earlier stage of feeling, also, which survives where taboo prevails, it is the community as a whole which may be infected, and which must suffer if the offender is allowed to spread the infection; it is the community, as a whole, which is concerned to thrust out the guilty person--every one shuns him because he is taboo. Thus, in this the earliest stage, the offender against the custom of the community is outlawed just as effectively as in later stages of social development. But no formal sentence is pronounced; no meeting of the men or the elders of the community is held to try the offender; no reason is given or sought why the offence should thus be punished. The operation of taboo is like that of the laws of nature: the man who eats poisonous food dies with no reason given. A reason may eventually be found by science, and is eventually discovered, though the process of discovery is slow, and many mistakes are made, and many false reasons are given before the true reason is found. So, too, the true reason for the prohibition of many of the things, which the community feels to be forbidden and pronounced to be taboo, is found, with the progress of society--when it does {233} progress, which is not always--to be that they are immoral and irreligious, though here, too, many mistakes are made before true morality and true religion are found. But at the outset no reason is given: the things are simply offensive to the community and are tabooed as such. We, looking back at that stage in the evolution of society, can see that amongst the things thus offensive and tabooed are some which, in later stages, are equally offensive, but are now forbidden for a reason that can be formulated and given, viz. that they are offences against the law of morality and the law of God. That reason, at the outset of society, may scarcely have been consciously present to the mind of man: progress, in part at least, has consisted in the discovery of the reasons of things. But that man did from the beginning avoid some of the things which are forbidden by morality and religion, and that those things were taboo to him, is beyond the possibility of doubt. Nor can it be doubted that in the prohibition and punishment of them there was inchoate justice and inchoate religion. Such prohibition was due to the collective action and expressed the collective feeling of the community as a whole. And it is from such social action and feeling that {234} justice, I suggest, has been evolved--not from the feeling of resentment experienced by the individual as an individual. Personal resentment and personal revenge may have stimulated justice to action. But, by the hypothesis we have been examining, they were not justice. Neither have they been transformed into justice: they still exist as something distinct from justice and capable of perverting it.