As students of morals our chief interest in primeval man as he emerges from the obscurity of prehistoric times is not concerning the degree of skill he has developed in making his weapons or in constructing for himself a shelter, nor concerning what advance he has made in the arts of weaving and pottery, nor yet concerning what kind of social arrangements he has worked out; our main interest in this primeval man as he appears on the threshold of the historic day is not concerning these or any like things, but rather respecting what kind of a conscience has grown up within him during those long prehistoric ages of struggle, privation, watch and ward. The first fact that compels our notice here is that the life of the savage is largely _un_moral.[31] His activities to secure food, shelter, and clothing arise from purely animal impulses, such as hunger and cold. Into all of these activities, however, there enters as time passes an ethical element.[32] The economic life, in a word, comes more and more under the dominance of moral feelings and motives.[33] Conscience becomes more and more involved in all these matters. This gradual moralization of these at first nonmoral activities of primitive man constitutes one of the most important phases of the moral evolution of the race. [Sidenote: The “goodness” of uncivilized races largely a negative goodness] A second fact in the moral life of savages that claims our attention is that much that is counted unto them for “goodness” is a purely negative goodness. Failure in discrimination here often results in a wrong estimate of their morality as compared with that of advanced communities. Thus in portraying the manners and customs of primitive peoples, some writers, like Tacitus in his account of the early German folk, laud their morals as superior to those of civilized men. This opinion is based rather on the absence among such peoples of the usual vices and crimes of civilized societies than on the practice by them of the higher positive virtues.[34] But the absence of the vices which characterize civilization is to be explained, of course, by the simpler organization of society and the fewer temptations to wrongdoing. Thus the single circumstance that the institution of individual property has not yet come into existence, or at least has not as yet received any great extension, accounts for the comparative absence of crimes against property, which constitute probably the greater number of criminal acts in civilized society. [Sidenote: The true starting point of the historic ethical development]