In my last lecture I examined the grounds on which it is sometimes held that among primitives religion is the source of moral authority, the ground of the rightness of moral rules. I pointed out that, while the evidence shows that the magico-religious beliefs and practices of primitive peoples exercise a profound influence on the character of individuals and promote among them strong social sentiments and a spirit of co-operation and goodwill, this does not warrant the conclusion that their religion prescribes or sanctions or justifies their moral rules. I also called attention to an important difference between the attitude of the natives themselves to their magico-religious and their moral rules. The former they accept on authority without understanding the reasons for them. The latter they understand to be the conditions of individual and social well-being. And this difference holds even when moral rules are believed to have supernatural as well as social sanctions. Their obligatoriness can be understood without any reference to the supernatural. To comply with their requirements is a moral duty whether or not it is also a religious duty.

We can bring out the nature of this distinction between the attitude of the native to magico-religious or ritual rules on the one hand, and to moral and social rules on the other, if we compare it with a parallel distinction which we find in his attitude to his natural environment. In considering primitive man's dealings with nature, Malinowski distinguishes carefully between the way in which the native uses knowledge and experience on the one hand, and magico-religious practices on the other; but he does not seem to have recognised the parallel distinction in the native's attitude to his social environment nor the implications of this distinction for morality.

In his efforts to extract a living from his natural environment, and in constructing and using the primitive tools which help him in his task, in hunting, fishing and tilling the soil, in constructing his bow or his canoe, primitive man, as we have seen, shows powers of accurate observation, exact knowledge and sound reasoning. He is guided by experience and uses strictly rational methods. “In all matters in which knowledge is sufficient”, Malinowski writes, “the native relies on it exclusively.”1 It is only when he reaches the limits of his knowledge and skill and comes up against situations which he does not understand and cannot control, situations which nevertheless he cannot ignore because they are fraught with important consequences for his own welfare and that of his people, that he resorts to magico-religious practices. These practices are a supplement to, not a substitute for, skill and energy and honest toil; and we are assured that the native never confuses the two.2 The native has recourse to supernatural aid only to guard against unseen evils due to causes which are beyond his comprehension and control. As Malinowski himself puts it, “magic and religion and ritual step in only where knowledge fails”; or again, “sacred tradition is concerned only with things where experience and reason are of no avail”.3 And while his magic and ritual practices do not produce the effects which the native expects from them, they strengthen his morale and give him courage and confidence which enable him to persevere in the face of dangers and difficulties. Thus, in regard to primitive man's dealings with nature, we have by common consent both a secular and a sacred tradition, the former concerned with technical skill and knowledge, the latter with the magico-religious practices by which he supplements the limitations of the former. But while both are handed down by tradition, the native understands the reasons for the former: their “practical utility is recognised by reason and testified by experience”.4 The latter he has to accept on authority. However inextricably the two are mixed up in primitive life, the field worker never experiences any difficulty in knowing when the native is engaged in secular and when in magico-religious practices.5

Now what I have been suggesting is that, according to the evidence which Malinowski himself provides, we get a similar distinction between a secular and a sacred tradition concerning the way in which primitive man should deal with situations presented by his social environment. The former gives him rules as to how he should behave towards his fellows in the ordinary affairs of life. The latter prescribes what he should do in the crises of life, where he meets forces which he can neither understand nor control, as in the presence of such events as illness and war, and above all death. Here, too, he understands the reasons for the ways he is expected to behave in the former, in a way in which he does not those required of him in the latter. Here, also, even if the practices enjoined by his religion do not have the effects which he expects from them, they have, as we have seen, other important psychological and social effects.

What we find, then, is that among every people, however primitive their culture and however simple their way of life, there are technical rules governing the way they master their natural environment and extract from it the means of livelihood. There are, also, rules dealing with the relations between individuals, rules necessary for the smooth working of their institutions and the maintenance of an ordered social life. These two together constitute their secular tradition. They are the results of experience and experiment, the products of the accumulated skill and wisdom of their ancestors. In dealing with them the native feels at home; he understands what he is doing and why he is doing it. He believes himself master of the situation. But both in their dealings with nature and in their relations with their fellow-men, situations arise where the issues are important and the outcome uncertain, situations with which their primitive skill and knowledge and powers of understanding do not enable them to deal. It is in such situations that they turn to religion; and the ways which it prescribes for dealing with such situations constitute the sacred tradition of magico-religious beliefs and practices. In dealing with these situations, the native senses the presence of something which makes him uneasy, the presence of the sacred or the uncanny, that which arouses the religious thrill.

I am going to give one more quotation to show how near Malinowski comes, even in the Foundations of Faith and Morals, to adopting this conclusion, and yet how in the end he fails to draw it. Referring to the Australian Aborigines he writes: “There is a body of rules, handed from one generation to another, which refers to the manner in which people live in their little shelters, make their fire by friction, collect their food and cook it, make love to each other and quarrel. This secular tradition consists partly of customary or legal rules determining the manner in which social life is conducted. But it also embodies rules of technique and behaviour in regard to the environment. . . . The rules which we find here are completely independent of magic, of supernatural sanctions, and they are never accompanied by any ceremonial or ritual elements.” Here the individual “relies on reason” and the resulting tradition is “plastic, selective and intelligent”.6

Here we have a clear distinction drawn between a secular tradition based on reason and experience and a sacred tradition relating to the supernatural which transcends knowledge and experience; and the rules of right conduct governing the relations of the members of the community to one another are included in the secular tradition. But when Malinowski so includes them he calls them customary or legal rules, in the same way as he does in his account of the Trobrianders where, as we saw, he refers to them as rules of primitive law or principles of social justice. On the other hand, whenever he refers to them as moral rules he associates them with religion and with the attitudes and feelings which religious beliefs and the performance of ritual ceremonies arouse; and, because of this association, he tends to include them in the sacred tradition. But whether they are called legal or moral, they are the same rules of right conduct—the ordinary rules of individual and social morality.

