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11 Darwin, op. cit. p. 108.

12 Melville, Typee, p. 297 sq.

13 Robertson, History of America, i. 350. Cf. Clifford’s theory of the “tribal self” (Lectures and Essays, p. 290 sqq.). He says (ibid. p. 291), “The savage is not only hurt when anybody treads on his foot, but when anybody treads on his tribe.”

14 Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 170.

Our explanation of what has here been called “sympathetic resentment,” however, is not yet complete. This emotion, as we have seen, may be a reaction against sympathetic pain; but it may also be directly produced by the cognition of the signs of anger. In the former case it is, strictly speaking, independent of the emotion of the injured individual; we may feel resentment on his behalf though he himself feels none. In the latter case it is a reflected emotion, felt independently of the cause of the original emotion of which it is a reflection—as when the yells and shrieks of a street dog-fight are heard, and dogs from all sides rush to the spot, each dog being apparently ready to bite any of the others. In the former case, it is, by the medium of sympathetic pain, closely connected with the inflicted injury; in the latter case it may even be the reflection of an emotion which is itself sympathetic, and the origin of which is perhaps out of sight. In an infuriated crowd the one gets angry because the other is angry, and very often the question, Why? is hardly asked. This form of sympathetic resentment is of considerable importance both as an originator and as a communicator of moral ideas. To teach that a certain act is wrong is to teach that it is an object, and a proper object, of moral indignation, and the aim of the instructor is to inspire a similar indignation in the mind of the pupil. An intelligent teacher tries to attain this end by representing the act in such a light as to evoke disapproval independently of any appeal to authority; but, unfortunately, in many cases where the duties of current morality are to be enjoined, he cannot do so—for a very obvious reason. Of various acts which, though inoffensive by themselves, are considered wrong, he can say little more than that they are forbidden by God and man; and if, nevertheless, such acts are not only professed, but actually felt, to be wrong, that is due to the fact that men are inclined to sympathise with the resentment of persons for whom they feel regard. It is this fact that accounts for the connection between the punishment of an act and the consequent idea that it deserves to be punished. We shall see that the punishment which society inflicts is, as a rule, an expression of its moral indignation; but there are instances in which the order is reversed, and in which human, or, as it may be supposed, divine, punishment or anger is the cause, and moral disapproval the effect. Children, as everybody knows, grow up with their ideas of right and wrong graduated, to a great extent, according to the temper of the father or mother;15 and men are not seldom, as Hobbes said, “like little children, that have no other rule of good and evill manners, but the correction they receive from their Parents, and Masters.”16 The case is the same with any outbreak of public resentment, with any punishment inflicted by society at large. However selfish it may be in its origin, to whatever extent it may spring from personal motives, it always has a tendency to become in some degree disinterested, each individual not only being angry on his own behalf, but at the same time reflecting the anger of everybody else.

15 Cf. Baring-Gould, Origin and Developwent of Religious Belief, i. 212.

16 Hobbes, Leviathan, i. 2, p. 76.

Any means of expressing resentment may serve as a communicator of the emotion. Besides punishment, language deserves special mention. Moral disapproval may be evoked by the very sounds of certain words, like “murder,” “theft,” “cowardice,” and others, which not merely indicate the commission of certain acts, but also express the opprobrium attached to them. By being called a “liar,” a person is more disgraced than by any plain statement of his untruthfulness; and by the use of some strong word the orator raises the indignation of a sympathetic audience to its pitch.

All the cases of disinterested resentment which we have hitherto considered fall under the heading of sympathetic resentment. But there are other cases into which sympathy does not enter at all. Resentment is not always caused by the infliction of an injury; it may be called forth by any feeling of pain traceable to a living being as its direct or indirect cause. Quite apart from our sympathy with the sufferings of others, there are many cases in which we feel hostile towards a person on account of some act of his which in no way interferes with our interests, which conflicts with no self-regarding feeling of ours. There are in the human mind what Professor Bain calls “disinterested antipathies,” sentimental aversions “of which our fellow-beings are the subjects, and on account of which we overlook our own interest quite as much as in displaying our sympathies and affections.”17 Differences of taste, habit, and opinion, are particularly apt to create similar dislikes, which, as will be seen, have played a very prominent part in the moulding of the moral consciousness. When a certain act, though harmless by itself (apart from the painful impression it makes upon the spectator), fills us with disgust or horror, we may feel no less inclined to inflict harm upon the agent, than if he had committed an offence against person, property, or good name. And here, again, our resentment is sympathetically increased by our observing a similar disgust in others. We are easily affected by the aversions and likings of our neighbours. As Tucker said, “we grow to love things we perceive them fond of, and contract aversions from their dislikes.”18

