Page:Philosophical Review Volume 26.djvu/51

No. 1.] type of continuous industry that is quite impossible for the savage in his environment, and with his way of getting a living. Dewey calls attention to the abundant evidence that the savage can give himself continuously to the strain of the chase or the war path when need arises, and that this type of activity is the very kind that in his conditions is important. Similarly his control of sex relations or of the food supply may not be ours, but yet be precisely adapted to secure certain valuable ends. These ends may or may not be as desirable as some of the needs of civilized man, but the important thing is that the savage is controlling his life and is controlling it for certain ends which he thinks desirable. Unless we view his methods in their just relation to his whole business of living, his acts have no real significance when put beside those of people of other cultures.

Professor Dewey draws his illustrations largely from the classic studies of Spencer and Gillen, which may be said to have marked an epoch by their sympathetic and detailed descriptions. Many other peoples have since then been studied in similar fashion, though in few cases has the study been pursued into such detail. But the difficult task of utilizing the source material for an evolution of morality is as yet in its infancy. In the first edition of his admirable Morals in Evolution Hobhouse made almost no attempt at any correlation between the various lines of development. He traced law and justice, marriage and the position of woman, relations between communities, class relations, and the facts as to property and poverty, each by itself. We had a highly valuable survey of the successive stages, but little or no suggestion as to forces at work. In his recent revision an important step toward correlation has been taken. On the basis of a study made by him jointly with Wheeler and Ginsberg, he now relates the various types of legal marriage, or other institutions, to the method of getting a living. Such a treatment cannot of course be adequate if pursued purely by a statistical method. It must be supplemented and checked by a study of the actual history of peoples who have passed through various stages in their morality. We have considerable data for such study in the histories of the Israelites, Greeks, Romans, and