divine, punishment or anger is the cause, and moral disapproval the effect. Children, as everybody knows, grow up with their ideas of right and wrong graduated, to a great extent, according to the temper of the father or mother;15 and men are not seldom, as Hobbes said, “like little children, that have no other rule of good and evill manners, but the correction they receive from their Parents, and Masters.”16 The case is the same with any outbreak of public resentment, with any punishment inflicted by society at large. However selfish it may be in its origin, to whatever extent it may spring from personal motives, it always has a tendency to become in some degree disinterested, each individual not only being angry on his own behalf, but at the same time reflecting the anger of everybody else.
15 Cf. Baring-Gould, Origin and Developwent of Religious Belief, i. 212.
16 Hobbes, Leviathan, i. 2, p. 76.
Any means of expressing resentment may serve as a communicator of the emotion. Besides punishment, language deserves special mention. Moral disapproval may be evoked by the very sounds of certain words, like “murder,” “theft,” “cowardice,” and others, which not merely indicate the commission of certain acts, but also express the opprobrium attached to them. By being called a “liar,” a person is more disgraced than by any plain statement of his untruthfulness; and by the use of some strong word the orator raises the indignation of a sympathetic audience to its pitch.
All the cases of disinterested resentment which we have hitherto considered fall under the heading of sympathetic resentment. But there are other cases into which sympathy does not enter at all. Resentment is not always caused by the infliction of an injury; it may be called forth by any feeling of pain traceable to a living being as its direct or indirect cause. Quite apart from our sympathy with the sufferings of others, there are many cases in which we feel hostile towards a person on account of some act of his which in no way interferes with our interests, which conflicts with no self-regarding feeling of ours. There are in the human mind what Professor Bain calls “disinterested antipathies,” sentimental aversions “of which our fellow-beings are the subjects, and on account of which we overlook our own interest quite as much as in displaying our sympathies and affections.”17 Differences of taste, habit, and opinion, are particularly apt to create similar dislikes, which, as will be seen, have played a very prominent part in the moulding of the moral consciousness. When a certain act, though harmless by itself (apart from the painful impression it makes upon the spectator), fills us with disgust or horror, we may feel no less inclined to inflict harm upon the agent, than if he had committed an offence against person, property, or good name. And here, again, our resentment is sympathetically increased by our observing a similar disgust in others. We are easily affected by the aversions and likings of our neighbours. As Tucker said, “we grow to love things we perceive them fond of, and contract aversions from their dislikes.”18
17 Bain, Emotions and the Will, p. 268.
18 Tucker, Light of Nature Pursued, i. 154.
We have already seen that sympathy springing from an altruistic sentiment may produce, not only disinterested resentment, but disinterested retributive kindly emotion as well. When taking a pleasure in the benefit bestowed on our neighbour, we naturally look with kindness upon the benefactor; and just as sympathetic resentment may be produced by the cognition of the outward signs of resentment, so sympathetic retributive kindly emotion may be produced by the signs of retributive kindliness. Language communicates emotions by terms of praise, as well as by terms of condemnation; and a reward, like a punishment, tends to reproduce the emotion from which it sprang. Moreover, men have disinterested likings, as they have disinterested dislikes. As an instance of such likings may be mentioned the common admiration of courage when felt irrespectively of the object for which it is displayed.
Having thus found the origin of disinterested retributive emotions, we have at the same time partly explained the origin of the moral emotions. But, as we have seen, disinterestedness is not the sole characteristic by which moral indignation and approval are distinguished from other retributive emotions: a moral emotion is assumed to be impartial, or, at least, is not knowingly partial, and it is coloured by the feeling of being publicly shared. However, the real problem which we have now to solve is not how retributive emotions may become apparently impartial and be coloured by a feeling of generality, but why disinterestedness, apparent impartiality, and the flavour of generality have become characteristics by which so-called moral emotions are distinguished from other retributive emotions. The solution of this problem lies in the fact that society is the birthplace of the moral consciousness; that the first moral judgments expressed, not the private emotions of isolated individuals, but emotions which were felt by the society at large; that tribal custom was the earliest rule of duty.
Customs have been defined as public habits, as the habits of a certain circle, a racial or national community, a rank or class of society. But whilst being a habit, custom is at the same time something else as well. It not merely involves a frequent repetition of a certain mode of conduct, it is also a rule of conduct. As Cicero observes, the customs of a people “are precepts in themselves.”19 We say that “custom commands,” or “custom demands,” and speak of it as “strict” and “inexorable”; and even when custom simply allows the commission of a certain class of actions, it implicitly lays down the rule that such actions are not to be interfered with.
19 Cicero, De Officiis, i. 41.
The rule of custom is conceived of as a moral rule, which decides what is right and wrong.20 “Les loix de la conscience,” says Montaigne, “que nous disons naistre de nature, naissent de la coustume.”21 Mr. Howitt once said to a young Australian native with whom he was speaking about the food prohibited during initiation, “But if you were hungry and caught a female opossum, you might eat it if the old men were not there.” The youth replied, “I could not do that; it would not be right”; and he could give no other reason than that it would be wrong to disregard the customs of his people.22 Mr. Bernau says of the British Guiana Indians:—“Their moral sense of good and evil is entirely regulated by the customs and practices inherited from their forefathers. What their predecessors believed and did must have been right, and they deem it the height of presumption to suppose that any could think and act otherwise.”23 The moral evil of the pagan Greenlanders “was all that was contrary to laws and customs, as regulated by the angakoks,” and when the Danish missionaries tried to make them acquainted with their own moral conceptions, the result was that they “conceived the idea of virtue and sin as what was pleasing or displeasing to Europeans, as according or disaccording with their customs and laws.”24 “The Africans, like most heathens,” Mr. Rowley observes, “do not regard sin, according to their idea of sin, as an offence against God, but simply as a transgression of the laws and customs of their country.”25 The Ba-Ronga call derogations of universally recognised custom yila, prohibited, tabooed.26 The Bedouins of the Euphrates “make no appeal to conscience or the will of God in their distinctions between