17 Bain, Emotions and the Will, p. 268.

18 Tucker, Light of Nature Pursued, i. 154.

We have already seen that sympathy springing from an altruistic sentiment may produce, not only disinterested resentment, but disinterested retributive kindly emotion as well. When taking a pleasure in the benefit bestowed on our neighbour, we naturally look with kindness upon the benefactor; and just as sympathetic resentment may be produced by the cognition of the outward signs of resentment, so sympathetic retributive kindly emotion may be produced by the signs of retributive kindliness. Language communicates emotions by terms of praise, as well as by terms of condemnation; and a reward, like a punishment, tends to reproduce the emotion from which it sprang. Moreover, men have disinterested likings, as they have disinterested dislikes. As an instance of such likings may be mentioned the common admiration of courage when felt irrespectively of the object for which it is displayed.

Having thus found the origin of disinterested retributive emotions, we have at the same time partly explained the origin of the moral emotions. But, as we have seen, disinterestedness is not the sole characteristic by which moral indignation and approval are distinguished from other retributive emotions: a moral emotion is assumed to be impartial, or, at least, is not knowingly partial, and it is coloured by the feeling of being publicly shared. However, the real problem which we have now to solve is not how retributive emotions may become apparently impartial and be coloured by a feeling of generality, but why disinterestedness, apparent impartiality, and the flavour of generality have become characteristics by which so-called moral emotions are distinguished from other retributive emotions. The solution of this problem lies in the fact that society is the birthplace of the moral consciousness; that the first moral judgments expressed, not the private emotions of isolated individuals, but emotions which were felt by the society at large; that tribal custom was the earliest rule of duty.

Customs have been defined as public habits, as the habits of a certain circle, a racial or national community, a rank or class of society. But whilst being a habit, custom is at the same time something else as well. It not merely involves a frequent repetition of a certain mode of conduct, it is also a rule of conduct. As Cicero observes, the customs of a people “are precepts in themselves.”19 We say that “custom commands,” or “custom demands,” and speak of it as “strict” and “inexorable”; and even when custom simply allows the commission of a certain class of actions, it implicitly lays down the rule that such actions are not to be interfered with.

19 Cicero, De Officiis, i. 41.

The rule of custom is conceived of as a moral rule, which decides what is right and wrong.20 “Les loix de la conscience,” says Montaigne, “que nous disons naistre de nature, naissent de la coustume.”21 Mr. Howitt once said to a young Australian native with whom he was speaking about the food prohibited during initiation, “But if you were hungry and caught a female opossum, you might eat it if the old men were not there.” The youth replied, “I could not do that; it would not be right”; and he could give no other reason than that it would be wrong to disregard the customs of his people.22 Mr. Bernau says of the British Guiana Indians:—“Their moral sense of good and evil is entirely regulated by the customs and practices inherited from their forefathers. What their predecessors believed and did must have been right, and they deem it the height of presumption to suppose that any could think and act otherwise.”23 The moral evil of the pagan Greenlanders “was all that was contrary to laws and customs, as regulated by the angakoks,” and when the Danish missionaries tried to make them acquainted with their own moral conceptions, the result was that they “conceived the idea of virtue and sin as what was pleasing or displeasing to Europeans, as according or disaccording with their customs and laws.”24 “The Africans, like most heathens,” Mr. Rowley observes, “do not regard sin, according to their idea of sin, as an offence against God, but simply as a transgression of the laws and customs of their country.”25 The Ba-Ronga call derogations of universally recognised custom yila, prohibited, tabooed.26 The Bedouins of the Euphrates “make no appeal to conscience or the will of God in their distinctions between right and wrong, but appeal only to custom.”27 According to the laws of Manu, the custom handed down in regular succession since time immemorial “is called the conduct of virtuous men.”28 The Greek idea of the customary, τὸ νόμιμον, shows the close connection between morality and custom; and so do the words ἔθος, ἤθος, and ἠθικά, the Latin mos and moralis, the German Sitte and Sittlichkeit.29 Moreover, in early society, customs are not only moral rules, but the only moral rules ever thought of. The savage strictly complies with the Hegelian command that no man must have a private conscience. The following statement, which refers to the Tinnevelly Shanars, may be quoted as a typical example:—“Solitary individuals amongst them rarely adopt any new opinions, or any new course of procedure. They follow the multitude to do evil, and they follow the multitude to do good. They think in herds.”30

