Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/248

 236 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

military, had a chief into whose hands the property passed, but the property remained communal, with a tendency to individual- ization in the hands of the chief or chiefs. However, confusion persisted between the limits of the state and those of landed property. The latter remained communal, at least by right of possession, but the chief or chiefs were the titularies of it. The exterior and also interior limits of the group become all the more rigid as the internal structure in reference to the external is no longer equal, but authoritative; and according to this internal structure, if it continues to develop in the same authoritative sense, all the special social organs economic, familial, moral, juridic, and others will be modeled in proportion to the social development. Each new differentiation produced among the groups in the interior will be a differentiation in the direction of inequality, and of the authority of the groups and individuals in reference to each other.

Everywhere, to an equal extent, these forms of social life have their repercussion in religious beliefs. For example, the real forms of the frontiers, as well as those of the boundaries of the particular groups in the interior, have their reflex in the beliefs relative to the future life. The Chibehas of America, according to Schoolcraft, believed that in the future life each nation would have its own territory where it could cultivate the soil. We find the same belief among hunting populations; and among the one kind as among the other, the organization of the future common or private territories is always commensurate with the organiza- tion which exists among the living. There is, however, this reser- vation, that sometimes the post-mortem life represents primitive conditions considered as happier than those in real existence. Hence is formed, within societies having unequal structures, a social ideal at first borrowed from the past, but which, with the progress of sciences, becomes more and more attached to present conditions and to the prevision of the most advantageous forms for the future. Thus from the beyond the ideal redescends upon the earth to illuminate the progressive march of humanity.

In this way is explained how, where the communal equality and peaceful forms have disappeared, they persist or reappear as