. Syncretism.+ Although folkways for the same purpose have a great
similarity in all groups, yet they present variations and characteristic
differences from group to group. These variations are sometimes due to
differences in the life conditions, but generally causes for them are
unascertainable, or the variations appear capricious. Therefore each
in-group forms its own ways, and looks with contempt and abhorrence upon
the ways of any out-group (sec. 13). Dialectical differences in language
or pronunciation are a sufficient instance. They cannot be accounted
for, but they call out contempt and ridicule, and are taken to be signs
of barbarism and inferiority. When groups are compounded by
intermarriage, intercourse, conquest, immigration, or slavery,
syncretism of the folkways takes place. One of the component groups
takes precedence and sets the standards. The inferior groups or classes
imitate the ways of the dominant group, and eradicate from their
children the traditions of their own ancestors. Amongst Englishmen the
correct or incorrect placing of the _h_ is a mark of caste. It is a
matter of education to put an end to the incorrect use. Contiguity,
neighborhood, or even literature may suffice to bring about syncretism
of the mores. One group learns that the people of another group regard
some one of its ways or notions as base. This knowledge may produce
shame and an effort to breed out the custom. Thus whenever two groups
are brought into contact and contagion, there is, by syncretism, a
selection of the folkways which is destructive to some of them. This is
the process by which folkways are rendered obsolete. The notion of a
gradual refinement of the mores in time, which is assumed to go on of
itself, or by virtue of some inherent tendency in that direction, is
entirely unfounded. Christian mores in the western empire were formed by
syncretism of Jewish and pagan mores. Christian mores therefore contain
war, slavery, concubinage, demonism, and base amusements, together with
some abstract ascetic doctrines with which these things are
inconsistent. The strain of the mores towards consistency produced
elimination of some of these customs. The church embraced in its fold
Latin, Teutonic, Greek, and Slavonic nations, and it produced a grand
syncretism of their mores, while it favored those which were Latin. The
Teutonic mores suffered elimination. Those which were Greek and
Slavonic were saved by the division of the church. Those which now pass
for Christian in western Europe are the result of the syncretism of two
thousand years. When now western Christians come in contact with
heathen, Mohammedans, Buddhists, or alien forms of Christianity, they
endeavor to put an end to polygamy, slavery, infanticide, idolatry,
etc., which have been extruded from western Christian mores. In Egypt at
the present time the political power and economic prosperity of the
English causes the Mohammedans to envy, emulate, and imitate them in all
those peculiarities which are supposed to be causes of their success.
Hence we hear of movements to educate children, change the status of
women, and otherwise modify traditional mores. It is another case of the
operation by which inferior mores are rendered obsolete.
+121. The art of societal administration.+ It is not to be inferred that
reform and correction are hopeless. Inasmuch as the mores are a
phenomenon of the society and not of the state, and inasmuch as the
machinery of administration belongs to the state and not to the society,
the administration of the mores presents peculiar difficulties. Strictly
speaking, there is no administration of the mores, or it is left to
voluntary organs acting by moral suasion. The state administration fails
if it tries to deal with the mores, because it goes out of its province.
The voluntary organs which try to administer the mores (literature,
moral teachers, schools, churches, etc.) have no set method and no
persistent effort. They very often make great errors in their methods.
In regard to divorce, for instance, it is idle to set up stringent rules
in an ecclesiastical body, and to try to establish them by extravagant
and false interpretation of the Bible, hoping in that way to lead
opinion; but the observation and consideration of cases which occur
affect opinion and form convictions. The statesman and social
philosopher can act with such influences, sum up the forces which make
them, and greatly help the result. The inference is that intelligent art
can be introduced here as elsewhere, but that it is necessary to
understand the mores and to be able to discern the elements in them,
just as it is always necessary for good art to understand the facts of
nature with which it will have to deal. It belongs to the work of
publicists and statesmen to gauge the forces in the mores and to
perceive their tendencies. The great men of a great epoch are those who
have understood new currents in the mores. The great reformers of the
sixteenth century, the great leaders of modern revolutions, were, as we
can easily see, produced out of a protest or revulsion which had long
been forming under and within the existing system. The leaders are such
because they voice the convictions which have become established and
because they propose measures which will realize interests of which the
society has become conscious. A hero is not needed. Often a mediocre,
commonplace man suffices to give the critical turn to thought or
interest. "A Gian Angelo Medici, agreeable, diplomatic, benevolent, and
pleasure-loving, sufficed to initiate a series of events which kept the
occidental races in perturbation through two centuries."[163] Great
crises come when great new forces are at work changing fundamental
conditions, while powerful institutions and traditions still hold old
systems intact. The fifteenth century was such a period. It is in such
crises that great men find their opportunity. The man and the age react
on each other. The measures of policy which are adopted and upon which
energy is expended become components in the evolution. The evolution,
although it has the character of a nature process, always must issue by
and through men whose passions, follies, and wills are a part of it but
are also always dominated by it. The interaction defies our analysis,
but it does not discourage our reason and conscience from their play on
the situation, if we are content to know that their function must be
humble. Stoll boldly declares that if one of us had been a judge in the
times of the witch trials he would have reasoned as the witch judges
did, and would have tortured like them.[164] If that is so, then it
behooves us by education and will, with intelligent purpose, to
criticise and judge even the most established ways of our time, and to
put courage and labor into resistance to the current mores where we
judge them wrong. It would be a mighty achievement of the science of
society if it could lead up to an art of societal administration which
should be intelligent, effective, and scientific.
[90] _N. S. Amer. Anthrop._, IV, 3.
[91] _Globus_, LXXXVII, 130.
[92] "Religion of Israel," Hastings, _Dict._, Supp. vol.
[93] Tiele, _Relig. in Alterthum_, I, 295.
[94] _Ibid._, 242.
[95] Stammler, _Stellung der Frauen_, 3.
[96] Friedberg, _Recht der Eheschliessung_.
[97] _Ztsft. f. Volkskunde_, XI, 272.
[98] Scherr, _Deutsche Kultur-und Sittengesch._, 171.
[99] Stammler, _Stellung der Frauen_, 8.
[100] Wachsmuth, _Bauernkriege_, in Raumer, _Taschenbuch_, V.
[101] _Charters_, 449.
[102] Stubbs, _History_, II, 453.
[103] _Stellung der Frauen_, 3.
[104] Sec. 86.
[105] Hiekisch, _Tungusen_, 31; Sieroshevski, _Yakuty_, I, 415.
[106] Simkhovitsch, _Feldgemeinschaft in Russland_, Chap. XXIX.
[107] _Japan and the Japanese_, 360.
[108] _Vererbung und Auslese_, 282.
[109] _Pol. Anth. Revue_, III, 416.
[110] Brandt in _Umschau_, VIII, 722.
[111] Hearn, _Japan_, 193.
[112] _Ibid._, 112. Cf. sec. 76.
[113] _Web of Indian Life_, 125.
[114] _Brahmanism and Hinduism_, 352.
[115] Mayer, _Oesterreich_, II, 454-465.
[116] Gauthiez, _Lorenzaccio_, 230.
[117] _Ibid._, 227.
[118] _Japan_, 20.
[119] Harnack, _Dogmengesch._ (3rd ed.), I, 319.
[120] Van Duyl, _Beschavingsgeschiedenis van het Nederl. Volk_,
237.
[121] _De Anima_, 30.
[122] Boissier, _Relig. Rom._, I, 239.
[123] Pöhlmann, _Die Uebervölkerung d. Antiq. Grossstädte_, 12.
[124] Seeck, _Untergang der Antiq. Welt_, I, 258 ff., 278.
[125] _Ibid._, Chap. III.
[126] Gunkel, _Zum Religions-gesch. Verständniss d. N.T._, 19.
[127] Seeck, I, 353.
[128] _Ibid._, 364 ff.
[129] _Hist. Nat._, VII, 41, 44, 46, 51, 56.
[130] Euripides, _Antiope_, frag. 32.
[131] Burckhardt, _Griech. Kulturgesch._, II, 375 ff.
[132] _Ibid._, 391.
[133] _Ibid._, 395.
[134] _Ibid._, 397.
[135] Beloch, _Bevölkerung d. Griech.-Röm. Welt_, 157.
[136] Polybius, XXVII, 9, 5; Seeck, _Untergang d. Antiq. Welt_,
I, 325, 360.
[137] Seeck, I, 355.
[138] Seeck, II, Chap. IV; Beloch, _Griech. Gesch._, I, 226.
[139] Burckhardt, _Griech. Kulturgesch._, I, 222, 237, 259, 273;
II, 355, 367, 370.
[140] Seeck, I, 337.
[141] Burckhardt, I, 139 ff.; Beloch, _Griech. Gesch._, I, 283,
570; II, 362.
[142] W. Rob. Smith, _Relig. of the Semites_, 260.
[143] _Od._, XXII, 474 ff.
[144] _Ibid._, 412.
[145] _Iliad_, XXII, 395.
[146] _Iliad_, XXIV, 51.
[147] _Ibid._, XXIII, 164.
[148] Herodotus, IX, 78.
[149] Burckhardt, _Griech. Kulturgesch._, I, 327.
[150] _Globus_, LXXV, 271.
[151] Hubbard, _Smithson. Rep._, 1895, 673.
[152] Herodotus, II, 41.
[153] Burckhardt, _Griech. Kulturgesch._, I, 314.
[154] Galton, _Inquiries into Human Faculty_, 216.
[155] _Amer. Jo. Sociol._, VIII, 408.
[156] Kingsley, _West African Studies_, 377.
[157] _B. & M. Soc. d'Anthrop._, 1901, 362.
[158] Portman, _Station Studies_, 78.
[159] _Amer. Anthrop._, VI, 353, citing _Jo. Afr. Soc._, 1903,
208.
[160] _Globus_, LXXXVII, 129.
[161] Ashton, _Social Life in the Time of Queen Anne_, Chap. XLI.
[162] _N.Y. Times_, September 19, 1904.
[163] Symonds, _Catholic Reaction_, I, 144.
[164] Stoll, _Suggestion und Hypnotismus_, 248.
CHAPTER III
THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE
TOOLS, ARTS, LANGUAGE, MONEY
Processes and artifacts of the food supply.--Fishing.--Methods
of fishing.--The mystic element.--Religion and industry.--
Artifacts and freaks of nature.--Forms of stone axes.--How
stone implements are made.--How arrowheads are made.--How stone
axes are used.--Acculturation or parallelism.--Fire-making
tools.--Psychophysical traits of primitive man.--Language.--
Language and magic.--Language is a case of folkways.--Primitive
dialects.--Taking up and dropping language.--Pigeon dialects.--
How languages grow.--Money.--Intergroup and intragroup money.--
Predominant wares.--Intragroup money from property; intergroup
money from trade.--Shell and bead money.--Token money.--
Selection of a predominant ware.--Stone money in Melanesia.--
Plutocratic effects of money.--Money on the northwest coast of
North America.--Wampumpeag and roanoke.--Ring money. Use of
metal.--The evolution of money.--The ethical functions of
money.
