138 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 



to change as to appear invariable. Many of them are strongly 

 sanctioned by religion; in fact, practically all of them that are 

 of long standing are supported by the readiness of the spirits, 

 ancestral or other, to punish infringement or alteration. They 

 thus come to form a prescribed body of rules of behavior for 

 life in society that well deserves the title of "the social code." 



Within the range of societal self-maintenance, the mores 

 determine how the struggle for existence and the competition 

 of life shall go on, thus rising to meet and cope with certain 

 vital and perennial life-conditions. Another inescapable and 

 vital life-condition is laid down in the bisexuality of the human 

 race; there are the relations of the sexes to be ordered, in the 

 interest of the society's well-being. Innumerable mores attend 

 upon the association of man and woman, parents and children, 

 and they work out into various forms of marriage and the 

 family. A big group of mores always surrounds some vital 

 condition of society life, like that of sex, and forms the ap- 

 proved method of dealing with it. Another such condition, for 

 further example, was felt in the vividly conceived presence of 

 a world of ghosts and spirits, an imaginary environment to 

 which men adjusted themselves by the unplanned development 

 of a set of mores covering forms of avoidance, exorcism, con- 

 ciliation, and propitiation of spiritual beings. 



But these several sets of mores, "mere custom" at first, 

 gradually attained a stage of organization where they became 

 institutions, as, for example, matrimony or religion. There 

 is no human institution that has not risen from the matrix of 

 custom; the rise of new institutions, now as always, is out 

 of the same prolific source. And, as they take more definite 

 form and somewhat disengage themselves from the mass of 

 custom, the institutions do not lose, but carry with them, that 

 approval and that conviction as to their indispensability for 

 welfare that were accorded to the mores. Anything that is in 

 our mores is right, and so our institutions are the best. "The 