It should, however, be added that the parallelism between man's secular attitude to nature and his moral attitude to his fellows is not quite complete. For in every personality there is a supersensible or spiritual element, an element which is in the strict sense supernatural; and the emotional attitude which the recognition or the consciousness of this element tends to produce, the sense of restraint and embarrassment and intensified self-consciousness which we tend to experience in the presence of another person, especially in the presence of the very young and the very great, is akin to the feeling aroused by the supernatural.7 This feeling is at least an element in the respect or reverence for personality which arises from our recognition of others as persons or expressions of the moral consciousness, a recognition without some degree of which morality is impossible. But the point which I wish to make at present is that, given this recognition, the most primitive men of whom we have any knowledge understand the rules, which are the conditions of effective co-operation with their fellows, and, therefore, the requirements of social well-being, as clearly as they understand the rules for building a canoe or growing crops. The moral rules involved in the former are as much the results of experience and experiment and, therefore, as rational as the technical rules involved in the latter.

The purpose of my argument is not to belittle, much less to deny, the part which religion plays in the life of primitive peoples or the influences which it exerts on their individual and social conduct; but rather to reconcile the evidence of the anthropologists that it does fulfil such undoubtedly important functions with the fact that primitives have a secular morality which is relatively autonomous. But so far, though I have used language which has a general reference, I have relied mainly on the evidence regarding the two primitive peoples dealt with by Malinowski—the Trobrianders and the natives of Central Australia. The same state of affairs prevails in the two other tribes whose ways of life I described earlier, the Batonga tribes of South-East Africa and the Crow Indians of Montana. In both, magico-religious beliefs and practices exercise a profound influence on their character and conduct, but in neither does religion prescribe their moral code, nor does it hold out to them hope of reward or fear of punishment, here or hereafter, for the performance or neglect of most of their moral and social duties. I want now to consider the evidence from other primitive tribes to see how far it confirms my argument, and what further conclusions can be drawn from it.

Let me first state, tentatively and provisionally, the general conclusions which this wider evidence seems to support. They are: (1) that in the course of the continuous interaction between moral and religious beliefs and practices, in which they mutually modify and support one another, there is a tendency both for the concept of the supernatural to become moralised and for morality to acquire a religious sanction; but the latter tendency, at least, is by no means universal; (2) that, whether or not it acquires a religious sanction in whole or in part, morality is of independent origin and authority, springing from the nature of man as a being who is rational and social as well as a creature of impulses and desires; and (3) that primitive religion, while in the main non-moral and perhaps in origin entirely so, exercises an important influence on the formation of the character of the individual and on the social solidarity of his group. It should be added that, however they conceive the relations between them, we find both morality and religion among all men of whom we have any record. They all believe that some actions are right and others wrong. The differences between them concern which actions have which character. Similarly they all believe in the existence or reality of the supernatural but they entertain very different views about its character. It is the second of the above conclusions which specially concerns my argument; but in order not to leave a one-sided impression, I shall touch on the evidence for the others as well. As we have seen, it is the third which has been specially emphasised by field workers among primitive peoples.

I cannot give more than a few examples of the evidence on which I base these conclusions. So far as I am aware no one has made a survey of all, or even of a representative selection of, primitive peoples to discover either which of their moral rules have supernatural sanctions, and in which of the senses I have mentioned they have such sanctions, or what influence their religion exercises directly and indirectly on their character and conduct, and in what ways it exercises the influence which it does. But nothing short of such a survey would enable us to make generalisations about the relations between their morality and religion with any confidence. For the number of primitive peoples is so large8 and the relations between the different aspects of their religion and morality so various that by a judicious selection of examples one could prove almost any conclusion about them. What I have done is this.9 I have examined the reports of trained observers about some thirty or forty primitive peoples who are at different stages of development in the level of their material culture and the complexity of their social organisations, and widely scattered over different continents. I have selected the particular peoples concerned partly because we have a good deal of information about their ways of life, and partly because the information about them has been collected by experienced observers. I trust they are a representative selection.

Before trying to sum up the results of this examination, I want very briefly to give a few further illustrations, i.e. in addition to the four peoples whose ways of life I described earlier. I am, however, well aware that these illustrations can only give a very imperfect picture. For, as I have repeatedly pointed out, the moral codes and the magico-religious beliefs and practices of different primitive peoples are so diverse and the relations between them and the other aspects of their cultures so complex, that we cannot hope to understand them properly without considering the whole way of life of each of the peoples concerned and bringing out the parts which their morality and their religion play in it. Nevertheless, the illustrations may be of some value. I have chosen them to bring out the great contrast between different peoples as regards the extent to which, and the ways in which, their moral rules are prescribed or sanctioned by religion.

