son is found. So, too, the true reason for the
prohibition of many of the things, which the community feels to be
forbidden and pronounced to be taboo, is found, with the progress of
society--when it does {233} progress, which is not always--to be that
they are immoral and irreligious, though here, too, many mistakes are
made before true morality and true religion are found. But at the
outset no reason is given: the things are simply offensive to the
community and are tabooed as such. We, looking back at that stage in
the evolution of society, can see that amongst the things thus
offensive and tabooed are some which, in later stages, are equally
offensive, but are now forbidden for a reason that can be formulated
and given, viz. that they are offences against the law of morality and
the law of God. That reason, at the outset of society, may scarcely
have been consciously present to the mind of man: progress, in part at
least, has consisted in the discovery of the reasons of things. But
that man did from the beginning avoid some of the things which are
forbidden by morality and religion, and that those things were taboo to
him, is beyond the possibility of doubt. Nor can it be doubted that in
the prohibition and punishment of them there was inchoate justice and
inchoate religion. Such prohibition was due to the collective action
and expressed the collective feeling of the community as a whole. And
it is from such social action and feeling that {234} justice, I
suggest, has been evolved--not from the feeling of resentment
experienced by the individual as an individual. Personal resentment
and personal revenge may have stimulated justice to action. But, by
the hypothesis we have been examining, they were not justice. Neither
have they been transformed into justice: they still exist as something
distinct from justice and capable of perverting it.

The form which justice takes in the period which is almost, but not
quite, the lowest stage of human evolution is the sense of the
collective responsibility of the community for all its actions, that is
to say, for the acts of all its members. And that responsibility in
its earliest shape is felt to be a responsibility to heaven, to the
supernatural powers that send disease and famine upon the community.
In those days no man sins to himself alone, just as, in still earlier
days, no man could break a taboo without becoming a source of danger to
the whole community. The