+122. Processes and artifacts of the food supply.+ The processes and the
artifacts which are connected with food supply offer us the purest and
simplest illustrations of the development of folkways. They are not free
from the admixture of superstition and vanity, but the element of
expediency predominates in them. It is reported of the natives of New
South Wales that a man will lie on a rock with a piece of fish in his
hand, feigning sleep. A hawk or crow darts at the fish, but is caught by
the man. It is also reported of Australians that a man swims under
water, breathing through a reed, approaches ducks, pulls one under water
by the legs, wrings its neck, and so secures a number of them.[165] If
these stories can be accepted with confidence, they may well furnish us
a starting point for a study of the art of catching animals. The man
really has no tool, but must rely entirely on his own quickness and
dexterity. Birdlime is a device for which many plants furnish
material,[166] and which is available even against large game, which is
fretted and worn out by it until it becomes the prey of man. A Botocudo
hunter grates the eggs of an alligator together, when he finds them on
the bank, and so entices the mother.[167] The Yuroks of California
sprinkled berries on the shallow bottom of a river and stretched a net a
few inches below the surface of the water. Ducks diving for the berries
were caught by the neck in the meshes and drowned. As they hung quiet
they did not frighten away others.[168] The Tarahumari catch birds by
stringing corn kernels on a fiber which is buried underground. The bird
swallows the corn and cannot eject it.[169] Various animals were trained
to help man in the food quest and were thus drawn into the industrial
organization. The animals furnished materials (skin, bone, teeth, hair,
horns) and also tools, so that the food quest broadened beyond the
immediate supply of food into mechanical industrial forms. The Shingu
Indians, although they lived on the product of the ground, were obliged
to continue the chase because of the materials and implements which they
got from the animals. They used the jaw of a fish, with the teeth in it,
as a knife; the arm and leg bones of apes as arrow points; the tail
spike of a skate for the same; the two front claws of the armadillo to
dig the ground (a process which the animal taught them by the same use
of his claws); the shell of a river mussel as a scraper to finish wooden
tools. "These people were hunters without dogs, fishers without hooks,
and tillers without plow or spade. They show how much development life
was capable of in the time before metals."[170] The palometa is a fish
which weighs two or three pounds. It has fourteen teeth in each jaw so
sharp that the Abipones shear sheep with the jaw.[171] Such cases might
be pursued into great detail. They show acute observation, great
ingenuity, clever adaptation, and teachableness. The lasso, bola,
boomerang, and throw knife, as well as the throw stick, are products of
persistent and open-minded experience. The selection and adaptation of
things in nature to a special operation in the arts often show ingenuity
as great as that manifested in any of our devices.[172] This ingenuity
is of the same kind as that shown by many animals. Intelligent
experiment, however, is not wanting. It is reported of Eskimo that they
invent imaginary hard cases, such as might occur to them, and, by way of
sport, discuss the proper way to deal with the case.[173] Operations
similar to this in play show a mode in which ingenuity must have been
developed and inventions produced. In the higher grades of the hunting
stage, such as are presented by the North American Indians, buffalo
hunting, for instance, calls for the highest organization and skill, and
establishes inflexible discipline.[174]
+123. Fishing.+ Fishing furnishes a parallel case. A Thlinkit fisherman
puts on a cap which resembles the head of a seal, and hiding his body
between the rocks makes a noise like a seal. This entices seals towards
him and gives him opportunity to kill them.[175] The Australians had a
fish spear and a net made of fibers, which were chewed by the women to
make them soft. They had no hooks until they got them from the
whites.[176] Weirs for fishing were built of stone. One is described
which was a labyrinth of stone circles, of which some were connected
with each other. The walls are three or four feet high. The fish get
confused and are caught by hand.[177] Remains of weirs, consisting of
wattled work of reeds or saplings, are found in the rivers of northern
Europe. The device of putting into the water some poisonous or narcotic
substance in order to stupefy the fish is met with all over the globe.
It was employed by the aborigines on Lanzarote (Canary Islands). There
the fish were freshened in unpoisoned waters.[178] It is quite
impossible that this device should have spread only by contact. It must
have been independently invented. It secured a large amount of fish with
very little trouble. The Ainos dam the stream, leaving only a few
openings, opposite each of which, below, they build a platform. The fish
jump at the opening, but some miss it and fall on the platform where
they are caught.[179] The Polynesians depend largely on fish for their
food supply. They had nets a thousand ells long, which could be handled
only by a hundred men. They made hooks of shell, bone, and hard
wood.[180] The first fishhooks of prehistoric men in Europe and North
America were made of pieces of bone pointed at both ends, the cord being
attached in the middle.[181] The Shingu Indians fished with bow and
arrow, nets, scoop baskets, and weirs. Bait was used to make the fish
rise. Then they were shot with an arrow. The people had no hooks, but
eagerly adopted them when they became acquainted with them.[182] They
and other Brazilians set a long cylindrical basket in a stream in such a
way that when the fish enters it and seizes the bait, it tilts up into a
perpendicular position. The fish cannot then get out.[183]
+124. Methods of fishing.+ Nilsson remarks on the astonishing
resemblance between all the fishing apparatus of Scandinavians, Eskimo,
and North Americans.[184] The problem is solved in the same way, but the
materials within reach impose limiting conditions. The rod and hook
yield to the net when the fish are plentiful. Then, however, the spear
also is used. It is sometimes made so that the head will come off when
the fish is struck. By its buoyancy the spearhead, sticking in the body
of the fish, compels it to rise, when it is caught.[185] A peculiar
device is reported from Dobu, New Guinea. A string long enough to reach
to the ground is fastened to a kite. At the end of the string is a
tassel of spider's web. The kite is held at such a height that the
tassel just skims the water. The fish catching at it entangles its teeth
in the spider's-web tassel and is caught.[186] The Chinese have trained
cormorants to do their fishing for them.
+125. The mystic element.+ Although the food quest is the most
utilitarian and matter-of-fact branch of the struggle for existence, the
mystic element does not fail to present itself. No doubt it would be
found interwoven with many of the cases mentioned above, if the question
was raised and the investigation made. In the Caroline archipelago
fishing is combined with various rites and religious notions. The chief
medicine man owes the authority of his position, not to his knowledge of
the art of fishing, but to his knowledge of the formulæ of incantation
and exorcism employed in fishing. There must be abstinence from the sex
relation before a fishing expedition. The men start in silence.
Especially, the hoped-for success must not be mentioned. The boat must
have a formula of luck pronounced over it. Sacrifices of taro are
offered to win the favor of the god, lest the lines be broken by sharks
or become entangled in rocks. If the expedition fails to get a good
catch, the fault is laid to the men. Some one of them is thought to have
done something amiss.[187]
+126. Religion and industry.+ Here we meet with a familiar cycle of
notions and usages. We must assume them in all cases, whether they are
reported or not, for the element of supernatural intervention, or magic,
seems never to be wanting. At higher stages it gives way to religious
ritual or to priestly blessing. The Japanese sword maker formerly wore a
priestly garb when making a sword, which was a sacred craft. He also
practiced a purificatory ritual. The sacred rope of rice straw, the
oldest symbol of Shinto, was suspended before the smithy. The workman's
food was all cooked with holy fire, and none of his family might enter
the workshop or speak to him while he was at work.[188] There were also
ascetic practices in the Shinto religion, which an elected
representative of the community undertook each year for the prosperity
of the whole.[189] There is never a case of authority in human society
which does not go back, for its origin and explanation, to the influence
of the other world (ghosts, etc.) over this world.
+127. Artifacts and freaks of nature.+ In the Oxford University museum
may be seen a case full of natural stones, flints, etc., so like the
artifacts of the Chellean type that it would require a skilled observer
to determine whether they are artificial or not. The collection includes
apparent celts, rings, perforated stones, borers, scrapers, and flint
flakes, so that the objects are by no means such as would lie at the
beginning of the series of artifacts, in regard to which the doubt
whether they were artificial would arise from their rudeness and
consequent resemblance to stones broken by natural conjunctures. In the
museum at Dresden may be seen a collection of stones, natural products,
which might serve as models for artificial axes, celts, etc. One object
shows the possibility of freaks of nature of this class. It is a
water-worn stone which might be taken for a skull. In the Copenhagen
museum is a great collection of stone tools arranged in sequence of
perfection, beginning with the coarsest and rudest and advancing to the
highest products of art of this kind. That collection is arranged solely
with reference to the development of the flint and stone implements as
tools for a certain use. The sequence is very convincing as to the
interpretation put on the objects, and also as to the strain towards
improvement. Time and place are disregarded in the arrangement. The
earliest specimens in the series are very rude, and only expert opinion
could justify their place amongst artifacts. It reminds us of what we
are told about specimens of Australian "tomahawks." It is said of such a
weapon from West Australia that if it was "found anywhere divested of
the gum and handle, it is doubtful whether it could be recognized by any
one as a work of art. It is ruder in its fashioning, owing principally
to the material of which it is composed, than even the rude, unrubbed,
chipped cutting-stones of the Tasmanians."[190] With regard to these
stone implements of the Tasmanians Tylor said that some of them are
"ruder in make than those of the mammoth period, inasmuch as their edges
are formed by chipping only one surface of the stone, instead of both,
as in the European examples." The Tasmanians, when they needed a cutting
implement, caught up a suitable flat stone, knocked off chips from one
side, partly or all around the edge, and used it without more ado. This
they did under the eyes of modern Europeans. Tylor showed, "from among
flint instruments and flakes from the cave of le Moustier in Dordogne,
specimens corresponding in make with such curious exactness to those of
the Tasmanians that, were they not chipped from different stones, it
would hardly be possible to distinguish those of recent savages from
those of European cavemen. It is not strange that experienced
archæologists should have been at first inclined to consider a large
portion of the Tasmanian stone implements exhibited as wasters and
flakes, or chips, struck off in shaping implements." These stones had no
handle. They were grasped in the hand.[191] In the Oxford museum may be
seen side by side flint shapes from St. Acheul, Tasmania, India, and the
Cape of Good Hope: All the paleolithic implements which we possess, even
the oldest and rudest, belong far on in a series of which the antecedent
members are wanting, for the art, if recognized, is seen to be advanced
and artistic.[192] The Seri of southern California use a natural
cobblestone, which is shaped only by the wear of use, and is discarded
when sharp edges are produced by use or fracture. They use their teeth
and claws like beasts. They have not a knife-sense and need training
before they can use a knife. The stone selected is of an ovoid form
somewhat flattened. By use it is battered on the ends and ground on the
sides so that it becomes personal property and acquires fetishistic
import. It is buried with the corpse of the woman who owned and used
it.[193] Holmes, after experimenting with the manufacture of stone
implements, declared that "every implement resembling the final forms
and every blade-shaped projectile point made from a bowlder, or similar
bit of rock, not already approximate in shape, must pass through the
same or very nearly the same, stages of development, leaving the same
wasters, whether shaped to-day, yesterday, or a million years ago;
whether in the hands of the civilized, the barbarous, or the savage
man."[194] This conclusion is very important, for it recognizes a
certain constant determination of the art of stone-implement making by
the qualities of the material and the muscular activities of man. It has
been disputed whether the form called "turtle-backs" were one form in
the series of artifacts, or a misform produced by errors in manufacture.
