Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/117

 and from the agrarian communities of the Celts and the Arabs. No doubt such common ownership of land is not always a mark of clanship. No doubt it marks sometimes the desire to get as much as possible out of the soil by a kind of agricultural co-operation. But, allowing for such economic motives, and admitting the existence of village communities, which are signs of economic rather than clan organisation, we are amply justified in treating common property as an ordinary and prominent feature of clan life.

More interesting, however, than outward signs of clan communion is the inward spirit of these communities. On this moral side the intense social unity of the group expresses itself in notions of right and wrong which curiously conflict with those of civilised nations. Individual responsibility is conceived most obscurely; personal intention, if seen at all, is visible only through mists of communal sentiment; and the corporate responsibility of the group is vividly realised. Inherited guilt, vicarious punishment, the absence of belief in a future state of personal reward or retribution—such are some of the most interesting signs of this clan spirit. It is easy to see how these three characteristics of the clan spirit follow with an unconscious logic from corporate responsibility. The clansman has done wrong, and, until that wrong is atoned for, any member of the offending group is liable to punishment, a liability nowise altered by the birth or death of the individuals composing the group. In the eyes of the clan the inheritance of such responsibility seems not a whit less reasonable than the acquisition of rights in the common lands by birth. In the eyes of the clan the selection of this or that person for punishment seems as reasonable as the escape of others by death from the only known sphere of punishment