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 of Consanguinity, Smithsonian Contributions, 1871, Ancient Society, 1877. Many papers in the Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology, especially by Powell in 1st, 1879–80; Dorsey in 3rd, 1881–82, Mendeleff in 19th, 1893–94.
For India, China, and Japan: Lyall, Asiatic Studies, Religious and Social, 1882; Gray, China, 1878; Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 1894; Village Life in China, 1899; Nitobé, Bushido, 1905; L. Hearn, Japan, 1904.
For Semitic and Indo-Germanic Peoples: W. R. Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, 1885; The Religion of the Semites, 1894; W. Hearn, The Aryan Household, 1879; Coulanges, The Ancient City, 1873; Seebohm, The Tribal System in Wales, 1895, and Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law, 1902; Krauss, Sitte und Brauch der Südslaven, 1885.
General: Grosse, Die Formen der Familie und die Formen der Wirthschaft, 1896; Starke, The Primitive Family, 1889; Maine, Ancient Law, 1885; McLennan, Studies in Ancient History, 1886; Rivers, On the Origin of the Classificatory System of Relationships, in Anthropological Essays, presented to E. B. Tylor, 1907; Ratzel, History of Mankind, 1896–98; Kovalevsky, Tableau des origines et de l'Evolution de la Famille et de la Propriété, 1890; Giddings, Principles of Sociology, 1896, pp. 157–168, 256–298; Thomas, Relation of Sex to Primitive Social Control in Sex and Society, 1907; Webster, Primitive Secret Societies, 1908; Simmel, The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies, American Journal Sociology, Vol. XI., 1906, pp. 441–498. See also the references at close of Chapters VI., VII.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Wilamowitz-Möllendorf, Aristotle und Athen, II. 93, 47.
[4] History of Greece, III., 55.
[5] The Ancient City, p. 51.
[6] Russian mirs, South Slavonian "joint" families, Corsican clans with their vendettas, and tribes in the Caucasus still have the group interest strong, and the feuds of the mountaineers in some of the border states illustrate family solidarity.
[7] "In all the tribes with whom we are acquainted all the terms coincide without any exception in the recognition of relationships, all of which are dependent on the existence of a classificatory system, the fundamental idea of which is that the women of certain groups marry the men of others. Each tribe has one term applied indiscriminately to the man or woman whom he actually marries and to all whom he might lawfully marry, that is, who belong to the right group: One term to his actual mother and to all the women whom his father might lawfully have married."—Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 57.
[8] The fact that primitive man is at once an individual and a member of a group—that he has as it were two personalities or selves, an individual self and a clan-self, or "tribal-self," as Clifford called it—is not merely a psychologist's way of stating things. The Kafir people, according