"The American archæologists, who have labored long to repeat the
processes of the aborigines in stone work, find themselves unavoidably
making 'turtle-backs,' when they are really trying to make the
leaf-shaped blade."[195] The handicraftsmen of the Smithsonian Institute
have not been able to make a leaf-shaped blade such as may be seen in
the museums, and no Indian has been found who could make one. "This is
one of the lost arts."[196] Other pieces of rude form have been set
aside as chips, or rejects, but such are found in use as scrapers, or in
handles, and are to be recognized as products which belong to the
series.[197] Some rude implements found in the hill gravels of
Berkshire, England, have been offered as anterior to the paleolithic
implements as usually classified.[198] Lubbock said that he could not
find in the large Scandinavian collections "a single specimen of a true
paleolithic type."[199]
+128. Forms of stone axes.+ Stone axes are found all over the globe.
Chipped, sharpened, polished, grooved, pierced, handled, are different
kinds which may be set in a series of advancing improvement, and under
each grade local varieties may be distinguished, but the art is
essentially the same everywhere. "Probably no discovery is older than
the fact that friction would wear away wood or bone, or even
stone."[200] It was also learned that rawhide and sinew shrank in
drying, and this fact was very ingeniously used to attach handles, the
sinew or membrane being put on while fresh and wet. American stone axes
are grooved to receive a handle made by an ingenious adaptation of roots
and branches with pitch or bitumen. "Bored stone axes are found in the
tropical regions of America. Although they are very rare, they are well
executed."[201] The device of boring stone axes appears at the end of
the stone age in the lake dwellings of Switzerland. Perhaps they were
only decorative.[202] The Polynesians used stone axes which were
polished but not bored or grooved, and the edge was not curved.[203] The
Pacific islanders clung to the type of the adze, so that even when they
got iron and steel implements from the whites they preferred the knife
of a plane to an ax, because the former could be used adze-fashion.[204]
In the stone graves of Tennessee have been found implements superior to
all others found in the United States in size, variety, and workmanship.
Amongst these are a flint sickle-shaped tool, axes a foot long or more,
a flint sword twenty-two inches long, a flint needle eight inches long;
also objects supposed to be for ceremonial or decorative use. Stone axes
with handles all in one piece have been found in Tennessee, Arkansas,
and South Carolina.[205]
+129. How stone implements are made.+ What was the process by which
these stone implements were made? The artifacts bear witness directly to
two or three different operations, separate or combined, and to a great
development of the process. As above stated, Tasmanians, after they
became known to Europeans, made stone implements as they needed them,
giving to a stone a rude adaptation to the purpose by chipping off a few
flakes. Short sharp blows were struck by one stone upon another. The
blow must, however, fall upon just the right spot or it would not
produce the desired result. Therefore the flakes were often thrown off
by pressure. A stick or horn was set against the spot where the force
should be applied, and braced against the breast of the operator, while
he held the stone between his feet. This latter operation is described
as used by the Mexicans to get flakes of obsidian.[206] By carrying
further the process of chipping or pressing the stone could be shaped
more perfectly, and by rubbing it on another stone it could be given a
cutting edge. The rubbing process could also be applied to the surface
to make it smooth instead of leaving it as it was after the flaking
process. The processes of striking and pressing were also combined. The
pebble was broken by blows and the pieces were further reduced to shape
by the pressing process. Different devices were also invented for
holding the stone securely and in the proper position. Skill and
judgment in perceiving how and for what purpose each pebble could best
be treated was developed by the workers, and division of labor arose
amongst them as some acquired greater skill in one operation and others
in another. The operations of pressing and striking were also made
complex in order to accomplish what was desired. A sapling was cut off
so that the stump of a limb was left at the bottom of it. It was set
against the spot where the force was needed, and a blow struck in the
crotch of the limb caused the chip to fly. This apparatus was improved
and refined by putting a horn tip on the end point of contact. Another
device was to cut a notch in a tree trunk, which could be used as a
fulcrum. A long lever was used to apply the pressure to the stone laid
at the root of the tree, or on the horizontal space at the bottom of the
notch.[207] These variations show persistent endeavor to get control of
the necessary force and to apply it at the proper point with the least
chance for error and loss. Buckley reported about the "tomahawks" of the
aborigines of Victoria, that the stone was split into pieces, without
regard to their shape, but of convenient thickness. A piece was rubbed
on rough granite until "it is brought to a very fine thin edge, and so
hard and sharp as to enable them to fell a very large tree with it." The
handles are "thick pieces of wood, split and then doubled up, the stone
being in the bend and fixed with gum, very carefully prepared for the
purpose, so as to make it perfectly secure when bound round with
sinews."[208] The natives of the Admiralty Islands use obsidian which is
dug from layers in the ground. Only a few know the art of making axes,
and they prosecute it as a means of livelihood. Skill is required
especially to judge of the way in which the stone will split. The only
tool is a stone with which light, sharp blows are struck.[209] The axes
of the Swiss lake dwellings were made from bowlders of any hard stone.
By means of a saw of flint set in wood, with sand and water, a groove
was cut on one side and then on the other. With a single blow from
another stone the bowlder was made to fall in two. By means of a hard
stone the piece was rudely shaped and then finished by friction. A
modern student has made such an ax in this way in five hours. Sometimes
the stone was set in a handle of wood or horn.[210] It will be noticed
that this process was not possible until an auxiliary tool, the flint
saw, had already been made. The tools and processes were all rude and
great skill and dexterity were required in the operator. "Lafitau says
the polishing of a stone ax requires generations to complete. Mr. Joseph
D. McGuire fabricates a grooved jade ax from an entirely rough spall in
less than a hundred hours."[211]
+130. How arrowheads are made.+ As to arrowheads, "there are a dozen or
more authentic reports by eye-witnesses of the manufacture of arrowheads
in as many different ways."[212] The California Indians broke up a piece
of flint or obsidian to the proper-sized pieces. A piece was held in the
left hand, which was protected by a piece of buckskin. Pressure was put
upon the edge by a piece of a deer's antler, four to six inches long,
held in the right hand. In this way little pieces were chipped off until
the arrowhead was formed. Only the most expert do this successfully.[213]
Sometimes the stone to be operated on is heated in the fire, and slowly
cooled, which causes it to split in flakes. A flake is then shaped with
buck-horn pincers, tied together at the point with a thong.[214] In
another report it is the stone with which the operation is performed
which is said to be heated.[215] In a pit several hundred flint
implements were found stored away in regular layers with alternate
layers of sand between. Perhaps the purpose was to render them more easy
to work to the desired finish.[216] Catlin describes another process of
making arrowheads which required two workmen. One held the stone in his
left hand and placed a chisel-like instrument at the proper point. The
second man struck the blow. Both sang during the operation. The blows
were in the rhythm of the music, and a quick "rebounding" stroke was
said to be essential to good success.[217] A "lad" in Michigan made
arrowheads in imitation of Indian work, from flint, glass, and obsidian,
with a piece of oak stick five inches long as a tool.[218] Sophus
Müller[219] says of modern attempts to imitate stone-implement making
that an average workman can learn in fourteen days to make five hundred
to eight hundred arrowheads per day, but that no one of the best workmen
has been able to equal the fine chipping on the neolithic stone weapons,
although many have made the small implements on the types of the old
stone age.
+131. How stone axes were used.+ After stone axes were made it required
no little independent sense to use them for the desired result. A modern
archæologist used a stone ax of gray flint, with an edge six and a half
centimeters long, set in a handle after the prehistoric fashion, to cut
sticks of green fir, in order to test the ax. He held the stick upright
and chopped into it notchwise until he could break it in two. He cut in
two a stick eighteen centimeters in diameter in eighteen minutes. He
struck fifteen hundred and seventy-eight cuts. At the fourteen hundred
and eighty-fifth cut a piece flew from his ax.[220] A modern
investigator made a polished ax in eleven hours and forty-five minutes.
He cut down an oak tree 0.73 meter in circumference, with twenty-two
hundred blows of the ax, in an hour and thirteen minutes.[221] When
primitive men desired to cut down a tree, fire was applied to it and the
ax was used only to chop off the charred wood so that the fire would
attack the wood again. Canoes were hollowed out of tree trunks by the
same process. These processes are reported from different parts of the
world remote from each other.[222] Without these auxiliary devices the
stone ax can really be used only as a hammer, for, by means of it, the
wood is beaten into a fibrous condition and is not properly cut.[223]
Nevertheless, the Shingu Indians cleared forests, built houses and
canoes, and made furniture with the stone ax alone.[224] The Indians of
Guiana, with stone and bone implements, cut down big trees, cut out the
core of them, and made weapons and tools of great perfection and
beauty.[225] The same may be said of very many other peoples. Some
Australians value stone axes so much that they except them from the
custom to bury all a man's property with him. Axes are inherited by the
next of kin.[226]
+132. Acculturation versus parallelism.+ The facts in regard to making
and using stone implements bring up the question whether such arts have
a single origin and are spread by contagion (acculturation), or are
invented independently by many people who have the same tasks to
perform, and the same or similar materials at hand (parallelism).
Lippert[227] says that "the different modes of fashioning flint
arrowheads show us that we must not think of the earliest art as all
tied to a single tradition, and carried away from this. On the contrary,
human ingenuity has set about accomplishing the acts which are necessary
for the struggle for existence in different places, with the elements
there at hand." We have seen above that the materials may, from their
character, so limit and condition the operations of manufacture as to
set lines for the development of the art. If the processes of the men
are also limited and conditioned by the nature of human nerves and
muscles so that they must run on certain lines, it would follow that the
human mind also, in face of a certain problem, will fall into
conditioned modes of activity, and we should approach the doctrine that
men must think the same thoughts by way of mental reaction on the same
experiences and observations.
The facts, however, show that an art, beginning in the rudest way, is
produced along lines of concurrent effort, and is the common property
of the group. All practice it as it is, and all are unconsciously
coöperating to improve it. The processes are folkways. The artifacts are
tools and weapons which, by their utility, modify the folkways and
become components in them. The skill, dexterity, patience, ingenuity,
and power of combination which result are wider and higher possessions
which also modify the folkways at later stages of effort. The
generalizations of truth and right widen at every stage, and produce a
theory of welfare, which must be recognized as such, no matter how rude
it may be. It consists in the application of the notions of goblinism as
they are prevalent at the time in the group. The art itself is built up
by folkways according to their character as everywhere exhibited, for
arts are modes of providing for human necessities by processes and
devices which can be universally taught, and can be handed down forever.
The arts of an isolated group run against limits, even if the group has
great ingenuity, as we see in the case of China. It is when arts are
developed by give and take between groups that they reach their highest
development. The wider the area over which the coöperation and
combination are active, the higher will be the achievements. "Every art
is born out of the intelligence of its age."[228] It has been mentioned
above that Polynesians cannot use an ax. They want to set the blade
transverse to the handle. The negroes of the Niger Protectorate are very
clumsy at going up or down stairs. It is a dexterity, not to say an art,
which they have had no chance to acquire. They also find it very
difficult to understand or interpret a picture, even of the least
conventional kind.[229] The Seri of Tiburon Island have not the knife
habit. They draw a knife towards the body instead of pushing it
away.[230] Hence we see that the lack of a habit, or lack of opportunity
to see a dexterity practiced, constitutes a narrowing of the mental
horizon.
