recognises the group, in one form or another, as the only possible solution of the problem of existence.

Take whom you will, and strip him of all that he owes to his surroundings, to his home, education, and occupation,-to diet, soil, and climate,-to institutions and usages, religious, social, and political, to intercourse with neighbours and aliens, friends and enemies, still he must have been begotten and born; he must have been reared and cared for in the years of infancy and early childhood; and, during these processes, he must have been subjected to, and moulded by a variety of formative agencies to the existence of which he can in no way have contributed. Could we figure to ourselves a being who had never filled a place in domestic, social, industrial, religious, or political life, we should merely have created an abstraction, to which nothing in the actual world corresponds. Every one of us must be a term in one or more of such relations as parent and child, master and servant, employer and employed, teacher and scholar, etc. In short, a man has no real existence out of relation to his fellow-men; and every human relation contains this element, that each of its terms seeks a full and complete satisfaction which it cannot find in isolation.1

§ 3. Every human being is thus possessed of what, for want of a better name, we shall call negative and positive qualities. Viewed in one aspect, each man is distinguished from all other men. He is a separate physical entity; and his animal appetites are concerned exclusively with the satisfaction of his "self," qua individual. But this is no sufficient account of his nature, for it contains an element which he possesses, not as his own exclusively, but as common to himself and every other member of the human race. It is to be observed that human nature is not fragmentary; it is whole and indivisible. It is not split up into positive qualities and negative qualities, but it holds these qualities within it.

§ 4. Now the aim of every human being is self-satisfaction,— satisfaction, that is to say, of himself as a whole,--of his whole nature; and consequently this aim embraces the satisfaction of all his desires, be they positive or negative in quality. Were he to seek exclusively the gratification of his material cravings, of the negative side of his nature, in respect of which he is distinguished from all other men,-his life would be a mere subsistence from hand to mouth, a balancing of momentary wants and momentary satisfactions-the battle-ground, in short, of inclinations and appetites, recurring so soon as satisfied. And in such a life no permanent satisfaction is to be found. But man is a reasoning being, and as such he must rise above the ceaseless turmoil of "the needs and greeds of the mere animal"; he must reflect and compare, and endeavour by the exercise of choice, to secure a

1 Leslie Stephen, The Science of Ethics, p. 95; Mohl. Gesch. d. Staatsinssenschaften, i. 88 sqq.; cf. F. C. Montague, The Limits of Individual Liberty, 1884.

Power of

satisfaction at once more durable and more complete. choice, however, implies the possession of a criterion by which to choose; and this criterion is afforded us by our experience of past pleasures. In other words, we select this, in preference to that, gratification whenever reflection tells us that the former will approximate more closely to the standard which experience supplies; and that standard is thus the ideal, to realize which is the aim of action. But this ideal can never be realized as a whole, for it has no unity of its own. It is nothing more than the sum of the particular pleasures of which it is composed; and, consequently, to realize the pleasure which it represents would be possible only could we secure the particular satisfactions of which it is the sum. But a man's pleasures cannot be summed till he is dead; and, moreover, if he would enjoy the pleasures which constitute his ideal of happiness, he must plunge anew into the mêlée of conflicting desires, in which, as we have already seen, no permanent satisfaction is to be found. He is thus unsatisfied in the transitory gratifications of self-centred desire-in the satisfaction, that is to say, of the negative side of his nature. And that he is conscious of this inadequacy, he shows by the very method of his search after happiness. For he seeks it in the reproduction, as a whole, of what was most pleasurable in his past. He hopes, in the achievement of the most desirable, to escape the solicitations of fresh appetites. We have seen, however, that the most pleasurable, could it be obtained, is obtainable only by going the whole round of those very pleasures which have already been found thoroughly unsatisfying. Still, in his endeavour to secure this ideal, the seeker after happiness has learned to look beyond the gratifications of the moment, towards a gratification which is permanent and unbroken, because universal in its comprehensiveness. He has learned that his own complete satisfaction can never be the achievement of momentary endeavour, however frequently repeated-that it is to be found only within a higher unity, which shall embrace himself and the various conditions which determine his activities. In short, he must rise beyond himself and his individual cravings; he must join in aims larger than his own-in a common purpose; and, in its realization, realize not the negative only, but also the positive side of his nature-the side which he has in common with his fellow

men.

