Folk thinking permeated primitive religions. The earliest forms of religion presupposed societies of spirits or gods. The conduct of the individual was regulated by his ideas concerning the ways in which he had pleased or offended the spirits or gods. An infant was born into a society peopled with human and spirit beings. The latter were often more numerous than the former; they frequently were more feared; and hence were more powerful. The living people, the departed spirits, and the gods in a hierarchal order constituted an effective society for the exercise of many vigorous forms of social control. If pestilence came, it was because the gods had been offended by some human being. As a result of the offense of one individual, the whole tribe was considered to be liable to punishment. Consequently, the tribe in turn would punish the offending member and through the use of force and fear would exert a tremendous power over the conduct and thought of individuals. Primitive people were dominated by custom. They were subject to the autocracy of the past. They were hopelessly caught between ancestral ascendance and current fears. They threaded their way, mentally, through tantalizingly uncertain and narrow apertures. They learned the meaning of obedience, but obedience to a harsh and rigorous past and a fickle and disconcerting future. Leadership was drastic and capricious; followership was frantic and tremulous. Some of the incipient social concepts of primitive peoples have been preserved in the form of proverbs, maxims, fables, and myths. Many of the subtler social relationships of life were recognized by early man. His limited thinking drifted into simple formulae. His vocabulary was scanty; his ideas were few. He spoke in conventional sayings. “Primitive man spoke in proverbs.” Many folkthoughts, or primitive conceptions of social obligations, have been preserved. The early proverbs of man reveal the beginnings of social thought. Equally valuable and similar materials are found in the sayings of the tribes which today are in a state of arrested development. A few illustrations of embryonic social thought will be given here.[II-1]