+133. Fire-making tools.+ Another art which would offer us parallel
phenomena to that of stone working is that of fire making. It must have
had several independent centers of origin. It existed all over the
globe. Its ultimate origin is unknown to us. It may have originated in
different ways at different centers. The simplest instruments for making
fire can be classified according to the mode of movement employed in
them as drilling, plowing, and sawing instruments. The fire drills have
also undergone very important development and improvement, so that they
have become very complicated machines. The ingenuity and inventive skill
which were required to make a fire drill which was driven by a bow were
as great as the same powers when manifested by an Edison or a Bessemer.
+134. Psychophysical traits of primitive men.+ All the artifacts were
made and all the arts were produced by the concurrent efforts of men to
serve their interests. We find that primitive men put patient effort and
astonishing ingenuity into their tools. They also attained to great
skill in the use of clumsy tools. It is true, in general, of primitive
men that they shirk all prolonged effort or patient application, but
they do use great patience and perseverance when they expect to
accomplish something of great importance to their interests. The same is
true if they expect to gratify their vanity. In hair dressing or
tattooing they submit to very irksome restraint prolonged through a long
time. Also in feather work, partly useful and partly ornamental, they
assorted feathers piece by piece, and enlaced the feathers in the meshes
of their hats and caps, or fastened them into scepters with pitch. They
could make houses, etc., with their axes only by long-continued
industry.[231] South American Indians made tools for printing tattoo
patterns on the body. They were blocks, on each face of which a pattern
was raised, perhaps a different one on each side.[232] It should be
noticed what prodigious power a large body of men can put forth when
they all work at the same task and are greatly interested in it. They
begin by the same process, but the process differentiates and improves
in their hands. Each gains skill and dexterity. They learn from each
other, and the product is multiplied.
+135. Language.+ Language is a product of the folkways which illustrates
their operation in a number of most important details. Language is a
product of the need of coöperative understanding in all the work, and in
connection with all the interests, of life. It is a societal phenomenon.
It was necessary in war, the chase, and industry so soon as these
interests were pursued coöperatively. Each group produced its own
language which held that group together and sundered it from
others.[233] All are now agreed that, whatever may have been the origin
of language, it owes its form and development to usage. "Men's usage
makes language." "The maxim that 'usage is the rule of speech' is of
supreme and uncontrolled validity in every part and parcel of every
human tongue."[234] "Language is only the imperfect means of men to find
their bearings in the world of their memories; to make use of their
memory, that is, their own experience and that of their ancestors, with
all probability that this world of memory will be like the world of
reality."[235] The origin of language is one of those origins which must
ever remain enveloped in mystery. "How can a child understand the
combinations of sound and sense when it must know language in order to
learn them? It must learn to speak without previously knowing how to
speak, without any previous suspicion that the words of its mother mean
more than the buzzing of a fly. The child learns to speak from an
absolute beginning, just as, not the original man, but the original
beast, learned to speak before any creature could speak."[236] The
beasts evidently did not learn to speak. They only learned to use the
beast cries, by which they transmitted warnings, sex invitations, calls
to united struggles, etc. The cries answered the purpose and went no
further. Men, by virtue of the expanding power in them which enthused
their zeal and their play, broke through the limitations of beast
language, and went on to use the sounds of the human speech instrument
for ever richer communications. Poetic power in blossom guides the
development of a child's language as it guided that of the men who made
the first languages.[237] "The original languages must be, in
comparison with our languages, like the wildest love-passion compared
with marital custom."[238] Every word has a history of accidents which
have befallen it, the beginnings of which are lost in the abyss of
time.[239] In the Middle Ages the word "Word" came to mean the Word of
God with such distinctness that the romance languages adopted parabola,
or derivatives from it, for "word."[240] The students of linguistics
recognize metaphor as another great mode of modifying the signification
of words. By metaphor they mean the assembling of like things, and the
selection and extirpation of unlike things.
+136. Language and magic.+ Preuss offers an explanation of the origin of
language which is interesting on account of its connection with the vast
operation of magic: "Language owes its origin to the magic of tones and
words. The difficulty of winning any notion about the beginnings of
human speech lies in the fact that we cannot think of any cause which
should give occasion for speech utterances. Such occasions are products
of education, after language already existed. They are effects of
language, not causes of it.... Language belongs, like play, dances, and
fine arts, to the things which do not come on a direct line of
development out of the instinctive satisfaction of life-needs and the
other activities which create things of positive value, but it is the
result of belief in magic, which prompted men to imitate noises made in
labor, and other natural sounds, through a wide range, in order thereby
to produce operations."[241]
+137. Language is a case of mores.+ Whitney said that language is an
institution. He meant that it is in the folkways, or in the mores, since
welfare is connected with the folkways of language, albeit by some
superstition. He adds: "In whatever aspect the general facts of language
are viewed, they exhibit the same absence of reflection and
intention."[242] "No one ever set himself deliberately at work to invent
or improve language,--or did so, at least, with any valuable and abiding
result. The work is all accomplished by a continual satisfaction of the
needs of the moment, by ever yielding to an impulse and grasping a
possibility, which the already acquired treasure of words and forms, and
the habit of their use, suggest and put within reach."[243] "Every
single item of alteration, of whatever kind, and of whatever degree of
importance, goes back to some individual or individuals who set it in
circulation, from whose example it gained a wider and wider currency,
until it finally won that general assent, which is alone required in
order to make anything in language proper and authoritative."[244] These
statements might be applied to any of the folkways. The statements on
page 46 of Whitney's book would serve to describe and define the mores.
This shows to what an extent language is a case of the operation by
which mores are produced. They are always devices to meet a need, which
are imperceptibly modified and unconsciously handed down through the
generations. The ways, like the language, are incorporeal things. They
are borne by everybody and nobody, and are developed by everybody and
nobody. Everybody has his little peculiarities of language. Each one has
his peculiarities of accent or pronunciation and his pet words or
phrases. Each one is suggesting all the time the use of the tricks of
language which he has adopted. "Nothing less than the combined effort of
a whole community, with all its classes and orders, in all its variety
of characters, circumstances, and necessities, is capable of keeping in
life a whole language."[245] "Every vocable was to us [children] an
arbitrary and conventional sign; arbitrary, because any one of a
thousand other vocables could have been just as easily learned by us and
associated with the same idea; conventional, because the one we acquired
had its sole ground and sanction in the consenting use of the community
of which we formed a part."[246] "We do not, as children, make our
language for ourselves. We get it by tradition, all complete. We think
in sentences. As our language forms sentences, that is, as our
mother-tongue thinks, so we learn to think. Our brain, our entire
thought-status, forms itself by the mother-tongue, and we transmit the
same to our children."[247] Nature men have only petty coins of speech.
They can express nothing great. They cannot compare, analyze, and
combine. They are overwhelmed by a flood of details, in which they
cannot discern the ruling idea. The material and sensual constitute
their limits. If they move they have to get a new language. The American
languages are a soft mass which changes easily if tribes separate, or as
time goes on, or if they move their habitat.[248] Sometimes measures are
adopted in order to make the language unintelligible, as the Bushmen
insert a syllable in a word to that end.[249] "The language of nature
peoples offers a faithful picture of their mental status. All is in
flux. Nothing is fixed or crystallized. No fundamental thoughts, ideas,
or ideals are present. There is no regularity, logic, principles,
ethics, or moral character. Lack of logic in thinking, lack of purpose
in willing or acting, put the mind of a nature man on a plane with that
of our children. Lack of memory, antilogic, paradox, fantasy in mental
action, correspond to capriciousness, levity, irresponsibility, and the
rule of emotions and passions in practical action."[250] "Man's language
developed because he could make, not merely passive and mechanical
associative and reproductive combinations of notions, like a beast, but
because he had active, free, and productive apperceptions, which appear
in creative fantasy and logical reflection."[251] "Man does not speak
because he thinks. He speaks because the mouth and larynx communicate
with the third frontal convolution of the brain. This material
connection is the immediate cause of articulate speech."[252] This is
true in the sense that speech is not possible until the vocal organs are
present, and are duly connected with the brain. "The specific cry,
somewhat modified by the vocal resources of man, may have been
sufficient for the humble vocabulary of the earliest ages, and there
exists no gulf, no impassable barrier, between the language of birds,
dogs, anthropoid apes, and human speech."[253] "The warning or summoning
cry, the germ of the demonstrative roots, is the parent of the names of
number, sex, and distance; the emotional cry of which our interjections
are but the relics, in combination with the demonstratives, prepares the
outlines of the sentence, and already represents the verb and the names
of states or actions. Imitation, direct or symbolical, and necessarily
only approximative to the sounds of external nature, i. e.
onomatopoeia, furnished the elements of the attributive roots, from
which arose the names of objects, special verbs, and their derivatives.
Analogy and metaphor complete the vocabulary, applying to the objects,
discerned by touch, sight, smell, and taste, qualifying adjectives
derived from onomatopoeia. Reason, then coming into play, rejects the
greater part of this unmanageable wealth, and adopts a certain number of
sounds which have already been reduced to a vague and generic sense, and
by derivation, combination, and affixes, which are the root sounds,
produces those endless families of words, related to each other in every
degree of kindred, from the closest to the most doubtful, which grammar
finally ranges in the categories known as the parts of speech."[254]
"That metaphor makes language grow is evident. It brings about
connection between place, time, and sound ideas."[255]
+138. Primitive dialects.+ The _cebus azarae_, a monkey of Paraguay,
makes six distinct sounds when excited, which causes its comrades to
emit similar sounds.[256] The island Caribs have two distinct
vocabularies, one of which is used by men and by women when speaking to
each other, and by men when repeating, in _oratio obliqua_, some saying
of the women. Their councils of war are held in a secret jargon into
which women are never initiated.[257] The men and women have separate
languages, a custom which is noted also amongst the Guycurus and other
peoples of Brazil.[258] Amongst the Arawaks the difference between the
languages of the sexes is not in regard to the use of words only, but
also in regard to their inflection.[259] The two languages are sometimes
differentiated by a constant change, e.g. where in the man's language
two vowels come together the woman's language intercalates a _k_.[260]
The Arawaks have words which only men may speak, and others which only
women may speak.[261] Dialectical variations are illustrated for us by
facts which come under observation and report. Christian[262] mentions
an American negro castaway, who settled on Raven's Island with a native
wife and children and a few relatives and servants. In forty years they
had produced "a new and peculiar dialect of their own, broadening the
softer vowels and substituting _th_ or _f_ for the original _t_ sound in
the parent ponapeian." Martius mentions that native boatmen in Brazil,
who had grown up together, had each some little peculiarity of
pronunciation. Such a difference would produce a dialect in case of
isolation. On the other hand, the ecclesiastics adopted the Tupi
language and made it a general language for the province of Gram Para,
so that it was used in the pulpit until 1757 and is now necessary for
intercourse in the interior.[263] The Gauchos of central Uruguay speak
Spanish with harsh rough accents. They change _y_ and _ll_ into the
French _j_.[264] Whitney and Waitz thought that all American languages
proceeded from a single original one. Powell thought that they were
"many languages, belonging to distinct families, which have no apparent
unity of origin."[265] Evidence is adduced, however, that "the same
aboriginal peoples who named the waters of North America coined also the
prehistoric geographical titles in South America."[266] The Finns and
Samoyeds are, from the standpoint of language, practically the same
race. The two tongues present the highest development of the
agglutinative process of the Ural-Altaic languages.[267]
+139. Taking up and dropping languages.+ The way in which languages are
taken up or dropped is also perplexing. Keane[268] gives a list of
peoples who have dropped one language and taken up another; he also
gives a list of those who have changed physical type but have retained
the same language. Holub[269] mentions the Makololo, who have almost
entirely disappeared, but their language has passed to their
conquerors. It became necessary to the latter from the spread of their
dominion and from their closer intercourse with the peoples south of the
Zambesi, on account of which, "without any intentional interference by
the rulers, a common and easily understood language showed itself
indispensable." Almost every village in New Guinea has its own language,
and it is said that in New Britain people who live thirty miles apart
cannot understand each other.[270]
+140. Pigeon dialects.+ The Germans find themselves at a disadvantage in
dealing with aborigines because they have no dialect like pigeon English
or the Coast Malay used by the Dutch.[271] Many examples are given, from
the Baltic region, of peasant dialects made in sport by subjecting all
words to the same modification.[272] Our own children often do this to
English in order to make a secret language.
