ercise powerful effect upon the mental and moral modes of thought long before they become articulate in language: "Why am I restricted from doing what I please? Why does law or custom pronounce it wrong to kill one man, right to kill another? Why would my fellow-men think it right to kill me under certain circumstances? Why is the law on this and other points so unfair, so irregular, so incomplete, that were I to fashion my conduct by it alone, I should be always doing something of which I did not approve? Above all, am not I, the unit of which society is composed and for whose benefit it exists, in danger of losing my right to myself and becoming merged in a mere aggregate mass of my fellow-units? Is right and wrong to be determined for me without effort or remonstrance, or even coöperation of my own?"[1]
Now the answer which man has made for himself to such questions is, by common confession, the discovery and the assertion that there is an absolute lightness belonging to society as such, with which individual rights may be harmonized, but which they can never supersede. How did he come to make this discovery and assert it with so unhesitating a conviction? Of justice in the abstract (for this is what we call the social lightness) it is true that primitive man could have no conception; that idea has been generalized from experience. Now we have seen that the first man was dominated by the consciousness of a primitive rightness due to himself. We have seen also that, compelled by the instincts of forming a social life, he extended the same rightness to individual men like himself. We are now to see that, under the stress of questions such as the above, and strengthened by the growing power of forming general ideas, the mind transferred to society, to Nature, nay, to inanimate matter, the same idea of absolute rightness which it claimed for itself. Man perceived right everywhere and in all things just as he had done at first—then in the simple concrete form of the right to his own existence, now in the highly-abstract form of everything having its own right and wrong. At first all Nature is indebted to him, now he is indebted to all Nature. Utility prescribed in what right and wrong consisted, but did not give the idea of it; or, to speak more accurately, if we are willing to define utility as that which makes for the existence of anything, then just as utility or the needs of his own existence had suggested to man the idea of primitive rightness, so did it impress upon him the idea of rightness as inherent in the constitu-
- ↑ The relation between the power of law in enforcing rights and the power of conscience in detecting rightness is well illustrated by a sentence of Sir Henry Maine's, describing the action of English law upon Indian modes of thought: "Unfortunately for us, we have created the sense of legal right before we have created a proportionate power of distinguishing good from evil in the law upon which the legal right depends" ("Village Communities," lect. iii.). I may add that the history of village communities presents a curious illustration of the way in which the conflicting rights of egoism and society were preserved in early times, i. e., by what would now be considered an exaggerated expression of them side by side. See his remarks on the isolation of households and the secrecy of family life, in the fourth lecture.
