Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/84

 begins in some countries with the prominence of the individual. But we must remember that this early individualism is something very different from that to which our modern associations are accustomed. The chief of clan or tribe represents his group. Such personifications of the group we are liable to confuse with individual character in the modern sense. We are liable to forget that personality in an age of even weakened communal life means something quite different from personality in an age when individual independence—feudal or democratic—has been developed. Some leading ideas of clan life will sufficiently illustrate not only the differences which set a gulf between primitive and highly-evolved personality, but also the hopelessness of attempting to understand the nature of social evolution without attending to such differences.

The clan, as such, knows nothing of personal responsibility in a future state, for its corporate view of life needs no such individual sanction for morality. The Hades of the clan, therefore, like that of the Odyssey or like the Hebrew She'ôl, is merely a subterranean gathering-place of buried kinsmen whose life is a pale reflection of their life on earth. Reward and punishment, the terrors or consolations of an individualism not yet developed, have here no place, and for a reason easy enough to understand. This reason is that each clan, as a corporation which "never dies," suffers, or is liable to suffer, for the sins committed by any of its members as long as atonement is not made. Hence the place of personal reward or punishment in a future state is taken by corporate responsibility in the present life. Just as among the Bedâwi the rights and liabilities of Thâr or Blood-Revenge extend to the fifth generation, so in all clan communities responsibility is more or less an impersonal