+141. How languages grow.+ What we see in these cases is that, if we
suppose men to have joined in coöperative effort with only the sounds
used by apes and monkeys, the requirement of their interests would push
them on to develop languages such as we now know. The isolating,
agglutinative, incorporative, and inflectional languages can be put in a
series according to the convenience and correctness of the logical
processes which they embody and teach. The Semitic languages evidently
teach a logic different from that of the Indo-European. It is a
different way of thinking which is inculcated in each great family of
languages. They represent stages in the evolution of thought or ways of
thinking. The instance is one of those which best show us how folkways
are built up and how they are pulled down. The agglutination of words
and forms sometimes seems like a steady building process; again, the
process will not go forward at all. "In the agglutinative languages
speech is berry jam. In the inflectional languages each word is like a
soldier in his place with his outfit."[273] The "gooing" of a baby is a
case of the poetic power in its blossoming exuberance. The accidental
errors of pronunciation which are due to very slight individual
variations in the form of the vocal organs are cases of individual
contribution to the development of language. The baby words and
individual mispronunciations which are taken up by a family and its
friends, but never get further, show us how dialects grow. There are
changes in language which are, "in their inception, inaccuracies of
speech. They attest the influence of that immense numerical majority
among the speakers of English who do not take sufficient pains to speak
correctly, but whose blunders become finally the norm of the
language."[274] In analogy things which are alike are embraced in a
single term; in metaphor two or more things which seem alike, but may
not be so, are grouped together and are embraced in a single term. All
these modes of change in language attest the work of individuals on
language. Sometimes there is extension of influence to a group.
Sometimes the influence is only temporary and is rejected again.
Sometimes it falls in with a drift of taste or habit, when it is taken
up and colors the pronunciation or usage of the population of a great
district, and becomes fixed in the language. All this is true also on
the negative side, since usage of words, accent, timbre of the voice,
and pronunciation (drawling, nasal tones) expel older usages. Language
therefore illustrates well all the great changes of folkways under the
heads of coöperation and antagonism. We have an excellent chance to
study the operation in the case of slang. A people who are prosperous
and happy, optimistic and progressive, will produce much slang. It is a
case of play. They amuse themselves with the language. We may think the
new words and phrases vulgar and in bad taste, or senseless and
ridiculous. We may reject them, but the masses will decide whether they
shall be permanently rejected or not. The vote is informal. The most
confirmed purist will by and by utter a new slang word when he needs it.
One's objections are broken down. One's taste is spoiled by what he
hears. We are right in the midst of the operation of making folkways and
can perceive it close at hand.
+142. Money.+ Money is another primitive device which is produced in
the folkways. Money was not called into existence by any need
universally experienced and which all tried to satisfy as well as they
could. It was produced by developing other devices, due to other
motives, until money was reached as a result. Property can be traced to
portable objects which were amulets, trophies, and ornaments all at
once. These could be accumulated, and if they were thought to be the
abodes of powerful spirits, they were gifts which were eagerly sought,
or valuable objects for exchange. They led to hoarding (since the owner
did not like to part with them), and they served as marks of personal
distinction.[275] The interplay of vanity and religion with the love of
property demands attention. Religion also caused the aborigines of the
northwest provinces of South America to go to the rivers for gold only
in sufficient amount to buy what they needed. Any surplus they returned
to the stream. "They say that if they borrow more than they really need
the river-god will not lend them any more."[276] In later times and
higher civilization coins have been used as amulets to ward off or to
cure disease.[277] The Greenland Eskimo laughed when they were offered
gold and silver coins. They wanted objects of steel, for which they
would give anything which they had and which was desired.[278] The
Tarahumari of Sonora do not care for silver money. Their Croesus
raises three hundred or four hundred bushels of corn per annum. The
largest herd of cattle contains thirty or forty head. They generally
prefer cotton cloth to dollars.[279] "A Dyak has no conception of the
use of a circulating medium. He may be seen wandering in the Bazaar with
a ball of bee's wax in his hand for days together, because he cannot
find anybody willing to take it for the exact article which he
requires."[280] We meet with a case in which people have gold but live
on a system of barter. It is a people in Laos, north of Siam. They weigh
gold alone in scales against seeds of grain.[281] In the British Museum
(Case F, Ireland) may be seen bronze rings, to be sewn on garments as
armor or to be used as money, or both. The people along the west coast
of Hindostan, from the Persian Gulf to Ceylon, used as money the
fishhook which was their most important tool. It became degraded into a
piece of doubled wire of silver or bronze. If the degradation had gone
on, doubtless it would have resulted in a lump of metal, just as the
Siamese silver coins are the result of doubling up silver rings.[282]
The play of custom and convention is well shown by the use of the
Macedonian coins in England. The coins of Philip bore on the obverse a
head with a wreath, and on the reverse a chariot driver drawn by two
horses. In Britain this coin became a sign of value and lost its
reference to the sovereign. It is possible to show the order of the
reigns of the kings by the successive omissions of parts of the figures,
until only the wreath was left and four perpendicular strokes and two
circles for the legs of one horse and two chariot wheels. Each change
was a mark of value and then it was further changed to save
trouble.[283] On the Palau Islands there were seven grades of money,
determined by the size. Only three or four pieces exist of the first
grade. The second grade is of jasper. The third consists of agate
cylinders. These three grades are used only by nobles. They have the
same rank as gems amongst us. The people think of the money as coming
from an island where it lives a divine life, the lower ranks serving the
upper. They have myths of the coming of the money to Palau.[284] These
examples show to what a great extent other ideas than those of value
come into play in money.
+143. Intergroup and intragroup money.+ When money is used to overcome
the difficulties of barter two cases are to be distinguished,--the
intergroup and the intragroup uses, which are primarily distinguished by
a space relation. The intragroup use is here, in the we-group, close at
hand. The intergroup use is between our group and some out-group. It
will be found that all money problems include these two cases. "At least
we shall find that the current commonplace of the economists about the
succession of natural economy, money economy, and credit economy, is not
even remotely apt to the real problems."[285] What is true is that, on a
money economy, it is found that there is, or may be, a constant exchange
of money for goods and goods for money, from which gain or loss may
result; and furthermore that the risk (aleatory element) in this
exchange is intensified, if time is allowed to intervene. Inside the
we-group the first need for money is for fees, fines, amercements, and
bride price. In Melanesia pigs are not called money and there is shell,
feather, and mat money, but pigs are paid for fines, penalties,
contributions to feasts, fees in the secret society, pay for wives, and
in other societal relations. What is needed is a mobile form of wealth,
with which social dues can be paid. This is the function of money which
the paper-money projectors have in mind when they propose to issue paper
which the state shall take for taxes. It is evident that it is to be
distinguished from the economic function of money as a circulating
medium. The intragroup money needs to be especially a measure and store
of value, while the intergroup money needs to be a medium of exchange.
In the former case barter is easy; in the latter case it is regular. In
the former case a multiple standard is available; in the latter case
what is needed to discharge balances is a commodity of universal demand.
When credit is introduced its sphere is intragroup. The debtors would
like the money to be what every one can get. The creditors would like it
to be what every one wants.
+144. Various predominant wares.+ In the northeastern horn of Africa the
units of value which are used as money are salt, metal, skins, cotton,
glass, tobacco, wax, coffee beans, and korarima. Cattle and slaves are
also used as units of value from time to time amongst the Oromo. Salt is
used as money in prismatic pieces, twenty-two centimeters long and three
centimeters to five millimeters broad at the bottom, which weigh from
seven hundred and fifty grams to one and one half kilograms each. It is
carried in bundles of twenty to thirty pieces, wound in leaves.[286] The
Galla use rods of iron six to twelve centimeters long, somewhat thicker
in the middle, well available for lance ends, one hundred and thirty of
which are worth one thaler in Schoa; also pieces of copper, tin, and
zinc; calf-skins; black, printed, and unprinted cotton cloth; pieces of
cloth; coarse red cotton yarn (for knitting); and strings of beads. The
universal and intergroup money is the Maria Theresa thaler weighing
571.5 to 576 English grains.[287] Cameron mentions the exchange of
intergroup money for intragroup money at a fair at Kawile, on the
eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika. At the opening of the fair the money
changers gave out the local money of bugle beads, which they took in
again when the fair closed.[288] On the French Congo the boatmen were
paid with paper bons, which were superseded by metal ones in 1887. When
the recipient takes his bon to the station he obtains at first a number
of nails, beads, or other articles for it, which he can then exchange
for what he wants. Tokens of copper are issued at Franceville, stamped
"F," of different shapes and sizes, but always of the same shape and
size for the same value in French money.[289] At Grand Bassam in West
Africa the manilla (bracelet) serves as money. For six months the
natives give oil for these bracelets of metal mixed of copper, lead,
zinc, antimony, and iron, which can be closed around the arm or leg of a
slave by a blow of the hammer. Then for six months they exchange the
bracelets for the European goods which they want.[290] These bracelets
were a store of wealth for the black men.[291] The Kru have few cattle,
which pass from one to another in bride purchases, since these can be
made with nothing else. It is impossible to have wives and cattle too
until one's daughters grow up.[292] Since the seventeenth century
cylindrical (bugle) green-blue beads have been money on the ivory and
gold coasts. They come from an ancient cemetery on the Bokabo Mountains
and are of Egyptian origin. They were buried with the dead.[293] A local
money of stone is reported also from Avetime in Ehveland. It is said to
have been used as ornament. Pieces of quartz and sandstone, rudely
square but with broken corners, from four to five centimeters in
diameter and one and a half to two centimeters thick, rubbed down by
friction, have been found.[294]
+145. Intragroup money from property; intergroup money from trade.+
These cases already show us the distinction between intragroup money and
intergroup money. The effect of trade is to develop one or more
predominant wares. In the intragroup exchanges this is an object of high
desire to individuals for use. It may be an amulet ornament, or a thing
of great use in the struggle for existence, e.g. cattle, or a thing of
universal acceptance by which anything can be obtained. In intergroup
trade it is the chief object of export, the thing for which the trade is
carried on, e.g. salt, metal, fur. If this commodity is not easily
divisible, the money is something which can be given "to boot," e.g.
tobacco, sugar, opium, tea, betel.[295] That is money which will "pass."
