xv CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 345 



anew whether the ape should not be put on a level with 

 Homo sapiens. 



Human beings, from the lowest known levels upwards, 

 live in organised societies, resting on a complexity of 

 relations maintained from generation to generation by oral 

 or written tradition. It is this complexity of organisation 

 in which many distinct and on the surface conflicting 

 obligations can be held together, which appear to dis- 

 tinguish human society and human morality from the 

 social life and morality of animals. It would be super- 

 fluous to dwell on the way in which this complexity 

 increases in civilised and particularly in modern civilised 

 life. The relations of a man to his family, his neighbours, 

 his town, his profession, class, country, church, his own 

 moral consciousness, and his duty to humanity, involve 

 him in a network of obligations about which the surprising 

 thing is that the cases of conflicting duty are so few. 

 Among the higher animals we seem to find traces of the 

 personal, family, and social impulses which form the basis 

 of human life and society. But to work these out into an 

 elaborate system in which every instinct is pruned and 

 reshaped by a mass of social observances, customs or laws, 

 would seem impossible without the machinery of general 

 rules, definitions, and exceptions provided by conceptual 

 thought. If moral impulse exists among the higher 

 animals, morality as a rule of life comes into being only 

 with the conceptual order of thought, and hand in hand 

 with a regular political society. 



4. It should be added that with the power of working 

 with detached ideas the whole world of imagination may 

 be said to come into being. There is, if not art, at least 

 the potentiality of art as soon as there is free play of ideas 

 in detachment from practical interests. * So certain does 

 this seem to be, that the existence of anything resembling 

 Art among any species of animals might of itself be taken 

 as sufficient evidence of the capacity of that species for 

 conceptual thinking. 1 Science and the technical arts rest 



1 The analogue of Art among the lower animals is play in which ima- 

 gination, if it can be said to exist, takes the concrete form of immediate 

 frolicsome action. 



