86 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ways of doing things, those norms and elements of custom which Pro- 

 fessor Sumner has so admirably named " the folkways." 



Folkways, customs, mores, enforced by collective instinct and feel- 

 ing, constrain the individual. They become that " most terrible of all 

 tyrannies known to man," of which Mr. Bagehot wrote. But that 

 tyranny, as Bagehot demonstrated, perfects the group in the unity of 

 essential likeness, and in the consciousness of likeness, and holds it 

 together in the bonds of solidarity. Conscious of the usefulness of 

 solidarity, the group, as it becomes self-conscious, endeavors by definite 

 policies so far to prescribe individual conduct as to control and limit 

 variation from type. Society thus becomes a type-conforming group of 

 associates, endeavoring, by self-instituted discipline, to maintain, as a 

 type, its distinctive characteristics. 



To observe the successive stages, and the complications of man's 

 collective struggle for existence, is to examine the evolution of tribal 

 society and to follow the history of civilization — a large undertaking. 

 The few words that I have to offer upon these subjects at the present 

 time will refer only to some of the relations that seem to hold between 

 very general influences, on the one hand, and some of the larger results, 

 on the other. 



Group safety is the first consideration. It is attained through unity 

 of action, a prerequisite of which is the sense of solidarity. To the 

 making of solidarity, everything that we are in the habit of calling 

 conventionality contributes. Not only the fundamentally important 

 conventions of language, but also those of manners, of costume and 

 of ceremonial have here an essential function. 



Doubtless it is at this initial stage of the collective struggle, when 

 life is a day by day hazard, and man's overmastering emotion is dread, 

 that religion acquires its first intellectual coefficient. Since Edward B. 

 Tylor developed his theory of a primitive animism, much new light has 

 been thrown upon the earliest religious notions of the race. The new 

 discoveries have not convinced us that animism was, indeed, the actual 

 beginning of religion, much less have they proven that the ghost theory 

 of Spencer's exposition was. On the contrary, research apparently has 

 demonstrated that religion, before it was spiritistic or even animistic, 

 was quite impersonal. It was a recognition and an ever-present dread 

 of external power, conceived merely as strength or might. Mana, or 

 Manitou, was not the Great Spirit of the missionary's imagination; it 

 was merely The Great Big, The Great Mighty, The Great Dreadful, 

 and the earlier way of establishing working relations with external 

 might lay not through sacrifice or prayer, but through the ingenious 

 trickery of the black art, that is to say, of magic. 



But was even magic the very first mode of worship ? Speaking for 

 myself only, I doubt it. In the folkways and folklore of every people 