20 Cf. Austin, Lectures on Jurisprudence, i. 104; Tönnies, ‘Philosophical Terminology,’ in Mind, N.S., viii. 304. Von Jhering (Zweck im Recht, ii. 23) defines the German Sitte as “die im Leben des Volks sich bildende verpflichtende Gewohnheit”; and a similar view is expressed by Wundt (Ethik, p. 128 sq.).

21 Montaigne, Essais, i. 22 (Œuvres, p. 48).

22 Fison and Howitt, op. cit. p. 256 sq.

23 Bernau, Missionary Labours in British Guiana, p. 60.

24 Rink, Greenland, p. 201 sq.

25 Rowley, Religion of the Africans, p. 44.

26 Junod, Ba-Ronga, p. 477.

27 Blunt, Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates, ii. 224.

28 Laws of Manu, ii. 18.

29 For the history of these words, see Wundt, op. cit. p. 19 sqq. For other instances illustrating the moral character of custom, see Maclean, Compendium of Kafir Law and Customs, p. 34 (Amaxosa); Macpherson, Memorials of Service in India, p. 94 (Kandhs); Kubary, Ethnographische Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Karolinischen Inselgruppe, i. 73 (Pelew Islanders); Smith, Chinese Characteristics, p. 119.

30 Caldwell, Tinnevelly Shanars, p. 69.

Disobedience to custom evokes public indignation. In the lower stages of civilisation, especially, custom is a tyrant who binds man in iron fetters, and who threatens the transgressor, not only with general disgrace, but often with bodily suffering. “To believe that man in a savage state is endowed with freedom either of thought or action,” says Sir G. Grey, “is erroneous in the highest degree”;31 and this statement is corroborated by an array of facts from all quarters of the savage world.32 Now, as the rule of custom is a moral rule, the indignation aroused by its transgression is naturally a moral emotion. Moreover, where all the duties incumbent on a man are expressed in the customs of the society to which he belongs, it is obvious that the characteristics of moral indignation are to be sought for in its connection with custom. The most salient feature of custom is its generality. Its transgression calls forth public indignation; hence the flavour of generality which characterises moral disapproval. Custom is fixed once for all, and takes no notice of the preferences of individuals. By recognising the validity of a custom, I implicitly admit that the custom is equally binding for me and for you and for all the other members of the society. This involves disinterestedness; I admit that a breach of the custom is equally wrong whether I myself am immediately concerned in the act or not. It also involves apparent impartiality; I assume that my condemnation of the act is independent of the relationship in which the parties concerned in it stand to me personally, or, at least, I am not aware that my condemnation is influenced by any such relationship. And this holds good whatever be the origin of the custom. Though customs are very frequently rooted in public sympathetic resentment or in public disinterested aversions, they may have a selfish and partial origin as well. At first the leading men of the society may have prohibited certain acts because they found them disadvantageous to themselves, or to those with whom they particularly sympathised. Where custom is an oppressor of women, this oppression may certainly be traced back to the selfishness of men. Where custom sanctions slavery, it is certainly not impartial to the slaves. Yet in the one case as in the other, I assume custom to be in the right, irrespectively of my own station, and I even expect the women and slaves themselves to be of the same opinion. Such an expectation is by no means a chimera. Under normal social conditions, largely owing to men’s tendency to share sympathetically the resentment of their superiors, the customs of a society are willingly submitted to, and recognised as right, by the large majority of its members, whatever may be their station. Among the Rejangs of Sumatra, says Marsden, “a man without property, family, or connections, never, in the partiality of self-love, considers his own life as being of equal value with that of a man of substance.”33 However selfish, however partial a certain rule may be, it becomes a true custom, a moral rule, as soon as the selfishness or the partiality of its makers is lost sight of.

