EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



ously there is no kind of conduct which would 

 so surely awaken the dread of supernatural 

 vengeance as any neglect of the time-honoured 

 rites due to the tutelar deities, or any expression 

 of opinion, whether serious or flippant, which 

 might be interpreted as derogatory to their awful 

 dignity. 



The feeling of corporate responsibility, there- 

 fore, grew out of the necessities of that primeval 

 society in which the highest known order of 

 political organization was the tribe, and in which 

 neighbouring tribes were perpetually at war with 

 each other. Under such circumstances, those 

 tribes in which the feeling of corporate respon- 

 sibility was most intense must in general have 

 shown the highest capacity for coherent organ- 

 ization, and must have subjugated or extin- 

 guished those tribes in which the feeling was 

 more feebly developed. The feeling must have 

 grown by natural selection until it became, as it 

 were, part and parcel of the mental constitution 

 of mankind. No wonder that we find the feel- 

 ing so strongly developed among the highly cul- 

 tured Greeks and Romans and Jews. A feeling 

 so deeply rooted in men's ancestral experiences 

 must needs survive long after the establishment 

 of social conditions totally different from the 

 conditions which implanted it. If we wish for 

 evidence that this sense of corporate responsi- 

 bility has lain at the bottom of a great part of 

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