We have seen that the moral code of the natives of Central Australia has little or no supernatural sanction. But among their fellow tribesmen of New South Wales, whose principles of social organisation and material culture are very similar to theirs, what is much the same moral code is believed to have been established by their chief god, and is taught to their youth at initiation in his name and with his authority.10

In the exhaustive account which Radcliffe-Brown gives us of the natives of the Andaman Islands, I can discover only one moral rule which has a supernatural sanction, that against homicide,11 a breach of which exposes the guilty person to illness, unless he takes certain ritual precautions. The chief god of these islanders, we are told, is not disturbed by moral faults.12 All the actions which arouse her anger and cause her to show her displeasure, which she does by sending storms, are non-moral, such as burning or melting bees-wax, or eating certain foods.13 We find a somewhat similar state of affairs among the Murray Islanders, a very primitive but enterprising and intelligent people whose code of conduct is said to “exhibit a delicacy of feeling which is quite comparable with our own code of social morality”.14 Among the injunctions which they give to their youth during initiation are “reticence, thoughtful-ness, respectful behaviour, prompt obedience, generosity, diligence, kindness to parents and other relatives in deed and word, truthfulness, helpfulness, manliness, discretion in dealing with women, quiet temper. . . . The prohibitions are against theft, borrowing without leave, shirking duty, talkativeness, abusive language, talking scandal, marriage with certain individuals.”15

This code, Haddon tells us, is “a purely secular affair”. The natives believe that a dead ancestor might be angry if his children were wronged or his lands and chattels taken by people who had no claim to them. But “with this exception”, he writes, “there is no evidence that their code of morality gained either sanction or support from religion”.16 No punishment for its infringement was anticipated from a supernatural source either here or hereafter.

On the other hand, Hogbin reports that the natives of Ontong Java in Polynesia believe that their dead ancestors “are able to observe all human conduct and are aware of all hidden motives”.17 They punish with illness and misfortune and even death not all breaches of their moral code but only some,18 the commonest of which are “acts of violence within the joint family, for example, murder, adultery and displacement of the true heir; [and] incest or sexual relations between two persons who are within the forbidden degrees of kinship”.19

In the same way, according to Mead20 and Fortune,21 the Manus people of the Admiralty Islands, another ancestor-worshipping people, have two main ideals in life, to maintain a high standard of sexual morality and of commercial integrity; and the spirits of their ancestors, whom they regard not as omniscient or omnipotent, but as more knowledgeable and powerful than mortals, are believed to punish breaches of their code of conduct in relation to sex and business. “Sex offences which interfere with the Manus social order . . . light words, chance physical contacts . . . careless jests, non-observance of the proper avoidance reactions towards relatives-in-law, all these”, we are told, “may bring down the spirits’ righteous wrath, either upon the sinner or upon some one of his relatives.”22 The spirits also “abhor economic laxity of any sort: failure to pay debts, careless manipulation of family properties, economic procrastination, and unfair allotment of funds among the needs of several relatives”.23 Any of these is liable to bring illness, misfortune or death on the guilty person or on one of his relatives.

In order not to create a false impression, it should be added that these guardians of the morality of the natives of Ontong Java and Manus are believed to be in many respects as capricious, spiteful and even unjust as any mortal. For example, the spirits of the Manus will vent on their descendants their resentment for events which happen to themselves beyond the grave, events for which mortals are in no way responsible;24 while those of Ontong Java are sometimes believed to be guilty of such mean and spiteful acts that their descendants relieve their feelings by digging up the graves and burning the remains of those who are believed to be responsible, not necessarily to influence their conduct but merely to show that they no longer have any respect for them.25 But, as Fortune reminds us,26 these spirits, in punishing breaches of tribal morality at all, are the exception and not the rule among primitive supernatural beings.

When we turn from Australasia and Polynesia to Africa and America, we find the same contrasts between the views of different peoples about the relation between morality and religion. We have already seen that the Bantu tribes of South-East Africa have a keen sense of right and wrong and have developed a very remarkable system for the administration of justice. Yet Junod writes that “their religion is non-moral and their morality non-religious”.27 The only moral faults of which their ancestor gods take notice are dissolute sexual conduct, which they punish with death, and displacement of the true heir, which results in no children being born. Their other demands on their worshippers—and they are numerous and exacting—are all of a ritual and ceremonial character. On the other hand, according to Wilson,28 many, if not most, of the moral rules of the Nyakyusa tribes have a supernatural sanction. Gross breaches of their moral code are punished, if they occur in the relations between members of the group, mainly by their ancestor gods; and, if in the interrelation between groups, by sorcery and magic, some forms of which are believed to be effective only when those who exercise them are satisfied of the justice of the cause in which they are being used. And Culwick reports that among the Wabena, a Bantu tribe of Tanganyika, all moral rules have supernatural sanctions.29

Similar contrasts are found among the American Indian tribes. We have already seen that, according to Lowie, the conduct prescribed by the religion of the Crow Indians is “manifestly unconnected with anything normally included under the heading of ethics”. Their “really vital social canons . . . have no supernatural sanction”.30 On the other hand, Cooper tells us that in their initiation ceremonies the Yahgans, a South American tribe, give their young people “elaborate moral instructions with very concrete counsels on the obligations of altruistic behaviour, respect for the aged, peaceableness, industry, not spreading scandal or carrying tales, and so on”. These instructions are presented to them as the will of their supreme being who sees everything and will punish delinquents with shortened life and the death of their children.31 Similarly the Luisino, a tribe of Californian Indians, instruct their youth to respect their elders, to refrain from anger, to be polite and cordial to their relatives-in-law and so on; and tell them that prosperity here and hereafter will follow the observance of these rules, while breaches of them will give rise to many misfortunes. They believe, however, that both rewards and punishments will come about automatically. There is no suggestion that they are the result of the personal intervention of supernatural agents, though the rules themselves are believed to be the will of such agents.32

Some of the statements which I have made in the course of these illustrations would require further elaboration and refinement, in the light of the ways of life of the peoples to whom they refer, before they could be regarded as quite exact. But they are sufficiently precise for our present purpose.