It is not, accordingly, on the lines of egoism that man seeks, and seeks successfully, to better his condition and supply his own insufficiency, but in the actualization of common aims. He finds himself co-operating with others in seeking to realize a permanent good, which, because it is a good for all, is a good for each. Of

J. H. Stirling, Lect. on the Philosophy of Law, 1873, p. 17 sq.; Bradley, Ethical Studies, 1876, Essay II. and Note.

2

Green, Prolegom. to Ethics, 1883, p. 241 sqq.; Bradley, loc. cit. p. 88 sqq.

course it is not to be supposed that the egoistic side of human nature ever wholly disappears:

The members of a family, for example, are never intellectually or morally indistinguishable, although it is true that they have the same aim in common. For while each seeks the realization of that aim, the contribution of each to its realization is coloured by his passions and desires. But the more a man lives in, and for, the realization of this common good, the more his life sets and hardens, as moulded by it; and his egoistic desires survive only as informed by it, and as contributing to its realization. And thus, while he raises himself to a higher stage of existence, he subordinates himself to the aims of a common life, which becomes rule to all who participate in making it good. The life of the individual in society may be compared to a point within a circle containing many other circles, within which the point may or may not be. In other words, the individual may be a simple tribesman, or he may be in touch with all the various interests of a complex civilization. And what has been said of science holds true of life, moral and social. It is, as is science, a perpetual seeking; but it, too, is more, for it is a perpetual finding. As it advances, it grows richer and fuller; for what is best and noblest in the past of humanity is but the starting-point of fresh endeavour. § 5. Accordingly it is in the group alone that the individual finds self-satisfaction-self-realization-possible. The group is his world, apart from which life is impossible. Still, the contradiction within him, which is, indeed, condition to all future progress, is not altogether reconciled. For he knows that beyond his world there are mighty powers and forces, upon whose favour and assistance the existence of that world wholly depends. And as in the sphere of morality, the form of the common purpose which holds the group together is conditioned by the stage of development upon which those stand who contribute to its realization, so in the sphere of religion the form of the conception of the relation between God and man is similarly conditioned. In other words, the gods of primitive man correspond to his life, as child of nature. He explains to himself the larger world of which he is ignorant, in terms of the lesser world with which he is familiar. He knows " no truth other than life, and no task for knowledge other than the discovery of a vitality" like his own, "in all the forms and occurrences of nature." And yet he knows that these natural forces are above the things of his world-that his world depends upon them for its very existence; and he seeks by means of sacrifice and offering to obtain their favour and protection, or to assuage their anger. For any of its higher forms,

1

1 Lotze, Mikrokosmos, 3rd ed. iii. 187.

however, religion presupposes the existence of political and social institutions and observances. The old gods-the heaven and the earth, the ocean and the sun-are replaced by divinities, which recal but vaguely to memory and sympathy those half-forgotten Titans-divinities which are no longer mere natural forces, but the bright ethical spirits of self-conscious peoples. The ideal of morality is always the same to reproduce in our actions the life around us. So, too, the ideal of religion is always the same-to realize in our life the divine purpose. But while there is thus in religion and morality this constant element,—the realization of a common aim,-religious and moral conceptions are unceasingly progressive.

