Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/90

86 ways of doing things, those norms and elements of custom which Professor Sumner has so admirably named "the folkways."

Folkways, customs, mores, enforced by collective instinct and feeling, constrain the individual. They become that "most terrible of all tyrannies known to man," of which Mr. Bagehot wrote. But that tyranny, as Bagehot demonstrated, perfects the group in the unity of essential likeness, and in the consciousness of likeness, and holds it together in the bonds of solidarity. Conscious of the usefulness of solidarity, the group, as it becomes self-conscious, endeavors by definite policies so far to prescribe individual conduct as to control and limit variation from type. Society thus becomes a type-conforming group of associates, endeavoring, by self-instituted discipline, to maintain, as a type, its distinctive characteristics.

To observe the successive stages, and the complications of man's collective struggle for existence, is to examine the evolution of tribal society and to follow the history of civilization—a large undertaking. The few words that I have to offer upon these subjects at the present time will refer only to some of the relations that seem to hold between very general influences, on the one hand, and some of the larger results, on the other.

Group safety is the first consideration. It is attained through unity of action, a prerequisite of which is the sense of solidarity. To the making of solidarity, everything that we are in the habit of calling conventionality contributes. Not only the fundamentally important conventions of language, but also those of manners, of costume and of ceremonial have here an essential function.

Doubtless it is at this initial stage of the collective struggle, when life is a day by day hazard, and man's overmastering emotion is dread, that religion acquires its first intellectual coefficient. Since Edward B. Tylor developed his theory of a primitive animism, much new light has been thrown upon the earliest religious notions of the race. The new discoveries have not convinced us that animism was, indeed, the actual beginning of religion, much less have they proven that the ghost theory of Spencer's exposition was. On the contrary, research apparently has demonstrated that religion, before it was spiritistic or even animistic, was quite impersonal. It was a recognition and an ever-present dread of external power, conceived merely as strength or might. Mana, or Manitou, was not the Great Spirit of the missionary's imagination; it was merely The Great Big, The Great Mighty, The Great Dreadful, and the earlier way of establishing working relations with external might lay not through sacrifice or prayer, but through the ingenious trickery of the black art, that is to say, of magic.

But was even magic the very first mode of worship? Speaking for myself only, I doubt it. In the folkways and folklore of every people