31 Grey, Journals of Expeditions in North-West and Western Australia, ii. 217.

32 Tylor, ‘Primitive Society,’ in Contemporary Review, xxi. 706. Idem, Anthropology, p. 408 sq. Avebury, Origin of Civilisation, p. 466 sqq. Eyre, Journals of Expeditions into Central Australia, ii. 384, 385, 388. Curr, The Australian Race, i. 51. Mathew, ‘Australian Aborigines,’ in Jour. and Proceed. Roy. Soc. N.S. Wales, xxiii. 398. Idem, Eaglehawk and Crow, p. 93. Taplin, ‘Narrinyeri,’ in Woods, Native Tribes of South Australia, pp. 35, 136 sq. Hawtrey, ‘Lengua Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco,’ in Jour. Anthr. Inst. xxxi. 292. Murdoch, ‘Ethnological Results of the Point Barrow Expedition,’ in Ann. Rep. Bur. Ethn. ix. 427 sq. (Point Barrow Eskimo). Holm, ‘Ethnologisk Skizze af Angmagsalikerne,’ in Meddelelser om Grönland, x. 85. Nansen, First Crossing of Greenland, ii. 295. Johnston, British Central Africa, p. 452. New, Life, Wanderings, and Labours in Eastern Africa, p. 110 (Wanika). Scott Robertson, Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush, p. 183 sq.

33 Marsden, History of Sumatra, p. 247.

It will perhaps be argued that, by deriving the characteristics of moral indignation from its connection with custom, we implicitly contradict our initial assumption that moral emotions lie at the bottom of all moral judgments. But it is not so. Custom is a moral rule only on account of the indignation called forth by its transgression. In its ethical aspect it is nothing but a generalisation of emotional tendencies, applied to certain modes of conduct, and transmitted from generation to generation. Public indignation lies at the bottom of it. In its capacity of a rule of duty, custom, mos, is derived from the emotion to which it gave its name.

As public indignation is the prototype of moral disapproval, so public approval, expressed in public praise, is the prototype of moral approval. Like public indignation, public approval is characterised by a flavour of generality, by disinterestedness, by apparent impartiality. But of these two emotions public indignation, being at the root of custom and leading to the infliction of punishment, is by far the more impressive. Hence it is not surprising that the term “moral” is etymologically connected with mos, which always implies the existence of a social rule the transgression of which evokes public indignation. Only by analogy it has come to be applied to the emotion of approval as well.

Though taking their place in the system of human emotions as public emotions felt by the society at large, moral disapproval and approval have not always remained inseparably connected with the feelings of any special society. The unanimity of opinion which originally characterised the members of the same social unit was disturbed by its advancement in civilisation. Individuals arose who found fault with the moral ideas prevalent in the community to which they belonged, criticising those ideas on the basis of their own individual feelings. Such rebels are certainly no less justified in speaking in the name of morality true and proper, than is society itself. The emotions from which their opposition against public opinion springs may be, in nature, exactly similar to the approval or disapproval felt by the society at large, though they are called forth by different facts or, otherwise, differ from these emotions in degree. They may present the same disinterestedness and apparent impartiality—indeed, dissent from the established moral ideas largely rises from the conviction that the apparent impartiality of public feelings is an illusion. As will be seen, the evolution of the moral consciousness involves a progress in impartiality and justice; it tends towards an equalisation of rights, towards an expansion of the circle within which the same moral rules are held applicable; and this process is in no small degree effected by the efforts made by high-minded individuals to raise public opinion to their own standard of right. Nay, as we have already noticed, individual moral feelings do not even lack that flavour of generality which characterises the resentment and approval felt unanimously by a body of men. Though, perhaps, persecuted by his own people as an outcast, the moral dissenter does not regard himself as the advocate of a mere private opinion.34 Even when standing alone, he feels that his conviction is shared at least by an ideal society, by all those who see the matter as clearly as he does himself, and who are animated with equally wide sympathies, an equally broad sense of justice. Thus the moral emotions remain to the last public emotions—if not in reality, then as an ideal.

