ons of the Third International Congress of the History of
Religions. Oxford, 1908.

Tylor, E.B. Primitive Culture. London, 1873.

Westermarck, E. Origin and Development of Moral Ideas. London,
1906.

Wundt, W. Voelkerpsychologie. Leipzig, 1904-6.

I

INTRODUCTION

Every child that is born is born of a community and into a community,
which existed before his birth and will continue to exist after his
death. He learns to speak the language which the community spoke
before he was born, and which the community will continue to speak
after he has gone. In learning the language he acquires not only words
but ideas; and the words and ideas he acquires, the thoughts he thinks
and the words in which he utters them, are those of the community from
which he learnt them, which taught them before he was born and will go
on teaching them after he is dead. He not only learns to speak the
words and think the ideas, to reproduce the mode of thought, as he
does the form of speech, of the circumambient community: he is taught
and learns to act as those around him do--as the community has done
and will tend to do. The community--the narrower community of the
family, first, and, afterwards, the wider community to which the
family belongs--teaches him how he ought to speak, what he ought to
think, and how he ought to act. The consciousness of the child
reproduces the consciousness of the community to which he belongs--the
common consciousness, which existed before him and will continue to
exist after him.

The common consciousness is not only the source from which the
individual gets his mode of speech, thought and action, but the court
of appeal which decides what is fact. If a question is raised whether
the result of a scientific experiment is what it is alleged by the
original maker of the experiment to be, the appeal is to the common
consciousness: any one who chooses to make the experiment in the way
described will find the result to be of the kind alleged; if everyone
else, on experiment, finds it to be so, it is established as a fact of
common consciousness; if no one else finds it to be so, the alleged
discovery is not a fact but an erroneous inference.

Now, it is not merely with regard to external facts or facts
apprehended through the senses, that the common consciousness is
accepted as the court of appeal. The allegation may be that an
emotion, of a specified kind--alarm or fear, wonder or awe--is