He uses the whole machinery of society for his own elevation. Nevertheless custom and group unity are broken for all. Respect for law must be built new from the foundation.
4. Religious Forces.—While in general religion is a conservative agency, it is also true that a new religion or a new departure in religion has often exercised a powerful influence on moral development. The very fact that religion is so intimately bound up with all the group mores and ideals, makes a change in religion bear directly on old standards of life. The collision between old and new is likely to be fundamental and sharp. A conception of God may carry with it a view of what conduct is pleasing to him. A doctrine as to the future may require a certain mode of life. A cultus may approve or condemn certain relations between the sexes. Conflicting religions may then force a moral attitude in weighing their claims. The contests between Jehovah and Baal, between Orphic cults and the public Greek religion, between Judaism and Christianity, Christianity and Roman civilization, Christianity and Germanic religion, Catholicism and Protestantism, have brought out moral issues. We shall notice this factor especially in Chapters VI. and VIII.
§ 3. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AGENCIES
The psychological forces which tend toward individualism have been already stated to be the self-assertive instincts and impulses. They are all variations of the effort of the living being first to preserve itself and then to rise to more complicated life by entering into more complex relations and mastering its environment. Spinoza's "sui esse conservare," Schopenhauer's "will to live," Nietzsche's "will to power," the Hebrew's passionate ideal of "life", and Tennyson's "More life, and fuller" express in varying degree the meaning of this elemental bent and process. Growing intelligence adds to its strength by giving greater capacity to control. Starting with organic needs, this developing life process may find satisfactions in the physical world in the increasing power and mastery over nature gained by the explorer or the hunter, the discoverer, the craftsman, or the artist. It is when it enters the world of persons that it displays a peculiar intensity that marks the passions of individualism par excellence. We note four of these tendencies toward self-assertion.
1. Sex.—The sex instinct and emotion occupies a peculiar position in this respect. On the one hand it is a powerful socializing agency. It brings the sexes together and is thus fundamental to the family. But on the other hand it is constantly rebelling against the limits and conventions established by the social group for its regulation. The statutes against illicit relations, from the codes of Hammurabi and Moses to the latest efforts for stricter divorce, attest the collision between the individual's inclination and the will of the group. Repeatedly some passion of sex has broken over all social, legal, and religious sanctions. It has thus been a favorite theme of tragedy from the Greeks to Ibsen. It finds another fitting medium in the romance. It has called into existence and maintains in every large city an outcast colony of wretched creatures, and the evils which attend are not limited in their results to those who knowingly take the risks. It has worked repeated changes in the structure of the family authorized by society. Its value and proper regulation were points at issue in that wide-reaching change of mores attendant upon the Reformation, and apparently equilibrium has not yet been reached.
2. The Demand for Possession and Private Property.—In the primitive group we have seen that there might be private property in tools or weapons, in cattle or slaves. There was little private property in land under the maternal clan; and indeed in any case, so long as the arts were undeveloped, private property had necessary limits. The demand for private property is a natural attendant upon individual modes of industry. As we have said, it was a common principle that what the group produced was owned by the group, and what the individual made or captured was treated as his. When individual industry came to count for more, the individual claimed more and more as private possession.
The change from the maternal clan to the paternal family or household was a reënforcement to the individual control of property. The father could hand down his cattle or his house to his son. The joint family of India is indeed a type of a paternal system. Nevertheless the tendency is much stronger to insist on individual property where the father's goods pass to his son than where they go to his sister's children.
The chiefs or rulers were likely to gain the right of private property first. Among certain families of the South Slavs to-day, the head has his individual eating utensils, the rest share. Among many people the chiefs have cattle which they can dispose of as they will; the rest have simply their share of the kin's goods. The old Brehon laws of Ireland show this stage.
But however it comes about, the very meaning of property is, in the first place, exclusion of others from some thing which I have. It is therefore in so far necessarily opposed to group unity, opposed to any such simple solidarity of life as we find in group morality. As the American Indian accepts land in severalty, the old group life, the tribal restraints and supports, the group custom and moral unity that went with it, are gone. He must find a new basis or go to pieces.
3. Struggles for Mastery or Liberty.—In most cases these cannot be separated from economic struggles. Masters and slaves were in economic as well as personal relations, and nearly all class contests on a large scale have had at least one economic root, whatever their other sources. But the economic is not their only root. There have been wars for glory or for liberty as well as for territory or booty or slaves. As the struggle for existence has bred into the race the instinct of self-defense with its emotion of anger, the instinct to rivalry and mastery, and the corresponding aversion to being ruled, so the progress of society shows trials of strength between man and man, kin and kin, tribe and tribe. And while, as stated in the preceding chapter, the coöperation made necessary in war or feud is a uniting force, there is another side to the story. Contests between individuals show who is master; contests between groups tend to bring forward leaders. And while such masterful men may serve the group they are quite as likely to find an interest in opposing group customs. They assert an independence of the group, or a mastery over it, quite incompatible with the solidarity of the kinship clan, although the patriarchal type of household under a strong head may be quite possible. There comes to be one code for rich and another for poor, one for Patricians and another for Plebs, one for baron and another for peasant, one for gentry and another for the common folk. For a time this may be accepted patiently. But when once the rich become arrogant, the feudal lord insolent, the bitter truth is faced that the customs have become mere conventions. They no longer hold. All the old ties are cast off. The demand for freedom and equality rises, and the collision between authority and liberty is on.
Or the contest may be for intellectual liberty—for free thought and free speech. It is sometimes considered that such liberty meets its strongest opponent in the religious or ecclesiastical organization. There is no doubt a conservative tendency in religion. As we have pointed out, religion is the great conservator of group values and group standards. Its ritual is most elaborate, its taboos most sacred. Intellectual criticism tends to undermine what is outgrown or merely habitual here as elsewhere. Rationalism or free thought has set itself in frequent opposition likewise to what has been claimed to be "above reason." Nevertheless it would be absurd to attribute all the individualism to science and all the conservatism to religion. Scientific dogmas and "idols" are hard to displace. Schools are about as conservative as churches. And on the other hand the struggle for religious liberty has usually been carried on not by the irreligious but by the religious. The prophet Amos found himself opposed by the religious organization of his day when he urged social righteousness, and the history of the noble army of martyrs is a record of appeal to individual conscience, or to an immediate personal relation to God, as over against the formal, the traditional, the organized religious customs and doctrines of their age. The struggle for religious toleration and religious liberty takes its place side by side with the struggles for intellectual and political liberty in the chapters of individualism.
4. The Desire for Honor, or Social Esteem.—James, in his psychology of the self, calls the recognition which a man gets from his mates his "social self." "We are not only gregarious
