176 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



others to whom it is hostile. The impulse-feelings on 

 which social relations rest are, in fact, developed in the 

 course of experience and take a variety of individual and 

 concrete forms. The higher animals, therefore, are not 

 merely gregarious, but are capable of the rudiments of 

 family or social life. Parental care is, in all cases, well 

 developed ; whether to this is added the life of the herd 

 depends mainly on the method of feeding, which in some 

 cases gives an advantage to the gregarious type and in 

 others makes it necessary to disperse. 



4. The Moral Law. 



From the present point of view that of a comparison 

 of successive stages in the organisation of life the essen- 

 tial difference involved in the introduction of the rational 

 factor is the formation of a traditional standard of conduct. 

 Supposing no change at all in the primitive capacities of 

 impulse-feeling, great things would, nevertheless, follow 

 from the power to state in general terms the effect of an 

 impulse, to give expression to the feelings which it excited 

 in those whom it affected or in the onlooker, to distinguish 

 its immediate from its remoter effects and so on. All this 

 is done in effect as soon as class terms arise under which 

 actions are arranged and to which terms of approval and 

 disapproval are applied. There begins then to be a 

 standard whereby action is judged, and this standard is 

 neither the peculiar work nor the personal property of any 

 single man. It is formed in the medium of language, 

 grows up through the interaction of many minds, is 

 handed on as a social tradition and once constituted brings 

 the weight of an external force to bear on the promptings 

 of individual feeling. In the result, action passes beyond 

 the control of momentary desire. It is shaped by a rule 

 of permanent efficacy and of impersonal character. 



We have supposed this process to go forward without 

 the aid of any wholly new feeling. But it may be doubted 

 whether at one point such a feeling was not tacitly postu- 

 lated in our account. We spoke of the feelings excited by 

 an act in the onlooker, and the feeling of the onlooker is 

 the psychological correlative of the generality, the im- 