I want to give one more illustration with a little more detail, partly because one of our most cautious and competent anthropologists has recently made an intensive survey of the way of life of the people concerned, partly because they are still relatively untouched by Western influences, and partly because they provide an excellent example of the intricate interrelationships between morality and religion among primitives.33 These people inhabit the island of Tikopia in Polynesia. This island is less than three miles in circumference and capable of maintaining rather more than 1200 persons. It is seventy miles from the nearest island, and that is smaller than itself. The Tikopians have a complex social structure based on an intricate system of kinship together with a principle of rank determined partly by birth and partly by religious considerations. They are divided into three clans, each with its chief who is the intermediary between the people and one of their principal gods. They have a protracted system of seasonal ritual in which all the chiefs and the whole of the people play some part. This ritual is mixed up with their economic and social and political arrangements and so confers on them an added authority. In addition to their principal gods, who are non-human, they also invoke the blessing of their ancestors, whom they believe to have the power and will to do them good or harm. The moral ideas which they attribute to their gods, whether human or non-human, are mainly the ideas about right and wrong entertained by the present inhabitants. They have also ritual performances of a more magical character connected with canoe building and repairing, fishing and agriculture and other activities.

The moral and social obligations of the Tikopians are largely determined by considerations of kinship and neighbourhood, and they are sanctioned by the principle of reciprocity, rather loosely interpreted.34 Some of these rules, such as those requiring respect for parents and chiefs, have a direct supernatural sanction, in the sense that breaches of them are believed to bring disasters on the offenders; but they have also a moral and social sanction. On the other hand the rule against incest has a supernatural but no social sanction. The fact that breaches of the rule are believed to be punished by supernatural means seems in this case to be regarded as a reason or, it may be, an excuse why men should not interfere with the culprits.35

Most of their other rules seem to have no direct supernatural sanction and yet some at least of them derive a direct support from religion. For, as part of their principal religious ceremonies, all the people meet together once a year in a sacred glade; and, while the others sit with bowed heads, one of the chiefs recites a remarkable proclamation which, among other things, “cautions against theft, against disturbance and brawling . . . advises economic forethought . . . and enjoins restraint in the matter of procreation in the interests of communal welfare”.36 This proclamation contains no threat of punishment to wrongdoers, nor does it directly refer to any of their gods. But it is made as part of a sacred ceremony by a chief who is the accredited mouthpiece of the gods;37 and this gives the injunctions contained in it the support and sanction of religion. The proclamation, however, does not contain all their moral rules; and those which are, as well as those which are not, contained in it have also a moral and social sanction, and the people approve them and understand the reasons for them in a way in which they do not those for their ritual duties.

We may take as an illustration of their attitude to their moral rules, and their conscious understanding of their social value, the way they deal with their most pressing problem, the problem of population. The Tikopians are a virile and fertile race and would increase rapidly if they did not take steps to keep the population down. As they have no way of dealing with a surplus population, and as they have had for many years as large a population as the island can support, they have deliberately taken steps to prevent an increase. This they do in a variety of ways. We saw that the proclamation which I have already mentioned calls attention to the need to keep families small; and it delicately refers to a contraceptive method which is one of the ways of doing this. Another way of limiting the population is the voluntary celibacy of the younger members of families, and a third is the infanticide of children who arrive after the family is as large as its means of livelihood will support.38 These methods of limiting the population have no supernatural sanction, except that the first gets an indirect religious authority through its inclusion in the proclamation made during a religious ceremony. And they cannot be strictly enforced; nor is there any attempt so to enforce them. Nevertheless, they are not merely the customs of their people, passively and unreflectively accepted on the authority of tradition. The natives understand the reason for them and practise them consciously and deliberately.39 Indeed, some of them pleaded with Firth when he lived among them to try to persuade the authorities under whose jurisdiction the island now comes not to interfere, as they understood they wanted to do, with the practice of voluntary infanticide—this being in their opinion necessary to keep the population within the limits which the island can support.

Given the framework of their social structure and their magico-religious beliefs, the attitude of the more thoughtful, at least, among the Tikopians to most of their other moral rules and ends seems to be equally conscious and rational. Not that they do not break their rules and evade their obligations, but they recognise the conditions of effective co-operation and social well-being, even when they do not comply with them. We are told that their rules of distributive justice are based on rational principles,40 that they regard their institutions as good,41 and that they understand the conditions on which their smooth working depends. Just as they understand and can explain the technical rules with which they should comply in constructing a canoe or tilling the soil, so they understand that regard for the person and property of others, respect for truth and fair dealing and mutual helpfulness, a certain measure of self-restraint between husbands and wives, of respect by children for parents and by kin for one another, are necessary for the effective functioning of their institutions and the welfare of their society.

