Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/795

 SEX /.V PRIMITIVE MORALITY 775

the male is peculiarly able to react. This is not like the case of hunger and other physiological stimuli which are conditioned from within, but if the individual acts for the advantage of the group rather than for his personal advantage, the stimulus to this action must be furnished socially. Group preservation being of first-rate importance, no group would survive in which the public showed apathy on this point. Lewis and Clarke say of the Dakota Indians: "What struck us most was an institution peculiar to them and to the Kite Indians, further to the west- ward, from whom it is said to have been copied. It is an asso- ciation of the most active and brave young men, who are bound to each other by attachment, secured by a vow never to retreat before any danger, or to give way to their enemies. In war they go forward without sheltering themselves behind trees, or aiding

their natural valor by any artifice These young men sit,

and encamp, and dance together, distinct from the rest of the nation ; they are generally about thirty or thirty-five years old ; and such is the deference paid to courage that their seats in the council are superior to those of the chiefs, and their persons more respected."' The consciousness of the value of male activity is here expressed in an exaggerated degree — in a degree bordering upon the pathological, since the reckless exposure of life to dan- ger is not necessary to success at a given moment, and is unjustifi- able from the standpoint of public safety, unless it be on the side of the suggestive effect of intrepid conduct in creating a general standard of intrepidity. Similarly, the Indians in general often failed to get the full benefit of a victory, because of their prac- tice that the scalp of an enemy belonged to him who took it, and their pursuits after a rout were checked by the delay of each to scalp his own.

The pedagogical attempts of primitive society, so far as they are applied to boys, have as an end the encouragement of moral- ity of a motor, not a sentimental, type. The boys are taught war and the chase, and to despise the occupations of women. Thompson says of the Zulu boys : "It is a melancholy fact that

■ Lewis and Clarke, Travels to the Source of the Missouri, ed. 1814, Vol. I, p. 60.