SOCIAL CONTROL. XV.
CUSTOM.
It is perhaps safe to think of the lowest savage as a creature of appetite and propensity that is clever enough to reach its ends in round-about ways. But if we take man farther up the path of evolution, we find his life cannot be platted on the lines of a few simple animal desires. He has become polygonal, and no simple formula will fit him. Ideas and idea-motor activities com- plicate his life. Native promptings are overruled or postponed in virtue of built-up habits and sentiments. His thoughts about things, his notions of himself and other selves strangely perturb him. He is anything but rational, but he is very far from natural. Why is this ?
The active life of the primitive man is little organized. That is to say, it is not formed about ruling ideas or habits. It is the sport of bodily condition as the sand-dunes along the shore are the sport of the wind. The daily flow and ebb of energy, the unsteady pull of instinct, the rhythm of appetite, the irregular pulse of desire, the explosions of passion — it is chiefly the play of these that gives life its stamp. Then, too, there is a drift in respect to desire and choice answering to the physiological changes that lie between youth and age. But there is no build- ing up of personal character, because there is no stuff for the framework. The shifting sands do not become soil till the roots of some plant bind them. The shifting moods do not become soul till the force of some idea seizes and holds them against the play of bodily suggestions. And an idea that is to have this force should be implanted in childhood.
The association of parents and children is of little moral consequence unless there are ideas to communicate. The rise of a race tradition that can be handed down marks, therefore, a great hour in human development. Nothing so pregnant in social possibilities has occurred since the invention of language. The child now does something more than ape the parents' ways.
604