This reflective attitude to many of their institutions and customs may be further illustrated by another consideration. Firth tells us that they sometimes complain about some of their customs.42 They feel they ought to comply with them out of regard for the rights which they confer on others, rights which they think they ought to respect; and yet they do not regard the customs as good; just as we may comply with a law of which we do not approve and which we would like to see changed. In none of these ways are the Tikopians, who are described as “perhaps the most primitive people in Polynesia”,43 unique among native peoples; but Firth gives us more information about their inner attitudes than we usually get from field workers among primitives; and among the conclusions which he draws from this information is that “custom and tradition are not such rigid monitors in primitive life as they are often represented”.44

The state of affairs which the accounts from which I have selected these illustrations reveal is this, (1) There are primitive peoples no part of whose moral code has a supernatural sanction. (2) There are others many or most of whose moral rules have such sanctions in one form or another. (3) Perhaps the most common state of affairs is that in which some moral rules have such sanctions, while others, usually much more numerous, have not. (4) There is no important difference that I can discover between the nature of the moral rules which have and those which have not supernatural sanctions; nor between the content of the moral codes as a whole of peoples some or all of whose rules have such sanctions and of those whose rules have a merely moral or social sanction. The one kind cannot be regarded as higher or lower than the other. Nor is the presence of such sanctions confined to, or more common at any particular level of cultural development. What is much the same rule may be regarded in one community as sanctioned by the intervention of a personal supernatural agent, in another by the working of impersonal supernatural forces, and in yet another merely by moral or social approval and disapproval. It may even be that some rules which have a merely customary or social sanction for the ordinary man may be regarded as having a supernatural sanction by a specially gifted individual—a thinker, a prophet, a myth maker—of whom we are assured some are to be found from time to time among all primitive peoples. (5) Whether or not some of their moral rules have supernatural sanctions, all primitive societies recognise purely religious or ritual duties, the sanction for which is purely supernatural; and, as we have seen, these indirectly play an important part in their moral and social life. (6) When morality acquires a supernatural sanction an additional incentive to well-doing and deterrent to vice is provided; but whether or not, and if at all to what extent, this incentive and deterrent are to be regarded as moral depends on the way in which the supernatural is conceived.

In this connection it is necessary to remember that there is no such thing as a primitive conception of the supernatural, in the sense of one all whose details are common to different primitive peoples, any more than there is a primitive morality or a primitive religion. Some people think of the supernatural in more personal, others in more impersonal terms, according as they conceive it after the analogy of one or the other of the two entities which they know best, things and persons.

When the supernatural is thought of on the analogy of things, we get such conceptions as mana, wakan, orenda, etc., conceptions which in one form or another and with great variation in detail are to be found among most primitive peoples. The supernatural in this sense is thought of as a supersensible quality of, or power in, certain objects or events. It is like other qualities, such as colour or hardness, except that it is unseen. It has often been compared to an electric charge which is released on contact. Its operation is less discriminating and more automatic than that of personal agents. It is liable to affect anything or anybody who touches the object or brings about the event, whether by accident or design makes no difference. Its results are usually disastrous, such as disease or drought or death. When the supernatural is conceived after the analogy of persons, we get such conceptions as spirits or ghosts or gods, whether or not they are thought of as persons who once existed in human form.

Among most primitive peoples we find the supernatural conceived in both these ways, though one form is usually more prominent than the other. Both forms may provide supernatural sanctions for moral conduct, but only the personal form can take account of intentions and motives and, therefore, be a genuine moral sanction. It therefore provides the line of development to the ethical religions. No doubt the impersonal form is less arbitrary and more impartial than most of the personal supernatural powers of the primitive; but its impartiality is the impartiality of nature rather than the expression of justice. While it may at times punish breaches of moral rules, it takes account only of the external act and not of strictly moral considerations. For example, we find among many primitive people a belief that a homicide is defiled or impure, and that this pollution will produce disastrous consequences unless steps are taken to avert them. Now this pollution is regarded as the same, and as liable to have the same effects, in the case of the morally praiseworthy action of the warrior who kills an enemy in battle, the morally neutral action of the man who accidentally kills his friend and the morally reprehensible action of the man who murders his neighbour. There are other cases, such as the misfortune which is believed to result automatically from incest, where the operation of such forces seems more like a form of cosmic justice; but similar effects are believed to follow from events or occurrences, like the birth of twins, which have no moral or immoral character.

Not only do many primitives conceive the supernatural in both personal and impersonal terms, but they do not usually draw so sharp a distinction between the personal and the impersonal as we do. Indeed throughout the whole of this argument, though I have followed my authorities quite closely, I am conscious that I have been using abstract terms and drawing sharp distinctions which are apt to leave the impression that primitives are more analytic and reflective than in fact they are. If it is true that men generally are only partially and intermittently rational, it is even more true of primitives, though there are among them, as Radin and others have demonstrated, thinkers as well as prophets, and sceptics and agnostics as well as rebels against the established order. As we saw in considering the nature of primitive mentality, it is difficult to convey in a language like ours, which has been developed to express abstract and analytic thinking, the ideas of those who think mainly in concrete terms, and draw fewer distinctions and draw them less clearly than we do. Even though their attitude and behaviour show that they recognise distinctions between the natural and the supernatural, the mental and the material, the animate and the inanimate, the distinctions are usually operative in their experience rather than consciously reflected on. And even when they thus distinguish, or behave as if they distinguished, they do not sharply separate the distinguished elements. For example, few, if any, of them have the idea of a purely disembodied or immaterial spirit. It is therefore much easier for them to think of what we call natural happenings as being the results of the activities of conscious agencies.

