EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



rilege committed by one of its members, was 

 part and parcel of such a state of society. This 

 feeling of corporate responsibility must have 

 grown in strength through many ages by nat- 

 ural selection, as those tribes in which it was 

 most effectively developed must in general have 

 shown the highest capacity for social organiza- 

 tion, and must have exterminated or enslaved 

 their neighbours. Having so long been favoured 

 by natural selection, the feeling of corporate re- 

 sponsibility for conduct and opinion became so 

 deeply grounded in men's minds that it long 

 survived the stage of social development in 

 which it had its origin. Most conspicuous and 

 terrible of the consequences of this deeply rooted 

 feeling has been that fanatical craving for unity 

 of belief in religious matters which has been the 

 source of some of the worst evils that have af- 

 flicted mankind. But among the many changes 

 which have affected the relations of the individ- 

 ual to the community, with the growth of great 

 and complex modern societies, there has come 

 the gradual substitution of the idea of individual 

 responsibility for that of corporate responsi- 

 bility. From this point of view, the Protest- 

 antism of Luther is significant mainly as a revolt 

 against primeval notions of the relations of the 

 individual to the community, which have long 

 since survived their usefulness. Obviously, the 

 disintegration of orthodoxies which characterizes 

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