s at a certain
conjuncture. The structure holds the concept and furnishes
instrumentalities for bringing it into the world of facts and action in
a way to serve the interests of men in society. Institutions are either
crescive or enacted. They are crescive when they take shape in the
mores, growing by the instinctive efforts by which the mores are
produced. Then the efforts, through long use, become definite and
specific.

Property, marriage, and religion are the most primary institutions. They
began in folkways. They became customs. They developed into mores by the
addition of some philosophy of welfare, however crude. Then they were
made more definite and specific as regards the rules, the prescribed
acts, and the apparatus to be employed. This produced a structure and
the institution was complete. Enacted institutions are products of
rational invention and intention. They belong to high civilization.
Banks are institutions of credit founded on usages which can be traced
back to barbarism. There came a time when, guided by rational reflection
on experience, men systematized and regulated the usages which had
become current, and thus created positive institutions of credit,
defined by law and sanctioned by the force of the state. Pure enacted
institutions which are strong and prosperous are hard to find. It is too
difficult to invent and create an institution, for a purpose, out of
nothing. The electoral college in the Constitution of the United States
is an example. In that case the democratic mores of the people have
seized upon the device and made of it something quite different from
what the inventors planned. All institutions have come out of mores,
although the rational element in them is sometimes so large that their
origin in the mores is not to be ascertained except by a historical
investigation (legislatures, courts, juries, joint-stock companies, the
stock exchange). Property, marriage, and religion are still almost
entirely in the mores. Amongst nature men any man might capture and hold
a woman at any time, if he could. He did it by superior force which was
its own supreme justification. But his act brought his group and her
group into war, and produced harm to his comrades. They forbade capture,
or set conditions for it. Beyond the limits, the individual might still
use force, but his comrades were no longer responsible. The glory to
him, if he succeeded, might be all the greater. His control over his
cap