The way they conceive the supernatural also helps to explain why more primitive peoples do not have supernatural sanctions for their moral codes. It seems to us natural that morality and religion should be intimately associated, that morality should be a matter of cosmic concern and that no man should be regarded as religious unless he is at least morally good; and we can offer good reasons for this association. Morality and religion use the same terms, good and bad, right and wrong. They both call forth a strong emotional reaction and command man's supreme loyalty. There is a strong resemblance between the emotional reaction aroused by the consciousness of the presence of another person, especially a person whom we regard as morally better or purer than ourselves, and by the sense of the presence of the supernatural. Moreover, when a course of conduct calls forth the most profound reaction of which a man's nature is capable, the judgement of approval or disapproval which he passes on it is apt to seem to him as much cosmic or supernatural as individual and social. It is natural, therefore, that he should expect some cosmic reaction to it, some reaction by the powers that rule his universe, whether he conceives these as personal or impersonal. It may therefore seem surprising that the tendency to give their moral rules and ideals a more than human significance is not more marked among primitives. No doubt there would be a greater tendency for them to do this if they derived their ideas of the character of the supernatural merely from their own ideas of right and wrong. But they do not. They derive them in part also from what we would call the natural happenings which profoundly affect their life and welfare, drought and disease and death, and all the other hazards and hardships and tragedies to which man, especially primitive man, is heir. When we take this into consideration, need we be surprised that the ritual performances of most primitive peoples should be designed rather to prevent their supernatural powers from harming them than as an expression of gratitude or worship, or that they should not consider these powers as much better or more moral than themselves, or that when they conceive them in personal terms they should sometimes criticise them on moral grounds?45

It is also worth noting—for it has implications for our understanding of morality to which we shall have to return—that we sometimes find supernatural sanctions, both of the personal and the impersonal kind, for breaking moral rules, the general observance of which is socially approved by the community concerned. For example, a people like the Australian Aborigines, who in general disapprove of lying, may consider it a duty to lie on certain occasions as part of the requirements of their religion; and there is a supernatural sanction for their so doing; or a people who punish with death the killing of a fellow tribesman may regard the killing of twins as a duty supernaturally prescribed.

What we seem to find, then, in the relation between the morality and religion of different peoples is an exceedingly complex process of mutual interaction and modification. In the course of this process there is a tendency, among many peoples at least, for the supernatural to be conceived more and more in personal and moral terms and for morality to be put under supernatural guardianship. And when this happens, the moral qualities which are attributed to the supernatural beings tend to be those which the people who attribute them believe they ought to have, that is those which they themselves or their prophets and teachers think good; and when they, slowly and imperceptibly, but none the less surely, modify their ideas of what is right and good, whether as the result of changing conditions, or contact with other people, or because individuals arise among them with a deeper insight into the conditions of moral and social well-being, they tend to attribute the altered views of what seems to them right and good to the same supernatural authorities, thus reinterpreting their character and requirements.

Moreover, when a primitive man, some or all of whose moral rules have a supernatural sanction, is asked why a particular line of conduct is right and he replies, as anthropologists tell us that he does, that it is the will of his gods or that his gods would be angry or that certain misfortunes would befall him if he did not act in that way, we are not to suppose that he draws any clear distinction between being right and being the will of his gods or being supernaturally sanctioned. He does not raise the question whether forms of conduct are right because they are the will of his gods (in the sense that they might equally well have been otherwise and still right, if his gods had willed otherwise) or his gods will them because they are right. In other words, he does not distinguish between his reasons for believing that a course of conduct is right and the grounds of its rightness; nor indeed do most civilised people draw such a distinction. If we may draw the distinction for them, I think we may say that, as regards moral rules, being the will of their gods is the guarantee rather than the ground of their rightness, their reason for believing them to be right rather than what constitutes their rightness. But however natural may be the twofold tendency to moralise the supernatural and to give moral rules a supernatural sanction, and however little primitives or others distinguish, in the case of those rules which have a supernatural sanction, between their being so sanctioned and the grounds of their rightness, it is not the supernatural sanction which makes them right; and even when moral rules have a supernatural sanction, the primitive is capable of understanding the reasons for his moral and social duties in a way in which he does not understand the reasons for his ritual duties; just as he understands the reasons for the way in which he has to construct a canoe to make it seaworthy in a way in which he does not understand the reasons for the ritual of canoe magic.

This is confirmed by the testimony of some field workers among peoples whose rules of conduct have a supernatural sanction. While they emphasise most strongly the indispensable function which religion plays in the lives of these peoples, they point out that in the case of the more important moral rules supernatural sanctions are not the really operative or effective sanctions. Like the sanction of mere custom, the belief that they have supernatural sanctions may be sufficient to make the natives accept rules which are not irksome or troublesome, rules which do not make demands on the individual which are opposed to his inclinations or immediate interests. But for rules which do make such demands nearer, more tangible and more positive sanctions are required. Such rules are accepted as binding only when they are found by experience to be for the good of the group and the welfare of its individual members. When this is not the case, despite the supernatural sanctions, not only do the natives find means of evading them and discovering supernatural sanctions for so doing, but the rules themselves soon cease to be regarded as binding.

To quote just one authority. Culwick, whose main field work has been done among the Wabena tribe in Tanganyika, a people all whose rules of conduct are sincerely believed to have a supernatural sanction, emphasises the very important part which their religion plays in their lives, a part the value of which he says “it would be difficult to over-estimate”;46 but he points out that we must distinguish “between religious beliefs in and about supernatural beings or powers as a source of courage and hope and good morale, and rules of mundane behaviour introduced in the name of religion. The latter are given the support of religious authority and appear to be part and parcel of men's religion, but they are in fact extraneous and their . . . value must be assessed separately from that of primary religious beliefs.”47 The rules of mundane behaviour, that is the moral and social rules governing the relations of individuals to one another, owe most of their binding force to “their essentially practical nature”, the fact that “in men's experience they have been found to work”.48 The supernatural sanctions “have their part to play in enforcing them, but they are only effective because they are compelling people to conform not to a dead ‘cake of custom’ but to a living system . . . of mutual obligations with corresponding rights, binding each member of the tribe to his fellows. The whole is a network of duties and privileges, and dislocation of the system in one part upsets others not immediately or obviously connected with it.”49

