96 SOCIAL HEREDITY AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



his early history man must have been without that 

 which we call moral sense. How came mankind to 

 develop it later? These two questions are clearly 

 very closely associated. If it should appear that 

 the moral sense develops in the child as the result of 

 social inheritance, it would follow that a similar 

 explanation must have held in previous generations ; 

 while if it should appear that this distinctly human 

 attribute has come by organic inheritance, that it is 

 innate rather than acquired by the individual, then it 

 must find some other explanation of its origin than 

 social inheritance. In our discussion it will not be 

 possible to separate completely these two questions, 

 since they are so closely interwoven. It will be our 

 clearest line of thought to consider first the question 

 of the origin of the moral sense in primitive man. 



The Moral Sense in the Primitive Family 



Evidence as to the condition of the moral sense in 

 the human families of prehistoric times is quite lack- 

 ing, and our only approach to it is in the study of the 

 customs and traditions that literature has handed 

 down to us. So little does this give that we can prac- 

 tically neglect it except as confirmatory to the con- 

 clusions reached from other sources. The only 

 source of evidence open seems to be the study of the 

 life of the lower races of man still living, and the 

 endeavor to reconstruct from their habits of thought 

 the method by which what we call conscience in the 

 higher races has been developed. 



Moral Sense in Low Races. — The chief characteristic 

 of the moral sense is that it is an impulse to obey 

 certain laws or customs, no matter what the result. 

 Even the lowest families of mankind show some 