This does not mean that which can be forced to pass ("legal tender"),
but that which will go without force. Amulet ornaments may be either a
whim which does not take, or fashion may seize upon something of this
kind and make it a tribe mark. Then it becomes group money, because it
is universally desired. The articles admit of accumulation, and
ostentation is a new joy; they also admit of change and variety. They
are available for gifts to the medicine man (to satisfy ghosts, get
rain, or thwart disease). They may be used to buy a wife, or to buy a
step in the secret society of the men, or to pay a fine or penalty to
the chief. The differentiation of goods starts emotion on the line of
least resistance, and the predominant goods are the ones of widest
demand. Often the predominant ware has a gain from taboo, probably on
account of relation to the dead.[296] A thing which is rare and hard to
get may become intragroup money. In Fiji the teeth of the spermaceti
whale are taken as a measure of value and sign of peace. In German New
Guinea the bent tusks of a boar are used as money. In California red
birds' heads are used in the same way. Trophy skulls of birds and beasts
become a store of wealth, and money with which trade can be carried on
with neighbors.[297] The first step seems to be to use the predominant
article as the third term of reference in barter. Intergroup money is
really a ware and so remains, as gold is now; but groups widen as
communication improves, and group money gets a very wide range. In
intergroup affairs, therefore, the relations sooner become impersonal
and mechanical. The things which are best for this purpose become
mobile. Some are better as stores of value, others as means of power,
others as measures of value. The last are on the way to become money.
The others are more like gems. Thus group money arose from property;
intergroup money from trade.
+146. Shell and beads.+ Shells had very great convenience for
money and their value was increased by the fact that ghosts dwelt
in them. Cowries were early used as money, 2200 of them equaling
in value one franc.[298] They are now losing currency. On
Fernando Po bits of achatectonia shells are made into belts and
used as currency.[299] A far less widespread shell of a sea snail
was used in northern Transvaal.[300] Other cases of the use of
shells will be given below. A dress pattern of cotton cloth,
seven ells, called a "tobe," is a unit of monetary reference
through the Sudan.[301] Another money in the same region is the
iron spade, with which tribute is paid to the petty rulers of
eastern Equatoria. The spades are made of native iron and are
used upon occasion to cut down the grass.[302] Expeditions into
the Niam Niam territories always have a smith with them whose
duty it is to make rings of copper and iron wire, with a square
section, for minor purchases.[303] The currency of beads has
greatly lessened wherever more useful objects of European
manufacture have become known.[304] Forms of the lance head are
used to buy a wife, who costs twenty or thirty of them.[305]
Further south von Götzen found brass wire, in pieces fifteen to
thirty-five centimeters long, in use as money, not being an
article of use, but a real money used to store value, to buy what
is wanted, and to pay taxes for protection against one's forest
neighbors.[306] Formerly, when beads were still used as money,
each district had its own preferred size, shape, and color.
Travelers found that the fashion in a district had changed since
the information was obtained, relying on which they had provided
themselves. This is, however, evidently a part of the operation
of differentiating the predominant ware.[307]
+147. Token money.+ Token money demands treatment by itself, as a
special development of the money-producing movement. If different groups
adopt different kinds of amulet ornaments as money, such intragroup
money may be token money. If one such group conquers another, the
conquerors may throw the money of the conquered out of use (whites and
Indians as to wampum). In Burma Chinese gambling counters are used as
money.[308] Guttapercha tokens issued by street-car companies in South
America are said to be used in the same way. Postage stamps, milk
tickets, etc., have been so used by us. In Massachusetts, in the
eighteenth century, pieces of paper were circulated which had no
redemption whatever. They bore the names of coins of silver which did
not exist, but which had a definition in a certain amount of silver of a
certain fineness. At Carthage pieces of leather which inclosed an
unknown object, probably one of the holy moneys, were circulated.[309]
The same is reported of bits of leather cut, like samples, from a skin
and circulated in place of it. The device succeeded for the in-group
money, but it led to the attempt to put copper tokens in the place of
silver coins, which resulted in disaster.[310] The cacao beans of Mexico
were wares, if of good quality. Larger ones of poorer quality were
money. A part of the value was imaginary. Cloth was formerly money in
Bohemia. A loosely woven variety of cloth was used for this purpose, the
cloth utilities as a textile fabric and as money being separated. On the
west coast of Africa little mats were used as money. They were stamped
by the Portuguese government. Mat money was also used on the New
Hebrides, especially to buy grades in the great secret society. The mats
are long and narrow and are more esteemed when they are old and black
from the smoke of the huts. They are kept in little houses where they
are smoked. "When they hang with soot they are particularly
valued."[311] Useless broken rice is used as money in Burma and
elsewhere in the East.[312] The use of token money, in which a part of
the value is imaginary, always implies the inclosure of a group and the
exclusion of foreign trade. Then, within the group, the value may be
said to be real and not imaginary. It depends on the monopoly law of
value and varies with the quantity but not proportionately to the
quantity. Kublai-Khan, using a Chinese device, got possession of all the
gold and silver and issued paper. His empire was so great that all trade
was intragroup trade, and his power made his paper money pass.[313]
The Andamanese made inferior pots to be used as a medium in barter.[314]
They have very little trade; are on a stage of mutual gift making.[315]
Token money is an aberration of the folkways, due to misapprehension of
the peculiarity of group money. At the same time it has been used with
advantage for subsidiary silver coinage.
+148. Selection of a predominant ware.+ Crawfurd, in his history
of the Indian Archipelago, mentions a number of different
articles used there as money,--cakes of beeswax, salt, gold dust,
cattle, and tin.[316] The tin coins are small irregular laminæ
with a hole in the center, 5600 of them being worth a dollar.
Brass coins which come down from the Buddhist sovereigns of Java
are still met with; also other brass coins introduced by the
Mohammedan sovereigns. In the museum at Vienna copper rings,
bound into a circle, inclosed in a fibrous envelope, are another
form of money. The selection of a predominant ware is shown in
such cases as the one described in Ling Roth.[317] When Low was
at Kiau, in 1851, beads and brass wire were wanted. When others
were there some years later the people all had their hearts set
on brass wire. The Englishmen "distributed a good deal of cloth,
at reasonable rates, in exchange for food and services rendered."
In 1858 they found that even brass wire, unless of very great
size, was despised, and cloth was eagerly desired.
One thing which helped the selection of a predominant ware was
that only a specified article would make peace, atone for a
wrong, compose a quarrel, or ransom a captive. Also various
articles obtained such prestige, on account of age and the glory
of ancestors, that the possession of them conferred authority and
social importance on their owners. Such are porcelain jars in
Borneo, bronze drums in Burma, bronze cannon in the East-Indian
Archipelago. Many African chiefs stored up ivory tusks for social
prestige long before the white men came and gave them value in
world commerce.[318]
+149. Stone money in Melanesia.+ We must, however, turn our
attention to Melanesia where the shell and stone money have been
pushed to a most remarkable development, quite out of line with
the rest of the Melanesian civilization. On the Solomon Islands
there are some petty reef communities which occupy themselves
solely with fishing and making shell-bead money.[319] On New
Britain divarra is made by boring and stringing fathoms of shell
money. A fathom is worth two shillings sterling, and two hundred
and fifty fathoms coiled up together looks like a life buoy.[320]
In the northwestern Solomon Islands the currency consists of
beasts' teeth of two kinds,--those of a kind of flying dog and of
a kind of dolphin. Each tooth is bored at the root and they are
strung on thin cords. These people also use the small disks of
shell, five millimeters in diameter and from one to one and a
half millimeters thick.[321] The shell money of New Britain has
very great influence on the lives of the people. It minimizes the
evil and fatality of war, in which every life and every wound
must be paid for. It establishes the right of property. It makes
the people frugal and industrious, and makes them a commercial
people. To it may also be attributed their selfishness and
ingratitude. "Its influence is supposed to extend even to the
next life. There is not a custom connected with life or death in
which this money does not play a great and leading part.... Take
away their money and their secret societies sink at once into
nothing, and most of their customs become nothing."[322]
Evidently the missionary testifies that the money stimulates
commercialism with all its good and ill. Coils of feathers which
are spoken of as money are also reported from the New Hebrides
and Santa Cruz. Feathers are attached with resin to the outside
of coils, inside of which are charms, each possessing a
protective property. This money is very rare and, if shown, may
be handled only by the owner.[323] Our information as to the
commercial uses and effects of these island shell moneys is very
imperfect. The money seems to be still on the stage of gems. It
is used to buy steps of rank in the secret society, which cost
pigs and money and mark social importance, which is, like other
forms of force, regarded as supernatural. Rank can be gained only
by the consent of those who already have it.[324]
+150. Plutocratic effects of money.+ It must not be understood that the
money, on the barbaric stage, enters into the struggle for existence, at
least for food. There is only slight organization of labor. Each one
produces what he needs. There is little luxury. "Nevertheless, money
plays the chief rôle in the life of the people. The man, regarded as an
animal, has enough to do to support life. If he wants a wife, wants to
found a family, wants to be a member of the state, he must have
money."[325] It is evident that the circulation of this money must
produce phenomena which are unfamiliar to us.
The estimate placed by the Solomon Islanders on great stones of
aragonite, obtained in the southern Palau islands, is such that
they incur great risks in going to get them in their frail
boats.[326] The pieces have the appearance of our own
grindstones. They are set in rows by the men's clubhouses, and
are in care of the chiefs. Christian mentions two of the Big
Houses on Yap with stone money piled against the foundations. One
piece was twelve feet in diameter and one and a half feet thick,
and had a hole in the center two and a half feet in
diameter.[327] A certain Captain O'Keefe, in 1882, fitted out a
Chinese vessel and brought thousands of pieces of money from
Palau to Yap. He brought the whole island in debt to himself.
Nowadays they want big stones. Such six feet in diameter are not
rare. This kind of money is the money of the men; that of the
women is of mussel shells strung on strings. The exchange of a
big piece for smaller kinds of money involves considerations of
rank. Two of equal rank, and well disposed, exchange by dignity;
if one is inferior, the good will of the other is requisite. The
glass and porcelain money on Yap must have come from China or
Japan. It has controlled the social development of the islands.
