tHE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION 59 



tellectual device. It is accepted on probation and is at first 

 liable to change. It is tested by a process of trial and error; 

 and what is at first mainly a dim faith is corrected and justi- 

 fied or condemned by experience. Huxley said he believed in 

 justification not by faith but by experiment. The savage, 

 an investor in " futures " like us all, believed in testing by 

 experiment step by step the promising suggestions of his 

 faith. He accepted the provisional hypothesis which worked. 



This is only one side of a sublime process of human growth 

 and development, probably it is only the lower rough sur- 

 face of the fabric. The greatest asset of weak, defenceless, 

 curious, prying man was his needs; just as his greatest pos- 

 session was his possibilities, his " futures," his Castles in 

 Spain. He has long been prying into surrounding nature, 

 now he is beginning to turn his attention inward on himself. 

 Our " benighted ancestor " made full use of his discoveries in 

 both fields. We will return to this subject in our next chap- 

 ter. 



Out of all this defencelessness and feeling of need, prying 

 curiosity, social mode and form of life and its necessary im- 

 plications, out of a dim faith and endless experiment and 

 broadening and deepening experience, rose a body of ways and 

 customs which set in tribal law and tribal conscience. Some 

 things may be done; many must not be done under any prov- 

 ocation or circumstance. They are taboos, forbidden; the 

 individual dare not even think of rebelling. Viewed from this 

 standpoint the resulting system of Mores becomes a code of 

 morals or ethics. It was hardly the outgrowth of careful 

 thought; largely, as to-day, not so much a matter of logic as 

 of a certain good taste or instinct developed almost uncon- 

 sciously out of millennia of experience. However we may re- 

 gard man's attainments at this time as small or large, and I 

 believe that we have generally decidedly understimated them, 

 they were certainly full af possibility and promise. 



The development of primitive religion is still a field for 

 surmise rather than sure and definite statement.^ Through 



9 63-71. 



