MOTHER-AGE CIVILISATION 93 



instincts have carried him, we must investigate his 

 history in the days of his barbarism, when brute- 

 appetites ruled his unconscious development, and he 

 established customs and contracted habits still faintly 

 shadowed in the language, ceremonies, and institutions 

 of to-day. The control of the primitive appetites of 

 the individual in the interests of the group, wherever 

 and however it arose, was the germ of the first stable 

 society, the genesis of morality. Hence if the soundest 

 ethical theory makes no attempt to explain what men in 

 general ought to do or forbear from doing, but describes 

 how experience in a long course of ages has developed, and 

 tradition maintained, a code of right and wrong peculiar 

 to each individual human society, then to clearly under- 

 stand our moral position to-day we must investigate 

 its origin in the far past, when the gregarious instinct 

 moulded the brute appetites of individuals, and the 

 first social customs and institutions were established. 

 Fundamental among these primitive social institutions 

 is the organisation of sex, and if the morally desirable 

 be treated, not supernaturally, but sanely, as the socially 

 desirable, we still see in the genesis of morality some 

 excuse for that narrow, but sadly prevalent, state of 

 mind which identifies immorality with anti-social con- 

 duct in sexual matters. If the origin of the maternal 

 instinct can be described without the aid of super- 

 natural terms, then the history of the appearance and 

 survival of institutions and customs more and more 

 fostering the gregarious instinct in man will suffice to 

 show that naturalism is able to account for the develop- 

 ment of morality by the extra-group struggle for exist- 