34 Cf. Pollock, Essays in Jurisprudence and Ethics, p. 309.

The fact that the earliest moral emotions were public emotions implies that the original form of the moral consciousness cannot, as is often asserted, have been the individual’s own conscience. Dr. Martineau’s observation, that the inner springs of other men’s actions may be read off only by inference from our own experience, by no means warrants his conclusion that the moral consciousness is at its origin engaged in self-estimation, instead of circuitously reaching this end through a prior critique upon our fellow-men.35 The moral element which may be contained in the emotion of self-reproach or self-approval, is generally to such an extent mixed up with other and non-moral elements, that it can be disentangled only by a careful process of abstraction, guided by the feelings of other people with reference to our conduct or by our own feelings with reference to the conduct of others. The moral emotion of remorse presupposes some notion of right and wrong, and the application of this notion to one’s own conduct. Hence it could never have been distinguished as a special form of, or element in, the wider emotion of self-reproach, unless the idea of morality had been previously derived from another source. The similarity between regret and remorse is so close, that in certain European languages there is only one word for both.36

35 Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, ii. 29 sqq.

36 As, in Swedish, the word ånger.

From what has been said above it is obvious that moral resentment is of extreme antiquity in the human race, nay, that the germ of it is found even in the lower animal world, among social animals capable of feeling sympathetic resentment. The origin of custom as a moral rule no doubt lies in a very remote period of human history. We have no knowledge of a savage people without customs, and, as will be seen subsequently, savages often express their indignation in a very unmistakable manner when their customs are transgressed. Various data prove that the lower races have some feeling of justice, the flower of all moral feelings. And the supposition that remorse is unknown among them,37 is not only unfounded, but contradicted by facts. Indeed, genuine remorse is so hidden an emotion even among ourselves, that it cannot be expected to be very conspicuous among savages. As we have seen, it requires a certain power of abstraction, as well as great impartiality of feeling, and must therefore be sought for at the highest reaches of the moral consciousness rather than at its lowest degrees. But to suppose that savages are entirely without a conscience is quite contrary to what we may infer from the great regard in which they hold their customs, as also contrary to the direct statements of travellers who have taken some pains to examine the matter. The answer given by the young Australian when asked by Mr. Howitt whether he might not eat a female opossum if the old men were not present,38 certainly indicates conscientious respect for a moral rule, and is, as Mr. Fison observes, “a striking instance of that ‘moral feeling’ which Sir John Lubbock denies to savages.”39 Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden asserts that, among the people whom he had in his service, he found the Negroes, in their sense of duty, not inferior, but rather superior to the Europeans.40 Mr. New says of the Wanika:—“Conscience lives in them as the vicegerent of Almighty God, and is ever excusing or else accusing them. It may be blunted, hardened, resisted, and largely suppressed, but there it is.”41 M. Arbousset once desired some Bechuanas to tell him whether the blacks had a conscience. “Yes, all have one,” they said in reply. “And what does it say to them?” “It is quiet when they do well and torments them when they sin.” “What do you call sin?” “The theft, which is committed trembling, and the murder from which a man purifies and re-purifies himself, but which always leaves remorse.”42 Mr. Washington Matthews refers to a passage in a Navaho story which “shows us that he who composed this tale knew what the pangs of remorse might be, even for an act not criminal, as we consider it, but merely ungenerous and unfilial.”43

37 Avebury, Origin of Civilisation, pp. 421, 426.

38 See supra, p. 118.

39 Fison and Howitt, op. cit. p. 257 n.

40 Hübbe-Schleiden, Ethiopien, p. 184 sq.

41 New, op. cit. p. 96.

42 Arbousset and Daumas, Exploratory Tour to the North-East of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, p. 322.

43 Matthews, ‘Study of Ethics among the Lower Races,’ in Journal of American Folk-Lore, xii. 7.

A different opinion as to the existence of moral feelings among savages has been expressed by Lord Avebury. To him even modern savages seem to be “almost entirely wanting in moral feeling”; and he says that he has “been forced to this conclusion, not only by the direct statements of travelers but by the general tenor of their remarks, and especially by the remarkable absence of repentance and remorse among the lower races of men.”44 The importance of the subject renders it necessary to scrutinise the facts which Lord Avebury has adduced in support of his conclusion.

44 Avebury, op. cit. pp. 414, 426. Lord Avebury quotes Burton’s statement that in Eastern Africa, as also among the Yoruba negroes, conscience does not exist, and that “repentance” expresses regret for missed opportunities of mortal crime. Speaking of the stage of savagery represented by the Bakaïri, Dr. von den Steinen likewise observes (Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens, p. 351), “Goodness and badness exist only in the crude sense of doing to others what is agreeable or disagreeable, but the moral consciousness, and the ideal initiative, influenced neither by prospect of reward nor fear of punishment, are entirely lacking.” Lippert maintains (Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit, i. 27) “dass sich das Gewissen beim Naturmenschen nicht als ‘Selbsttadel,’ sondern nur als Furcht zeigt.”

