Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/804

 784 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Sachsenspicgel provides death by fire. In the lawbook of the tsar Wachtang a double composition price was exacted for death by poison. And in ancient Wales death and confiscation was the penalty for death by poison, and death or banishment the penalty of the manufacturer of poisons. The same quality of disapproval is expressed in early law of sorcery, and it is unne- cessary to give details of this also. But, stated in emotional terms, both poison and sorcery, and other underhand practices, arouse one of the most distressing of the emotions — the emo- tion of dread, if we understand by this term that form of fear which has no tangible or visible embodiment, which is appre- hended but not located, and which in consequence cannot be resisted : the distress, in fact, lying in the inability to function. The organism which has developed structure and function through action is unsatisfied by an un-motor mode of decision. We thus detect in the love of fair play, in the golden rule, and in all moral practices a motor element, and with changing con- ditions there is progressively a tendency, mediated by natural selection and conscious choice, to select those modes of reaction in which the element of chance is as far as possible eliminated. This preference for functional over chance or quasi-chance forms of decision is expressed first within the group, but is slowly extended, along with increasing commercial communica- tion, treaties of peace, and with supernatural assistance, to neighboring groups. The case of Odysseus is an instance of a moment in the life of the race when a disapproval is becoming of general application.

On our assumption that morality is dependent on strains, and that its development is due to the advantage of regulating these strains, we may readily understand why most of the canons of morality are functions of the katabolic male activity. Theft, arson, rape, murder, burglary, highway robbery, treason, and the like, are natural accompaniments of the more aggressive male disposition ; the male is par excellence both the hero and the criminal. But on the side of the sex we might expect to find the female disposition setting the standards of morality, since reproduction is even a greater part of her nature than of man's.