x THE WILL IN DEVELOPMENT 183 



father or elder brother, protect the poor from insult and 

 gain the beggar a dole, keep property sacred from trespass 

 and secure respect for the duly sworn oath. But such a 

 sanction is no moral sanction. It is simply egoistic and 

 prudential. 1 No doubt it embodies the workings of a real 

 ethical feeling. When a man insults his father, jeers at a 

 beggar or breaks his oath, he experiences an internal revul- 

 sion of feeling all the more violent in proportion to the 

 vftpis of his initial act. In this mood he is ready to be 

 filled with gloomy apprehensions, and in a condition to 

 believe that any threat pregnant with evil will come true. 

 But though the feeling is ethical the expression of it is 

 prudential and, indeed, selfish, and it is with the expression 

 that we are for the moment concerned. Looking at the 

 expression of the ethical consciousness in the belief in mis- 

 fortune following automatically on transgression, we may 

 say then that it fails to render the ethical judgment (i) in 

 that it gives an external and prudential reason for conduct 

 which, morally considered, rests on quite other grounds, 

 and (2) in that working automatically it takes no account 

 of the character and psychological conditions, while often 

 it is visited equally on the careless or purely innocent act, 

 and falls vicariously on those connected with the actual 

 agent. 



Not only magic but primitive animism has its bearing 

 on early custom. But here again we can distinguish a stage 

 at which the operation of the spiritual world is in full 

 harmony with the law of the blood feud. Poseidon 

 avenges the blinding of the Cyclops in the true spirit of the 

 avenger of blood. The rights and wrongs of the matter 

 are nothing to him. That Polyphemus ate several of the 

 companions of Odysseus and did his best to eat Odysseus 

 himself is of no account. He pursues Odysseus from 

 shore to shore, and blocks up the harbour of the Phaeacians 

 who rescue him. The earlier spirits support their wor- 



1 When the calamity is one that falls on society as a whole, society 

 as a whole protects itself by expelling or destroying the offender, and 

 perhaps his relations with him. It is significant of the nature of early 

 thics that it is just at this point that the conception of a public wrong 

 as against a private injury is first found. 