Mr. Neighbors states that, among the Comanches of Texas, “no individual action is considered a crime, but every man acts for himself according to his own judgment, unless some superior power—for instance, that of a popular chief—should exercise authority over him.” Another writer says, “The Redskin has no moral sense whatever.” Among the Basutos, according to Casalis, morality “depends so entirely upon social order that all political disorganisation is immediately followed by a state of degeneracy, which the re-establishment of order alone can rectify.” Similar accounts are given as regards Central Africa and some other places. Thus at Jenna, and in the surrounding districts, “whenever a town is deprived of its chief, the inhabitants acknowledge no law—anarchy, troubles, and confusion immediately prevail, and till a successor is appointed all labour is at an end.” The Damaras “seem to have no perceptible notion of right or wrong.” The Tasmanians were “without any moral views and impressions.” Eyre says of the Australians that they have “no moral sense of what is just and equitable in the abstract”; and a missionary had very great difficulty in conveying to those natives any idea of sin. The Kacharis had “in their own language no words for sin, for piety, for prayer, for repentance”; and of another of the aboriginal tribes of India Mr. Campbell remarks that they “are … said to be without moral sense.” Lord Avebury in this connection even quotes a statement to the effect that the expressions which the Tonga Islanders have for ideas like vice and injustice “are equally applicable to other things.” The South American Indians of the Gran Chaco are said by the missionaries to “make no distinction between right and wrong, and have therefore neither fear nor hope of any present or future punishment or reward, nor any mysterious terror of some supernatural power.” Finally, Lord Avebury observes that religion, except in the more advanced races, has no moral aspect or influence, that the deities are almost invariably regarded as evil, and that the belief in a future state is not at first associated with reward or punishment.45

45 Avebury, op. cit. p. 417 sqq.

Many of the facts referred to by Lord Avebury do not at all presuppose the absence of moral feelings. It is difficult to see why the malevolence of gods should prevent men from having notions of right and wrong, and we know from the Old Testament itself that there may be a moral law without Paradise and Hell. The statement concerning the Comanches only implies that, among them, individual freedom is great; whilst the social disorder which prevails among various peoples at times of political disorganisation indicates that the cohesiveness of the political aggregate is weak, as well as a certain discrepancy between moral ideas and moral practice. In Morocco, also, the death of a Sultan is immediately followed by almost perfect anarchy, and yet the people recognise both the moral tenets of the Koran and the still more stringent tenets of their ancient customs. As to the Basutos, Casalis expressly states that they have the idea of moral evil, and represent it in their language by words which mean ugliness, or damage, or debt, or incapacity;46 and M. Arbousset once heard a Basuto say, on an unjust judgment being pronounced, “The judge is powerful, therefore we must be silent; if he were weak, we should all cry out about his injustice.”47 Moreover, a people may be unconscious of what is just “in the abstract,” and of moral “notions,” in the strict sense of the term, and at the same time, in concrete cases, distinguish between right and wrong, just and unjust. Of the Western Australians, Mr. Chauncy expressly says that they have a keen sense of justice, and mentions an instance of it;48 whilst our latest authorities on the Central Australians observe that, though their moral code differs radically from ours, “it cannot be denied that their conduct is governed by it, and that any known breaches are dealt with both surely and severely.”49 As regards the Tonga Islanders, Mariner states that “their ideas of honour and justice do not very much differ from ours except in degree, they considering some things more honourable than we should, and others much less so”; and in another place he says that “the notions of the Tonga people, in respect to honour and justice … are tolerably well defined, steady and universal,” though not always acted upon.50 The statement that the American Indians have “no moral sense whatever,” sounds very strange when compared with what is known about their social and moral life; Buchanan, for instance, asserts that they “have a strong innate sense of justice.”51 Of course, there may be diversity of opinion as to what constitutes the “moral sense”; if the conception of sin or other theological notions are regarded as essential to it, it is probably wanting in a large portion of mankind, and not only in the least civilised. When missionaries or travellers deny to certain savages moral feelings and ideas, they seem chiefly to mean feelings or ideas similar to their own.