7. The origin and development of primitive ways of doing constitute a well-cultivated field of study. Anthropologists have published an endless amount of materials on the origin of languages, religions, occupations, sex distinctions. A portion of this work has been done without an accurate understanding of the psychological principles that are involved, and hence has to be viewed with caution or neglected entirely. W. G. Sumner, whose argument in favor of individualism and of a _laissez faire_ governmental policy was given in Chapter XI, published in his _Folkways_ a minute and extended account of the nature of primitive institutions. In the development of his theories, Sumner began with the needs of primitive peoples and with the attempts to meet these needs. Repetition of these acts leads to established ways of doing, that is, to folkways. Folkways are “the widest, most fundamental, and most important operation by which the interests of men in groups are served.”[XVIII-2] Societal life consists chiefly in making folkways and applying them. Even the science of society might be defined as the study of folkways. Folkways are the product of the trial and failure method of meeting needs. They tend to become firmly established and to be passed on from generation to generation. They become traditional. They acquire all the authority which is attached to the memory of respected ancestors. Even the ghosts of ancestors stalk the earth keeping guard over the folkways. The folkways carry with them the conviction that they are essential to human welfare. It is this conviction which gives them the force of _mores_. Thus the folkways are not purposeful methods of securing progress but unconscious ways of meeting current exigencies; they are blindly and rigorously forced upon successive generations. 8. Races are guilty of ethnocentrism.[XVIII-3] Each race considers itself the center of mankind. It judges all other races by its own standards, and not by a higher standard that is determined by data that are representative of the best interests of all races. Ethocentrism compels each race to exaggerate the importance of its own folkways and to depreciate the folkways of other races. For example, the Romans and Greeks called all outsiders “barbarians.” The Jews considered themselves “the chosen people,” and the Romans and Greeks as “pagans.”