Culwick warns us not to think of the native “as that mythical spineless creature who follows the dictates of custom blindly, intuitively, spontaneously, in all his dealings with fellow-members of the group. . . . Custom unbacked by potent practical sanctions”, he continues, “fares badly when it comes into conflict with human nature; and a man's observance of its rules so far from being automatic and unconstrained or induced by purely supernatural sanctions is clearly forced on him . . . by sanctions inherent in the system of mutual rights and obligations in his group.”50 After giving detailed illustrations of the operation of supernatural and social sanctions, Culwick concludes: “It is plain that the effect of his religious beliefs on the actual everyday behaviour of the Bantu African is secondary to that of his social organisation and is very much smaller than either he believes or many students of his society imagine”.51

As regards its bearing on our present argument Culwick's contention may be summed up thus: Unless in addition to having supernatural sanctions, being the customs of his ancestors or the will of his gods, moral and social rules are also proved by the experience of the native to be good, in the sense that they contribute to the welfare of the group and therefore to his own good, they cease not only to be effective but to be regarded as binding; but if, in addition to being recognised as in this sense right, they also have supernatural sanctions, this gives them a higher prestige and provides an additional incentive for complying with them.52 Such sanctions and incentives, however, do not make them right unless they are found by experience to be so.

But whatever be thought of this interpretation of the complex interaction of morality and religion among peoples whose moral rules have a supernatural sanction, many, if not most, primitive peoples have developed and still practise a complex system of individual and social morality without any or with very little religious or supernatural sanction, and this seems to show that morality is in origin and authority independent of religion.53

This conclusion, drawn from the study of contemporary primitive people, receives some support from an examination of the relation between morality and religion, both among the early ancestors of men who are now advanced and in the systems of the great moral teachers and reformers of mankind. I can only touch briefly and dogmatically on this large subject.

It is true that many of the teachers and prophets who arose during the great moral and religious awakening which took place about the second quarter of the first millennium b.c. (i.e. about 700–400 b.c.) and which extended from Greece to China and from Egypt to Persia, put forward their moral and social doctrines in the name and with the authority of their gods. This is true of Zoroaster, whose enlightened moral teaching was enunciated in the name of Ahura Mazda. It is true of the remarkable succession of Hebrew prophets, whose revolutionary moral and social doctrines were put forward as the will of Yahweh. It is true of Iknaton, the moralist king of Egypt, who propounded the requirements of justice, truth and love in the name of Aton. But it is only very partially, if at all, true of Buddha, and not at all true of Confucius. The latter regarded the religion and ritual of his people with good-natured tolerance, but he did not seek from it any sanction for his moral doctrines which he propounded as the conditions of a way of life which is right and reasonable in itself. And yet the central principle of these doctrines, according to which a people with a high civilisation have ordered their lives for some 2500 years, is much the same as the golden rule of the Christian gospel. Nor is the connection of morality with religion and supernatural sanctions any more evident in the reflective moral awakening in Greece as we find it, for example, in the teaching of Socrates with his gospel of goodness as the end of life, knowledge as the means to goodness and critical enquiry, which will accept nothing that cannot justify itself before the bar of reason, as the method of attaining knowledge. It may also be added that those teachers and prophets who propounded their ethical doctrines in the name and with the authority of their gods, made it clear that, whatever other demands religion may make on man, no man can be regarded as really religious unless he is at any rate morally good. They demanded of their followers that they should love mercy and do justly as well as walk humbly with their God. And many, if not most, of them criticised the requirements of the established religion of their day in the light of their own moral insight.

What we find, then, is that neither in the case of contemporary primitive peoples, nor in the thought of the great moral teachers who developed it to its highest level, has morality always been connected with religion or supported by supernatural sanctions, and that the nature of the morality does not seem to differ greatly in the cases where it is and in those where it is not regarded as so sanctioned. The conclusion which I draw from these facts is that, both as regards its historical origin and the grounds of its rightness, morality is autonomous, carrying its authority within itself, whatever additional sanctions may from time to time be attached to it.

I am well aware that this conclusion still leaves unanswered many important questions about the relation between morality and religion, even among primitives. But it is the conclusion which specially concerns my argument. For if it is well-grounded we are justified in considering primitive morality by itself, without trying to answer many difficult and controversial questions about the nature of primitive religion. I want, however, in conclusion to sum up very briefly the influences which primitive man's magico-religious beliefs and ritual practices have exerted on, and the support they have given to, his individual and social morality. I need say little about some of them because I have described them already.

(1) When rules are given a religious and not merely a moral and social sanction, there is an additional incentive to comply with them. How far it is a moral incentive depends on the way in which the supernatural is conceived. It may merely lead to the right thing being done from the wrong motives; but there may be occasions when this is better than that the right thing should not be done at all.

(2) His magico-religious beliefs give primitive man the hope and confidence which enable him to face the difficulties and overcome the dangers with which his life is beset. The beliefs may be mistaken, but their psychological and social effects are very real. The practices in which they lead him to engage may not control the forces which he has not succeeded in understanding, but they put him in a condition in which he can face them with hope of success. Whether his attitude to the supernatural forces to which he appeals in his difficulties be that of humble prayer—the attitude of religion strictly so-called—or that of aggressive command like the magician, or, as more often happens, a mixture of or a compromise between the two (varying with his conception of the powers with which he is dealing), there is one respect in which the effect on him is the same. It provides him with an ally which he believes to be stronger than the forces arrayed against him, an ally with whose assistance he will confidently proceed to face and conquer them.54 This is an effect of religion specially emphasised by Malinowski. But as Radcliffe-Brown has pointed out,55 there are occasions when religion produces not so much hope and confidence as a sense of seriousness and responsibility, even anxiety; and this attitude is very appropriate in situations where important matters of common concern are at stake.

