From a moral point of view, this lack of capacity for private judgment is equivalent to a want of moral freedom.  We have seen how relatively external are the sanctions of savage life.  This does not mean, of course, that there is no answering judgment in the mind of the individual when he follows his customs.  He says, “It is the custom; therefore it is right.”  But this judgment can scarcely be said to proceed from a truly judging, that is to say, critical, self.  The man watches his neighbours, taking his cue from them.  His judgment is a judgment of sense.  He does not look inwards to principle.  A moral principle is a standard that can, by means of thought, be transferred from one sensible situation to another sensible situation.  The general law, and its application to the situation present now to the senses, are considered apart, before being put together.  Consequently, a possible application, however strongly suggested by custom, fashion, the action of one’s neighbours, one’s own impulse or prejudice, or what not, can be resisted, if it appear on reflection not to be really suited to the circumstances.  In short, in order to be rational and “put two and two together,” one must be able to entertain two and two as distinct conceptions.  Perceptions, on the contrary, can only be compared in the lump.  Just as in the chapter on language we saw how man began by talking in holophrases, and only gradually attained to analytic, that is, separable, elements of speech, so in this chapter we have to note the strictly parallel development from confusion to distinction on the side of thought.

Savage morality, then, is not rational in the sense of analysed, but is, so to speak, impressionistic.  We might, perhaps, describe it as the expression of a collective impression.  It is best understood in the light of that branch of social psychology which usually goes by the name of “mob-psychology.”  Perhaps mob and mobbish are rather unfortunate terms.  They are apt to make us think of the wilder explosions of collective feeling—­panics, blood-mania, dancing-epidemics, and so on.  But, though a savage society is by no means a mob in the sense of a weltering mass of humanity that has for the time being lost its head, the psychological considerations applying to the latter apply also to the former, when due allowance has been made for the fact that savage society is organized on a permanent basis.  The difference between the two comes, in short, to this, that the mob as represented in the savage society is a mob consisting of many successive generations of men.  Its tradition constitutes, as it were, a prolonged and abiding impression, which its conduct thereupon expresses.