they were at the mercy of every impulse and blown by every passion.

The condition of the primitive man, if we conceive of him rightly,
is, in several respects, different from any we know. We
unconsciously assume around us the existence of a great
miscellaneous social machine working to our hands, and not only
supplying our wants, but even telling and deciding when those wants
shall come. No one can now without difficulty conceive how people
got on before there were clocks and watches; as Sir G. Lewis said,
'it takes a vigorous effort of the imagination' to realise a period
when it was a serious difficulty to know the hour of day. And much
more is it difficult to fancy the unstable minds of such men as
neither knew nature, which is the clock-work of material
civilisation, nor possessed a polity, which is a kind of clock-work
to moral civilisation. They never could have known what to expect;
the whole habit of steady but varied anticipation, which makes our
minds what they are, must have been wholly foreign to theirs.

Again, I at least cannot call up to myself the loose conceptions (as
they must have been) of morals which then existed. If we set aside
all the element derived from law and polity which runs through our
current moral notions, I hardly know what we shall have left. The
residuum was somehow, and in some vague way, intelligible to the
ante-political man, but it must have been uncertain, wavering, and
unfit to be depended upon. In the best cases it existed much as the
vague feeling of beauty now exists in minds sensitive but untaught;
a still small voice of uncertain meaning; an unknown something
modifying everything else, and higher than anything else, yet in
form so indistinct that when you looked for it, it was gone--or if
this be thought the delicate fiction of a later fancy, then morality