even health or
life itself, if need be, for the welfare of the child?

Right in there, then, out of this fact of sex and in the becoming of
the family, are born love and sympathy, and tenderness and mutual care,
all those things which are the highest and finest constituent elements
of the noblest developments of the moral nature of men.

Imagination plays a large part in the development of morality; for you
must be able to put yourself imaginatively in the place of another
before you can feel for that other, and in that way recognize the
rights of that other and be ready to grant these rights to that other.
So we find that morality at first is a narrow thing: it is confined
perhaps to the little family, the father, the mother, the child, bound
together by these ties of kinship, of love, of sympathy, devoting
themselves to each other; but they may look upon some other family as
their natural enemies, and feel no necessity whatever to apply these
same principles of love and tenderness and care beyond the limits of
their own little circle.

So you find, as you study the growth of the moral nature of man, that
it is confined at first to the family, then to the patriarchal family,
then the tribe; but the fiction of kinship is still kept up, and, while
the member of the primeval tribe feels he has no right to rob or murder
within the limits of his tribe, he has no compunction whatever about
robbing or murdering or injuring the members of some other tribe. So
the moral principle in its practical working is limited to the range of
the sympathy of the tribe, which does not go beyond the tribal limits.
We see how that principle works still in the world, from the beginning
clear up to the highest reaches which we have as yet attained.

Take the next step, and find a city like ancient Athens. Still,
perhaps, the fiction of kinship is maintained. All the citizens of
Athens are regarded as members of the same great tribe or family. But
even in the time of Plato, whom we are accustomed to look upon as one
of the great teachers of the world, there was no thought of any moral
obligation to anybody who lived in Sparta, lived in any other city of
Greece, and less was there any thought of moral obligation as touching
or taking in the outside barbarian. So when the city grew into a
nation, and we came to a point where the world substantially stands
to-day, do you not see that practically the same principle holds, that,
while we recogniz