Living and eating together.

When the members of the totem-clan who lived together recognised that
they owed something to each other, and that the gratification of the
instincts and passions of the individual must to a certain degree be
restrained if they endangered the lives and security of other members
of the clan, they had taken the first step on the long path of moral
and social progress. The tie by which they supposed themselves to be
united was quite different from those which have constituted a bond of
union between the communities who have subsequently lived together in
the tribe, the city-state and the country. These have been a common
religion, common language, race, or loyalty to a common sovereign;
but the real bond has throughout been the common good or the public
interest. And the desire for this end on the part of the majority
of the members of the community, or the majority of those who were
able to express their opinions, though its action was until recently
not overt nor direct, and was not recognised, has led to the gradual
evolution of the whole fabric of law and moral feeling, in order to
govern and control the behaviour and conduct of the individual in
his relations with his family, neighbours and fellow-citizens for
the public advantage. The members of the totem-clan would have been
quite unable to understand either the motives by which they were
themselves actuated or the abstract ideas which have united more
advanced communities; but they devised an even stronger bond than
these, in supposing that they were parts or fractions of one common
body or life. This was the more necessary as their natural impulses
were uncontrolled by moral feeling. They conceived the bond of union
in the concrete form of eating together. As language improved and
passing events were recorded in speech and in the mind, the faculty of
memory was perhaps concurrently developed. Then man began to realise
the insecurity of his life, the dangers and misfortunes to which he
was subject, the periodical failure or irregularity of the supply
of food, and the imminent risks of death. Memory of the past made
him apprehensive for the future, and holding that every event was the
result of an act of volition, he began to assume an attitude either of
veneration, gratitude, or fear towards the strongest of the beings by
whom he thought his destinies were controlled--the sun, moon, sky, wind
and rain, the ocean and great rivers, high m