same. Whether you catch the evil through your own fault or not is a minor matter, for the evil is the same. One supposes there is a rule against every danger, and if one knew and perfectly obeyed them all one would presumably be immune from ill luck, vaccinated against all evil. Of course one does not know them all. The medicine man or priest knows more law than most people. The scrupulously careful man in these matters is the prototype of the religious man. The sinless man, who breaks no rule, is almost necessarily prosperous.

Integer vitæ, scelerisque purus,

Non eget Mauris jaculis nec arcu.

"I have been young and now I am old, yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken."

III

Consciousness of humanity as humanity, of the species man, is a late development. If we picture him as slowly emerging from "nature," we must also observe that he still more slowly becomes aware that he has emerged, that an impassable gulf lies between him and all life below and behind. Himself and nature seem to him one indivisible whole. But his mind moving naturally from the known to the unknown, he does not suppose himself like “nature;" he supposes "nature" like himself. Feeling himself conscious and with a spirit something, or resident power, active within him, he supposes everything is conscious with a spirit something, or resident power, active within it. This supposition of the humanity of nature, this ignoring of the gulf, shows its lingering trails in the innumerable metamorphoses of folk-lore; this seeing everything like himself in all the anthropomorphic gods.

Indeed we state the same thing, and emphasize this absorbing relationship in another way, when we say that to the savage the nature or essence of anything is its re

The nature of this animal

lation to him or to his group. is to be good to eat, the nature of that tree to furnish bark for canoes. Just as in the interfolded and blended configuration of New England hills, the names "Baldwin Hill, Church Hill, Bell Hill, Painter Hill" do not essentially mean to country folk any visible configurations. Essentially they mean the hill roads, and where there is no road there is usually no name. The essence of the hills is their human relationship. They are things one has to climb.

So far as we now tend to conceive humanity and the human order in terms of nature and nature's order, we reverse the primitive, who conceived nature and nature's order in terms that he knew best, which were human. So do the poets still conceive, and Ruskin denounced the habit. Foam is not "cruel" nor the morning "jocund." But poetry is rooted in forgotten ages and immune to the criticism.

"Ought," to us, is social; "must" is natural. If a man is mortally ill he "must" die. But if nature is moral he also "ought" to die. If man and nature have the same law, the "ought" of the one is the same as the "must" of the other. "Whatever is, is right," is a reassertion of the primitive's point of view - his inability to conceive of humanity as having struck out a new path for itself, and gone "voyaging through strange seas- - alone."

The primitive boundaries of right are not the limits of the individual as against society, nor yet of society as against nature, but radiate in unbroken lines from the center of society to the circumference of the cosmos. . . The visible world was parcelled out into an ordered structure reflecting, or continuous with, the tribal microcosm, and so informed with types of representation which are of social origin. To this the order of nature owes its moral character. It is regarded as not only necessary, but right or just, because it is a projection of the social constraint imposed by the group upon the individual, and in that constraint "must" and "ought" are identical. (Cornford.) Ancient faith held, and in part modern religion still holds,

that moral excellence and material prosperity must go together, that man by obeying Themis, the Right, can control the way of nature. This strange faith, daily disproved by reason, is in part the survival of the conviction, best seen in totemism, that man and nature are one indivisible whole. (Harrison.)

Now, when men have become conscious of themselves in organic groups, and have also seen that nature is also grouped, they again suppose the same kind of grouping. Totemism is the identification of a species with a human group. The men of the emu totem insist that emus and emu-men are the same, but kangaroos and kangaroo-men are different from them. The men of the kangaroo totem agree that they and the kangaroos are the same, but that emu-men are different from them. Totemism, it has been suggested, arises in part from the desire to emphasize and realize more vividly the group solidarity by identifying it with the emphatic and unmistakable unity of species. The men of one totem are "all one flesh" because they are "all one flesh" with their totem animal. They get from the idea the emphatic sense of social solidarity which they need. Totem groups are generally exogamous, and folk-lore abounds in the intermarriage of animals of different species. But some groups are endogamus like real species. Caste is a sort of attempt at imitative species.

However that may be, the group unity was successfully emphasized. If one has a cancer, it is not a question of sympathy with that unfortunate portion of the body: it is a question of saving one's life. If one dove in a dove cote is crippled, the other doves attack and cast it out, because their instincts say nothing about sympathy with individuals, but only about advantage to the community. In primitive human society too, the group rather than the individual seems to be the moral unit. Edipus and Job and the misfortunes of innocence do not, in such a society, puzzle or revolt the mind or conscience of any of its normal members.

Now when, into this moral code, hitherto wholly or predominantly social in its nature and aims, there began to creep or increase considerations for the individual, a doubt whether the group was everything and the person nothing when "justice" and "right" began to mean issues between man and man, or even between a man and his group, and not merely observance of those tribal laws, common customs and sanctioned habits which maintained the group this change in the conception of the social order passed over to and was held good for the natural order, since the two were still thought of as the same. An innocent man injured by group action being now held to have something wrong about it, it appeared also wrong for an innocent man to be unfortunate. Fortune "ought" to be "just." "Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?" The conception of nature had shifted, following a shift in the conception of society. But the realities of society had actually followed the shift in conception, because they consist of that conception, whereas the realities of nature remained precisely as they were before. The new conception of nature was not as true as the old one.

When it was believed that the gods punished the tribe for the sins of its members, or a member for the sins of his tribe, "this belief was not only effective in practice but substantially true in theory." But when it was taught "that the gods always punished the individuals for their own sins, the formula lost so much of its truth as to lose nearly all of its effectiveness." (Hadley.)

To study the universe, and then, turning back to humanity and human society with altered eyes, to attempt the statement of man in terms of nature, is comparatively modern. Of old the statement was of nature in terms of man. The wrench and struggle, old beyond measurement and yet unfinished, to set the two apart to realize that whether nature ultimately makes all laws for man

or not, man does not make laws for nature; that his moral jurisdiction stops short at his own frontiers, and beyond them there are no personal rights this wrench and struggle and crying out of great pain are the subjectmatter of the book of Job, the central motif of the Edipus. Job is crushed not only because his wealth and his children are gone and he sits alone in the ashes, but because the fair structure of his moral universe seems to have broken down, and his whole soul cries out against admitting it.

The primitive said, "The whole world is the same as we are," and it was not. The facing of the fact drove Job to the ash heap of despair and the choruses of Edipus to helpless contradictions. Some modern men have said: "We are the same as the whole world," and we are not. For instance we are just or unjust, and nature is neither. These conceptions of primitive man-mana, totem, and magic - seem strange enough to us now, though the threads of them are inwoven in our thoughts and govern our feelings, our goings out and our comings in.

First: He thought of the whole universe, both nature and man, in the same terms, namely, in terms of man and his society. He thought of everything as having, what he felt himself to have, some kind of indwelling power. For the most part he thought of that power as dangerous rather than beneficent, and attempted to manipulate it by magic and to avoid it by taboos.

Second: His general feeling of fear, as well as his fear of particular things, came up with him from below into humanity. The object of that generalized fear or awe was the projection of it. (Monotheism is as primitive as polytheism. The much debated and often shifted line between magic and religion may perhaps as reasonably as anywhere be drawn at the point where one begins to think of the Power, or Powers, as like himself, instead of as like something in himself— as a being, or beings, to be pleaded with and propitiated, instead of a mere force or forces to