It is also noticeable that other things of high utility, e.g. the
wooden vessels in which yellow powder is prepared, or in which
food is set forth at feasts, are made the objects of exchange,
and, at the making of peace after a fight, or at other
negotiations, affect the relations of tribes.[328] At the present
time bags of dried cocoanut are employed as a medium of exchange,
probably in intergroup trade.[329] What Kubary[330] says about
the use of the money shows that it has no proper circulation. It
accumulates in the hands of the great men, since it is used to
pay fees, fines, gifts, tribute, etc. The armengol women,
marriages, and public festivals start it out again, and on its
way back it performs many social services. It is also reasonable
to suppose that, having got a footing on these islands, it spread
to others by social contagion. This explains the presence of a
general medium of exchange amongst people who are otherwise
barely out of the stone age.[331] The tales about the crimes
which have been connected with the history of great pieces of the
aragonite stone[332] remind us of the stories about the greatest
diamonds yet found.
+151. Money in northwestern North America.+ In South America
nothing served the purposes of money. There was none in Peru.
Metal, if they had any, was used by all for ornament.[333]
Martius, however, says of the Mauhes that they used seeds of
_paullinia sorbilis_ as money. They obtained from the seeds a
remedy for skin disease and diarrhoea.[334] The Nishinam of
California had two kinds of shell money, ullo and hawok. The
former consists of pieces, one or two inches long and one third
of that in width, strung on a fiber. The pieces of shell take a
high polish and make a fine necklace. The hawok is small money by
comparison. A string of the large kind was worth ten dollars. It
consisted of ten pieces. A string of one hundred and
seventy-seven pieces of the small kind sold for seven dollars. In
early days every Indian in California had, on an average, one
hundred dollars' worth of the shell money, the value of two women
(although they did not buy wives) or three average ponies.[335]
The Hupa of California will not sell to an American the flakes of
jasper or obsidian which they parade at their dances. They are
not knives, but jewelry and money amongst themselves. Nearly
every man has ten lines tattooed across the inside of his left
arm. A string of five shells is the standard unit. It is drawn
over the left thumb nail. If it reaches the uppermost tattooed
line it is worth five dollars per shell.[336] They also grind
down pieces of stone which looks like meershaum into cylinders
one to three inches long, which they wear as jewelry and use as
money.[337] The Eskimo of Alaska used skins as money. Here the
effect of intergroup trade has been to change the skin which was
taken as the unit. It is now the beaver. Other skins are rated as
multiples or submultiples of this.[338] In Washington Territory
dentalium and abelone shells were the money, also slaves, skins,
and blankets, until the closer contact with whites produced
changes.[339] The Karok use as money the red scalps of
woodpeckers which are rated at from $2.50 to $5.00 each, and also
dentalium shells of which they grind off the tip. The shortest
pieces are worth twenty-five cents, the longest about two
dollars. The strings are generally about the length of a man's
arm. They were worth forty or fifty dollars a string, but have
fallen in value, especially amongst the young.[340] The copper
plates which are so highly valued on the northwestern coast may
be esteemed holy on account of the ring in them. Slaves are
killed and their flesh is used as bait in catching the dentalium
snails, perhaps in order to get a mystic idea into the shells of
the snails.[341]
+152. Wampumpeag and roanoke.+ On the Atlantic coast shell money
was made on Long Island Sound and at Narragansett from the shell
of the round clam, in two colors, white and purple, the latter
from the dark spot in the shell. These were bugles, the hole
running in the thickness of the shell. They were called
wampumpeag, were sewed on deer or other fine skins, and the belts
thus made were used to emphasize points in negotiation or in
treaties, or in speeches. Farther down the coast beads were made
like flat button molds, with holes bored through them
perpendicularly to the plane of the shell, and called roanoke.
These beads, of both kinds, but especially of the former kind,
spread by exchange into the Mississippi Valley, and in the middle
of the nineteenth century they had reached the upper waters of
the Missouri River.
+153. Ring money; use of metal.+ The standpoint of the Vedic
hymns is that the cow is the real measure of value, but metal,
especially gold, is used for money in the payment of penalties
and weregild. The objects at stake in formulæ of oaths and of
duels were estimated in gold.[342] There was therefore a pure
gold currency. In ancient India, however, silver and copper were
also used and locally some coins of lead and mixed metals
occurred. In value one of gold equaled ten of silver, and one of
silver forty of copper.[343] The most ancient money of China
consisted of shells,[344] also of knives and dress patterns of
silk.[345] The knives had rings at the end of the handle and were
gradually reduced to rings of metal as money.[346] The same
ancient king who established measures of length and capacity is
the legendary author of money (2697 B.C.). He fixed the five
objects of exchange,--beads, jade, gold, knives, textiles. The
sign for money was combined of the signs for "shell" and "to
exchange."[347] We hear that the Chinese emperor, 119 B.C., gave
to his vassals squares of white deerskin, about one foot on a
side, embroidered on the hem. He who had one of these could get
an audience of the emperor.[348] We are inclined to connect with
that usage the use of a scarf of bluish-white silk in central
Asia, which was used in all greetings and ceremonies. A certain
quality of this scarf was used in places as the unit of
value.[349] Przewalsky mentions the chadak which is given to
every guest in southern Mongolia, for which another must be given
in return. In Chalcha chadaks are used as money, not as
gifts.[350] An intragroup money of copper or brass rings is also
reported from Korintji on Sumatra. They are cast of three sizes,
so that one hundred and twenty, three hundred and sixty, and four
hundred and eighty are required to equal a Dutch gulden.[351] In
the Old Testament the bride price and penalties were to be paid
in money.[352] Gifts and fees to the sanctuary were to be paid in
kind.[353] If the sacrificer wished to redeem his animal, etc.,
he must pay twenty per cent more than the priest's assessment of
it.[354] Until the Exile the precious metals were paid by
weight.[355] The rings represented on the Egyptian monuments were
of wire with a round section. Those found by Schliemann at Mykenæ
are similar, or they are spirals of wire.[356] In Homer cattle
are the unit of value, but metals are used as media. The talent
is mentioned only in reference to gold.[357] Possibly Schurz is
right in supposing that fluctuations in the value of cattle and
sheep forced the classical nations to use metal.[358] The metals
were in the shape of caldrons or tripods, in which fines were
imposed. They may have been accumulated because used as money, or
a great man who had many clients may have needed many for
meals.[359] "The transition from the old simple mode of exchange
to the use of currency can nowhere be better traced than amongst
the Romans." Fines were set in cattle or sheep, but copper was
used as well, weighed when sold. Then the state set the shape and
fineness of the bars and stamped them with the mark of a sheep or
ox. Later the copper was marked to indicate its value, and so
money was reached.[360] Amongst Germans and Scandinavians the cow
was the primitive unit of value.[361] It was superseded by metals
used in rings to make out the fractions.[362]
+154. The evolution of money.+ It is evident that money was developed
out of trade by instinctive operations of interest, and that money
existed long before the idea of it was formed. The separate operations
were stimulated only by the most immediate and superficial desires, but
they set supply and demand in motion and produced economic value
thousands of years before any man conceived of value. The rational
analysis of value and money is not yet satisfactorily made. There are,
therefore, points of view in which money is the most marvelous product
of the folkways. The unconsciousness of the operation and the secondary
results of it are here in the strongest contrast. Inside of the we-group
useful property was shared or exchanged in an infinite variety of ways,
according to variations of circumstances. We cannot follow the customs
which thence arose, because the phenomena have been reported to us
without distinction between intragroup and intergroup transactions. We
see groups of predominant wares set out in intergroup trade, and only
slowly is a smaller number segregated to be the general terms of every
trade. The inconvenience of barter was only slowly felt, and could not
have been a motive until trade was customary and familiar. In intragroup
exchanges the predominant ware was more easily differentiated. It was
the thing greatly desired. Here the amulet-trophy-ornament was important
for the elements of superstition, vanity, and magic which it bore. In
intergroup trade the utility of the object predominated. It was sought
in journeys only for its utility, and in that trade the transactions
first became impersonal. In the selection of leading wares individuals
could not experiment for their own risk. By taking what each wanted at a
time selection at last resulted, and when we are told that a certain
group uses this or that group of articles for money, we are told only
what articles predominate in their desires or transactions; in other
words, what stage in the selection of a money they have reached. It is
evident that this entire operation was an impersonal and unregulated
play of custom, which went through a long and varying evolution, but
kept its authority all the time and at every stage. The persistence of
the word "shilling" in our language is a striking proof of the power of
custom--above all, popular custom--in connection with money. The metric
system was invented to be a rational system, but the populace has
insisted on dividing kilograms and liters into halves and quarters.
Language, money, and weights and measures are things which show the
power of popular custom more than any others. The selection of
predominant wares reached its acme in the selection of _one_, not
necessarily the commodity most desired, but, after the function of money
is perceived, the one which performs it best. To return and take up a
greater number is to go backward on the path of civilization.
+155. The ethical functions of money.+ From shells to gold the ethics of
social relations has clung to money. There is more pure plutocracy in
Melanesia than in New York. The differentiation of men by wealth is
greatly aided by money, because money adds immensely to the mobility of
wealth and lets all forces reach their full effect in transactions. The
social effect of debt is best seen in barbarous societies which have
money. Debt and war together made slavery.[363] It is, however, an
entire mistake to regard a money-system as in itself a mischief-working
system. The effect of money is exhausted when we notice that it makes
wealth mobile and lets forces work out their full result by removing
friction. So soon as there is a money there is a chance for exchanges of
money for goods and goods for money, also for the loan and repayment of
money at different times, under which transactions interests may change
and speculation can arise. These facts have always interested the
ethical philosophers. "Naught hath grown current amongst mankind so
mischievous as money. This brings cities to their fall. This drives men
homeless, and moves honest minds to base contrivings. This hath taught
mankind the use of villainies, and how to give an impious turn to every
kind of act."[364] In such diatribes "money" stands for wealth in
general. Money, properly speaking, has no more character than axes of
stone, bronze, iron, or steel. It only does its own work impersonally
and mechanically. The ethical functions and character ascribed to it are
entirely false. There can be no such thing as "tainted money." Money
bears no taint. It serves the murderer and the saint with equal
indifference. It is a tool. It can be used one day for a crime, the next
day for the most beneficent purpose. No use leaves any mark on it. The
Solomon Islanders are expert merchants and "are fully the equal of white
men in cheating."[365] They do it with shell money as whites do it with
gold, silver, and banknotes. That is to say, the "money" is indifferent
because it has no ethical function at all and absolutely no character.
+156.+ There are other topics which might be brought under the struggle
for existence as a cluster of folkways, with great advantage. The
struggle for existence takes on many different forms and produces
phenomena which are cases of folkways. It speedily develops industrial
organization, which, in one point of view, is only the interaction of
folkways. Weights and measures, the measurement of time, the
communication of intelligence, and trade are primary folkways in their
earliest forms and deserve careful study as such.
[165] Smyth, _Aborig. of Victoria_, I, 194, 197.
[166] Mason, _Origin of Invention_, 252.
[167] Tylor, _Anthrop._, 208.
[168] Powers, _California Indians_, 50.
[169] Lumholtz, _Scribner's_, October, 1894, 448.
[170] Von den Steinen, _Berl. Mus._, 1888, 205.
[171] Southey, _Brazil_, I, 131.
