to the common interest, which first received a definite direction
when the family was formed, there grew the rude beginnings of human
morality.

It was thus through the lengthening of his infancy that the highest
of animals came to be Man,--a creature with definite social
relationships and with an element of plasticity in his organization
such as has come at last to make his difference from all other
animals a difference in kind. Here at last there had come upon the
scene a creature endowed with the capacity for progress, and a new
chapter was thus opened in the history of creation. But it was not
to be expected that man should all at once learn how to take
advantage of this capacity. Nature, which is said to make no
jumps, surely did not jump here. The whole history of
civilization, indeed, is largely the history of man's awkward and
stumbling efforts to avail himself of this flexibility of mental
constitution with which God has endowed him. For many a weary age
the progress men achieved was feeble and halting. Though it had
ceased to be physically necessary for each generation to tread
exactly in the steps of its predecessor, yet the circumstances of
primitive society long made it very difficult for any deviation to
be effected. For the tribes of primitive men were perpetually at
war with each other, and their methods of tribal discipline were
military methods. To allow much freedom of thought would be
perilous, and the whole tribe was supposed to be responsible for
the words and deeds of each of its members. The tribes most
rigorous in this stern discipline were those which killed out
tribes more loosely organized, and thus survived to hand down to
coming generations their ideas and their methods. From this state
of things an intense social conservatism was begotten,--a strong