Man lives the moral life by contributing by his actions to the realization of the aim common to himself and the society of which he is a member; and he lives the religious life by contributing by his actions to the realization of the divine purpose, which thus becomes a purpose common to the Power whom he worships and himself. But while a common purpose lies at the root of every society and every religion, the relation of man to his fellowmen must be distinguished from his relation to his God. In the former case, he and his fellow-men work together for the realization of a common aim: it is a relation of co-operation and co-ordination. But, in the latter case, the very nature of his conception of God forces man to recognise his own immeasurable inferiority to God: it is a relation of obedience and subordina

tion.2

§6. Thus social relations rest upon a common purpose.

Since we are forced by the nature of our inquiry to examine society not only as it is, but in the making, we must begin with an investigation of society in its earlier stages.

II.—Method of Inquiry.

§7. When we speak of the "history" of society, or of an "early" social stage, we are not thinking only, or even primarily, of a succession or of an epoch in time. We use the term "history" not in the sense of a mere chronicle of successive events, but in the sense of an organic process. The geologist, unassisted by testimony other than that of the earth itself, can tell us the sequence of the transformations of its surface. He can tell us, if he take a standard of comparison sufficiently wide, the length of time occupied by these transformations. And if we know the order in development, we shall in the same way be enabled to form a general notion of the order in time. Lapse of time by no means necessarily involves development, but develop1 Hegel, Phänomenologie, p. 514.

2 Pfleiderer, Religionsphilosophie, 1878, pp. 255-263.

ment necessarily involves lapse of time. Accordingly that is oldest which is least complex, and an early stage will therefore mean a simple stage.

§8. Starting from this conception, many recent writers have endeavoured to reconstruct primitive society in its most essential and characteristic features, and have attempted to present to us the rules of social life in their least complex, and, consequently, in their most archaic form. With this end in view, they have gathered together, from the narratives of travellers and missionaries, accounts of the usages and observances of uncivilized races in every quarter of the globe. But observe the character of this evidence, upon which these authorities would have us conclude that in the rudest forms of contemporary savage society the counterpart of this most primitive social life is to be found. Does a mere collection of the instances in which a certain institution obtains amongst peoples, distinct in origin and widely removed from each other, assist us in tracing its history? The proof of an exact correspondence such as that which presents itself between the marriage customs of Thibet, Ceylon, and British antiquity, is, by itself, quite valueless. We must know more of customs than the mere fact that certain observers speak to their existence. Are they similar in form because they are historically connected? If they are unconnected historically, to what do they owe their similarity in form? Has due consideration been given to the action of such formative agencies as soil, climate, food, the general aspect of nature, and the character of surrounding groups? These and many other such questions must be answered before we can determine the position which such customs occupy in the history of society. For unless we know something of the historical conditions of the group under observation, we are wholly ignorant of the meaning and bearing of its customs. To pronounce upon its present, we must know its past. Nor are these the only difficulties which beset the path of the jurist who founds upon the results of comparative ethnology. For objections may be taken not only to the evidence but to the witnesses. Striking variations and inconsistencies present themselves in the accounts of savage life; and unfamiliar customs are susceptible of interpretations the most irreconcilable.3 In many cases reliance must be placed upon the evidence of

1 Jhering, Der Geist d. Röm. Rechts, 4th ed. i. pp. 55-80.

2 M Lennan, Studies in Ancient Hist. 1876, p. 155 sqq.

We may cite, as an example in point, the well-known passage of Tacitus (Germ. c. 20):—Sororum filiis idem apud avunculum qui apud patrem honor. Quidam sanctiorem artioremque hunc nexum sanguinis arbitrantur, et in accipiendis obsidibus magis exigunt, tanquam ii et animum firmius et domum latius teneant. Heredes tamen successoresque sui cuique liberi; et nullum testamentum. These words Lubbock, Origin of Civilization, 4th ed. 1882, p. 148, understands as pointing to female inheritance; M'Lennan, loc. cit. p. 144, as showing that polyandry was more widely prevalent in former times than at the present day; Schrader, Sprachvergleichung u. Urgeschichte, 1883, p. 389, as referring to the