[172] E.g. a rasp made from the skin of the palate of a kind of
ray, by Tahitians, Vienna Museum.
[173] Mason, _Origin of Invention_, 23.
[174] Grinnell, _Folk Tales_, 295.
[175] Dall, _Bur. Eth._, III, 122.
[176] Ratzel, _Völkerkunde_, II, 52.
[177] Smyth, _Aborig. of Victoria_, I, 202.
[178] _N. S. Amer. Anthrop._, II, 466.
[179] _U. S. Nat. Mus._, 1890, 471.
[180] Ratzel, _Völkerkunde_, II, 163.
[181] Smithson, _Contrib. to Knowledge_, XXV; Rau, _Prehist.
Fishing_.
[182] Von den Steinen, _Berl. Mus._, 1888, 209, 231, 235.
[183] Ehrenreich, _Völkerkunde Brasiliens; Berl. Mus._, 1891, 57.
[184] _Prim. Inhab. of Scandinavia_, 35.
[185] JAI, XXIII, 160.
[186] _Ibid._, XXVIII, 343.
[187] Kabary, _Karolinenarchipel._, 123-130.
[188] Hearn, _Japan_, 139.
[189] _Ibid._, 165.
[190] Smyth, _Aborig. of Victoria_, I, 340.
[191] Tylor, JAI, XXII, 137; JAI, XXIV, 336; _Early Hist. of
Mankind_, 195; Ling Roth, _Tasmania_, 158.
[192] JAI, XXIII, 276.
[193] _Bur. Eth._, XVII (Part I), 153, 245.
[194] _Ibid._, XV, 61.
[195] Mason, _Origin of Invention_, 132.
[196] _Ibid._, 123, 136.
[197] _Intern. Cong. Anthrop._, 1893, 67.
[198] JAI, XXIV, 44.
[199] _Ibid._, X, 316.
[200] Mason, _Origin of Invention_, 148.
[201] Ratzel, _Völkerkunde_, II, 586.
[202] Ranke, _Der Mensch_, II, 519.
[203] Ratzel, _Völkerkunde_, II, 149.
[204] Hagen, _Unter den Papuas_, 214; Pfeil, _Aus der Südsee_,
97.
[205] Thurston, _Antiq. of Tenn., etc._, 218, 230-240, 259; JAI,
XIII, XVI; _Bur. Ethnol._, XIII; _Smithson. Rep._, 1874, 1877,
1886, Parts I, II, III; _Peabody Mus._, No. 7.
[206] Lubbock, _Prehist. Times_, 90.
[207] _Smithson. Rep._, 1885, Part I, 874, 882; _Ibid._, 1887,
Part I, 601.
[208] Smyth, _Aborig. of Victoria_, I, 359.
[209] _Globus_, LXXXVII, 238.
[210] Ranke, _Der Mensch_, II, 517.
[211] Mason, _Origin of Invention_, 26.
[212] _U. S. Nat. Mus._, 1894, 658.
[213] Powers, _Calif. Indians_, 374.
[214] _Ibid._, 104; _Smithson. Rep._, 1886, Part I, 225.
[215] _Smithson. Rep._, 1887, Part I, 601.
[216] _Bur. Eth._, XII, 561.
[217] _Smithson. Rep._, 1885, Part II, 743.
[218] _Scient. Amer._, March 10, 1906.
[219] _Vor Oldtid_, 169.
[220] _Aarbøger f. Oldkyndighed_, 1891.
[221] _L'Anthropologie_, XIV, 417.
[222] JAI, XXVIII, 296; _Bur. Ethnol._, II, 205; Horn, _Mennesket
i den forhistoriske Tid_, 168.
[223] _Globus_, LXXVI, 79.
[224] Von den Steinen, _Berl. Mus._, 1888, 203.
[225] Schomburgk, _Britisch Guiana_, I, 424.
[226] Howitt, _S. E. Australians_, 455.
[227] _Kulturgesch._, I, 289.
[228] _Umschau_, VII, 184.
[229] JAI, XXVIII, 108.
[230] _Bur. Ethnol._, XVII, Part I, 152.
[231] Martius, _Ethnog. Brasil._, 405.
[232] Boggiani, _I Caduvei_, I, 168.
[233] Gumplowicz, _Sociol. und Politik_, 93.
[234] Whitney, _Language and the Study of Language_, 37, 40.
[235] Mauthner, _Kritik der Sprache_, III, 2.
[236] _Ibid._, II, 403.
[237] _Ibid._, II, 426, 427.
[238] Mauthner, 278.
[239] _Ibid._, 186.
[240] _Ibid._, 184.
[241] _Globus_, LXXXVII, 397.
[242] _Language_, 48, 51.
[243] Whitney, _Language_, 46.
[244] _Ibid._, 44.
[245] _Ibid._, 23.
[246] _Ibid._, 14.
[247] Schultze, _Psychologie der Naturvölker_, 96.
[248] Schultze, 86.
[249] _Ibid._, 89; _Am Urquell_, II, 22, 48.
[250] Schultze, 91.
[251] _Ibid._, 99.
[252] Lefevre, _Race and Language_, 3.
[253] _Ibid._, 27.
[254] Lefevre, 42.
[255] Mauthner, II, 468.
[256] Darwin, _Descent of Man_, 53.
[257] JAI, XXIV, 234.
[258] Martius, _Ethnog. Bras._, 106.
[259] _Ibid._, 704.
[260] Ehrenreich, _Berl. Mus._ (1891), II, 9.
[261] Schomburgk, _Brit. Guiana_, I, 227.
[262] _Caroline Isl._, 175.
[263] Spix and Martius, _Brasilien_, 927.
[264] JAI, XI, 41.
[265] _Bur. Ethnol._, VII, 44.
[266] PSM, XLIV, 81.
[267] JAI, XXIV, 393.
[268] _Ethnology_, 202.
[269] _Sieben Jahre in Süd-Afrika_, II, 173.
[270] Ratzel, _Völkerkunde_, II, 230.
[271] Krieger, _New Guinea_, 208.
[272] _Am Urquell_, II, 22, 48.
[273] Schultze, _Psychol. d. Naturvölker_, 93.
[274] Whitney, _Language_, 28.
[275] Schurz, _Entstehungsgesch. des Geldes, Deutsch. Geogr.
Blätter_, XX, 22.
[276] JAI, XIII, 245.
[277] JASB, I, 390.
[278] _Amer. Anthrop._, IX, 192.
[279] _Scribner's_, September, 1894, 298.
[280] Ling Roth, _Sarawak_, II, 231.
[281] Ridgeway, _Origin of Currency and Weight Standards_, 166.
[282] Ridgeway, 27.
[283] Evans, _Ancient British Coins_.
[284] Semper, _Palau Ins._, 61.
[285] Schurz, 3.
[286] Paulitschke, _Ethnog. N.O. Afrikas_, I, 317; Vannutelli e
Citerni, _L'Omo_, 463.
[287] Paulitschke, I, 318, 320.
[288] _Across Africa_, 176.
[289] Zay, _Hist. Monetaire des Colon. Franç._, 249.
[290] _Ibid._, 246.
[291] Kingsley, _West African Studies_, 82.
[292] Schurz, _Entstehungsgesch. des Geldes, Deutsch. Geogr.
Blätter_, XX, 14.
[293] _Anthropologie_ (1900), XI, 677, 680.
[294] _Globus_, LXXXI, 12.
[295] Schurz, _Entstehungsgesch. des Geldes_, 38.
[296] _Ibid._, 25.
[297] Schurz, 22.
[298] Foureau, _D'Alger au Congo_, 539.
[299] Kingsley, _Travels in West Africa_, 59.
[300] _Globus_, LXXVIII, 203; _Ibid._, LXXXII, 243.
[301] Peel, _Somaliland_, 102.
[302] Junker, _Afrika_, III, 52; _Ibid._, I, 341.
[303] Schweinfurth, _Heart of Africa_, I, 502.
[304] Junker, II, 245; _Ibid._, I, 295.
[305] Junker, I, 415.
[306] von Götzen, _Durch Afr._, 339.
[307] Schurz, 28; Volkens, _Kilimanjaro_, 221.
[308] Schurz, 17.
[309] Meltzer, _Carthage_, II, 106.
[310] Schurz, 19.
[311] Codrington, _Melanesians_, 323.
[312] _Amer. Anthrop._, XI, 285.
[313] Marco Polo, II, 18.
[314] JAI, XII, 373.
[315] _Ibid._, 339.
[316] _Indian Archipelago_, 280.
[317] _Sarawak_, II, 234.
[318] Schurz, 13.
[319] Woodford, _Naturalist amongst Head-Hunters_, 16.
[320] Cayley-Webster, _New Guinea and Cannibal Countries_, 93.
[321] Parkinson, _Ethnog. d. Nordwestl. Salomo Ins._, 22.
[322] JAI, XVII, 314, 316.
[323] JAI, XXVIII. 164.
[324] JAI, X, 287.
[325] Kubary, _Karolinenarchipel._, 2.
[326] Semper, _Palau Inseln_, 167.
[327] _Caroline Isl._, 259.
[328] Kubary, _Karolinenarchipel._
[329] Christian, _Caroline Isl._, 237.
[330] _Die Soc. Einrichtungen d. Pelauer._
[331] Pfeil, _Aus der Südsee_, 112.
[332] Semper, _Palau Ins._, 118.
[333] Martius, _Ethnog. Brasil._, 91.
[334] _Ibid._, 402.
[335] Powers, _Calif. Indians_, 335.
[336] _Ibid._, 76, 79.
[337] _Smithson. Rep._, 1886, Part I, 232.
[338] _Bur. Eth._, XVIII, Part I, 232.
[339] _Smithson. Rep._, 1887, Part I, 647.
[340] Powers, 21.
[341] Schurz, 25.
[342] Jolly, _Recht und Sitte_, 96.
[343] JASB, II, 214.
[344] Ridgeway, 21.
[345] Vissering, _Chinese Currency_.
[346] Ridgeway, 156.
[347] Puini, _Le Origine della Civiltà_, 64; _Century Dict._,
s.v. "Knife-money."
[348] Vissering, _Chinese Currency_, 38.
[349] _U. S. Nat. Mus._, 1893, 723.
[350] _First Journey_ (Germ.), 61.
[351] _Globus_, LXXVI, 372.
[352] Exod. xxii. 16; xxi. 36.
[353] Deut. xiv. 24.
[354] Levit. xxvii. 13, 15, 19.
[355] Buhl, _Soc. Verhält. der Isr._, 95.
[356] Ridgeway, _Origin of Currency and Weight Standards_, 36.
[357] Ridgeway, 3.
[358] Schurz, 15.
[359] Babelon, _Origines de la Monnaie_, 72.
[360] Schrader, _Prehist. Antiq. of Aryans_, 153; Ridgeway, 31.
[361] Weinhold, _D. F._, II, 52.
[362] Geijer, _Sveriges Historie_, I, 327; Sophus Müller, _Vor
Oldtid_, 409.
[363] See Chapter VI.
[364] Sophokles, _Antigone_, 292 (Campbell's trans.).
[365] JAI, XXVI, 405.