totem is felt to be as distinctly a member of the group as is any of the human members.
2. Ancestral Religion.—At a somewhat higher stage of civilization, and usually in connection with the patriarchal households or groups in which kinship is reckoned through the male line, the invisible members of the group are the departed ancestors. This ancestor worship is a power to-day in China and Japan, and in the tribes of the Caucasus. The ancient Semites, Romans, Teutons, Celts, Hindoos, all had their kindred gods of the household. The Roman genius, lares, penates, and manes, perhaps the Hebrew teraphim—prized by Laban and Rachel, kept by David, valued in the time of Hosea—were loved and honored side by side with other deities. Sometimes the nature deities, such as Zeus or Jupiter, were incorporated with the kinship or family gods. The Greek Hestia and Roman Vesta symbolized the sacredness of the hearth. The kinship tie thus determined for every member of the group his religion.
Religion Completes the Group.—Conversely, this bond of union with unseen, yet ever present and powerful kindred spirits completed the group and gave to it its highest authority, its fullest value, its deepest sacredness. If the unseen kin are nature beings, they symbolize for man his dependence upon nature and his kinship in some vague fashion with the cosmic forces. If the gods are the departed ancestors, they are then conceived as still potent, like Father Anchises, to protect and guide the fortunes of their offspring. The wisdom, courage, and affection, as well as the power of the great heroes of the group, live on. The fact that the gods are unseen enhances tremendously their supposed power. The visible members of the group may be strong, but their strength can be measured. The living elders may be wise, yet they are not far beyond the rest of the group. But the invisible beings cannot be measured. The long-departed ancestor may have inconceivable age and wisdom. The imagination has free scope to magnify his power and invest him with all the ideal values it can conceive. The religious bond is, therefore, fitted to be the bearer, as the religious object is the embodiment in concrete form, of the higher standards of the group, and to furnish the sanction for their enforcement or adoption.
§ 6. GROUPS OR CLASSES ON THE BASIS OF AGE AND SEX
While the kindred and family groups are by far the most important for early morality, other groupings are significant. The division by ages is widespread. The simplest scheme gives three classes: (1) children, (2) young men and maidens, (3) married persons. Puberty forms the bound between the first and second; marriage that between the second and third. Distinct modes of dress and ornament, frequently also different residences and standards of conduct, belong to these several classes. Of groups on the basis of sex, the men's clubs are especially worthy of note. They flourish now chiefly in the islands of the Pacific, but there are indications, such as the common meals of the Spartans, of a wide spread among European peoples in early times. The fundamental idea[16] seems to be that of a common house for the unmarried young men, where they eat, sleep, and pass their time, whereas the women, children, and married men sleep and eat in the family dwelling. But in most cases all the men resort to the clubhouse by day. Strangers may be entertained there. It thus forms a sort of general center for the men's activities, and for the men's conversation. As such, it is an important agency for forming and expressing public opinion, and for impressing upon the young men just entering the house the standards of the older members. Further, in some cases these houses become the center of rites to the dead, and thus add the impressiveness of religious significance to their other activities.
Finally, secret societies may be mentioned as a subdivision of sex groups, for among primitive peoples such societies are confined in almost all cases to the men. They seem in many cases to have grown out of the age classes already described. The transition from childhood to manhood, mysterious in itself, was invested with further mysteries by the old men who conducted the ceremonies of initiation. Masks were worn, or the skulls of deceased ancestors were employed, to give additional mystery and sanctity. The increased power gained by secrecy would often be itself sufficient to form a motive for such organization, especially where they had some end in view not approved by the dominant authorities. Sometimes they exercise strict authority over their members, and assume judicial and punitive functions, as in the Vehm of the Middle Ages. Sometimes they become merely leagues of enemies to society.
§ 7. MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE KINDRED AND OTHER GROUPS
The moral in this early stage is not to be looked for as something distinct from the political, religious, kindred, and sympathetic aspects of the clan, family, and other groups. The question rather is, How far are these very political, religious, and other aspects implicitly moral? If by moral we mean a conscious testing of conduct by an inner and self-imposed standard, if we mean a freely chosen as contrasted with a habitual or customary standard, then evidently we have the moral only in germ. For the standards are group standards, rather than those of individual conscience; they operate largely through habit rather than through choice. Nevertheless they are not set for the individual by outsiders. They are set by a group of which he is a member. They are enforced by a group of which he is a member. Conduct is praised or blamed, punished or rewarded by the group of which he is a member. Property is administered, industry is carried on, wars and feuds prosecuted for the common good. What the group does, each member joins in doing. It is a reciprocal matter: A helps enforce a rule or impose a service on B; he cannot help feeling it fair when the same rule is applied to himself. He has to "play the game," and usually he expects to play it as a matter of course. Each member, therefore, is practicing certain acts, standing in certain relations, maintaining certain attitudes, just because he is one of the group which does these things and maintains these standards. And he does not act in common with the group without sharing in the group emotions. It is a grotesque perversion to conceive the restraints of gods and chiefs as purely external terrors. The primitive group could enter into the spirit implied in the words of the Athenian chorus, which required of an alien upon adoption
"To loathe whate'er our state does hateful hold,
To reverence what it loves."[17]
The gregarious instinct may be the most elemental of the impulses which bind the group together, but it is reinforced by sympathies and sentiments growing out of common life, common work, common danger, common religion. The morality is already implicit, it needs only to become conscious. The standards are embodied in the old men or the gods; the rational good is in the inherited wisdom; the respect for sex, for property rights, and for the common good, is embodied in the system—but it is there. Nor are the union and control a wholly objective affair. "The corporate union was not a pretty religious fancy with which to please the mind, but was so truly felt that it formed an excellent basis from which the altruistic sentiment might start. Gross selfishness was curbed, and the turbulent passions were restrained by an impulse which the man felt welling up within him, instinctive and unbidden. Clannish camaraderie was thus of immense value to the native races."[18]
LITERATURE
The works of Hobhouse, Sumner, Westermarck contain copious references to the original sources. Among the most valuable are:
For Savage People: Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, 1859–72; Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1903; Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, 1899, and The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, 1904; Howitt and Fison, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, 1880; Howitt, The Native Tribes of S. E. Australia, 1904; N. Thomas, Kinship, Organization and Group Marriages in Australia, 1906; Morgan, Houses and House-life of the American Aborigines, 1881, The League of the Iroquois, 1851, Systems
