It would be a tedious repetition if more illustrations from savage life were given.  Wherever we go we find the same sociable manners, the same spirit of solidarity.  And when we endeavour to penetrate into the darkness of past ages, we find the same tribal life, the same associations of men, however primitive, for mutual support.  Therefore, Darwin was quite right when he saw in man’s social qualities the chief factor for his further evolution, and Darwin’s vulgarizers are entirely wrong when they maintain the contrary.

The small strength and speed of man (he wrote), his want of natural weapons, etc., are more than counterbalanced, firstly, by his intellectual faculties (which, he remarked on another page, have been chiefly or even exclusively gained for the benefit of the community). and secondly, by his social qualities, which led him to give and receive aid from his fellow men.(44)

In the last century the “savage” and his “life in the state of nature” were idealized.  But now men of science have gone to the opposite extreme, especially since some of them, anxious to prove the animal origin of man, but not conversant with the social aspects of animal life, began to charge the savage with all imaginable “bestial” features.  It is evident, however, that this exaggeration is even more unscientific than Rousseau’s idealization.  The savage is not an ideal of virtue, nor is he an ideal of “savagery.”  But the primitive man has one quality, elaborated and maintained by the very necessities of his hard struggle for life—­he identifies his own existence with that of his tribe; and without that quality mankind never would have attained the level it has attained now.

Primitive folk, as has been already said, so much identify their lives with that of the tribe, that each of their acts, however insignificant, is considered as a tribal affair.  Their whole behaviour is regulated by an infinite series of unwritten rules of propriety which are the fruit of their common experience as to what is good or bad—­that is, beneficial or harmful for their own tribe.  Of course, the reasonings upon which their rules of propriety are based sometimes are absurd in the extreme.  Many of them originate in superstition; and altogether, in whatever the savage does, he sees but the immediate consequences of his acts; he cannot foresee their indirect and ulterior consequences—­ thus simply exaggerating a defect with which Bentham reproached civilized legislators.  But, absurd or not, the savage obeys the prescriptions of the common law, however inconvenient they may be.  He obeys them even more blindly than the civilized man obeys the prescriptions of the written law.  His common law is his religion; it is his very habit of living.  The idea of the clan is always present to his mind, and self-restriction and self-sacrifice in the interest of the clan are of daily occurrence.  If the savage has infringed one of the smaller tribal rules, he