(3) The ritual and ceremonial practices which religion requires, initiation rites, ceremonial dances, mortuary ritual, etc., produce important psychological and social effects. They refresh and reinvigorate the individual; they strengthen the bonds which bind the members of the group together; they promote goodwill and mutual trust. In these and other ways which we have already seen they promote the mental integrity of the individual and the social solidarity of the group.

(4) Some of the duties required of the individual by his religion are arduous and exacting and many of them are believed to be for the well-being of the community. Compliance with them therefore strengthens the self-discipline of the individual and his loyalty and devotion to the common good.

(5) The person who reproves wrongdoing or neglect of duty, or calls on men to undertake difficult and unpleasant tasks, in the name or with the authority of religion is in a very much stronger position than he who speaks merely in his own name or even as the representative of the community. He is less likely to be regarded by his neighbours as an impertinent meddler in their affairs. His adverse judgement is less likely to be resented, and his call for service is more likely to meet with a favourable response.

(6) There is still another way in which religion may influence morality. It may do so more directly and immediately than through the relatively external prescription of rules or the attaching of rewards and penalties to them, and it may affect character more profoundly than through the indirect effects of ritual and ceremonial practices. This happens when it presents men with the conception of a supersensible reality which, whatever its other characteristics, is regarded as the embodiment of moral perfection and purity. The thought of such a being, especially when it is conceived in the form of a person, produces in the believer a profounder sense of the moral evil of wrongdoing and evokes in him a desire to reform and purify his own life so that it may approximate more closely to the perfection which he contemplates; and this desire tends to find expression both in worship and in a life of moral goodness. The consciousness of the abiding presence of such a being who evokes respect and loyalty, and to whom moral evil is regarded as disloyalty, provides a stimulus to moral steadfastness and an incentive to rightdoing, the importance of which cannot be over-estimated. Moreover, the belief that the ultimate power in the universe is on the side of goodness gives the believer an assurance that in his moral struggles he is not alone and that, despite appearances to the contrary, the good will prevail; and this assurance not only brings him an inner sense of peace and tranquillity, when powerful forces of evil are arrayed against him, but it also strengthens and sustains him in doing what he believes to be right when appearances might suggest that all effort is vain or that in being moral he is simply playing the fool.

Now we find such conceptions in one form or another in all the developed ethical religions, but if they exist among primitives our authorities have little to say about them. It is true that even if they were to be found among them, they would not be the most obvious or easily observable aspect of their religion; and therefore it may be unwise to deny entirely their presence and power in the lives of some individuals among them. Indeed there seems to be some evidence that among some ancestor-worshipping peoples respect for, and a sense of loyalty to, their dead ancestors, whom they regard as the ideal exemplars of the sort of persons they ought to be, mingles with and is often as strong an incentive to the observance of tribal custom as fear of any consequences to themselves which might result from the displeasure of their ancestors, or any sense of awe due to their supernatural status. So far as this is so, the experience of the wrongdoer is more akin to what we call the sense of alienation from God than to fear of punishment, here or hereafter. No doubt there are considerable differences in this respect between individuals and between peoples. But, as I have said, our authorities make little reference to such conceptions among primitives, and when they discuss the moral value of religion among them it is the other influences which I have mentioned that they specially emphasise.

But these undoubtedly great benefits which his magico-religious beliefs and practices confer on the primitive are sometimes bought at a heavy price. For while they make for social stability and solidarity, they tend to retard moral and social progress; while they give him hope and courage with which to face the problems and crises of life, they tend to prevent him from trying to understand his environment and to control it by his skill and energy. For magico-religious ritual is apt to be more rigid and less modifiable than secular rules, because its neglect or infringement is believed to be fraught with more desperate consequences. Accordingly, when moral and social duties are given a religious sanction, change and progress tend to be regarded as sins, liable to bring down on the individual or the community the wrath of supernatural powers. The reformer who wants to change existing customs tends to be classed with the sinner who rebels against them, and both are apt to be treated in the same way. Thus the action of the reformer comes to be regarded not merely as a crime against society, but as sacrilege—sin against its gods. Hence the proverbial fate of prophets and reformers, a fate usually meted out to them in the name of the established religion of their day.

It is true that the most difficult problem which any society or civilisation has to face is how to reconcile the requirements of individual initiative and personal development with those of the common good, how to combine the tolerance and openness to new ideas which is necessary for progress with the respect for established institutions and customs which is a condition of the stability of the moral and social order. In the precarious conditions of many primitive societies, where unity has to be maintained at the cost of life and survival, and where unity is apt to mean uniformity, there are many factors making for intolerance to would-be reformers. And though many of the greatest reformers have claimed to speak in its name, religion has always tended to be on the side of stability rather than progress; so that intimate association with it has not always been an unmixed blessing for morality.

In the same way, the belief in magic, however valuable it may be in promoting hope and confidence in the face of dangers and difficulties, tends to prevent men from trying to understand their environment and taking steps to control it. For example, the belief in rain magic has prevented men from undertaking schemes of irrigation, and the belief in curative magic has retarded the development of medicine.

What concerns us, however, is that, profound as may be the influences which the magico-religious beliefs and practices of primitives exercise on their individual and social life, the content of their moral codes and the principles governing their social institutions were not derived from, and are not dependent on, their religion. Religion may support them; they may be given supernatural sanctions; but they are of independent origin and authority, and therefore we are justified in considering them without further direct reference to religion.